Compare methods

	Archaeobotanical Flotation	Site Catchment Analysis	Starch Grain Analysis
Field	Archaeology	Archaeology	Archaeology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1968	1970	2004
Originator	Stuart Struever (machine-assisted flotation); systematized by Deborah M. Pearsall	Claudio Vita-Finzi & Eric S. Higgs	Developed in paleoethnobotany; systematized by Deborah M. Pearsall and colleagues
Type	Field-and-laboratory recovery pipeline for charred plant macroremains	Spatial economic pipeline delimiting and characterizing a site's exploitation territory	Microbotanical extraction-and-identification pipeline for ancient starch granules
Seminal source	Pearsall, D. M. (2015). Paleoethnobotany: A Handbook of Procedures (3rd ed.). Routledge / Left Coast Press. ISBN: 9781611322996	Vita-Finzi, C., & Higgs, E. S. (1970). Prehistoric Economy in the Mount Carmel Area of Palestine: Site Catchment Analysis. Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society, 36, 1-37.	Pearsall, D. M. (2015). Paleoethnobotany: A Handbook of Procedures (3rd ed.). Routledge / Left Coast Press. ISBN: 9781611322996
Aliases	Water Flotation, Macrobotanical Flotation Recovery, Paleoethnobotanical Flotation, Light-Fraction Recovery	Catchment Analysis, Site Exploitation Territory Analysis, Economic Catchment Modeling, Resource Catchment Analysis	Ancient Starch Analysis, Starch Granule Microfossil Analysis, Archaeological Starch Residue Analysis, Starch Microbotany
Related	2	2	2
Summary	Archaeobotanical flotation is the standard recovery technique for charred plant macroremains, separating buoyant carbonized seeds, nutshell, and wood charcoal from archaeological sediment by agitating the soil in water. Because carbonized tissue is light and water-repellent, it rises and overflows into a fine mesh as a 'light fraction,' while denser bone, lithics, and uncharred residue settle as a 'heavy fraction.' The remains are then dried, sorted under low-power magnification, and identified against modern reference collections to reconstruct past diet, agriculture, fuel use, and environment. Machine-assisted water flotation was popularized by Stuart Struever in the late 1960s and systematized for routine paleoethnobotanical practice by Deborah Pearsall, whose handbook codified sampling, processing, and quantification procedures now used worldwide.	Site catchment analysis models a settlement's economy by delimiting the territory that its inhabitants could realistically exploit and inventorying the resources within it. Introduced by Claudio Vita-Finzi and Eric Higgs in their 1970 study of the Mount Carmel area, the method rests on the premise that the cost of moving to and from a site falls off sharply with distance, so most subsistence activity occurs within a limited radius. By drawing a catchment — classically the area within one or two hours' walk — and measuring how much of it is arable land, grazing, water, lithic sources, or wild biota, the analyst characterizes whether a site is oriented toward farming, herding, hunting, or gathering. Modern practice replaces simple circles with terrain-sensitive least-cost territories computed in a Geographical Information System, as set out by Conolly and Lake.	Starch grain analysis recovers and identifies microscopic starch granules preserved on archaeological artifacts and in dental calculus to reconstruct ancient plant use. Many economically important plants — tubers, roots, seeds, and cereals — store energy as starch in granules whose size, shape, hilum position, and surface features can be diagnostic of a plant family, genus, or even species. Because starch can lodge in the use-wear pits of grinding stones, adhere to pottery, settle into sediments, and become trapped in calcified dental plaque, it survives where charred macroremains do not, opening a window onto plants such as manioc, potato, and banana that rarely carbonize. Under polarized light, intact starch shows a characteristic birefringent extinction cross, and identification proceeds by morphometric comparison to modern reference granules, following procedures consolidated in Pearsall's paleoethnobotanical handbook.