They were… …the grass on the housetops and blasted before it be grown up

Abstract

Archaeobotanical finds of plant parts, especially of wild taxa that were domesticated and their derived domesticated forms, unearthed from archeological sites assume an important role in plant domestication research. Those finds are used in modelling plant domestication under the explicit or implicit assumptions that they represent past genetic, ecological, and cultural situations and dynamics and may illuminate the mechanisms that underly plant domestication. This ‘representability assumption’ is discussed herein by considering the potential contribution to the archaeobotanical finds of a source that was not investigated in depth in the past – that is, ‘housetop plants’. The match between the lists from four botanically surveyed ruins in Israel, taxa mentioned in the archaeobotanical literature, and lists of segetal taxa in recent traditional argo-ecologies in Israel, shows that flora of housetop and ruins of built complexes should be considered as an important origin of archaeobotanical finds identified in archaeological sites. These results are further considered on the backdrop of the suggested protracted model of plant domestication in the Levant focusing on pre-domestication cultivation and arguments concerning weeds of cultivation.