bucketssenegal

 Mary Anne Murray & her crew for flotation at Cubalel, Senegal near the Mauritanian border 1990.

Flotation from this West African Iron Age  produced large quantities of fonio grains, pearl millet grains and pearl millet chaff (the involucre bases, which look like spikey hollow balls when charred), as below.

For more information see:

Murray, M. A., D. Q. Fuller, and C. Cappeza. 2007. "Crop production on the Senegal River in the early First Millennium AD: preliminary archaeobotanical results from Cubalel," in FIeld of Change. Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop for African Archaeobotany. Edited by R. Cappers, pp. 63-70. Groningen: Barkhuis & Groningen University Library.