Evidence that Homo sapiens was grinding tubers, fruits, and seeds, comes from the finding of starch grains – the reserve of polysaccharides accumulated in the amyloplasts of plants storage organs – entrapped inside the pores of the ground stone tools, the actual target of this project, and in dental calculus and coprolites of Late Pleistocene. The recognition of the starch grains – structured as concentric rings of amylose and amylopectin – is challenging because of their micrometric size and lack of a tailored reference collection. Indeed, once extracted, the identification is conventionally carried out by means of optical microscopy with bright and polarised light. Starches are currently removed from the archaeological findings by a wet extraction – either pipetting or sonicating the selected portion of the stone tool surface – or by mechanical stripping using peels of polyvinyl derivatives, although both procedures demonstrated some drawbacks related to the sample alterations. Moreover, the archaeological materials often belong to museum collections and issues can be voiced regarding the reliability of these collections as a suitable source for analysis and quality control of the samples to be measured, since contamination issues can be raised when ancient starch grains are claimed to be retrieved. On these basis, it is crucial to develop new integrated procedures that combine: i) high-tech and smart materials for a suitable recovering of ancient organic residues (without altering their structure and chemical composition) from ground stones to allow reliable application of ii) high-resolution techniques (i.e. microscopy, spectroscopy, and spectrometry) for an in depth physicochemical characterisation of the recovered material, necessary to overcome the limits of the sole morphological attribution in use at present, and also to assess their genuine origin. SMart4BioArCH aims at proposing an integrated procedure by developing innovative smart materials acting as reversible adsorbents for entrapping and releasing biogenic residues from the stone tools – provided by selected collections – safeguarding both morphology and physicochemical properties. The new adsorbent materials will be tested prior on proxies obtained by means of experimental archaeology setup (controlled conditions for rocks and starchy-plants selection) and then on real archaeological items. The proposal applies basic chemistry know-how to until present underestimated bio-archives and aims at developing new operative procedures to extract genuine archaeological residues for further physicochemical characterisation, allowing to shedding light on what carbs – different from cereals – were available to humans during their successful colonisation of Eurasia.