The habitats and inhabitants of fossil garden constructions – A theoretical study of the dynamic relationships between plants, insects and agroenvironments, and their implications for archaeological interpretation

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the possibility of paleoentomology as a proxy in garden archaeology research. Garden contexts can prove difficult to identify and interpret due to the many changes the contexts go through during their activity period. Mixing of materials, harvesting and cultivation of many different plants will affect the environmental data that is retrieved from them and thus our interpretation of horticulture. This essay looks at the contexts and materials involved in the gardening process; irrigation sources, fertilizer, garden plant macrofossils and modern ecological insect and host plant relationships. The goal is to suggest a conceptual indicator group of insect and plant species that could aid in the identification of garden context and the in situ growth of relic plants. Paleoentomological information from the relating contexts (middens, composts, wells etc.) and other indicator groups have been included along with the ecological data in order to get a more complex picture over the garden contexts and their varying content. For instance, many of the plants found in garden soils are recorded as host plants to several insect species. This paper argues that investigation of these relationships can aid garden archaeology and further our understanding of herbivorous insects’ and associated species’ relationships to plant domestication in pre-history.