The analysis of starch grains from food-related archaeological artefacts and human dental calculus has provided evidence for the consumption of plant resources worldwide. Recently, and based on experimental research, starch grain analysis has also been used as a proxy to reconstruct food transformation in the archaeological record through the analysis of the damage produced on starch grains by different food-processing techniques such as grinding, boiling and fermentation. The prospect of identifying food transformation through starch grain analysis opens exciting avenues for exploring the cultural factors underlying culinary practices. However, the structural integrity of starch grains may be affected by a variety of depositional and post-depositional processes, including but not limited to food processing, so that in order to identify damage produced by food processing one would first need to discard potential damage occurred at later stages (e.g., in the burial environment, during laboratory processing and analysis, etc.). The identification of food processing through the analysis of the damage produced on starch grains is further obscured by equifinality and multifinality, as exemplified by uncooked modern reference material presented here showing damage patterns consistent with “boiling”, “spouting” and “fermenting”. Consequently, the identification of food transformation in the archaeological record through the analysis of the damage produced on starch grains needs to be supported by reliable contextual information, a representative number of samples and the existence of alternative sources of evidence (i.e., a multi-proxy approach).

对与食物有关的考古文物和人类牙结石中的淀粉颗粒的分析为全世界植物资源的消耗提供了证据。最近，基于实验研究，通过分析通过不同的食品加工技术（例如研磨，煮沸和发酵）对淀粉颗粒产生的损害，淀粉颗粒分析也已被用来替代考古记录中的食物转化。通过淀粉颗粒分析鉴定食物转化的前景为探索烹饪实践背后的文化因素开辟了令人兴奋的途径。但是，淀粉颗粒的结构完整性可能会受到各种沉积和沉积后过程的影响，包括但不限于食品加工，因此，为了识别食品加工产生的损害，首先需要丢弃在以后阶段发生的潜在损害（例如，在埋葬环境中，实验室加工和分析等期间）。通过对淀粉颗粒产生的损害进行分析来识别食品加工过程，由于等度性和多重性进一步模糊了这一点，如此处所示的未经烹制的现代参考材料所说明的那样，其损害模式与“沸腾”，“喷射”和“发酵”一致。因此，需要通过可靠的上下文信息，代表性的样本数量以及替代证据的存在（例如，多代理人）来支持通过分析淀粉颗粒所产生的损害来识别考古记录中的食物转化。方法）。