Broadening the narrative: reflecting on archaeological discourses on plant domestication

Arguably, archaeological discourses on plant domestication have tended to be normative, linear and teleological. They often seek the emergence of specific phenotypic and, increasingly, genotypic traits through time. These temporal reconstructions of plant domestication foreground certain lineages of a crop, yet they simultaneously background an array of crop wild relatives and locally important cultivars and cultiwilds that existed through time and from which the major domesticate lineages arose. Consequently, a vast diversity of plants and associated historical biogeographies, as well as the people who cultivated them, have been marginalised from archaeological reconstructions of the past.