Thousands of years after the advent of agriculture, ancient farmers in India routinely foraged for wild plants — even weeds — when times got tough, a UCLA archaeologist has found.
In fact, they may have eaten a flower now used today in Hawaii for leis, a weed considered invasive in the American West and a relative of the acacia plant that now grows beside Southern California freeways, said Monica L. Smith, the article's author and an assistant professor in the UCLA Department of Anthropology and who also heads the South Asian archaeology laboratory at UCLA's Cotsen Institute of Archaeology.
The findings, which appear in the latest issue of the peer-reviewed journal Economic Botany, challenge conventional wisdom about the speed and extent to which agriculture eclipsed hunting and gathering, not just in India but elsewhere.
Seems eminently plausible and it's true that very often non-domesticated plants don't get much mention in journal articles and monographs. One question though: What controls were used to separate human food plants from animal fodder? Often the two overlap and the latter can enter the archaeological record in similar settings (hearths) through dung used as fuel.
Also, check out this ethnobotany bibliography and this link describing some North American "weed plants" that were cultivated until maize came to dominate agriculture. Would be interesting to see if there were similar patterns of use in these formerly-cultivated plants after maize became dominant.