Pollen (Other Keyword)
1-25 (28 Records)
This project examined the cultural resources of the western half of the Ak Chin Community's lands prior to intensive agricultural development using waters from the Central Arizona Project. The project's research design assumed that Ak Chin had been used as a floodwater farming location for many centuries. The problem domains and research questions focused on the physical {geomorphological), biological, and cultural subsystems within the Ak Chin ecosystem. The investigation also considered the...
ANCIENT CACAO GROVES IN YUCATAN: A PALYNOLOGICAL APPROACH (2017)
Cacao had a transcendental role in the life of prehistoric people of Mesoamerica, becoming part of their economic, ideological and social system. Due to the morphological and environmental characteristics necessary for the growth of cacao tree, the main producers were concentrated in places like southern Mexico and Central America. However, written sources of the first colonizers in Yucatan disclose that the indigenous nobility of that time had at their disposal cacao orchards in different...
Archaeobotanical Realities at Yaxnohkah: A Pollen Grain of Truth on Preclassic Land Use (2017)
Examination of sediments from several reservoirs at the Preclassic site of Yaxnohkah Campeche, Mexico reveals less that stellar pollen preservation, but still useful botanical data. Thus far, pollen grains show varying degrees of degradation, requiring the use of exacting extraction methods. Cultigens and economic taxa are abundant in the samples demonstrating that we are sampling in the right place, but cyclic wetting and drying has resulted in the loss of fragile taxa, skewing the botanical...
Archaeology of the Ak Chin Indian Community West Side Farms Project: The Land and the People (1990)
This volume presents an overview of the project area through environmental, geomorpological, and historical studies. The chapters contained herein represent only one aspect of the Ak-Chin Archaeological Project, which involved data recovery at 31 prehistoric, protohistoric, and historic sites. Four other volumes in the series provide the research design, reports on the sites studied, interpretations of the material culture and human remains from the sites, subsistence information derived from...
Botanical and aDNA Analysis of the Dietary Contents of Human Paleofeces from Turkey Pen Ruin, Utah (2016)
Over the last few decades archaeologists and paleontologists have made great strides in paleofecal analysis, not the least of which was the application of aDNA testing. However, most aDNA analyses of paleofeces have focused exclusively on studying human populations and researchers have largely ignored the potential for using this tool to study dietary constituents themselves. In this study, we present analyses of aDNA from both the faunal and floral dietary constituents of 20 Basketmaker II...
Deciphering Ornamental Landscapes at Monticello (2016)
Pollen data can serve as valuable evidence to advance our understanding of change and spatial variation in the landscape of Thomas Jefferson's Monticello from its initial European settlement in the 18th century to the present. The data presented in this paper draws from a multi-year campaign of stratigraphic sampling conducted in the largely ornamental mountaintop landscape immediately surrounding Jefferson's mansion. Comparing these data to stratigraphic samples collected away from the...
DENTAL CALCULUS ANALYSIS OF A SINGLE TOOTH FROM SITE SON:F:10:3, MEXICO (2005)
Dental calculus was recovered from a burial in northern Sonora, Mexico was submitted for analysis that would identify any pollen, phytoliths, starches, or other identifiable remains that might inform concerning the diet of the individual.
Did the Neolithic Revolution Revolutionize the European Landscape? An Analysis of the Relationship between Climate, Vegetation, and the Arrival of Agro-pastoral Subsistence (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists have long recognized the spread and adoption of agro-pastoral subsistence in Europe as a transformative economic and social process. While many studies have tied site-specific changes in vegetation communities to the arrival of the Neolithic, very few attempts have been made at synthesizing these data to examine the Neolithic revolution in...
Dietary Reconstruction Based on Coprolites from Antelope Cave (2015)
Results of 20 Antelope Cave coprolites show both consistencies and inconsistencies with other Ancestral Pueblo coprolite analyses. Most of the human coprolites appear to be late summer and early fall depositions. Four principle plant foods were ground to a fine flour: maize kernels, dropseed caryopses, sunflower achenes, and cheno-am seeds. Maize and dropseed were found in six coprolites each and they did not co-occur. Microscopically, maize starch occurred in seven coprolites. Thus, maize was...
Discovering Landscape Modification through Pollen Data Analysis at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello (2016)
Pollen analysis can advance our understanding of change and spatial variation in the landscape of Thomas Jefferson's Monticello plantation from its initial settlement in the 18th century to the present. In this poster, we present and evaluate data from an intensive, multi-year campaign of stratigraphic sampling conducted in the largely ornamental mountaintop landscape immediately surrounding Jefferson's mansion. Comparing these data to stratigraphic samples not from Monticello Mountain allows us...
Environmental History of the Petén Campechano (2023)
This is an abstract from the "A Session in Memory of William J. Folan: Cities, Settlement, and Climate" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Paleoenvironmental inferences are based on pollen and geochemical data from sediment cores collected in Lakes Silvituc and Uxul, and Oxpemul Reservoir, near three archaeological sites that supported agricultural activity between ca. 900 BC and AD 750, under the control of the Kaan Dynasty. These sites show patterns...
EXAMINATION OF TOOTH TARTAR FROM TWO PREHISTORIC INDIVIDUALS FROM THE SALT LAKE VALLEY, UTAH (2004)
Calculus from two teeth recovered from individuals of unknown age and provenience were submitted for microscopic analysis. Remains were extracted from the calculus, identified, and many photographed. The results are presented here and accompany a digital record of the photographs on a CD.
From Forest to Field: Over Three Centuries of Vegetation Change at Poplar Forest (2017)
A sealed context dating to the mid-17th century at Poplar Forest, Thomas Jefferson’s plantation and retreat in Bedford County, Virginia has provided an opportunity to examine aspects of the protohistoric environment prior to the introduction of large-scale European agriculture in the 18th and 19th centuries. Palynological analysis conducted on this context reveals ratios of arboreal to non-arboreal pollen as well as the presence or absence of disturbance indicators that provide a baseline for...
Human Landscape Modification and Environmental Change in the Western Kenyan Highlands (2017)
Interpretive challenges involving issues of equifinality and causation can chronically hamper environmental reconstruction efforts, as numerous physical, environmental, or anthropogenic processes may potentially be responsible for creating observed raw data patterns. Nested multi- proxy and multiscalar analyses offer potential means of approaching these difficult conceptual issues which can plague interpretations reliant on single lines of proxy evidence. A dataset comprised of multiple...
Landcover Change and Economic Change During the Iron Age in Western Kenya (2016)
Archaeological evidence from numerous sites throughout Western Kenya show that the Iron Age was a time of considerable environmental and cultural change in this region. A short sediment core derived from lower Kingwal Swamp was collected and analyzed for its microbotanical, fungal, and charcoal content with the goal of clarifying the duration, context, and extent of these changes as visible through landscape modification. These sediments capture approximately the last 1800 years of ecological...
The meaning of the plants around the death: the case of the Offer 149 (2017)
Each offer in the Tenochtitlan Sacred Enclosure is the representation of a microcosmos that can be understood through the analysis and interpretation of each one of its compounds. An important part of them are the vegetal microremains, floral remains that did not endure trough the pass of the time for its own organic nature but that in the Aztec period had multiple meanings that allowed them to be an frequent material of offering. The Offer 149 is an exceptional case up to the moment, not only...
Peopling the Landscape: The Pollen Record and Nomadic Pastoralism in Iron Age Ireland (2018)
The people of the Irish Iron Age are often referred to as ‘invisible’ due to their seeming absence from the archaeological record. Ceramics, so often associated with domestic activities, are not a part of the Iron Age material culture. Burials and domestic settlements dating to the Iron Age exist, but they are the exception to the generally sparse archaeological record. In the absence of sufficient material culture and settlement patterns, other means of studying the people of the Iron Age must...
Pollen Analyses of Samples from New Jersey (2021)
A series of pollen samples representing five cores were submitted for pollen analysis. The pollen signatures from these cores are discussed below.
A Pollen Analysis of a Hudson's Bay Company Non-garden Provenience, Fort Vancouver, Washington
The Andrew Fiske Memorial Center for Archaeological Research at the University of Massachusetts Boston conducted a palynological analysis on six contiguous soil samples that were collected from the Fort Vancouver site. The samples were recovered from a location associated with the Hudson Bay Company's occupation that is situated in close proximity to what is today Fort Vancouver's Visitors Center, which is scheduled to undergo extensive renovations in the near future (Dorset 2010 Pers. Comm.)....
A Pollen Analysis of a Hudson's Bay Company Non-garden Provenience, Fort Vancouver, Washington. (2011)
The Andrew Fiske Memorial Center for Archaeological Research at the University of Massachusetts Boston conducted a palynological analysis on six contiguous soil samples that were collected from the Fort Vancouver site. The samples were recovered from a location associated with the Hudson Bay Company's occupation that is situated in close proximity to what is today Fort Vancouver's Visitors Center, which is scheduled to undergo extensive renovations in the near future (Dorset 2010 Pers. Comm.)....
POLLEN AND PHYTOLITH ANALYSIS OF SAMPLES FROM THE EAST GARDEN, STRATFORD HALL PLANTATION, WESTMORELAND COUNTY, VIRGINIA (2013)
Soil samples from the East Garden of the 18th-century Stratford Hall Plantation in Westmoreland County, Virginia, were submitted for pollen and phytolith analysis. Results will be used to assist with the process of identifying plants cultivated in the possible planting bed features of the garden.
Pollen Record Formation Processes in Temperate Zone Archaeological Sites (2015)
The pollen spectra of archaeological sites in the temperate zone are subject to post-deposition modifications in the form of earthworms mixing the pollen in the humus zone.They are subsequently percolated downward in rainwater, at rates that vary with the location and nature of the matrix, and are physically degraded by aerobic fungi, by groundwater oxygen, and by repeated hydration and dehydration.These processes produce a profile with the highest pollen concentrations at the top and quantities...
Pueblo Agricultural Persistence and Innovation during Spanish Colonization (2022)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "New Avenues in the Study of Plant Remains from Historical Sites" , at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. This project investigates how (and to what extent) Pueblo people in the Rio Grande region of New Mexico adjusted their agricultural practices when confronted with Spanish colonization. The data collected for this project involved surveying the areas around multiple pre-contact and contact-era Pueblos to document...
Quaternary Vegetation and Climate in the Lesser Caucasus, an Update (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Pleistocene Landscapes and Hominin Behavior in the Armenian Highlands" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The numerous archaeological discoveries in the Lesser Caucasus document the crucial role that this territory had for humans more than 2 Ma. In particular, the scientific debate has highlighted its strategic position for phases of migration “out of Africa,” and expansion to the Eurasian continent. The role of climate...
Reconstructing the Environmental History of El Paraíso, Chillón Valley (2018)
By Late Preceramic Perú (3000-2100 BC) lomas environments were largely abandoned in favor of riparian and littoral ecozones, and hunting and gathering subsistence strategies were increasingly replaced by agriculture. This change coincided with the emergence of several hallmarks of complexity: monumental architecture, specialization, and hierarchical organization. The role that environmental degradation or climate change played in this transition remains a subject of debate. This paper presents...