Archaeological Maize: Does It Vary across Space and Time?

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Recovery of maize cobs as part of the archaeological record yields a rich potential for discerning connections between people, places, and through time. Started almost three decades ago, the study of maize cob phytolith morphometrics has now produced a sufficient dataset for comparison of phytoliths from reference cobs spanning ancient varieties and more recent maize populations from living tribes with archaeological cobs. Some relationships are surprising, while others are expected. This paper delves into the explanation of the best phytolith "face" to measure, the meaning of shape versus size measurements, and statistical comparisons that show regional relationships between Fremont cobs and suggest the possibility that remote granaries contained different types of maize. Similarities between cobs from southeastern Colorado and eastern Utah were surprising. This study, which started in the Southwest, has now expanded onto the Great Plains with the addition of tribal maize as references.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25969