archaeobotany (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mallory Melton.

Communities cannot be fully identified by their built landscapes; they must also be understood in terms of mundane activities that enact communal bonds. In this paper I use plant remains and pit features to examine communal food processing events at two Protohistoric sites in Hillsborough, North Carolina: Wall (A.D. 1400-1600) and Jenrette (A.D. 1650-1680). By combining a functional analysis of features with a spatial analysis of plants, I have identified two types of discard patterns: larger...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kimberly Kasper. Karen Hess. Anthony P. Graesch. David M. Schaepe.

Many archaeologists overlook the presence of uncharred archaeobotanicals, specifically seeds, within excavated cultural contexts. Frequently assemblages of uncharred seeds receive little analytic attention due to the difficulty of differentiating taphonomic variables associated with their presence, including soil moisture, pH, and insect activity. Further confounding this methodological quandary, it is often difficult to distinguish between the "cultural" and the "modern" seed rain recovered...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ting An.

Evidence of millet in Europe before 2000 BC has invited questions about its material culture context, possibly related with external regions such as China. This study compares the matrial assemblages of distinctively painted pottery vessels associated with findings of millet in different regions, such as the Cucuteni-Tripolye Culture of Southeast Europe, the Anau Culture of Central Asia,and the Majiayao Culture of China. These painted pottery vessels have been argued to be similar to each other,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexandria T Mitchem.

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. In 1761, John Bartram, a self-taught Philadelphia naturalist, attested that his garden could “challenge any in America for variety.” He primarily referred to Eastern North American flora identified during his plant-collection trips and brought under cultivation in his own garden. These species, including the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bruce Smith.

Recent advances in archaeobotany are discussed, and emerging research domains and future challenges are outlined. Particular emphasis is paid to the challenges of replication of results, and the curation of archaeobotanical collections for future researchers. SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Fabian Toro. Chantel White. Joyce White.

Legacy ethnobotanical collections have untapped potential to elucidate human-plant relationships through time and space. This paper examines a subset of a comprehensive ethnobotanical collection undertaken in 1979-1981 in northeast Thailand. The subset comprises 43 traditional rice cultivars and wild forms, each collected along with detailed information about cultivar-specific uses and growing conditions. Our study includes morphometric examination of grains and spikelet bases with the objective...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jens Lüning. Arie J Kalis.

This resource is a citation record only, the Center for Digital Antiquity does not have a copy of this document. The information in this record has been migrated into tDAR from the EXARC Bibliography, originally compiled by Roeland Paardekooper, and updated. Most of these records consist of a document citation and other metadata but do not have the documents themselves uploaded. If you have a digital copy of the document and would like to have it curated in tDAR, please contact us using the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only K H Behre.

This resource is a citation record only, the Center for Digital Antiquity does not have a copy of this document. The information in this record has been migrated into tDAR from the EXARC Bibliography, originally compiled by Roeland Paardekooper, and updated. Most of these records consist of a document citation and other metadata but do not have the documents themselves uploaded. If you have a digital copy of the document and would like to have it curated in tDAR, please contact us using the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cynthia Zutter.

Over past decade, I have assembled a reasonable variety of archaeobotanical data sets from 17th and 18th century Labrador Inuit sites, which includes both macro- (seeds, wood) and micro-botanicals (phytoliths and starches). The recovery and interpretation of these remains, however, has met with many challenges. I will discuss a number of these challenges along with the successes of this work and provide some guidelines to further archaeobotanical research and other work of this type in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Susan Allen. China Shelton.

Since 2008, we have been investigating botanical evidence for subsistence practices, economic organization, and environmental change at the Bronze Age site of Iklaina in southwestern Greece. The spatially intensive sampling strategy we have adopted—the first of its kind to be applied to a Mycenaean administrative center—promotes a high spatial resolution for the archaeobotanical dataset. As such, in addition to providing insights concerning changes in subsistence and land use during the Mycenaen...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexia Smith. Lucas Proctor.

In the 1980s, Naomi Miller’s seminal publications detailing the use and identification of dung fuel within archaeobotanical samples at Malyan provided archaeobotanists with an alternate explanation for the source of plant remains preserved archaeologically, allowing for considerations of ancient fuel use and pasturing practices. Since then, archaeobotanists have generally relied upon wood to weed seed ratios or the composition of weed assemblages to support the use of dung fuel within flotation...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Timothy Messner.

Over the last several decades, Dolores Piperno has made significant methodological and theoretical contributions to our archaeological understanding of the past. This paper draws on these insights to explore Early Holocene foraging strategies in the Lower Illinois River Valley and how these practices fit within their paleoenvironmental and social contexts. These data offer insights into the long trajectory toward plant domestication in eastern North America and the construction of space and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alison Weisskopf. Dorian Fuller.

While grain crops, such as rice, are relatively easy to identify in the archaeobotanical record, evidence for early agriculture in the wet tropics can be elusive. In this region staple foods were not always grain-based and even today wild plants play an important role. So how do we identify ancient food pathways? Unlike temperate parts of the world, charred material rarely preserves, so this is where micro fossils such as phytoliths and starches come into play. I use phytoliths in combination...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Spengler.

In the early 1980s Naomi Miller changed the way paleoethnobotanists in several parts of the world approached the interpretation of their data. With her research into whether the ancient seed eaters of southwest Asia were human or herbivore, she opened an ongoing debate over what impact the burning of animal dung had on archaeobotanical assemblages and how researchers can differentiate between human and animal food remains. As the number of systematic paleoethnobotanical studies across Central...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Ramsay. Geoffrey Hedges.

The Early Bronze Age site of Khirbet Iskander is located on the central plateau, south of Madaba, Jordan. Excavations at the site have focused primarily on the fortified Early Bronze Age III (EBIII) city remains and the transition to the Early Bronze Age IV (EBIV) agricultural settlement. The well-known and much debated collapse or abandonment of the early cities at the end of the EBIII has been documented at many sites in the Levant and is evident at Khirbet Iskander as well. Excavations of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Naomi F. Miller. Chantel E. White.

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. Archaeologists periodically encounter concentrations of uncharred plant remains. Whether excavated or never actually buried, they are a challenge for interpretation. In addition to identification, the archaeobotanical tasks include determining the agent of deposition and the source and date of the material. This...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Charlene Murphy.

Examining the evidence for millet in the Roman empire, during the period, circa 753BC-610AD, presents a number of challenges: a handful of scant mentions in the ancient surviving agrarian texts, several frescoes, only a few fortuitous preserved archaeological finds and limited archaeobotanical and isotopic evidence. Ancient agrarian texts note millet’s ecological preferences and multiple uses but disparage its lowly status. Recent archaeobotanical and isotopic evidence has shown that millet was...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Susan Smith. Karen Adams. Kristin Kuckelman.

For more than 20 years, the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center has systematically acquired flotation, macrobotanical, and pollen samples from structure floors, thermal features, middens, and other contexts during the testing or excavation of many ancestral Pueblo sites dating from a wide range of time periods. In this study, we synthesize uses of plant materials through nearly 500 years of the Pueblo occupation of the Sand Canyon locality in the northern San Juan region. In order to control for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cameron L. McNeil.

This is an abstract from the "The Flower World: Religion, Aesthetics, and Ideology in Mesoamerica and the American Southwest" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Clues to the creation of flower-laden spaces in ancient Maya temples, tombs, and palaces lie on the floors of the best-preserved of these structures. The Copan Acropolis has proved to be a particularly good site for the recovery of well-preserved pollen grains from flowers that adorned ritual...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jon Hageman. David Goldstein.

While chenopod cultivation has been documented extensively in North and South America, evidence for similar practices in the Maya area is lacking. Macrobotanical evidence of Chenopodium recovered from pre-Hispanic Maya archaeological sites is limited to a few seeds. In contrast, the palynological record minimally suggests widespread tolerance across the entirety of the Maya area, if not intensive management or in some contexts even cultivation of Cheno-am genera. It is likely that chenopods...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Heather B Trigg.

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. In 17th-century New Mexico, subsistence activities were the major ways Spanish colonists engaged plants and created landscapes. Colonists’ relationships with plants were developed through a combination of existing notions of human-environment interactions and the creation of new practices that suited the social...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Stone.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As part of a Fulbright–Creative Ireland Museum Fellowship collaboration with the Smithsonian Institution (Washington DC), research will be conducted to establish best practice for the curation and storage of environmental remains from archaeological investigations and establish codes of practice for digital archiving of ecofact material, addressing pressing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Leslie Bush.

Features identified at The Voxman School of Music Site (13JH1436) were investigated by archaeologists in association with construction of a new building on the University of Iowa campus in downtown Iowa City. Historical documents and artifacts indicate residents of the urban site were comparatively affluent people. Two privy features produced abundant seeds of familiar fruits such as blackberry, strawberry, grape, elderberry, gooseberry, tomato, bell or hot pepper, and eggplant. Also present...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Felipe Gaitan-Ammann. Daniela Trujillo-Hassan. Andrés Sarabia.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Historical Archaeology of Cities: Unearthing Complexity in Urban Landscapes", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The second half of the 19th century was an unstable period in the history of Colombia. In cities such as Bogotá, drastic political and economic reforms, inspired by radical interpretations of liberal values, allowed some privileged urban sectors to connect with global networks of production and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Susan Allen.

Settlement patterns and mobility during the Halaf period (ca. 6000-5400 B.C.) are known primarily from Late Halaf sites. On the basis of the Late Halaf pattern, Halaf economies have been characterized as having segmentary organization with some degree of pastoral specialization reflecting a broad pattern of long-term mobility. However, the paucity of floral and faunal studies, particularly for the Early Halaf, limits the visibility of economic variability over the course of the Halaf. In this...