archaeobotany (Other Keyword)
76-100 (128 Records)
Marley Brown's investment in and foresight toward environmental and garden archaeology during his tenure at Colonial Williamsburg has created a community of scholarship and professional archaeologists that has adopted these research domains in a more scientific, critical, and publicly-engaged way than before. Garden and environmental arcaheology are frequently topics of interest to historical archaeologists but have a checkered record of application. This paper examines how lessons learned,...
The Homol’ovi Settlement Cluster (ca. A.D. 1260–1400): Reconstructing Environment and Ancient Hopi Lifeways through Charred Botanical Remains (2015)
The Homol’ovi settlement cluster, a group of Hopi villages occupied A.D. 1260–1400, shared common utilization of a wide range of wild and domesticated plants for both subsistence and non-subsistence needs. Inhabitants had an extremely well-rounded and informed view of the plant world that surrounded them, as well as plant resources obtained from afar. The ubiquity of domesticates in the archaeological record indicates a heavy reliance on agriculture for food, household items, clothing, fuel, and...
How Do Households Work? Examining plant use during the Late Chalcolithic at Çadır Höyük, Turkey (2016)
This paper presents archaeobotanical data from the Late Chalcolithic (LC) archaeobotanical assemblage at Çadır Höyük, a mounded site on the north central Anatolian plateau with almost continuous occupation from the Middle Chalcolithic through the Byzantine period. Architectural and metallurgical evidence indicate that during the LC, Çadır was developing as a regional rural center, which makes it an ideal site to study the role that households occupied during in emerging systems of social...
How to Reduce the Boxes in your Laboratory and Produce Good Research: Archaeobotanical Analyses and Rehabilitated Collections (2015)
We have all heard the adage that "one hour in the field equals ten in the lab". It is proof of this saying that nearly every archaeological laboratory boasts an impressive collection of meticulously collected soil samples. Nearly every complex archaeological excavation has the potential to yield hundreds or even thousands of liters of carefully collected sediment, despite the excavator’s knowledge that the mass majority will never be analyzed. Archaeobotanists can find great research value in...
Integrating archaeobotany to provide Insight into domestic and public ritual in southern Brazil (2017)
Archaeobotanical results are integrated with archaeological and paleoecological data for the southern proto-Jê of the southern Brazilian highlands. Results from a domestic structure displays a pattern of architectural termination and renewal that not only uncovers an ancient ritual practice, but also reveals practices of plant management when considered alongside paleoecological data. Within the wider context, the data support a change in the performance of ritual practices revolving around fire...
Isotopes & Curation: New Lessons Learned from Legacy Waterlogged Wooden Artifacts (2018)
A pilot study was conducted to test the feasibility of applying strontium isotope analysis to source the origins of archaeological "canoe trees" tested to make pre-contact dugout canoes spanning some 5000 years. Many canoes collected decades ago from Florida’s lakes produced unexpected signatures. These results raised further questions about the methods' feasibility and the impact of past preservation approaches to the curation of waterlogged wooden artifacts. The anatomical nature of wood...
Maize, Mast, and Other Plant Resources from the Late Prehistoric and Contact Period North Carolina Piedmont (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Before, After, and In Between: Archaeological Approaches to Places (through/in) Time" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The Contact period is often designated as a significant temporal marker for American archaeology. Excavations led by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill under the Siouan Project have produced an extensive number of archaeobotanical samples from late Prehistoric and Contact period...
Millets and Rice on the Move: Adaptive Strategies in the Past and Future (2017)
A growing tradition of archaeobotanical research, one that was pioneered by Steven Weber, is allowing us to form a picture of how millets and rice spread into Southeast Asia. Although rice continues to play an important role in the diet in this area, the use of millet has been slowly forgotten. These two different crops have been alternatively seen as a "cultural package" that coincided with the spread of farmer populations from Southern China, or adaptations to different ecological or climatic...
Morphometric Analyses of Cereal Grains from Central Jordan Improve the Resolution of Identifying Shifts in Crop Cultivation and Processing Strategies over 2000 Years (ca. 800 BCE - 1300 CE) (2015)
The measurement of carbonized domesticated cereal caryopses through a number of established morphometric parameters has the potential to provide information on past cultivation conditions, crop processing practices, and taphonomic processes. This poster presents the results of morphometric analyses using a microscope-mounted camera on carbonized cereal caryopses of wheat (Triticum aestivum/durum and Triticum dicoccum) and barley (Hordeum vulgare) collected from the archaeological site of Dhiban,...
Naomi F. Miller and Applied Paleoethnobotany of Southwest Asia (2017)
Naomi F. Miller’s work exemplifies the paleoethnobotanical approach towards understanding human interactions with botanical landscapes in the past using archaeological remains, rooted in theoretical traditions of American anthropological archaeology. On the occasion of her Fryxell Award in Interdisciplinary Research from the SAA, we reflect on her body of published research and active fieldwork to draw out five themes that highlight areas in which Miller has made significant contributions to the...
Native Irrigation in Owens Valley: The 2000 Year Back-story (2015)
Owens Valley is unique in that the Native Paiute were recorded as using irrigation to promote growth of certain crops such as taboose, Cyperus esculentus. This paper looks at the archaeological occurrence of the taboose tuber and other archaeobotanical remains in Owens Valley to explore the issue of whether Native irrigation would have made sense for this hunter-gatherer group. For roughly the last 2000 years of prehistory the Owens Valley archaeological record shows a cycle of alternating...
The Nature and Status of Paleoethnobotany (2015)
How does one honor the greatest generation of paleoethnobotany? It should not be difficult. What they have accomplished is no less than establishing paleoethnobotany as fundamental archaeology. Their cutting edge approaches succeeded in keeping scientific methodology in archaeology throughout the discipline’s theoretical paroxysms, all the while keeping the "ethno" in paleoethnobotany. The next generation of paleoethnobotanists is already building on their mentors’ successes by further advancing...
Nectandra sp. seed from archaeological contexts in Panquilma. An approach based on morphological features and contextual information (2016)
One of the main socioeconomic characteristics during the late periods is the high and dynamic presence of exchange of foreign goods, many of them coming from the amazon basin, including Nectandra sp., a seed with psychoactive properties, characteristic of moist woodlands, associated with offerings and funerary contexts in the Andean region. This study presents the preliminary analysis of Nectandra sp., including physical and chemical properties, such as the pharmacological features mentioned in...
Neolithic Resource Use and Niche Construction on Jeju Island, Korea (2017)
One of the key subjects in island archaeology is how islanders adapted to isolated environments and sustained with local resource. Jeju Island sites reveal Early Holocene Neolithic settlements, dating 2,000 years prior to any of Neolithic sites in the Korean mainland. Accordingly, Jeju Island offers an opportunity to understand any shift in subsistence strategies amid the changing Early Holocene environments. A sudden appearance of arrowheads and grinding slabs in the Early Holocene Jeju has...
New Perspectives on the use of Yucca in the arid Southwest: archaeobotany and experiment (2015)
Macrofloral analysis conducted on sites concentrated in the northwestern Permian Basin (southeastern New Mexico) recovered evidence of charred yucca (Yucca sp.) leaf bases in numerous features. Ethnographically various yucca plant parts are mainly associated with fiber and food processing. The presence of these remains in solitary hearth features distributed on the arid landscape of southeastern New Mexico suggests use of these plants simply as tinder. Yucca plants represent a natural and easily...
A New Survey of Plant Foods in Post-medieval Ireland: Evidence from Archaeobotany (2023)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "FoodCult: Food, Culture and Identity in Ireland, c.1550-1650", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. This paper will explore the nature and meaning of foodways in post-medieval Ireland, based upon a new survey of archaeobotanical remains from more than 50 excavations across the island. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were a period of increasingly globalised trade when new foods arrived in Ireland, some of...
Niche Construction and Common Pool Resource Management in Marginal Environments: A Diachronic Approach (WGF - Dissertation Fieldwork Grant) (2018)
This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Anthropologists have long been concerned with the immense variety of collective institutions developed by small-scale societies to foster solidarity, inculcate values, and manage resources. Long-term studies tracking the development and maintenance of such institutions would greatly benefit a range of social science disciplines, but are unfortunately rare. To this end, the proposed project...
On the Periphery of Collapse: An Archaeobotanical View from the Mycenaean Hinterland at Tsoungiza (2015)
The site of Tsoungiza, situated in the Nemea Valley of southern Greece, offers a glimpse into processes of agricultural and land-use practices in the Mycenaean hinterland and their intersection with the waxing and waning of Mycenaean political, economic, and social control. After abandonment in the Early Helladic III period (ca. 2,000 B.C.), the site was re-occupied during the late Middle Helladic III (ca. 1,650 B.C.), at a time of regional population expansion associated with the rise of the...
Paleoethnobotanical Remains Associated with the Sacbe at the Ancient Maya Village of Cerén (2015)
Paleoethnobotanical research conducted during the 2013 field season at Joya de Cerén in El Salvador focused on the analysis of plant remains found on the surface and associated features of an ancient Maya sacbe (causeway) that were well protected beneath tephra deposited by the volcanic eruption of Loma Caldera around AD 660. Plant remains were retrieved from the sacbe surface, adjacent drainage canals, and agricultural fields on either side of the sacbe. Because the plant remains found in...
Paleoethnobotany in Undergraduate Research (2017)
I have spent the last year gaining laboratory experience in the Paleoethnobotany laboratory at Washington State University. My purpose in the lab was to aid two graduate students with their master’s thesis research. Thus far, I have learned the basics of paleoethnobotanical analysis through examining material from both the Old World (Thailand) and the New World (the Pacific Northwest). These basics include how to identify different types of seed and wood charcoal, how to properly organize and...
Plant niche construction; from forager to planter in the Zagros Mountains, Iran (2015)
In terms of niche construction, the development of agriculture at the end of the Palaeolithic was a realignment and expansion of existing hunter-gatherer plant ecology modifications to a transforming human and natural setting. This paper suggests that people's engagement with their surroundings altered under pressure of changes in the environment and their subsistence, residence and mobility strategies. Increased foraging efficiency and stability were sought. These relied on a suite of...
Plant Remains Assemblage in Santa Clara Valley (2015)
The Santa Clara Valley has an archaeobotanical record that spans from the central California Early, Middle, and Late periods. Sites CA-SCL-12, -478, -674, and -919 have robust plant remains assemblages from distinct periods that can be used to evaluate change in plant use and land-management practices. Temporal context and habitat will be compared for each site to understand variation in plant diversity and intensification. SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for...
PLANT RESOURCES IN GREAT BASIN HIGH ALTITUDE FORAGING (2015)
Prehistoric high altitude occupation sites in the White Mountains and Toquima Range contain archaeobotanical assemblages that inform on the use of plant resources both alpine in origin and imported from lower altitudes. Plant assemblages from the two areas show many similarities in the range of plant resources represented, as well as evident differences that reflect variable modes of high altitude living across the Great Basin. This presentation compares the plant materials from the White...
The Potentials of Anthracology and the Study of Archaeological Parenchyma in Vietnam Archaeology (2017)
Archaeobotanical studies in Southeast Asia has been gradually developing in the archaeological scene in providing interpretation of the past. In this paper, a macro-botanical study of Vietnam, focusing on the anthracology (wood charcoal) and archaeological parenchyma, was initiated. The principles and methods used by the archaeologists in other regions in the analysis of wood charcoal and parenchymatous plant tissue are applied in the analysis of the plant remains recovered in the archaeological...
The Power of Plants: Recentering Traditional Ecological Knowledge in New England (2016)
Often plants recovered from archaeological sites are not seen as keys to interpreting the agency associated with social contexts and cultural identities. Yet, the physical remains of plants left behind by individuals and communities, like other aspects of material culture, are the result of the choices made, completed actions, knowledge availability, and goals/strategies. This paper highlights and recenters traditional ecological knowledge of the Mashantucket Pequot Tribe from 1000 to 1800 A.D....