Subsistence and Foodways (Other Keyword)
351-375 (486 Records)
This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Oaxacan Cuisine" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The rich culinary traditions of Oaxaca were both enhanced through and catastrophically disrupted by Spanish incursions during the Colonial Period. However, in spite of many radical transformations in cooking techniques and ingredients, indigenous people of Oaxaca persisted in their use of certain foods and practices. This persistence sometimes required...
Prey and Predators on the Late Pleistocene Llano Estacado (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Human Interactions with Extinct Fauna" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Humans are among the major predators on the Llano Estacado (Southern High Plains, USA) during the late Pleistocene in competition with a diverse carnivore guild that included the now-extinct giant short-faced bear, saber-tooth cat, American lion, and dire wolf. Direct evidence on bone in the form of cut marks and bone fracture patterns are used in...
Provisioned and Caught: Historic Perspectives on Diet in the Danish West Indies (2018)
Historic records indicate that during the late 18th and into the 19th century preserved North Atlantic fishes were shipped to the West Indies as a relatively cheap source of protein to feed enslaved persons and also the planter class. However, in historic zooarchaeological analyses of faunal assemblages from the Caribbean, the presence of these food remains is often not identified. Using two sites from the Danish West Indies, a case will be made for the use of fine-screen techniques to ensure...
Pueblo Agricultural Adaptations to Socioeconomic Changes in New Mexico (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation illustrates the results of the survey work of the agricultural areas around two precontact villages (Poshuouinge and Pueblo Blanco) and two contact-era villages (Cuyamungue and San Marcos). One hundred and fifty-six agricultural features were documented on the survey and ranged from Pueblo irrigation ditches in and slightly above the...
Puebloan Subsistence Patterns on the Shivwits Plateau, North Rim of the Grand Canyon (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeology of the Grand Canyon-Parashant National Monument" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Based on fieldwork from the South Rim, Alan Sullivan has argued that ancient Puebloans in the Grand Canyon region practiced little or no corn agriculture. Instead, he proposes they relied on the gathering and processing of wild plants such as pinyon nuts, amaranth, and goosefoot. Here, we evaluate the applicability of this...
Quantitative Paleodietary Reconstruction with Complex Foodwebs: An Isotopic Case Study from the Caribbean (2018)
Stable isotope analysis is one of the most effective tools for paleodietary reconstruction and has been widely applied to a vast array of archaeological contexts including the Caribbean region. This region, however, possesses a particularly complex isotopic ecology, including both a large number of isotopically variable food sources and a high degree of isotopic overlap between different food groups. As such, to date, most regional paleodietary studies have been limited to descriptive and...
Quotidian and Ritual Use of Maize at Early Formative Etlatongo, Oaxaca, Mexico (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent research on subsistence systems in Early Formative (1600–900 BCE) Mesoamerican communities contest longstanding concepts linking the growth of early sociopolitical complexity with full-time agriculture. Lowland-focused studies have introduced mixed nonagricultural models in coastal regions that were able to support both sedentary groups and much larger...
Rabbits, Pronghorn, Oh Deer! Oh My! A Preliminary Analysis of Subsistence Strategies at Wupatki National Monument, Northern Arizona (2018)
Wupatki National Monument is a Puebloan site located in the Sinagua region of Northern Arizona, featuring an array of wildlife available to past populations for subsistence and technological purposes. Analyzing faunal remains from Colorado Plateau sites is an important part of developing a holistic understanding of the lifeways of agricultural communities in the Southwest. This poster focuses on the zooarchaeological analysis of materials from Wupatki National Monument housed at the Museum of...
Radiocarbon Dates and Freshwater Resource Use within Prehistoric Diets (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Northeast Asian Prehistoric Hunter-Gather Lifeways: Multidisciplinary, Individual Life History Approach" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The human remains of Early to Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age populations surrounding Lake Baikal have known and large offsets in their radiocarbon ages caused by “old carbon” in freshwater ecosystems. This freshwater reservoir effect (FRE) causes human radiocarbon ages to appear...
Raise Your Glass to the Past: An Experimental Archaeology of Beer and Community (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A pint of beer is more than a "simple" beverage. The presence of ethanol resulting from the yeast-based fermentation contributes to making beer a unique form of embodied material culture that has fermented alongside humanity since well before written records. It is the most widely used psychoactive substance in the world, and is regularly discussed in...
Raised Field Agriculture in the Maya Lowlands: Archaeobotanical Remains from Birds of Paradise (2018)
Up until the late 1990s, researchers believed the Maya were solely reliant on slash and burn agricultural practices. However, discoveries of rectangular canal patterns in the margins of wetlands in the Maya lowlands of Guatemala, Belize, and Mexico shined light on a new agricultural practice: raised wetland fields. One example of wetland fields is found at the site Birds of Paradise (BOP) in the Rio Bravo region of northwestern Belize. The macrobotanicals recovered from the raised fields and...
Raising a Rafter: A Cost-Benefit Analysis of Ancestral Pueblo Intensification of Turkey Husbandry in the Northern Rio Grande Region, New Mexico (2018)
Zooarchaeological research in the Northern Rio Grande shows that turkey husbandry became increasingly important to the Ancestral Pueblo during the Classic Period (AD 1350-1600). During this time, immigrant and local communities coalesced into increasingly larger villages and towns, with abundant evidence for turkey husbandry. Turkeys served as a critical resource for both subsistence and ritual uses. Yet, it remains uncertain at what scale (household, sub-community, or community) turkey...
Rare Animals at a Mississippian Chiefly Compound: The Irene Mound Site (9CH1), Georgia, USA (2018)
The Irene site (ca. AD 1150 - 1450) was a small, prestigious community occupied by a chief and his lineage. It was located on the Savannah River, a few kilometers inland from the Atlantic Ocean. The presence of animals rare in the region and animals rare or absent in other coastal assemblages distinguishes the Irene collection from other tidewater collections. Many of these animals exhibit atypical, even dangerous, behavior. Rare animals, and other attributes, provide a standard for assessing...
Re-evaluating Butchery Marks from a Mastodon Assemblage Using 3D Geometric Morphometrics and Experimental Archaeology (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Geometric Morphometrics in Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. At the end of the Pleistocene, North America experienced a mass extinction of megafauna, including proboscideans—mammoths and mastodons. Archaeologists and other scientists continue to debate the role of human predation in these extinctions. Some point to traces of human butchery, such as cut marks and other bone surface modifications (BSM), as...
Re-evaluating the Earliest Evidence for Wild Potato Use in South-Central Chile (2018)
The earliest evidence of wild potato use anywhere in the world comes from Monte Verde (southern Chile), where tuber fragments were recovered from hearths that directly date to 14,500 cal B.P. Those tubers were tentatively assigned to a wild potato species (Solanum maglia) based on their starch granule morphology, which, according to Ugent et al., could be distinguished from the granule morphology of the domesticated potato (S. tuberosum). Recently, that identification has been called into...
Recent Insights into Protohistoric Foodways in the Northern Quoddy Region of the Northeast (2018)
Despite more than a century of archaeological research in the Quoddy Region of southwestern New Brunswick, in the Canadian Maritime Provinces, the protohistoric and early contact periods in this area have remained obscure. However, recent research at several sites has begun to illuminate this period, and like many of the precedent Woodland period sites (prior to 500 BP), many of these newly studied protohistoric sites have produced shell-bearing components, and contain a wealth of information on...
Reconsidering Cereal Production and Consumption in the North Atlantic: A case study from Northern Iceland (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Mind the Gap: Exploring Uncharted Territories in Medieval European Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the Viking Age, the Norse settled Iceland, a sub-arctic volcanic island at the climatic margin of cereal production. These settlers brought with them a distinctive subsistence economy involving animal husbandry and cereal production, most notably barley. Barley (Hordeum vulgare) has been noted by...
Reconstructing Animal Economies of Early Ireland in Transition (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Animal Bones to Human Behavior" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In Ireland, one of the defining features of the transition from the Iron Age to the Early Medieval period, during the first centuries AD, is the development of a dairying economy. The concern for dairy as a commodity had social and political consequences for Early Medieval society; with status reflected in quantities of dairy cattle and social obligations...
Reconstructing Diet from Combined Pollen, Macrofossil, and DNA Analysis of Human Paleofeces (2018)
This work integrates multi-proxy data from 44 human paleofeces in order to study resource use among early farmers in the northern Southwest. Macrofossils and pollen were analyzed for all specimens. Since not all foods leave pollen or macrofossils identifiable after digestion, available resources unlikely to be visually identified were targeted for PCR-analysis in 20 samples using mitochondrial and chloroplast DNA primers. Separate cluster analyses of each of these datasets showed almost no...
Reconstructing Individual Life Histories in Early Medieval Italy through Serial Analysis and Compositional Analysis of Bones and Teeth (2018)
This contribution aims at gaining on the life history of individuals buried in northeastern Italy between the fifth and the seventh centuries AD. Elemental analysis of human and animal remains provides data on the evolution of diet and mobility at a time of significant social changes. Our research strategy, based on a preliminary histological study on teeth and bones and on serial sampling, gives us the opportunity to observe these variations at the level of the individual. Thus, this research...
Reconstructing Life Histories at the Site of Estuquiña: Incorporating Isotopic Data from Archaeological Hair to Investigate Palaeodietary Trends (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The site of Estuquiña is a Late Intermediate Period (AD 1100-1476) site in the Osmore drainage near the modern city of Moquegua in southern Peru. This time period is characterized by regional socio-political decentralization and transition of imperial polities throughout much of Andean South America. Previous research on human remains from the site...
Reconstructing Recipes: Stable Isotope Analysis of Food Residues from a Year-long Cooking Experiment (2018)
Charred food residues provide a unique window into ancient peoples’ culinary cultures, and chemical analyses of burnt meals can help us identify the ingredients used to create specific recipes. However, limited experimental work leaves us wondering - when we find residue in an ancient pot, are we viewing the remains of the final meal cooked in that pot or is it the product of multiple recipes? Does the chemical signature of the residue accurately reflect the meal(s) cooked in that pot? Seven...
Reconstructing the Childhood Diet of an Eighteenth- to Nineteenth-Century North Carolina Land-Owning Family (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Breastfeeding and weaning practices can impact a child’s immune system development and nutritional status and cause long-term health effects. Here we explore the potential relationship between the weaning process and childhood frailty in a late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century land-owning family in coastal North Carolina. The 10 individuals recovered...
Reconstruction of the Diet at the Iron Age Site of Cvijina Gradina, Croatia (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cvijina Gradina, located along the Zrmanja River in present day Croatia, was once one of the largest Liburnian settlements during the Iron Age period (6th – 1st century BC). The settlement was prominent in the region’s economic and sociopolitical sphere, leaving behind significant bioarchaeological evidence of diet to be researched. Based on the fragmentary...
A Reexamination of the Faunal Assemblage at Bird Hammock (8Wa30) (2018)
The Bird Hammock site (8Wa30) located in Wakulla County, Florida, is a multicomponent site representing Late Swift Creek and Weeden Island occupations. The site consists of two burial mounds as well as two accompanying middens each representing one phase of occupation. Bense completed excavations in 1968 that provided a preliminary description of faunal material at the site but it was not until Nanfro’s (2004) excavations that a more thorough analysis was completed. My research reexamines the...