Subsistence and Foodways (Other Keyword)
101-125 (757 Records)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. <html> Chaco Canyon was an epicenter of ancestral Puebloan activity between AD 850 and 1250. One of the most powerful ways of understanding the past comes from stable isotope analysis, which has provided insights into the ecology, mobility, resource utilization, and landscape management of Chaco Canyon for decades. Over the last five years, numerous...
Changing Diets: Using Stable Isotopic Micro-sampling Approaches to Explore Dietary Changes throughout Life (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Isotope analysis of bulk carbon and nitrogen from tooth dentine and bone collagen are now commonly used in studies of dietary reconstruction from past populations. Teeth do not remodel once formed, so bulk dentine values provide an “average” dietary signal from the few years of childhood when the tooth was formed. Bones, on the other hand, continue to...
Changing mid-Holocene environmental conditions in Belize – a role for Saharan dust? (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Northern Belize Archaic Period and Sahara Dust" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Several studies have highlighted the role of the Holocene ‘Green Sahara’ in affecting environmental conditions across the tropics. Expansive Saharan vegetation altered albedo and evapotranspiration, and changed atmospheric circulation, impacting climate over remote regions. For example, mid-Holocene precipitation changes in eastern South...
Changing Patterns of Plant Use at Formative and Classic Period Matacanela (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Olmec Manifestations and Ongoing Societal Transformations in the Tuxtlas Uplands: A View from Matacanela" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Although there has been much speculation about the nature of agriculture along the Formative and Classic period Gulf Coast of Mexico, the local and regional subsistence economies of these periods remain poorly understood, particularly for Classic-period sites. In this paper, we...
Changing Plant Economies and Diverse Plant Practices at Piedras Negras (2018)
Botanical residues recovered from the Piedras Negras kingdom have yielded rich information about activities and economies of ancient inhabitants. Data for this paper were derived from large-scale excavations targeting Classic Period craft production areas, defensive features, and dwellings. Evidence of agricultural practices as well as the collection of wild and fallow-dwelling plants has been revealed through charred seeds and other botanical residues. The recovered archaeobotanical remains...
Changing Rural Production Strategies during Urbanization in Medieval Lucca (2024)
This is an abstract from the "New Work in Medieval Archaeology, Part 1: Landscapes, Food, and Health" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The later Middle Ages saw significant changes in the ways that humans exploited their natural environments, fueled by rising populations in cities and the development of commercial industries. This has been studied historically, often through the lens of urban elites, but it is less clear how these changes occurred...
Changing Taste: An Investigation into the Importance of New York Coastal Marine Shells to Albany Foodways During the 19th century (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. An examination of the relationships between food and identity is explored among middle-class African Americans in Albany, New York through four periods (early to middle 19th century, middle 19th century, late 19th century, and late 19th to early 20th century). This research synthesizes zooarchaeological data collected from the Stephen and Harriet Myers...
Charting the Understudied Landscape: Isotopic Baselines for CAM Plants and Other Native Organisms in Peru’s Tierras Blancas Region (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Stable Isotope Analysis in Global History" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Tierras Blancas Valley in the Nasca region of southern coastal Peru is home to a diverse array of plant and animal species. The Nasca culture, which emerged during the Early Intermediate Period (100-650 C.E.), primarily used ceramics to depict these natural elements in their iconography. While previous isotope studies have investigated...
Chemical Analyses at Hell Gap: Preliminary Results from Blood Residue and Stable Isotopes (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Hell Gap at 60: Myth? Reality? What Has It Taught Us?" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cross‐over immunoelectrophoresis (CIEP) analyses from chipped stone artifacts have been completed to provide additional information on faunal procurement and use at Hell Gap. Results include positive reactions to dog and bovine antisera, with canid and bison bones represented in the faunal assemblage at the site. In addition to blood...
Chemical Residue Analysis, Foodways, and Ceramic Consumption in Tlajinga, Teotihuacan (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Tlajinga is the southernmost district of Teotihuacan, a cosmopolitan city that thrived in Central Mexico during the Classic Period. Previous research done in Tlajinga includes surface collection associated with the Teotihuacan Mapping Project and the excavation of one apartment compound, during the 70’s. Recent investigations carried out by the Proyecto...
Chickasaw Pottery Vessel Form and Function in the Early Historic Period (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study of Chickasaw pottery vessel forms dating to ca.1700 C.E. explores 268 reconstructed analytical vessels from six okaakinafa’ midden pits across two sites (22Le907 and 22Po755) located in and around Tupelo in Lee and Pontotoc counties, Mississippi. Ethnohistorical information, prior research, and oral traditions are gleaned for interpretive...
Childhood in the Wari World: A Bioarchaeological Investigation of Dietary Patterns in a Middle Horizon (600–1000 CE) Community (2024)
This is an abstract from the "The Marking and Making of Social Persons: Embodied Understandings in the Archaeologies of Childhood and Adolescence" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper uses an anthropological bioarchaeological approach to examine stable isotope data to reconstruct juvenile diet and migration. Through the analysis of stable carbon and oxygen isotope data from dental enamel carbonates, this study builds a preliminary...
Cholla Bud Roasting in St. George, Utah during the Early Pueblo II Period (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Hot Rocks in Hot Places: Investigating the 10,000-Year Record of Plant Baking across the US-Mexico Borderlands" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cactus-bud procurement is not typically associated with Virgin Branch Ancestral Puebloan subsistence systems. Yet, when I visited a small artifact scatter on the apex of a rocky, cholla-covered hill near St. George, Utah, I was reminded of cactus-procurement landscapes on the...
Chronic Care in the Archaic Midwest: A Bioarchaeological Analysis of Healthcare Provisioning and Chronic Illness at Carrier Mills, IL (6000–3000 BC) (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Bioarchaeology has provided useful data on the relationship between subsistence patterns and human health. Yet few studies have considered healthcare provisioning in their models. The Bioarcheology of Care (BoC) is a four-stage method for empirically testing the possibility of healthcare provisioning in the past. Using the BoC, this study examines the...
Classic Maya Food Systems and the Sociality of Diet in the Usumacinta Region (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The ancient Maya utilized a range of landscape modifications for agricultural production, including terraces and raised fields. These agricultural strategies were tied into food systems that also included taxation and tribute, all significant components of a political economy that may have reflected autonomy, exploitation, or both. Using a paleoethnobotanical...
Collaborative Archaeology in Willapa Bay, Washington: Supporting Communities through Scientific Research (2018)
How can archaeologists and indigenous communities work together to transform an understanding of prehistory into something that serves the community’s goals? Since the 1990’s archaeologists have become increasingly dedicated to developing new ways to directly and meaningfully engage descendant communities. This paper presents a case study of collaborative and applied archaeology from the Pacific Northwest Coast. In it, we describe our ongoing efforts to collaboratively define the questions,...
Collinsella intestinalis as Potential Marker of Processed Dairy Consumption (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Maillard Reaction products (MRPs) are formed during the polymerization of a sugar and amino acid in the presence of heat, most of which add desirable flavor and aroma to the food we eat such as bread, powdered milk products and other thermally treated items. MRPs have been shown to impact the composition and diversity of the human gut microbiome,...
A Commensal-Prey Relationship in Early Mainland Southeast Asia? The Case of the Burmese Hare (Lepus peguensis) (2018)
Rabbits and hares are often a central part of human subsistence strategies in both the past and the present. However, the Burmese hare (Lepus peguensis) – the sole member of the family Leporidae indigenous to mainland Southeast Asia (MSEA) – is rarely eaten today, and its status in the past is unclear. Although this taxon is currently abundant across a wide geographic range, it has a poor zooarchaeological record during the Pleistocene and Holocene. Identified specimens occur sporadically in...
The Community at the Crossroads: Insights into Connectivity from the Tijeras Pueblo Fauna (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeology, Cultural Heritage, and Public Education at Tijeras Pueblo, New Mexico" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Tijeras Pueblo lies at a crossroads. It sits at the junction of two canyons, one north-south and one east-west, and occupies a boundary between two distinct culture areas—the Pueblos to the west and the Plains to the east. This position on the landscape may have created both challenges and opportunities...
A Comparative Analysis of Trincheras Tradition and Hohokam Subsistence Practices from ~400 to 1450 CE (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Advances in Macrobotanical and Microbotanical Archaeobotany Part 1" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For nearly a century, archaeologists have debated the subsistence adaptation of the Trincheras Tradition of Sonora, México. Nineteenth-century scholars hypothesized that they were foragers until the arrival of the Hohokam around 1300 CE. Having recently excavated Snaketown in the Phoenix basin, archaeologists had...
A Comparative Archaeological Exploration of Question-Oriented Sampling Strategies to Integrate ZooMS into Zooarchaeological Methods (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances in Zooarchaeological Methods" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. ZooMS (Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry) collagen fingerprinting is increasingly applied to prehistoric faunal collections—especially highly fragmented and/or altered ones—to tackle questions regarding diet, subsistence, and hunting strategies. When mass sampling archaeological bones (i.e., hundreds of bone fragments), ZooMS is a powerful...
A Comparative Paleoethnobotanical Analysis of Geographically Disparate Salado Sites (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Mogollon, Mimbres, and Salado Archaeology in Southwest New Mexico and Beyond" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the thirteenth century, the southwestern United States underwent extensive demographic shifts, including migration and drastic social upheaval. From this context what archaeologists call the Salado ideology emerged in southern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico in the fourteenth century from the...
Comparative Stable Isotopic Analyses between Dental Enamel and Bone Collagen among Central American Archaeological Samples Spanning 8,000 Years (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Advances in Interdisciplinary Isotopic Research" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Carbon, Nitrogen and Oxygen stable isotope analyses are popular tools within the field of archaeology. Applications for stable isotope analyses of human and faunal bone collagen and dental enamel include environmental reconstructions, modeling subsistence patterns, and investigating human-animal relationships, as well as potential to...
Comparing Energy Expenditures of Mortar and Pestle and Grinding Slab Technologies (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Formal Models and Experimental Archaeology of Ground Stone Milling Technology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Daily activities such as grinding plant material require energy input. It is ideal to put in the least amount of work to obtain the greatest yield of product. Energetic expenditures and returns for grinding slab and mortar and pestle use remain largely unstudied. In this study, resting and grinding heart-rate...
Comparing Isotopic Data for Diet and Mobility of Males and Females in the Lower Río Verde Valley, Oaxaca, Mexico (2018)
This poster presents a comparison of the isotopic data from male and female individuals interred in the lower Río Verde Valley of coastal Oaxaca, Mexico from the Early Formative period, beginning in 2000 BC, to the Early Postclassic period, ending in AD 1100. Our previous work in this region has focused primarily on broad dietary changes through time, focusing little attention on comparisons by sex. Our sample for the present study includes 54 individuals: 31 males and 23 females. These...