Subsistence and Foodways (Other Keyword)
26-50 (757 Records)
In honor of Robert Powers, Bandelier National Monument (BNM) presents research on his final project investigating agricultural potential in the arid highlands of the American Southwest. Powers’ research was conducted on behalf of the University of New Mexico’s anthropology doctoral program for archaeology. The Park is well-known for its ancestral Pueblo archaeological sites and the unique, natural ecotones throughout the Eastern Jemez Mountains. The region is topographically dynamic; the...
Ancestral Pueblo Turkey Management at 5MT1905: Evidence for Confinement of Turkeys within a Pueblo II Roomblock in Southwest Colorado (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The human-turkey relationship is an important aspect of Ancestral Pueblo history and has been the focus of recent research in the US Southwest and Northwest Mexico. One of the most important turkey management approaches employed by Ancestral and modern Pueblo peoples involves confinement (i.e., penning or tethering). The central Mesa Verde region, located...
Ancient Genomics Is Archaeobiology (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Enduring Relationships: People, Plants, and the Contributions of Karen R. Adams" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeo- or paleoethnobiology is the study of how humans interact with their environment; the most extreme and intimate expression of this relationship is domestication. Domesticates are not only a biological organism, with their own unique evolutionary trajectories that they bring into domestication, but...
Ancient Human-Animal Interactions in Chachapoyas Region: Isotopic Analysis of Zooarchaeological Remains from Kuelap, Peru (2018)
This study uses isotopic analysis of fauna remains as a proxy for reconstructing the ancient Chachapoya environment of the northeastern highlands in Peru. Large middens have been excavated at the monumental center of Kuelap (900-1535 CE), yet there is little previous research focused on the fauna remains at this or other archaeological contexts in the region. The goal of this project was to reconstruct animal resource exploitation and provide insight into dietary variation and environment at...
Ancient Indigenous Cuisine: Multiproxy Investigations of Food Choice and Cooking (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The application of pottery function analysis alongside analysis of adhered food residues on ancient pottery offers new insights into past foodstuff selection and cooking methods, aka cuisine. Identification of phytoliths and starches present in carbonized food residues provides evidence of specific plant species processed in ceramic cooking vessels, while...
Ancient Maya Agriculture: The Intersection of Archaeology, Soil Science, Ethnobotany and Traditional Ecological Knowledge (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. One enduring mystery of the ancient Maya is how they managed to feed large populations in a tropical environment and land resources that have long been characterized as hostile and challenging for agriculture. The traditional academic and popular perception of Maya agriculture, both ancient and modern, was based on the cultivation of maize, beans, and...
Ancient Maya Diet, Environment, Animal Use and Exchange at El Mirador: The Zooarchaeological Evidence (2018)
The site of El Mirador (Petén, Guatemala) is among the largest Preclassic settlements in the Maya lowlands. The site has attracted attention due to its size and antiquity, but also for its location within a region containing few permanent or perennial water sources. This study summarizes current zooarchaeological evidence from the site to assess past diet, habitat use, environment, and exchange. Comparative analysis demonstrates that the inhabitants of El Mirador conformed to certain widespread...
Ancient Maya Land Use: Water Management and Agricultural Production at Actuncan, Belize (2018)
Research conducted during the 2015-2017 Actuncan Archaeological Project field seasons revealed several land use strategies utilized during the Late and Terminal Classic periods, including terracing, agricultural plots, and cobble mounds. Excavations conducted in the Northern Neighborhood of Actuncan exposed two terracing methods: 1) terraforming, in which earthen berms created to facilitate water drainage and 2) two small agricultural plot systems filled with a large amount of redeposited...
Animal Remains and Archaeological Context in the Mogollon Area, AD 1000–1450 (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Research Hot Off the Trowel in the Upper Gila and Mimbres Areas" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster examines contextual patterns in deposits of animal bones from the Mimbres and upper Gila areas of southwest New Mexico from the Mimbres Classic through Cliff phase Salado periods (AD 1000–1450). Remains of common animal species in contexts like sheet middens and room fill are often interpreted as food remains....
Animal Use among the Monongahela: Insights from the Analysis of the Johnston Site Faunal Assemblage (2018)
Excavations at the Johnston site (36IN2), a Middle Monongahela village located in western Pennsylvania, have generated a large, generally well-preserved assemblage of faunal remains. Between excavations in the 1950s and those conducted since 2005 by IUP, a significant portion of this large ring village has been sampled. Thus, this assemblage provides a rare opportunity to document the use of animals by the Monongahela. Initial faunal analysis was undertaken by John Guilday of the Carnegie Museum...
Animal Use in the Last Maya Kingdom (2018)
The archaeological site of Flores is a small, lacustrine island located in Northern Guatemala. Despite lacking in physical size, the island has a lengthy occupational history, dating from the Preclassic Maya period through the present. Flores, which became a provincial capital during the late Postclassic, was able to resist Spanish rule until 1697 AD, making it the last Maya holdout. Given this distinction, the island has been under much archaeological scrutiny and the subject of many...
Apishapa Structures and Subsistence Strategies in Purgatoire Canyon Colorado (2018)
From 2002 to the present we excavated five Apishapa Structures in the Purgatoire Canyon. This presentation will provide a brief synthesis of structural types and food ways of the sites inhabitants. It appears that maize and a variety of wild plants made up a considerable portion of the Apishapa diet. Analysis of the floral remains from these sites indicate the sites inhabitants relied heavily on available edible plants but also consumed exotics such as pecans. This brief synthesis puts forth our...
Applications of Black Feminist Theory to Archaeobotanical Analysis: A Case Study of Belle Grove’s Enslaved Quarters (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Advances in Macrobotanical and Microbotanical Archaeobotany" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The contributions of enslaved African Americans to local formal economies have often gone unrecognized in previous historical and archaeological research; this is especially true concerning the actions of enslaved women. Black Feminist Theory allows researchers to consider the ways that Black women viewed and affected the...
Arboriculture, Translocated Flora, and Ecological Inheritance in the Marquesas Islands, East Polynesia (2018)
Contact-period accounts point to considerable variability in Polynesian agronomic production systems. In the Marquesas Islands, a mountainous island group in the eastern Pacific, food production in the proto-historic period was narrowly focused on tree cropping and breadfruit cultivation in particular. Early western visitors remarked on the archipelago’s large and thriving island populations, and their stable and productive arboricultural systems. In this paper, we present the results of a...
Archaeobotanical Evidence of Swahili Cuisine at Unguja Ukuu, Zanzibar (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Food has an integral role in the formation of identity. Archaeobotanical techniques are an underutilized yet productive avenue through which we can understand African cuisines and identities, both past and present. This presentation will focus on the preliminary analysis of the archaeobotanical assemblage excavated from the site of Unguja Ukuu by the Urban...
Archaeobotanical Remains from the Roman Harbor Vada Volaterrana (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We present preliminary botanical data and interpretations from the ancient Roman harbor of Vada Volaterrana, located in the modern province of Livorno, Italy. The harbor was supported by a network of structures immediately surrounding the port at Vada's San Gaetano site. A 2015 GPR survey identified a series of rectangular buildings of unknown purpose in...
Archaeobotany Foodscapes (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Enduring Relationships: People, Plants, and the Contributions of Karen R. Adams" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. There is more than one way to gain insight about past Native American use of plants. The conventional approach is to collect archaeobotanical samples during archaeological excavations. Another perspective is to inventory the environments surrounding sites and communities to understand the foodscape that...
Archaeobotany of Food & Craft near Bono Manso, Ghana, during the Transition from Trans-Saharan to Atlantic Trade (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Kranka Dada is a village site on the periphery of Bono Manso, a complex polity occupied between the 14th – 17th centuries AD, at the height of the trans-Saharan trade and the shift to early Atlantic trade. Questions remain about the degree and nature of the involvement of sites like Kranka Dada in these different trade networks. In this paper, we offer...
Archaeological Agave in the Cultural Landscapes of the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Across the Southwestern United States and Mesoamerica, agave has been essential as a source of food, textile, and alcoholic/nonalcoholic beverages for millennia. This study examines a sample of 153 archaeological sites with observed presence of agave in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest, Arizona. This plant does not grow naturally on the northern side...
Archaeological and Ethnographic Plant Use in Mongolia (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The history and prehistory of Mongolia and Central Asia is sometimes characterized as static nomadic pastoralism, with little to no change in resource use over hundreds of years. Many scholars have debunked this unnuanced image by showing the complexities of pastoral lifeways, as well as the adoption of other subistence strategies in areas traditionally...
Archaeological Applications of Optimal Foraging Theory: Employing Bayesian probability modeling to estimate profitability parameters for rare and extinct prey (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Novel Statistical Techniques in Archaeology II (QUANTARCH II)" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Reconstructing the subsistence strategies of past hominin populations remains one of the most important endeavors of archaeological studies. However, the presence and relative frequency of species alone, recovered as faunal material in archaeological contexts, is insufficient to reconstruct the complex foraging decisions made...
Archaeological Evidence of Human Hunting and North American Megafauna Extinctions: A Statistical Reassessment of the Fenske Bone Surface Modifications (2023)
This is an abstract from the "The Expanding Bayesian Revolution in Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists continue to debate what caused the mass extinction of North American megafauna at the end of the Pleistocene—human hunting, climate change, or a combination of both. This debate persists because archaeologists lack standardized methodologies to relate unobservable human hunting behaviors with fossilized animal remains. Some...
Archaeological Legacy Data and Archaeological Data Legacies (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Breaking the Mold: A Consideration of the Impacts and Legacies of Richard W. Redding" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Although digital repositories are well established, many researchers still use informal ways to share data, such as email. This type of sharing runs a great risk of information loss because data is often not well documented or formally described. One could argue, in fact, even new data is legacy data if...
The Archaeological Potential of North American Fungal Microfossils (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Advances in Macrobotanical and Microbotanical Archaeobotany" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Fungi are ubiquitous across diverse landscapes and play critical roles in human societies, influencing global foodways, land use, and economies. In North America, the ethnographic works of various Indigenous groups document the significance of fungi as dietary items, medicine, fire tinder, and more. Despite their demonstrated...
An Archaeologist and a Historian Walk Into A Classroom . . . (2024)
This is an abstract from the "AI-Proof Learning: Food-Centered Experimental Archaeology in the Classroom" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the fall 2022 semester, we co-taught a Special Topics in Anthropology course entitled The Culture and History of Food and Drink. From our respective academic backgrounds as a historian and an archaeologist, we provided students with both an anthropological and a historical perspective to examine how...