Subsistence and Foodways (Other Keyword)
326-350 (650 Records)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The abundance of faunal remains in archaeological sites is generally associated with the availability of those fauna on the landscape. However, over time, the spatial variability in faunal abundances could change due to environmental or anthropogenic factors. In the American Southwest, the occurrence and abundance of artiodactyls and lagomorphs varies...
Late Paleoindian Earth Ovens in the Texas Big Bend (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. Over the last eight years, the Center for Big Bend Studies (CBBS) has investigated a number of Late Paleoindian thermal features in the Big Bend region of Texas. Excavation of these features and attendant laboratory analyses have provided new insights regarding hot rock cooking...
Late Pleistocene Faunal Utilization: Some Current Thoughts on Paleoindian Diet and Tool Source Selection (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Accumulated evidence regarding the range of prey utilization and tools made from animal remains is rapidly growing and overdue for a summary consideration of Clovis and Pre-Clovis sites in North America. This discussion is heavily weighted with data from Florida sites along the Wakulla and Aucilla Rivers, and the Old Vero Site. Recent proboscidean data from...
Late Pleistocene Megafauna in the Archaeological Record of the Greater Southwest (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Human Interactions with Extinct Fauna" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The record of extinct fauna from Terminal Pleistocene archaeological sites in the Southwest is stereotypically characterized as mammoth from kill sites. Mammoth kills certainly are well known from the region, including the highest concentration of such sites anywhere in the Americas, but the remains of other extinct megafauna with evidence for human...
Lend Me Your Ears: Modeling Traditional Maize Production at Las Cuevas, Belize (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Provisioning Ancient Maya Cities: Modeling Food Production and Land Use in Tropical Urban Environments" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Las Cuevas region, situated on the southeastern edge of the Vaca Plateau in western Belize, consists of several medium-sized centers dispersed between low hills, steep ridges, and small seasonal swamps. Although occupied only briefly during the Late Classic period (700–900 CE),...
Let the Crops Speak for Themselves: How to Avoid Imposing Agroecological Assumptions at Altar de Sacrificios (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Provisioning Ancient Maya Cities: Modeling Food Production and Land Use in Tropical Urban Environments" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Any sizable population must be sustained by an adequate food supply. As such, estimates for high population densities in the Maya Lowlands must be met with an equal or greater productive capacity. The “Provisioning Ancient Maya Cities” symposium seeks to understand this on a...
Let Them Eat Corn: Using Stable Isotopes to Explore Turkey Management in the Mississippian Period Southeast (2018)
The eastern wild turkey (Meleagris gallopavo sylvestris) is a well documented resource for Native Americans in the Southeastern United States. Recent research suggests that turkeys may have been managed by Mississippian period people in Middle Tennessee as opposed to being hunted solely in the wild. These conclusions are based on a combination of ethnographic sources, osteometric data, and other non-osseous evidence. As a part of my thesis, I extracted collagen from 12 prehistoric turkey...
Leveraging DNA Capabilities for Lithic Analysis: Experimental Results and Best Practices (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Old Technology, New Methodology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper outlines the results of a multipart experiment in obtaining DNA deposited on lithics to address questions regarding localized resource use. Previous publications hypothesize that DNA molecules can be preserved in microcracks in lithics and suggest that questions regarding resource exploitation can be addressed with lithics. The goal of this...
Life on the Edge: Fifty Years of Belize Wetland Archaeology (2024)
This is an abstract from the "“The Center and the Edge”: How the Archaeology of Belize Is Foundational for Understanding the Ancient Maya, Part II" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the early years of Maya archaeology, Belize was considered peripheral, and the wetlands were at the far edge of this pseudo-backwater. It was not until Turner and Harrison’s seminal study of Pulltrouser Swamp in the 1970s that Belizean wetlands moved from the edge to...
Living on the Edge: Uncovering Quotidian Life of the Eighteenth-Century Land Grant Community of San Miguel de Carnué (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Hill People: New Research on Tijeras Canyon and the East Mountains" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Following the approval of their application for a community land grant east of Albuquerque in 1763, several New Mexico families of diverse origin ventured into the Tijeras Canyon in hopes of improving their status by managing lands in this colonial buffer zone. The constant threat of Apache raids, however, meant the...
Local Organization in Imperial Settings: Evidence from Late Antique and Middle Islamic Dhiban, Jordan (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. One of the many intellectual legacies of Richard Redding’s work is his exploration of how local communities made provisioning decisions to meet both their own local needs and demands by political authorities. This paper examines these themes among inhabitants of ancient Dhiban, Jordan during the Late...
Long-Term Changes in Human-Animal Relationships on the Pajarito Plateau (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of the Eastern Jemez Mountain Range and the Pajarito Plateau: Interagency Collaboration for Management of Cultural Landscapes" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Previous research from the northern American Southwest suggests that human populations gradually transitioned their animal-based diet away from artiodactyls to a focus on lagomorphs and turkeys throughout the Basketmaker to Pueblo periods. Faunal...
Long-Term Dietary Change among Hunters of the North American Great Plains (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The 13,000-year-long record of hunting by North American Great Plains populations is often portrayed as an almost exclusive reliance on large-bodied prey, such as bison. This simplified perspective ignores temporal and regional variability in environmental conditions and changes in human-prey dynamics, making exclusive reliance on a single taxon unlikely. The...
Long-Term White-Tailed Deer and Human Relationships in Parita Bay, Panama (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Unraveling the Mysteries of the Isthmo-Colombian Area’s Past: A Symposium in Honor of Archaeologist Richard Cooke and His Contributions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A long history of human groups interacting with white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) can be traced to Parita Bay in Panama. Archaeological evidence supports deer consumption since the Middle Holocene, and modern deer are continuously abundant on...
Machine Learning Species Identification with ZooMS Collagen Fingerprinting (2018)
The creation of a robust method of species identification using collagen fingerprinting, also known as ZooMS (Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry) has been useful for objectively defining the composition of the fragmentary component of archaeological assemblages. The method usually works through the measurements of the sizes of collagen peptides following enzymatic digestion, which yield a fingerprint that can be genus or even species-specific. However, even these peptide biomarkers have been...
Macro- and Microbotanical Results from Select Archaeological Contexts in the Plaza of the Columns Complex, Teotihuacan, Mexico (2018)
Paleoethnobotanical analyses provide significant information regarding past human behaviors, which include the selection, production, and consumption of plant resources, among others. This paper focuses on select archaeological contexts, domestic and ritual in nature, which have been investigated from a paleoethnobotanical perspective at the urban center of Teotihuacan, and more specifically in the area known as the Plaza of the Columns Complex. The recovery of macrobotanicals such as maize (Zea...
Macrobotanical and Microbotanical Evidence for Plant Use and Consumption at Gede, Kenya (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the last several decades, excavations at numerous Swahili period sites along the East African coast have yielded a wide variety of data on economic and cultural practices during the last millennium BP. The results of intensive flotation recovery of macrobotanical remains from pit latrine sediments at housing structures are presented, providing direct...
Macrobotanical Evidence from Poverty Point (2024)
This is an abstract from the "*SE Not Your Father’s Poverty Point: Rewriting Old Narratives through New Research" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While it was initially assumed that the residents of Poverty Point relied on an agricultural subsistence base, it soon became apparent that there was no macrobotanical evidence supporting such an assumption. Instead, subsistence remains were found to be generally consistent with a Late Archaic hunting,...
Macrobotanical Perspectives on Earth Oven Use in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands, Texas (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. The tradition of cooking foods in earth ovens goes back at least 10,000 years in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of southwest Texas. Throughout millennia earth ovens were used to transform otherwise inedible plants into food, fiber, and possibly beverages. The region’s arid climate...
Maize Adaptation to Changing Environments (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Subsistence Crops and Animals as a Proxy for Human Cultural Practice" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. All organisms must contend with rapidly changing environments in the face of climate change in order to ensure the survival of the population (Hoffmann and Sgrò 2011). Domesticated plants, with a 10,000 year history of adapting to new environments, provide an excellent model for understanding genetic responses to...
Maize and Meat over Millennia: Meta-analysis of Stable Carbon and Nitrogen Isotope Ratios from the Andean Preceramic to the Colonial Period (7000 BCE - 1600 CE) (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Within the last 40 years, stable isotope analysis has revolutionized bioarchaeology, particularly in the study of human diets in the past. Thousands of studies have analyzed human and animal bone collagen and apatite, tooth enamel, dentin, and hair, but results have rarely been aggregated and studied at large scale. For this investigation, I will compile...
Maize in the Mix: Gas Chromatography Mass Spectrometry Analysis of a Fremont Ceramic Mug Recovered from the Snow Farm Site in Payson, Utah (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Snow Farm site, located on private farmland within the contemporary town of Payson, Utah, was inhabited by the Fremont people from approximately A.D. 700 to 1100 and is believed to have been a part of a larger village complex known as the Payson Mounds. The site is rich in Fremont artifacts and features, including three burials, some of which have been...
Making a Meal at the Late Moche (AD 600-850) Site of Wasi Huachuma, Peru (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Farm to Table Archaeology: The Operational Chain of Food Production" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Creating a meal at the Late Moche (AD 600-850) site of Wasi Huachuma was not simply a matter of visiting the pantry and cooking the ingredients. It required the knowledge of whom to acquire ingredients from, when the ingredients were available, and how to process them. The culinary materials recovered from Wasi Huachuma...
Making Archaic Snaileries out of Shell Heaps: Human Behaviors and Ecological Niches (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Do Good Things Come in Small Packages? Human Behavioral Ecology and Small Game Exploitation" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Global evidence for human consumption and management of gastropods predates the Neolithic Revolution - the period noted for independent experimentation and domestication of terrestrial plants and animals. Archaeological data indicates that gastropods, terrestrial and aquatic, were vital resources...
Managing Teotlalpan: Resourcefulness and Socioecological Diversity during the Epiclassic Period in Central Mexico (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Beyond Maize and Cacao: Reflections on Visual and Textual Representation and Archaeological Evidence of Other Plants in Precolumbian Mesoamerica" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Studies on traditional ecological knowledge stress the importance of local resource management and autonomous governance. Resourcefulness constitutes an integral aspect of such bottom-up pathways. Dependent on knowledge, skills, and social...