Subsistence and Foodways (Other Keyword)
376-400 (650 Records)
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. Modeling agricultural yields provides one way to examine questions of Classic Maya agricultural practices and land management, with follow-on implications regarding intensification, household sustainability, and exchange practices. In this paper, we use models to examine whether milpa...
Modeling the Milpa at Tikal: New Dimensions of the Carr and Hazard Map (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. Much debate has surrounded population and land-use strategies of the Maya. Residential settlements are accepted as a proxy for population and areas without architecture would be available for subsistence. We examine the case of Tikal, where the existing map visually describes...
Modeling the Milpa-Cycle at Classic Period El Pilar: A New Method for Assessing Maya Subsistence Production (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 ancient Maya city El Pilar was founded in an ecotonal location, where the karstic ridgelands of the greater Petén grade into the alluvial Belize River Valley and coastal plain. Established early in the Middle Preclassic (ca. 1000 BCE), El Pilar grew into a major center that...
Modeling the Milpa-Cycle: A GIS-Based Approach to Envisioning Ancient Maya Land Use and Traditional Agricultural Practices (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. Traditional ecological knowledge from living Maya farmers informs us of a storied heritage of agricultural production within the tropical Maya lowlands that traces its lineage to the development and height of ancient Maya civilization. In studying the Maya milpa-cycle, a 20-year...
Modeling Time Investment Trade-Offs for Stone and Wooden Mortars (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. California archaeology and ethnography record instances of mortars made from wood, as well as stone. Differences in raw material availability, intended uses, and mobility are major factors that could contribute to preferential manufacture of wooden mortars versus similarly shaped stone mortars. Although...
Modes of Labor Organization and Variations of Pastoral Economies across East Asia during the Second Millennium BCE (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Ancient Pastoralism in a Global Perspective" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. There has been considerable recent momentum in documenting pastoral communities in the past who engaged with multi-resource subsistence strategies, including both husbandry and cultivation. This paper explores the potential conceptual conflict between cultivation and pastoral activities in the context of labour budget and surplus accumulation....
Molecular and Isotopic Analysis Indicates Variable Uses for Early Pottery from Northwest Alaska (2024)
This is an abstract from the "American Foragers: Human-Environmental Interactions across the Continents" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ceramic technology was adopted approximately 2,800 and 2,500 years ago in Alaska, coinciding with a transition toward an economy increasingly focused on marine resource use. Despite expectations for marine resource use in early northern pottery, an initial pilot study found strong evidence for freshwater aquatic...
Molecular Starch Degradation and Their Fingerprints: Insights from Modern African Taxa (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ancient starch analysis is a controversial technique, as the polymer’s chemical survivability over long periods of time is not understood. Our objectives are to establish the molecular composition of starch granules from sub-Saharan taxa of ethnobotanical relevance subjected to diagenetic processes, and to determine if these byproducts have diagnostic...
Multi-isotope Evidence for Animal Husbandry, Transhumance, and Human Diet at San Giuliano, Italy (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Etruscan Centralization to Medieval Marginalization: Shifts in Settlement and Mortuary Traditions at San Giuliano, Italy" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The San Giuliano Archaeological Research Project (SGARP) offers an excellent opportunity to investigate potential diachronic changes in human-animal interactions from the Etruscan to Late Medieval periods in central Italy. Here, we report on faunal and human...
Multi-isotopic Investigation of Late Pleistocene Human Diet from the Site of Taforalt, Morocco (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Paleolithic to Neolithic transition generally denotes a dietary change from hunting, gathering, and fishing to agriculture. However, due to the limited number of Pleistocene sites that have yielded preserved human remains, our knowledge of the diets of pre-agriculturist human populations is still limited. Previously published isotopic studies have...
Multi-isotopic Paleo-diet Reconstruction in a High Altitude Rockshelter of Southern Peru (2018)
Expanding on a previous report, we expand the results of the analysis of stable carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur isotope analyses from collagen of three Early and two Late-Middle Holocene adult human burials with coeval fauna remains of Cuncaicha rock shelter in the Peruvian Puna. We also reconstruct important aspects of the ecology of the Pucuncho Basin, in which Cuncaicha is located, using new and published isotopic values of archaeological and modern fauna and plants. Sulfur isotope values...
A Multi-method Investigation of the Diets of Dogs from the Angel Site (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Dogs in the Archaeological Record" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Angel site (12VG1) is located in southern Indiana, USA, on the Ohio River, and was occupied from approximately 1100 to 1450 CE. This site is part of a larger Mississippian cultural landscape. Research presented in this paper employs two methods for investigating the dietary behavior of domestic dogs recovered from the Angel site. Both dental...
A Multi-technique Approach to Investigating Reliance on Big Game Hunting in the Northwestern Great Basin (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Stability and Resilience in Zooarchaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Multiple archaeometric techniques were used to inform on prey acquisition in the Archaic to Terminal Prehistoric periods (1450–4700 cal BP) in the northwestern Great Basin. Stable isotope analysis, cementum increment analysis, and AMS radiocarbon dating were performed on artiodactyl teeth excavated from Paiute Creek Shelter (PCS) in Nevada’s...
The Multiple Uses of Animals in the Ritual Site of Pachacamac, Peru: Results from a Recent Archaeozoological Analysis (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Pachacamac is a major site of the Peruvian central coast, occupied from the fifth to the sixteenth century AD. This presentation will report the results of an ongoing analysis of faunal remains recovered during the 2014, 2016, and 2018 excavation campaigns within the framework of the Ychsma Project (Université libre de Bruxelles). The different buildings...
Multiproxy Approach to Identify Pottery Contents in Postclassic Xochimilco, Mexico: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Prehispanic Foodways (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Mesoamerican food has been studied for years, and although much is known about many of the native practices and ingredients, the archaeological study of food in Mesoamerica is still developing and we are learning that we know far less of it than we thought. For this research, we applied a multiproxy approach, that involved the use of GC-MS, starch grain...
Multiscalar Investigations of Ridged Fields at the Menominee Reservation, WI (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Advancing the Archaeology of Indigenous Agriculture in North America" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Raised Indigenous agricultural features were once the most common earthworks in the American Midwest. Today, they are among the rarest. The Menominee Reservation in northern Wisconsin contains the densest concentration of ancient agricultural features in the American Midwest, providing a unique opportunity to study...
Multispecies Entanglements in Great Lakes Agricultural Landscapes: A Case Study from the Late Woodland Arkona Cluster Sites, Ontario (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Multispecies Frameworks in Archaeological Interpretation: Human-Nonhuman Interactions in the Past, Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper explores the multispecies entanglements in and along the edges of Western Basin maize fields ca. AD 1000–1300 in southern Ontario, Canada. As these communities became increasingly reliant on agriculture, their construction and management of new field landscapes catalyzed...
Navigating the Frontier of Colonial Diets: Domesticates and Wild Resource Use in the North America Fur Trade (2024)
This is an abstract from the "The Columbian Exchange Revisited: Archaeological and Anthropological Perspectives on Eurasian Domesticates in the Americas" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. European settlers in the Americas brought with them a familiar suite of domesticated plants and animals and frequently relied upon them for subsistence. Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, European colonial powers became involved in the fur trade,...
Neolithic Dietary Practices: Comparison of Stable Isotopes and Dental Microwear (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The aim of the paper is to reconstruct Middle and Late Neolithic dietary practices in Central Europe with the help of complementary evidence of stable isotope and dental microwear analysis. From a total of 171 individuals, carbon and nitrogen isotopic values were measured in bone collagen from 146 humans and 64 animals, and 113 individuals were included in...
New Context from an Old Site: Collections Research on the Colby Mammoth Clovis Site (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since the first discovery of projectile points associated with mammoth remains, the iconic recreation of Clovis life has been a group of hunters stalking this multi-ton animal. However, despite nearly 100 years of research, questions remain about traditions associated with Pleistocene megafauna hunting including its frequency and importance. In the 1970s...
New Frontiers in Ancient Diet & Nutrition. Developing innovative methods for quantitative compositional analysis of desiccated archaeobotanical remains. (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. This methodological paper presents on the development of new chemical methods to obtain functional, nutritional, and antinutritional compositional data from desiccated archaeobotanical specimens. It discusses the potential, pitfalls, possible applications, and significance of novel approaches to quantitatively assess the...
New Insights into the Consumption of Cultigens for "Archaic" Age Populations in Cuba: The Archaeological Site of Playa el Mango, Rio Cauto, Granma (2018)
The use of cultigens and wild plants by pre-historic populations has been well established for many regions of the circum-Caribbean and Greater Antilles. However, in the case of Cuba, the largest island in the Caribbean, the evidence is scarce. In this paper, we examine the population of Playa El Mango (Cauto Region, Eastern Cuba), traditionally understood by Cuban archaeologists as "fisher-gatherers", to examine subsistence practices using a combination of starch evidence from dental calculus,...
New Insights on Avifauna from Picuris Pueblo (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Collaborative Archaeology at Picuris Pueblo: The New History" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The avifauna collection of Picuris Pueblo is fertile ground for understanding human-environmental relationships in the Northern Rio Grande. Migratory birds like geese (Branta sp.) illustrate the seasonality and adaptivity of past peoples, staples such as turkey (Meleagris gallopavo) show domestication strategies, and wild...
New Life for Old Samples: Investigating the Paleoethnobotanical Record from Tijeras Canyon (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. University of New Mexico field school excavations carried out at Tijeras Pueblo in the Sandia Mountains by Jim Judge and Linda Cordell from 1971 to 1976 left a legacy of more than than 2,000 botanical samples, consisting of maize, flotation samples, wood samples, and macrobotanical specimens. Apart from a...
New Methods, Old Data: Reanalysis of Diets of the Copán Classic Maya Using Stable Isotope Mixing Models (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Innovations and Transformations in Mesoamerican Research: Recent and Revised Insights of Ancestral Lifeways" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Sex and age factor into ancient diets. This poster revisits the largest single Maya polity paleodiet study using approaches that have been developed since the original data were collected, and to incorporate newer knowledge of Maya foodways in developing a better reconstruction of...