Subsistence and Foodways (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only T. Cregg Madrigal. Suzanne E. Pilaar Birch.

This is an abstract from the "Human Interactions with Extinct Fauna" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The passenger pigeon, once the most abundant bird in the world, became extinct barely a hundred years ago. It has been assumed that the passenger pigeon was equally abundant prior to the European colonization of North America, but some have argued that the bird was nowhere near as common in prehistory. Because so much of what is known is based on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kyra Smith.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Colonialism has had significant influences on lifeways across the South Pacific, including health and diet in the past and today. Colonially introduced diets have caused a loss of traditional food practices, created cultural power dynamics, and have led to contemporary public health issues. These colonial legacies not only have continued impacts on the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Samantha Upton. Jennifer Green. Barbara Heath.

Coan Hall is the site of the first English settlement on the Northern Neck of Virginia, established by John Mottrom, an English merchant-planter, around 1640. Mottrom resided there with his family, servants, and slaves until his death in 1655. His descendants occupied the house until the early 18th century. It was situated on the banks of the Coan River, a brackish tributary of the Potomac River that empties into the Chesapeake Bay. Representative samples of shellfish, predominantly those of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Hannigan. Jane Buikstra. Eric Bartelink. Paraskevi Tritsaroli. Hannah Liedl.

This is an abstract from the "The Bioarchaeology of the Phaleron Cemetery, Archaic Greece: Current Research and Insights" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While the Archaic (700–480 BCE) was a transformative and tumultuous period in ancient Greece, there is a considerable lack of paleodietary studies for this time. The recent excavation (2012–2016) of ~1,500 individuals from the Archaic period Phaleron cemetery in Athens provides a means of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shanti Morell-Hart. Éloi Bérubé.

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 cuisine of contemporary Oaxaca sprouted from deep roots. Archaic Period plant remains recovered from the MRG-6 rockshelter enhance prior work at Guila Naquitz and grant us insight into some of the managed and wild food plants still used in contemporary Oaxacan dishes. Over 70 different botanical taxa were identified from samples excavated at...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marilyn Masson.

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. Analysis of a large sample of Late Archaic tools from the multi-year Belize Archaic Project at Progresso Lagoon provides an updated assessment of formal (and especially) informal flake tools utilized by Preceramic peoples extensively occupying the lagoon shore. Primarily from habitation sites, this analysis assesses the types of activities...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dr. Scott Palumbo.

This is an abstract from the "Advances and New Perspectives in the Isthmo-Colombian Area" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Aguas Buenas (roughly 300 BC–AD 900) was a period characterized by the growth of small villages and the development of identifiable settlement hierarchies in certain areas. This paper applies a variant of the site catchment analysis originally articulated by Steponaitis (1981) to evaluate the relationship between...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Devio.

Understanding household plant use can provide a wealth of data about subsistence practices, past agricultural systems, and strategies used to mitigate climatic stress. Plant use may also vary between households. By examining this variation, botanical data may yield further information on personal preference and cuisine differences between households. Aside from consumption for subsistence, plants were used for a wide range of activities conducted by individual households. Botanical datasets may...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Wake.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ongoing analysis of rich and diverse samples of vertebrate bone from Sitio Drago (SD), Bocas del Toro, Panama illustrates the importance of fine-grained sampling in understanding past subsistence strategies at the site. The analysis of charred macro- and micro-plant remains recovered from 30 x 30 x 10 cm column samples provide crucial information...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jacqueline Fox. William Bryce. Andrea Gregory. Travis Cureton.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Logan Simpson recently mitigated multiple prehistoric sites along the Middle Gila River in Arizona for the Natural Resources Conservation Service’s Florence Flood Retarding Structure Rehabilitation project. One site, AZ U:15:836(ASM), is a small Hohokam farmstead within the Grewe-Casa Grande canal system. Recent investigations at the site identified evidence...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chantel White. Grant Bruner. Alessandra Dominguez. Jennifer Feng. Phoenix Strouse.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeogastronomy: Grocery Lists as Seen from a Multidimensional Perspective" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Mughr el-Hamamah (MHM) cave site, located on the Jordan Valley’s eastern flanks, contains a prehistoric layer associated with Early Ahmarian artifacts. AMS 14C dates bracket the Early Upper Paleolithic (EUP) occupation between ca. 45 and 39 ka cal BP and are comparable in age to Ahmarian-associated layers...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amanda Logan.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Approaches to Slavery and Unfree Labour in Africa" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Although the Columbian Exchange had a significant impact on local agroecologies, we still know very little about the African side of the exchange. This is particularly complex knot to unravel given that the Atlantic slave trade peaked during those same centuries. Both processes were to have major impacts on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristin Corl.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Harris Site (LA 1867) is a Late Pithouse-period (A.D. 550-1000) agricultural village located along the upper Mimbres River Valley in New Mexico. Faunal remains recovered from the Harris site indicate that inhabitants continued to depend on a wide variety of wild resources even as they transitioned into a more sedentary agricultural subsistence...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Curt Carbonell. Marie Hopwood. Laura Carbonell.

This is an abstract from the "Experimental Pedagogies: Teaching through Experimental Archaeology Part II" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Bappir (Sumerian: "beer bread") was a ubiquitous ingredient in ancient Mesopotamian beer brewing for millennia. However, little is known about exactly what bappir was or how it was used. Nevertheless, the scant evidence available from contemporary texts, such as the second-millennium BCE "Hymn to Ninkasi," have...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erik Otárola-Castillo. Melissa Torquato. Jesse Wolfhagen. Matthew E. Hill.

This is an abstract from the "The Expanding Bayesian Revolution in Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Zooarchaeologists rely on long-term records of faunal remains to study significant diachronic changes in human-environmental interactions, including foraging-farming transitions, human-driven extinctions, animal translocations, and the development of complex societies. Here, we define the magnitude and direction of change observed in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tate Paulette.

This is an abstract from the "Drinking Beer in a Blissful Mood: A Global Archaeology of Beer" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Many early states were deeply invested in alcoholic beverages. In focusing on the political instrumentality of these beverages, however, archaeologists have often lost sight of what makes them such an effective tool of statecraft. People seek out alcoholic beverages because of their affective power, their ability to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Grant McCall. Theodore Marks.

For the better part of a century, archaeologists have surmised that beer brewing played a significant role in a range of major social and economic changes having to do with origins of agriculture. This paper examines an unusual case of early beer brewing, which likely originated during the Middle Holocene among the Later Stone Age (LSA) populations of the hyper-arid Central Namib Desert of western Namibia. In this paper, I discuss practices of modern traditional beer brewing in the region and I...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Arthur.

This is an abstract from the "Drinking Beer in a Blissful Mood: A Global Archaeology of Beer" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Beer is an essential culinary food for many African societies today and in the past for daily meals, economic compensation, and ritual feasting. This paper focuses on the ethnoarchaeology and archaeology in the Gamo region of southwest Ethiopia located on the western escarpment of the Great Rift Valley. Today, a unique...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Rosenswig.

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. The 8,000 years before ceramic first appear is the longest epoch in the human occupation of Mesoamerica when domestication and sedentary life changed how the inhabitants of the region lived. Yet, despite the importance of changing adaptation, Mesoamerica’s Archaic period is known from only a handful of site, and most of these are caves and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anwen Cooper.

This is an abstract from the "Beyond Academia: Zooarchaeological Case Studies from CRM and Other Nonacademic Spaces" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The ‘Rewilding’ later prehistory project has set a developer-funded fieldwork organisation – Oxford Archaeology – and the wider developer-funded industry centre stage of exciting cross-sector multidisciplinary research with environmental archaeology colleagues from academia, Historic England, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kandace Hollenbach.

This is an abstract from the "Hearths, Earth Ovens, and the Carbohydrate Revolution: Indigenous Subsistence Strategies and Cooking during the Terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene in North America" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the Eastern Woodlands of North America, researchers tend to discuss cooking technologies of early foragers at the close of the Pleistocene and early Holocene in terms of nut processing rather than for use of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ran Chen. Yue Wu.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The miniaturization of lithic artifacts indicates a significant shift in lithic technology and functions since the Upper Paleolithic, revealing a probable shift in subsistence strategy. Microblades are specific kinds of small stone tools that occur in sites dating back to the Upper Paleolithic through Neolithic in many parts of the world. Although it is widely...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sonya Sobel. John Blong. Rachel Horowitz.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Cascade Phase, spanning roughly 9000-5000 years BP, is defined by distinctive lithic technology and edge-ground cobbles. Archaeological data suggests mobile foragers temporarily camped in resource-rich areas during this period. Despite its recognition as a unique cultural period, our understanding of Cascade Phase lifeways, particularly resource use...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna Luurtsema.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Late 19th-century Philadelphia was a landscape of urbanization and industrial growth. Feature 89, a large pit in the rear of a dwelling in central Philadelphia, offers a glimpse into the city’s complex foodways during this transformative time. Faunal remains recovered from Feature 89 represented the discards of pig, cattle, chicken, turkey, sheep, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ashley Smallwood.

This is an abstract from the "Papers in Celebration of Bruce B. Huckell, Part 2" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Bruce Huckell was a pioneer of experimental archaeology. His early work “Of Chipped Stone Tools, Elephants, and the Clovis Hunters” and “The Denver Elephant Project” demonstrated how actualistic experiments offer archaeologists powerful interpretative data for understanding Paleoindian technology and subsistence. This paper builds on a...