Subsistence and Foodways (Other Keyword)
26-50 (486 Records)
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...
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...
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 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...
Archaeology and Stable Isotope Ecology of the Passenger Pigeon: Tracing the Prehistory of an Extinct Bird (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 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...
The Archaeology of Public Health and Food Sovereignty in the Pacific Islands (2023)
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...
Archaeology on the Half Shell: Preliminary Analysis of Shellfish Consumption at Coan Hall (44NB11), Virginia (2018)
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...
Archaic Period MRG-6 and the Deep Culinary Roots of Oaxacan Cuisine (2019)
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...
Assessing Agricultural Intensification in Greater Chiriquí during the Aguas Buenas Period (2021)
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...
Assessing Botanical Diversity of Late-to-Terminal Classic Households at Xunantunich, Belize (2018)
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...
Assessing Evidence of Hunting as Subsistence Specialization at an Early Classic Period Hohokam Farmstead (2019)
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...
Assessing the Impacts of the Atlantic Slave Trade and American Crops on African Agriculture (2019)
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...
Bayesian Multilevel Models of Diachronic Dietary Trajectories (DDTs) from 13,000 years of Great Plains Faunal Exploitation (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. 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...
Beer and the Politics of Affect in Mesopotamia (2023)
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...
Beer in the Desert: Archaeological, Ethnohistoric, and Experimental Perspectives on Early Beer Brewing in the Central Namib Desert, Namibia (2018)
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...
Beer, Pots, and Caste: A Tale of Two Sites in the Gamo Highlands of Southwestern Ethiopia (2023)
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...
Beyond Boiling and Baking? Cooking Plant Foods in the Early US Midsouth (2023)
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...
Beyond Projectiles: Experimental Study of Microblades as Cutting Tools (2021)
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...
The Biggest Party of All? Zooarchaeological Analysis of an Oversized Late Inca Banquet at Pachacamac (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Pachacamac is a major archaeological site on the central coast of Peru, occupied from the 5th to the 16th centuries, AD. This paper reports the results of an interdisciplinary study of a late Inca context discovered in building B4, excavated in 2016 and 2018 by the Ychsma Project (ULB). A series of analyses were conducted, including zooarchaeological ones,...
Bodies Shaping Bodies: Using Butchery to Trace Human-Animal Relationships (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Frontiers in Animal Management: Unconventional Species, New Methods, and Understudied Regions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While our relationship encompasses far more than just the dinner menu, food is one of the key ways in which human and animals lives and bodies directly shape one another. Indeed, beyond just the act of eating, how human and animal bodies meet in the context of procurement and processing can...
Bonfire Shelter: A Zooarchaeological Reevaluation of Bone Bed 2 (2021)
This is an abstract from the "The Big Bend Complex: Landscapes of History" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Bonfire Shelter is a rockshelter in Eagle Nest Canyon, a short tributary of the Rio Grande in West Texas, that contains three distinct bone beds of varying ages. The middle bone bed, Bone Bed 2, is a Paleoindian-aged deposit dating to ~12,000 years BP. Bone Bed 2 was originally interpreted as the remains of one or more bison mass kills;...