Subsistence and Foodways (Other Keyword)
426-450 (486 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Raise Your Glass to the Past: An Exploration of the Archaeology of Beer" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Why study an archaeology of beer? Beyond the modern popularity of craft beer, this beverage is a deeply ancient and meaningful form of material culture. It is also a powerful tool to put faces onto the past, and to make the ancient peoples we study both relevant and enticing to our students and the larger public....
Technological and Methodological Developments in Approaches to Species Identification: Advancements in Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry (ZooMS) (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Zooarchaeology and Technology: Case Studies and Applications" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. ZooMS, or ‘Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry’, is a relatively recently developed method in the field of archaeology, with the ability to identify large numbers of fragmentary animal bone to genus or species level. Most importantly, its advantages over ancient DNA-based approaches of identification are that it can be...
Technological Investment and Subsistence Strategy Flexibility within the Uinta Basin Fremont (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Cub Creek area of Dinosaur National Monument has a Fremont occupation spanning from AD 300-1350 that shows variable reliance on maize agriculture depending on environmental conditions. Settlement data indicate a stable upland occupation throughout the sequence characterized by ~120 roasting features, but an intensive lowland pithouse occupation that lasted...
"Tell me what you are eating and I tell you who are you": Differences in Subsistence Systems of Elite and Non-Elite Gamo Society of the Ethiopia Highlands during Historical Times (2018)
There is little archaeobotanical data from Ethiopia, in this presentation, we will be comparing samples from two historic domestic archaeological sites spanning from late seventeen centuries to the late eighteen century A.D. within the same environment (Gamo highlands in Southern Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples Region (SNNPR), Ethiopia) with the intention of examining status differences through subsistence remains. The food habits of past human societies are of importance because the act of...
Ten Right-Sided Sheep Femora and Other Peculiarities: What To Make of the Arch Street Faunal Assemblage (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Bones and Burials in Philadelphia: The Arch Street Project’s Multidisciplinary Research" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 1860, a concerned party claimed that neighboring tenement dwellers used the cemetery of the First Baptist Church of Philadelphia as their personal dumping ground, leaving behind ‘refuse of their domestic economy’ in the form of material culture and food waste. In 2017, salvage archaeology...
Terminal Pleistocene and Holocene Adaptive Strategies at the Paisley Caves, Oregon (2018)
There are key questions about the timing of the initial settlement of the northern Great Basin, how settlers adapted to the pluvial lake and wetland landscape they encountered upon arrival, and how these adaptations changed in response to Holocene climate change. The Paisley Caves in south-central Oregon provide a unique opportunity to investigate these questions. The caves produced the earliest evidence for human settlement of the Great Basin including coprolites containing human DNA dating to...
Testing Methods of Microbotanical Analysis on Samples from the Copan Valley, Honduras (2018)
The Copan Valley in western Honduras has been the subject of a number of studies concerning human-environmental interaction, with particular emphasis on questions of ancient sustainable practices and whether or not land-use mismanagement contributed to the end of the Maya dynasty at Copan. The current PARAC project seeks to identify the range of foods consumed by the inhabitants of the Copan Valley during the Late Classic to Postclassic period. This paper will describe analyses conducted on...
Testing the Efficacy of Sulfur Isotopes from the Maya Site of Chulub (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Stable isotope analysis of carbon (13C/12C) and nitrogen (15N/14N) are often used to reconstruct ancient Maya diets. While these two isotopes provide us with a broad understanding of past subsistence practices, carbon and nitrogen are limited in their ability to differentiate freshwater and terrestrial based diets. Similar problems exist in other areas of the...
Thermal Properties of Prehistoric Ceramic Vessels of the American Southeast (2018)
A common class of prehistoric ceramic vessels are those that share attributes related to the processing, cooking, storage and serving of food resources. Depending on the specifics of the use contexts, attributes will vary systematically and depend on the range of activities, the details of the food resources, and the heating technology in which the vessels are used. Thus, we can expect that many technological traits of vessels such as temper, wall thickness, porosity, firing temperature, and...
Towards a Social Paleoethnobotany of Urbanization: Integrating Macrobotanical and Microbotanical Data to Explore Foodways at La Blanca, Guatemala (2018)
This paper uses macrobotanical and microbotanical remains to investigate the impacts of developing sociopolitical complexity on the foodways of Middle Preclassic inhabitants of the Pacific coast of Guatemala. I use these datasets to explore how urbanization affected food-related practices of residents of La Blanca (900-600 BCE). Macrobotanical remains from house floors facilitate comparisons between elite and commoner foodways, while starch grains and phytoliths extracted from grinding...
Tracing the Human Exploitation of Salmonids on the Pacific Coast of North America (2019)
This is an abstract from the "HumAnE Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Pacific salmonids (Oncorhynchus spp.) are important economic and subsistence resources for contemporary and past indigenous peoples of the Pacific coast of North America. The seven recognised Oncorhynchus species each occupy different ecological niches and exhibit diversity in seasonal spawning and migratory behaviours. Although salmonid remains are ubiquitous at...
Traditional Dishes and Culinary Improvisations: Elite Gastronomy in the Maya Area (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the past few decades, understandings of cuisine in the Maya area have been radically amplified by the use of new techniques. Some methods offer the opportunity to directly connect artifacts and features with actual plant food residues. The ability to recover microscopic residues of food from sediments, artifacts, and human teeth has revealed not only...
Traditions and Community: Hornos and Communal Feasting among the Hohokam (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. Earth ovens (hornos) have been documented at many sites across the Hohokam region of south-central Arizona. These features were commonly used to cook large amounts of food at public gatherings. They were part of a long-standing tradition of communal feasting that served, among...
A Tropical Treasure Trove: Preliminary Assessment of Archaeological Faunal Remains from Culebra Bay, Guanacaste, Costa Rica (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. For over 50 years, excavations in Guanacaste, Costa Rica, have yielded a large amount of well-preserved faunal materials, yet few zooarchaeological studies have been carried out. To explore the research potential of archaeofaunal materials in the region, I will present data from several sites around the Culebra bay area. These...
Tubers, Grain, and Everything In Between: Mesoamerican Applications of Dolores Piperno’s Research (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Fryxell Symposium in Honor of Dolores Piperno" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the past several decades, Dolores Piperno has made broad contributions to archaeology and deep contributions to paleoethnobotany. Her published work includes studies on the origins of agriculture in the Neotropics, the presence of cooked plants in Neanderthal diets, the process of domestication, the use of wild cereals in the Upper...
Understanding Animal Use at the Wetland Maya Site of Chulub (2018)
Reconstructions of ancient Maya animal use often emphasize the importance of terrestrial species, such as deer, to the overall diet. While these species played an important role, much less attention has been paid to the use of aquatic resources despite the presence of resource rich perennial wetlands in the Maya lowlands. To further understand this crucial area of the Maya-environment relationship, we investigated the site of Chulub located in the Western Lagoon Wetlands of Belize. This site...
Understanding Patterns of Indigenous White-tailed Deer (*Odocoileus virginianus) Exploitation in the North Carolina Piedmont Using Strontium (87Sr/86Sr) Isotope Analysis (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Animal Bones to Human Behavior" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The varied responses by Native communities within the American Southeast to European colonization resulted in a period of dynamic social, economic, and political change. One such response to the colonial encounter was the development of a robust trade in the skins of white-tailed deer. In this paper, I focus on the effects of the deerskin trade on the deer...
Understanding the Diet of Late to Terminal Classic Period Maya Groups in the Sibun River Valley, Belize, through Food Web Reconstruction (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A stable isotope based dietary study, coupled with previously collected zooarchaeological and botanical data, expands our understanding of ancient Maya dietary variation in the Late and Terminal Classic periods in the Sibun River Valley of central Belize. A food web was created based on the analysis of stable carbon and nitrogen isotope ratios in plants and...
Unlikely Allies: Modern Wolves and the Diets of Pre-contact Domestic Dogs (2019)
This is an abstract from the "New and Ongoing Research on the North American Plains and Rocky Mountains" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Assumptions of prehistoric domestic dogs as scavengers has been pervasive in archaeology and beyond. This project clarifies these assumption by investigating the dietary behavior of prehistoric domestic dogs via dental microwear data or features on the tooth surface that indicate types of food consumed. In order...
Updating and Reevaluating Faunal Datasets from Quina Mousterian Levels at Jonzac and Pech de l'Azé IV by Incorporating Screened Materials (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Current Zooarchaeology: New and Ongoing Approaches" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Logistical challenges of managing large zooarchaeological projects mean that researchers must often conduct faunal analyses in phases and implement sampling strategies, including studying subsamples that do not fully incorporate screened materials. However, screened portions may contain specimens that can provide depth to studies of...
Use of Plants by Enslaved Laborers at Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage Plantation (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. From 1804 until 1865, The Hermitage was home to Andrew Jackson, his descendants, and over 130 enslaved men, women, and children, often invisible in the historical record, who labored in the fields of Jackson's cotton plantation near Nashville, Tennessee. After emancipation, freed households continued to live in the former domestic quarters. For three decades...
Use-Wear Analysis of the Middle Horizon (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Exploring Culture Contact and Diversity in Southern Peru" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Use-wear analysis is a qualitative method of study that observes abrasion patterns on material remains. Wear traces can come from stirring, lids, storage techniques, and other culinary practices. Apparent wear patterns and abrasion coarseness are features that help infer the use of different vessel forms. I applied this technique...
Uses of Different Species of Animals from Vista Alegre: A Zooarchaeological Analysis (2018)
Previous zooarcheological research has focused on knowing the patterns of wildlife exploitation in the different archaeological sites of the Maya area. In this sense, the present work intends to approach the different uses of the different species of animals in activities carried out by the pre-Hispanic Maya people located at the site of Vista Alegre, Quintana Roo, Mexico. The simple has c. 23,000 remains of fauna, coming from three architectural constructions: Structure 9 (Operation 3A),...
Using Compound Specific Isotope Analysis of Amino Acids to Distinguish Aquatic and Terrestrial Diets of Early Holocene Hunter-Gatherers in Southern Sweden (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this study, we present the results of compound specific carbon and nitrogen isotope analysis on amino acids from bone collagen of Early Holocene humans and contemporaneous terrestrial and marine fauna recovered from multiple sites in southern Sweden. These analyses were aimed at individuals spanning the Early Mesolithic to the Middle Neolithic Pitted...
Using Micro and Macrobotanical Analyses to Assess Socio-economic Strategies at 48PA551, the McKean Occupation in the Sunlight Basin, Wyoming (2019)
This is an abstract from the "New Multidisciplinary Research at 48PA551: A Middle Archaic (McKean Complex) Site in Northwest Wyoming" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Located in the Absaroka Mountains of northwest Wyoming site 48PA51 is unique for its pithouse, rock pile surrounded by deer skull caps with antlers, abundant hearths and pit features, large number of dart points and groundstone, and substantial faunal assemblage. These features and the...