Subsistence and Foodways (Other Keyword)
76-100 (486 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Advances in Interdisciplinary Isotopic Research" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Carbon, Nitrogen and Oxygen stable isotope analyses are popular tools within the field of archaeology. Applications for stable isotope analyses of human and faunal bone collagen and dental enamel include environmental reconstructions, modeling subsistence patterns, and investigating human-animal relationships, as well as potential to...
Comparing Energy Expenditures of Mortar and Pestle and Grinding Slab Technologies (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. Daily activities such as grinding plant material require energy input. It is ideal to put in the least amount of work to obtain the greatest yield of product. Energetic expenditures and returns for grinding slab and mortar and pestle use remain largely unstudied. In this study, resting and grinding heart-rate...
Comparing Isotopic Data for Diet and Mobility of Males and Females in the Lower Río Verde Valley, Oaxaca, Mexico (2018)
This poster presents a comparison of the isotopic data from male and female individuals interred in the lower Río Verde Valley of coastal Oaxaca, Mexico from the Early Formative period, beginning in 2000 BC, to the Early Postclassic period, ending in AD 1100. Our previous work in this region has focused primarily on broad dietary changes through time, focusing little attention on comparisons by sex. Our sample for the present study includes 54 individuals: 31 males and 23 females. These...
Comparision of Fish Habit and Exploitation—A Comparison of Two Third-Millennium BCE Sites in the Arabian Gulf Region (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the third millennium BCE, one of the earliest civilizations emerged in South Asia, the Indus Valley Tradition/Civilization. It had a trade network that spread throughout the Persian and Arabian Gulf, including sites on the Omani coast. This paper will compare two sites, Balakot on the Makran coast of Pakistan associated with the Indus Valley...
Conch, Whelk, or Clam: Comparing Southern Florida’s Indigenous Shellfish Collection Patterns (2018)
The populations of southern Florida are an exemplary case of indigenous groups who organized into large political entities without the advantages of agriculture. This is due to the populations’ close proximity to vast amounts of marine resources. Among these resources, many shellfish (both gastropods and bivalves) were used not only for nutritional sustenance, but also made up an important proportion of the tool industry, and as trade goods between these local populations and those at a...
The Consequences of Cultural Encounters on Late Bronze Age Transylvania Cuisine and Subsistence Economies (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The transition to the Late Bronze Age in Transylvania around 1500 BCE coincided with the arrival of the Noua cultural group from the Eurasian Steppe. These new migrant communities arrived in a Transylvanian landscape that had been occupied by the Wietenberg cultural group for over 500 years. For nearly 150 years, communities with both the Noua and Wietenberg...
Consuming Our Pasts: Food as Nature and Culture (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Thinking about Eating: Theorizing Foodways in Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Taking inspiration from post-humanist theory, I frame my work about human life both past and present in a way that attempts to avoid traditional concretized definitions of humanity and culture that envision these subjects as separate from nature or the environment. Post-humanists view humanity as only part of a much bigger and...
Contextualizing the Influence of Climate and Culture on Mollusk Collection: *Donax obesulus Malacology from the Jequetepeque and Nepeña Valleys, Peru (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 influences of climate and human activity on archaeomalacological assemblages can be difficult to disentangle. We compare Early Horizon (EH; 800–200 BC) and Middle Horizon (MH; AD 600–1000) *Donax obesulus size, age estimates, and paleoclimate data. *D. obesulus is a short-lived (<5 years) intertidal clam common in archaeological and modern contexts...
Cooking across the Continent: Overview of Pleistocene Archaeobotanical Remains and Exploration of Biases Affecting Botanical Visibility (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. Understanding how Indigenous communities used plants during the Pleistocene is fundamental to addressing questions about long-term ecological relationships, dietary practices, and adaptive strategies. Pleistocene plant...
Cookware and Crockery: A Form and Functional View from the Southern Bahamas (2018)
Recent archaeobotanical research on the Palmetto Junction archaeological site located in Providenciales, Turks and Caicos Islands, provides new insights into the livelihoods and subsistence practices of the peoples who inhabited this coastal region from c. AD 1200-1500 Significantly, the plant microbotanical remains, identified as primarily seeds and tubers provide evidence for a continuation in the consumption and manipulation of plant resources. During the late precolonial period people used...
Coprolite Analysis: The Early Years (2018)
Volney Jones was one of the first to examine coprolites found in Eastern Kentucky caves. By today’s standards, his technique was primitive, but it did provide information about early human diets. During the mid-1950s Eric Callen pioneered the study of coprolites when he looked at coprolites from the site of Huaca Prieta de Chicama in the coastal region of Peru. Later, in the early 1960s Callen worked in Mexico with Richard MacNeish at Tehuacan. Callen worked in isolation at McGill University in...
The Corn That We Eat: Feasting on Maize and Maize Diversity in the Early Formative Community of Etlatongo, in the Mixteca Alta of Oaxaca (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Checking the Pulse: Current Research in Oaxaca Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent excavations at Etlatongo recovered one of the largest analyzed macrobotanical samples for Early Formative Mesoamerica. We have explored the significant richness of species identified at the site, asserting that full-time agriculture was in place in the Highlands as early as the fourteenth century BCE. Here we turn...
Crop Processing in the Lower Yellow River Valley: From Known to Unknown (2018)
As one of the most highly-developed cultural regions in China, many aspects of the lower Yellow River Valley have been systematically studied, including climatic revolutions, cultural patterns, and subsistence strategies, among others. It is now known that the diversified environments of the Valley, including flood plains, hills and coastal regions, facilitated the development of distinctive cultures and subsistence patterns in these areas. These distinctions are principally reflected in their...
Crops, Gender, and Food Choices: Investigating the Formation of Chinese Staple Cuisines via Stable Isotope Analysis (2019)
This is an abstract from the "From Tangible Things to Intangible Ideas: The Context of Pan-Eurasian Exchange of Crops and Objects" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The modern Chinese food system was formed over thousands of years from a diverse set of regional agricultures and cuisines. Isotopic analysis of archaeological skeletons can be used to investigate the importance of different food resources to past diets. This approach has been extensively...
Cuisine on the Harappan Frontier: Regional Cooking Vessels in Harappan Gujarat (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. During the 3rd and 2nd millennium BCE, the western Indian state of Gujarat was home to a regional expression of Harappan culture known as the Sorath Harappans. This cultural group was composed of a network of farmers, herders, and craftsmen that subsided on an economy based on cattle herding and the farming of summer...
Culinary Archaeology at Hyde Park Barracks: Multi-material Analysis of Food and Dining in a Nineteenth-Century Immigration Depot (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Culinary Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In history, Barbara Haber has made the distinction between academic food history and culinary history grounded in knowledge of recipes and cooking techniques. This paper uses the case study of the Female Immigration Depot (1848–1887) in Sydney, Australia, to consider what a culinary archaeology would look like. The site, at Sydney’s Hyde Park Barracks, features...
Current Middle Atlantic Paleoethnobotany (2018)
A growing body of research from across the Middle Atlantic reveals patterns of native plant use that are both highly variable and unique within the North American landscape. This paper provides an overview of the current state of paleoethnobotanical research across the region, with a focus on the Chesapeake Bay where maize (corn) was a relative latecomer to the native subsistence regime. Multiple lines of evidence (including macro and micro-botanical data, direct radiocarbon assays and stable...
Dating Charred Food Crust: Offsets, Pretreatment, and Organic Compunds (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Unlike charcoal, charred food residue has an obvious advantage of fundamental association with use of the pottery and hence, human activity. Food is annual or short-lived. Usually animals hunted for food live only a few to perhaps a few tens of years. Therefore, good dates on food residue from ceramics or pottery should tighten ceramic chronologies and provide...
Delayed-Return Hunter-Gatherers in the Horn of Africa? Faunal and Radiometric Data from the Guli Waabayo Rock Shelter in Southern Somalia (2019)
This is an abstract from the "African Archaeology throughout the Holocene" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Environmental changes during the African Humid Period (~11,000-5,000 BP) are associated with the emergence of new social and economic strategies among some hunter-gatherers in northern and eastern Africa. In response to Early Holocene climatic amelioration, foragers in southwestern Libya and the Lake Victoria Basin decreased their mobility and...
Dental Health Assessment of Nil Kham Haeng and Its Implications in Prehistoric Central Thailand (2018)
Three adjacent, chronologically overlapped, and metallurgically active sites in central Thailand were excavated by the Thailand Archaeometallurgy Project (TAP). This study focuses on dental pathology (caries, calculus, periapical abscessing, antemortem tooth loss, linear enamel hypoplasia) observed on human skeletal remains from Nil Kham Haeng (500 B.C.-A.D. 600) to investigate possible foodways and lifeways of its inhabitants. Among approximately 20 individuals represented, 16 have sufficient...
Dental Pathology and Paleodiet: Exploring Spatial and Temporal Variability of Ancient Maya Subsistence Practices in Northwestern Belize (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The osteological analysis of skeletal remains provides a unique lens for viewing social behaviors within ancient complex societies at the level of the individual as well as the population. The dentition from skeletal remains can be especially useful for answering questions regarding dietary practices as the consumption of specific foods leave identifiable...
Developing a Culinary Archaeology Framework for Comparative Studies of the Chinese Diaspora (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Culinary Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In addition to being a primary concern for descendant community stakeholders, the identification of food ingredients, their supply, and their uses are an increasingly important avenue for investigating the health effects of labor and care practices in the late nineteenth- to early twentieth-century Chinese diaspora, especially for railroad workers and at other...
Diachronic Patterns in Subsistence at Swan Point, Tanana Valley, Alaska (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Approximately 1000 years ago, the archaeological record of Southcentral and interior Alaska shows a shift toward the increased use of fish caches, semi-subterranean houses, permanent year-round villages, and the appearance of ranked societies. Ultimately, the highly mobile big game hunter-gatherer way of life was supplanted by more intensive resource...
Diet Among Marine Hunter-Gatherer-Fishers of the Northern Patagonian Channels (41°50’- 47° S): Assessing Plant Use and Consumption through Dental Calculus Studies (2018)
In the western Patagonian channels, the archaeofaunistic record, technological and isotopic studies show subsistence strategies based on fishing, hunting and gathering of marine resources. Unfortunately the consumption of plant resources still has not been assessed for this area and the consumption of C3 plants is hard to detect though these type of analysis. Our aim is to evaluate the consumption of wild and domesticated plants and parafunctional use of the teeth for the processing of plant...
The Diet of Dogs: Dental Microwear Texture Analysis to Interpret the Human-Canine Connection in Prehistoric North America (2018)
The archaeology of dog-keeping by indigenous Native North Americans enriches our understanding of ways people conceptualized their environments in the past. Finding new ways to investigate this topic contributes to broader anthropological knowledge about relationships among humans and the natural world. In this paper, I present exploratory research to examine ways that domestic dogs were maintained and the assumed value of dogs among Native Americans who lived in the Ohio River valley, in Plains...