Subsistence and Foodways: Domestication (Other Keyword)
26-50 (99 Records)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent excavation at the site of Las Chachalacas in Quiriego, Sonora produced evidence for Early Agricultural period (EAP) occupation. Dating likely between the Silverbell Interval and the San Pedro phase this settlement would have been contemporaneous with other important early agricultural sites in Sonora, Chihuahua, and Arizona such as La Playa, Cerro...
Early Millet Cultivation, Subsistence Diversity, and Wild Plant Use at Neolithic Anle, Lower Yangtze of China (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study examines the macrobotanical assemblage of Anle, a middle Neolithic site in the Lower Yangtze region of China. The Lower Yangtze is thought to be the origin of domesticated rice and most studies of this region to date have focused on rice domestication and cultivation within its paleoenvironmental setting. In contrast, we highlight here diverse...
Early Subsistence and Settlement in the Basin of Mexico: Preceramic and Pre-Urban Indicators (2018)
The race to stay ahead of modern human impact on preceramic and early ceramic sites in the Basin of Mexico is particularly dramatic. Recent investigations at sites located in three sectors of the Basin of Mexico, all of which are threatened to some degree, contribute to a broader understanding of the kinds of communities that anticipated increased complexity in social, economic and political spheres that ultimately developed into early urban centers such as Cuicuilco and Teotihuacan. ...
The Effects of Regional Climate Change on the Foraging-Farming Transition in Eastern North America (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For a century, scholars studying prehistoric subsistence have questioned why humans began farming. A common hypothesis is that climate change contributed to the emergence of agriculture. One area where climate change may have influenced early agriculture is the Interior Eastern Woodlands of North America, where the independent domestication of native plants...
Eleventh-Century Aviculture in the Mimbres Valley: An Archaeology of the Human Experience Approach (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Isotopic and Animal aDNA Analyses in the Southwest/Northwest" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For the past 2,000 years, people throughout the US Southwest and Northwest Mexico have woven scarlet macaws and turkeys into their economic, social, and ceremonial fabric. Pueblo groups in the past did not view all birds as being equal, and neither do archaeologists today, as we study macaws and turkeys more so than any other...
The Environmental and Cultural Context of North American Turkey Domestication (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Questioning the Fundamentals of Plant and Animal Domestication" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The turkey (Meleagris gallopavo) is the only native vertebrate animal domesticated in North America. As such, the history, timing and process of its domestication is critical to our understanding of past human-animal relationships in the ancient Americas. This paper summarizes recent advancements in reconstructing the...
Evaluating Turkey Wellness and Treatment in the Maya World (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Current Research on Turkey (Meleagris gallopavo) Domestication, Husbandry and Management in North America and Beyond" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As the primary domesticated animal in prehistoric Mesoamerica, the turkey occupied a prominent and multivalent role in society, as a food source, a feather provider, and a subject of ritual sacrifice. The preponderance of turkey remains across the archaeological record of...
The Evolution of Domestication in Cassava Unraveled through Historical Genomics and Archaeobotany (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Frontiers of Plant Domestication" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cassava (‘manioc' or ‘yuca' regionally) is a staple food for 800 million people worldwide. It was domesticated in the southwestern Amazon ~7,000 years ago, and archaeobotanical evidence suggests that it dispersed widely, including through Central America, shortly thereafter. In the present day, it is most widely grown in Brazil and throughout sub-Saharan...
An Examination of Circum-Alpine Lake Dwelling Botanicals at the Milwaukee Public Museum (2018)
The lake dwelling sites of circum-Alpine Europe were discovered by the archaeological community in the mid-19th century and their artifacts were dispersed to museum collections in the United States and Europe. The Milwaukee Public Museum houses one such collection, which includes zoological material, textile fragments, tools, and carbonized botanicals and food. This paper focuses on the collection of plants and food, which come from Robenhausen, a lake-dwelling site south of Zurich. In studying...
Examining the Bread-Basket Model: Puuc Intra and Inter-Site Diversity in Plant Foods (2018)
The Puuc mountains in the northwestern Maya lowlands have proven themselves to be double-faced in regard to pre-Columbian human settlement. On one side, the valleys exhibit the region's most fertile soils. On the other hand, rainfall is scarce and access to the underground water table is comparatively difficult. Nonetheless, authors such as Smyth (1991) have long suggested that the Puuc represented some of the bread-basket for the wider northwestern lowlands. As part of a broader study, in this...
Examining the Shift in Seed-Dispersal Mechanisms During Early Plant Domestication (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Frontiers of Plant Domestication" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Scholarship is reframing the study of plant evolution under cultivation to focus on the effects of complex human harvesting practices (seed predation), increased human population size, and sedentism, while turning away from conscious human selection. Research has pointed out that parallelism in domestication is linked to seed-dispersal mechanisms, but...
Exploring Early Historic Human-Canid Relationships in the Intermountain West: A Case Study from Seventeenth-Century Blacks Fork, Wyoming (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Relationships among people, dogs, and wild canid taxa played important cultural and functional roles in the early Great Plains and Rocky Mountains. However, the complexity of human-canid relationships in precolonial America and morphological similarities among wild and domestic canids make tracing human-canid interaction through the archaeological record...
Exploring Wild Avocado Germplasm through Herbarium Genomes (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The avocado has a complicated evolutionary history resulting from landscape-level management and domestication practices. Cultivars of the species are well-documented and categorized into three botanical races based on genetic differentiation, morphology, and adapted environment. However, we have very little knowledge of the avocado’s genetic variation...
"A feast of meat, a day of sociability": Examining Patterns in Turkey Management in the Cibola Region, AD 1150-1400 (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. Recent genetic and isotopic studies highlight important variations in the nature, timing, and intensity of domesticated turkey (Meleagris gallopavo) management practices across the northern U.S. Southwest. While a degree of intensification in turkey production has been associated with widespread settlement aggregation in the...
The Four Corners Potato: A Starch Granule Analysis of Ground Stone Artifacts from 5MT3873, Cortez, Colorado (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. New research suggests the utilization of a wild potato (Solanum jamesii) may have been an important resource in the arid West in general and particularly among Ancient Puebloan communities. This research tests for the role of S. jamesii in Ancient Puebloan societies by expanding upon the research goals and archaeological investigations of the Ladle House...
Fox Farm, a Large Fort Ancient Village in Mason County, Kentucky: Evidence of Turkey (Meleagris gallopavo) Management? (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Current Research on Turkey (Meleagris gallopavo) Domestication, Husbandry and Management in North America and Beyond" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Investigations of wild turkey (Meleagris gallopavo) remains from archaeological sites in Central America and the American Southwest have generated new data about the management and domestication of this species. We applied the methods used in those studies to our analysis...
Friends in High Places. An Integrated Examination of the Long-Term Relationship between Humans and Dogs in Arctic Prehistory (2018)
Dogs are arguably the most significant domestic species in the circumpolar North, in both their universal importance to life-ways and their near-uniqueness as a regional domesticate. The Arctic was the gateway for at least 4 independent waves of migration of dogs into the Americas, beginning as early as ~17,500-13,000 years ago, making this region particularly important for investigating not only the cultural and technological functions of Arctic dogs, but also the impact of successive...
From North America to Europe: Preliminary Biomolecular results Regarding the Transatlantic History of the Turkey (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Current Research on Turkey (Meleagris gallopavo) Domestication, Husbandry and Management in North America and Beyond" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While there is a growing body of studies on turkey domestication and use in North America, many questions remain unanswered regarding its introduction to Europe and its subsequent breeding. Which populations of turkeys were imported in Europe and when? How fast did they...
From the Early Holocene to Amazonian Forest Groves (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ecological studies in the Amazon increasingly report groves of economically useful tree species thought to be legacies of past human occupation and management practices, in contrast to an inherent composition with high species diversity and low species concentration. Brazil nut (Bertholletia excelsa – Lecythidaceae) trees occur in grove-type forest formations...
The Future of Paleogenomics in Archaeology: Insights from a Multidisciplinary Study on Sunflower Domestication (2018)
Ancient DNA (aDNA) methodologies have rapidly developed over the past three decades, and today these tools provide a powerful means to investigate a wide range of archaeological inquiries, including human evolution, animal and plant domestication, and paleoenvironmental reconstructions. In this talk, I will summarize general approaches in paleogenomics research, focusing on concerns and questions from archaeologists. To demonstrate how state-of-the-art paleogenomic techniques can contribute to...
The Genetic History and Diffusion Routes of Early Maize in North America (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Frontiers of Plant Domestication" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological and genetic evidence from modern and ancient maize (Zea mays) samples indicate that maize initially reached the southwestern United States (U.S.) by around 4,000 years ago via a highland Mexican route, followed by a second introduction via the Pacific coast, around 2,000 years ago. However, maize diffusion routes northward from the...
Genetic Species Identification of Large Birds from the Dadiwan Neolithic Site in Northern China (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We present information and insight drawn from the Neolithic of northern China (ca. 8,000 – 5,000 BP) about the manner by which large, meaty birds (including potential precursors of the domestic chicken) were drawn into the human biome. Long before they were essential staples, they (along with a range of different, but similar birds) were an occasional, and...
Geographic and Temporal Variation in Canid Dietary Patterns from Five Huron-Wendat Village Sites in Ontario, Canada (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 bone collagen in 48 dogs (Canis familaris) was conducted to investigate geographic and temporal variation in diet at five Huron-Wendat sites (A.D. 1250-1650) in southern Ontario, Canada. Carbon and nitrogen isotope data indicate intra- and inter-site variation in dietary protein for these dogs, as well as temporal variation in diet...
Global and Regional Frameworks for Comparing Agricultural Intensification and Productivity Across Cases (2018)
Understanding variation in the stability and productivity of subsistence strategies is fundamental to explaining patterns of variation in long-term human demography. This poster addresses under what conditions societies intensify food production at both global and regional scales using frameworks ranging from relatively abstract environmental measures to models based on detailed historical and archaeological data relating to agricultural productivity. At a global scale, the combination of...
Hydrogen and Oxygen (δ2H and δ18O) Isotopes and the Study of Human-Turkey Relationships in the Northern US Southwest (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Isotopic and Animal aDNA Analyses in the Southwest/Northwest" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Previous studies have established consistency, but also substantial anomalies, in how turkeys (Meleagris gallopavo) were managed across the US Southwest/Mexican Northwest. In this paper, we present bone collagen derived stable hydrogen (δ2H) and bone apatite derived stable oxygen (δ18O) isotopes in turkeys from Tijeras Pueblo...