Paleoethnobotany (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Kallenbach.

This is an abstract from the "Cordage, Yarn, and Associated Paraphernalia" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Early foraging communities in the Northern Great Basin engaged with a diverse and changing landscape over millennia. Archaeologists have developed settlement-subsistence models in relation to climatic shifts based on tool assemblages, dietary studies, and other datasets. In the current study, textiles from Paisley Caves are examined within the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Leilani Lucas.

This is an abstract from the "Pushing the Envelope, Chasing Stone Age Sailors and Early Agriculture: Papers in Honor of the Career of Alan H. Simmons" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since the first experiments with the method of flotation in 1962, the sub-discipline of archaeobotany (paleoethnobotany) has developed and revolutionized our understanding of the origins and spread of agricultural systems worldwide. The history of modern...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christine A. Hastorf. Melanie Miller.

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. Archaeological studies of ancient foodways focus on understanding subsistence practices in terms of the movement of species over space and time, human/plant/animal strategies, ecological transformations, periods of abundance/famine, economics, and politics. The values that foods are imbued with, the meaning and significance they...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maureece Levin. Floyd Silbanuz.

In Pohnpei, Micronesia, the uhmw, or earth oven, is one important way of preparing food. These ovens are typically located in cookhouses next to residential sites. Pohnpeians use heated stones on the ground to cook food and cover items with large leaves while cooking. It is clear that umhw are a long-standing Pohnpeian tradition, as multiple examples have been found in the archaeological record. In this paper, we ask what botanical residues from uhmw can tell us about the prehistory and history...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Weiland. Laura Crawford. Bret J. Ruby.

At Hopewell Mound Group in Ross County Ohio (33RO27), 2013 magnetic gradiometer investigations redefined the long invisible Great Circle, a 120-meter diameter woodhenge. The 2016 excavation of one of four central features within the Great Circle revealed a large thermal feature. Although unusually large for this purpose, the arrangement of fire-cracked rock, clay lining, hot-burning hardwoods and grass seed suggest a classic earth oven common to domestic sites. However, ethnographic analogy...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christine A. Hastorf.

Archaeobotanists find herbaceous plants in their collected macrobotanical collections regularly. Usually they are associated with animal fodder and fuel. But what if they were condiments? Recently there has been more information on wild herbaceous plants and insects as part of rural people’s cuisines. These oft-hidden ingredients should be recalled when taxa lists are studied, as some could have been important if rarely used spices and flavoring ingredients. We see, for example, that some...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shanti Morell-Hart.

Analysis of botanical residues recovered from the Río Verde Valley has yielded a wealth of information about activities of ancient inhabitants. Data from this paper were derived from large-scale excavations at the Terminal Formative urban center of Río Viejo, and the Terminal Formative outlying sites of Cerro de la Virgen and Loma Don Genaro. Evidence of agricultural practices as well as the collection of wild and fallow-dwelling plants have been revealed through charred seeds and other...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cameron L. McNeil.

This is an abstract from the "The Flower World: Religion, Aesthetics, and Ideology in Mesoamerica and the American Southwest" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Clues to the creation of flower-laden spaces in ancient Maya temples, tombs, and palaces lie on the floors of the best-preserved of these structures. The Copan Acropolis has proved to be a particularly good site for the recovery of well-preserved pollen grains from flowers that adorned ritual...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sadie Weber. Matthew Sayre.

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. The exchange of goods and movement among different ecozones is a hallmark of Andean society. Key to this system of mobility were camelid caravans, which are possibly best known for the Wari or Tiwanaku cultures but are today dwindling in frequency or have disappeared in the Andes. These caravans were established in the much earlier Formative...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Dresser-Kluchman.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Growing, collecting, preparing, storing, and using food and fuel are practices that illustrate environmental, community, and interpersonal relationships at the smallest and largest archaeological scales. This paper explores the plant landscape of the Gallina region and phase within the Ancestral Puebloan world. As understandings of this period and its...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amanda Logan. Sophie Reilly.

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. Why do we do food archaeology, and what can we use it for? In the last few decades, social archaeology has strongly shaped approaches to food in the past, directing our attention to how food is used to create social boundaries and values. More than ever before, archaeology is now facing the challenge of making ourselves relevant...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jose Oliver.

This is an abstract from the "The Intangible Dimensions of Food in the Caribbean Ancient and Recent Past" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper makes the case for a greater concerted effort in archaeobotany to give equal standing to the domain of 'food' for the soul and spirit, that is, useful/edible plants for the well-being of the individual and the community in the past. All too often, the emphasis falls into concerns of staple food as a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Karen Adams. Susan Smith.

Field schools run by Chuck Adams and Rich Lange introduced students to many archaeological disciplines. Together an archaeobotanist and a palynologist pulled students into the world of plants via introductory lectures on plant macrofossils and microfossils. Hands-on activities then focused on learning the important plant resources currently available. Student pairs were sent into three different plant communities to collect samples of all the different plants they encountered. When re-assembled...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dana Bardolph. Brian Billman. Jesus Briceno.

In this paper, we explore migration and culture contact in the prehispanic Moche Valley of north coastal Peru, specifically through the lens of domestic foodways. During the Early Intermediate Period (EIP, 400 B.C. to A.D. 800), serrano groups from the neighboring highlands colonized many principal river valleys along the Peruvian north coast; however, the nature of highland colonization remains poorly understood. Scholars have envisioned diverse interactions between locals and nonlocals, from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kayla Pio. John Marston.

While the collection and analysis of paleoethnobotanical material is increasingly common in settlement excavations, it still remains rare in burial contexts. Botanical material from cemeteries can provide important insights into mortuary practices and associative beliefs about the afterlife for investigated populations. Charred food remains may indicate food offerings or feasting around the burial site, as well as social inequality or aspects of the deceased’s personal identity. In the case of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lindi Masur.

This paper presents the results of a paleoethnobotanical analysis of the early Late Woodland (A.D. 1000–1300) Western Basin Tradition (WBT) sites informally known as the Arkona Cluster. Relatively little is known about WBT human-plant interaction as compared to their maize-bean-squash cultivating Iroquoian neighbors. Culture-historical models of the WBT are proving to be outdated, overemphasizing the supposed difference between WBT ‘hunter-gatherer’ subsistence strategies and Iroquoian farming....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Trevor Lamb.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. On Kodiak Island, Alaska many aspects of life changed during the Koniag Phase (650–200 BP): houses became larger and side-rooms were built to store food, social status and labret wearing intensified, community buildings known as qasgit ("men's houses") were built, and people began to use pottery. Zooarchaeological evidence demonstrates that marine mammals,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lindi Masur.

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. Recent excavations at the early Late Woodland (A.D. 1,000-1,300) Western Basin Tradition Arkona sites have called into question our conceptualization of Algonquian food production, landscape construction, and mobility in southwestern-most Ontario. Isotopic analyses have also revealed a vast underestimation of the amount...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Geoffrey Taylor.

Knowledge of Wari plant use has progressed significantly with analyses from sites such as Conchopata and Cerro Baul, but there has yet to be any investigation into Wari plant foodways at the capital city of Huari. This paper will investigate the botanical remains from flotation samples recovered throughout the 2017 excavations of Patipampa, a domestic sector of the site occupied during the Middle Horizon (AD 500-1000). For years, it has been assumed that the emergence of the Wari state in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily McKenzie.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the past few decades, archaeologists have embraced the compositional and elemental analysis of archaeological materials—primarily ceramic, metallic, and lithic objects—drawing new conclusions about the circumstances surrounding their production, such as the geographic origins of their raw components or the processes by which they were made. To explore the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Heather Thakar.

In recent years, burgeoning paleoethnobotanical research on the Northern Channel Islands of California has challenged long held assumptions regarding the nature of aboriginal patterns of plant exploitation and helped refine our understanding of prehistoric Chumash subsistence economies. Yet, little effort has been made to systematically integrate paleoethnobotanical analysis and datasets with normative subsistence studies, which tend to focus on the abundant (and highly visible) shellfish...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marc Levine. Kathryn Puseman.

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Oaxacan Cuisine" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper highlights the results of a recent analysis of macrobotanical remains from commoner households at the Late Postclassic (AD 1100-1522) Mixtec capital of Tututepec. The paleoethnobotanical data is considered in light of archaeological evidence, as well as ethnographic and ethnohistoric data, to investigate the nature of household food...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christine A. Hastorf.

This is an abstract from the "Culinary Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While archaeobotanists and zooarchaeologists work very hard to gain information about the presence and frequency of past food ingredients throughout time, it has been almost impossible to get at actual recipes and flavor combinations from archaeological settings. Food archaeologists worked hard while making great strides uncovering the rich archaeological data about...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathryn Kemp.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tim Riley.

The role of maize agriculture among the Fremont has been debated for decades. Archaeologists have organized dietary evidence from these widely dispersed communities, including faunal and floral debris, dental calculus studies,and experimental farming and foraging, to examine farming in the high desert. The Fremont farming/foraging frontier provides a framework to explore agriculture along the margins and the importance of diversified subsistence strategies across a network of rural communities....