Paleoethnobotany (Other Keyword)
76-100 (461 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Mogollon, Mimbres, and Salado Archaeology in Southwest New Mexico and Beyond" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the thirteenth century, the southwestern United States underwent extensive demographic shifts, including migration and drastic social upheaval. From this context what archaeologists call the Salado ideology emerged in southern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico in the fourteenth century from the...
Comparing Starch Granules from Wild and Cultivated Solanum jamesii to Determine the Effects of Domestication (2018)
The processes, antecedents, and outcomes associated with plant domestication have been central themes in archaeological and interdisciplinary research for the last century. While domesticates can often be readily distinguished from their wild progenitors both genetically and morphologically, the steps leading to domestication (transport, selective harvest, deliberate seed dispersal, active plant management, i.e. cultivation) can be difficult to track archaeologically. Techniques for identifying...
A Comparison of DNA Metabarcoding and Macroremains Analysis for Dietary Reconstruction using Coprolites from Bonneville Estates Rockshelter, Nevada (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Coprolites are increasingly the subject of multiproxy analyses, but there is need to determine how the data, results, and interpretation of coprolite contents could differ depending on the methods chosen. This study presents a comparison of DNA metabarcoding and macroremains analysis performed on ten coprolites from Bonneville Estates Rockshelter, Nevada....
Connecting Dead, Living, and Supernatural through Plants: Botanical Mortuary Offerings at Monte Albán (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Checking the Pulse: Current Research in Oaxaca Part I" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper examines the plants used as mortuary offerings at the Zapotec city of Monte Albán (500 BCE–900 CE). After their passing, the deceased became Ancestors able to offer protection to their descendants. I explore the possibility that food (specifically plants) might have helped to provide and strengthen a bridge between the...
Context and Age of Early Maize (Zea mays) in the Central Plains (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. Maize, or corn, was one of the dominate crops to many North American Plains tribes, contributing beyond subsistence to origin beliefs, rituals, ceremonies, and trade. Given this, archaeologists seek to recreate the evolutionary processes by which maize became an important element in the economy of Plains...
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...
Cooking, Cuisine, and Class: The Ritualistic Aspect of Eurasian Foodways (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Cultivating Cities: Perspectives from the New and Old Worlds on Wild Foods, Agriculture, and Urban Subsistence Economies" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent investigation has shown that between 5000 and 1500 cal BC, the Eurasian and African landmass underpinned a continental-scale process of “globalization” of food and foodways. By 1500 cal BC, the trans-Eurasian exchange of cereal crops brought together previously...
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...
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...
Cuisine at the Crossroads (2016)
Investigations at sites across Northwestern Honduras-- inside and outside of the Maya area—have uncovered diverse food practices and ingredients. As with other more durable goods, there is evidence of transformation over time, and the movement of elements across the landscape. Some foodways were never adopted in regions where they came to be readily available (considering the general flow of species and materials) while others were quickly adopted but in novel ways. Evidence points toward...
Cuisine of the Overseas Chinese in the Western United States: Using Recipes to Interpret Archaeological Plant Remains (2017)
Most of the Chinese who immigrated to the United States in the mid to late 19th century came from a few districts in southern China, an area with a well-developed cuisine. They brought ingredients, cooking equipment, dining implements, and seeds for garden crops to prepare food for daily meals and festivities. However, their culinary traditions were modified by a variety of factors including the absence of some ingredients, the easy availability of Euro-American foods, and restrictions on the...
Culinary Contributions: What’s Cooking on Griddles in the Northern Caribbean (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Advances in the Archaeology of the Bahama Archipelago" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Precolonial foodways in the northern Caribbean have received restricted investigations. This paper is a synopsis of microbotanical residues extracted from clay griddles (flat cooking plates) excavated from three archaeological sites: El Flaco, La Luperona, and Palmetto Junction. Social identities are strongly linked to cultural...
Cultivating Lost Crops: New Insights on the Domestication of Goosefoot (Chenopodium berlandieri) from a Common Garden Experiment (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Advancing the Archaeology of Indigenous Agriculture in North America" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In precolumbian eastern North America, archaeological evidence indicates that Indigenous peoples domesticated a unique crop system called the Eastern Agricultural Complex (EAC) before the arrival of maize (Zea mays) from what is now Mexico. The EAC is thought to have sustained past Indigenous people in eastern North...
Cultural Choices and Exchange Networks: Cereals in Iron Age and Archaic Italy. (2016)
Staple foods offer an ideal opportunity to investigate cultural identity and socio-economic interactions. In Iron Age and Archaic Central Italy several kinds of cereal staples were grown, consumed and possibly exchanged. Different patterns shown by recent archaeobotanical research suggest interesting implications for the understanding of the cultural and political landscape of Central Italy in a period of rapid tranformations. A new method has been developed to detect directly the movement of...
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...
Daily Life in a Classical Port City: Archaeobotanical Evidence from Northern Greece (2017)
Recent excavations at Molyvoti, a large fourth century B.C. settlement on the northern Aegean coast, have uncovered a residential neighborhood of homes and roadways laid out on a Hippodamian grid system. Thousands of carbonized plant remains have been identified from excavated domestic contexts including house floors, hearths, and abandoned wells. Macrobotanical results indicate that residents’ diets relied heavily on cereals such as barley and free-threshing wheat. Cereal processing activities...
Decoding the Molecular Structure of Food 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. There are many different ways to approach food and food culture as windows into past lifeways. In this paper we discuss how food plant evidence, landscape data, and new technologies can be combined to provide new approaches that allow the study of webs of communication that can explain variable socioeconomic settings through time...
A Deep History of Human Activity in the Jiuzhaigou National Park (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeology and Landscape Learning for a Climate-Changing World" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. China’s tuigeng huanlin, or “Returning Farmland to Forest,” program has been widely praised as the world’s largest and most successful payment for ecosystem services program, as well as a major contributor to China’s dramatic increase in forest cover. In order to the preserve the biodiversity and the scenic lakes found in...
Deposition, Disturbance, and Dumping: The Application of Archaeobotanical Measures to Taphonomic Questions (2018)
This study assesses the utility of archaeobotanical measures to recognize differential site formation processes, drawing on the Bronze and Iron Age hill fort site of Zagorë, in northern Albania, as a case study. The blanket sampling strategy for collection of flotation samples applied by the Projeki Arkeologjik I Shkodres (PASH) (2010-2014) during the site’s excavation provides a complete record of archaeobotanical changes across the depth of each excavation unit. The use of small mesh sizes for...
Detecting Domestication of the Four Corners Potato (Solanum jamesii Torr.) (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The process of domestication is essential for producing nutritious foods that can be grown, harvested, stored and eaten. Recent evidence suggests that a novel potato species, known as the Four Corners Potato (Solanum jamesii Torr.) was manipulated by ancient people sometime during the last 12,000 years. The tubers might have been an important food and...
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...
Diet change in the Ceramic Age Caribbean archipelago (2016)
This paper addresses temporal changes in dietary practices in the Ceramic Age (500BC – AD1500) Caribbean. Evidence from human dental wear and pathology has indicated a broad shift in dietary practices from the Early Ceramic Age (500BC – AD600/800) to the Late Ceramic Age (AD600/800 – AD1500). Comparisons between the two periods revealed significant differences in the rate of dental wear and pathology, suggesting a growing focus on refined, cariogenic foods, most likely horticultural produce....
Dietary Insights from a Middle Holocene Latrine Feature at the Connley Caves (35LK50), Oregon (2018)
The Connley Caves site is composed of eight rockshelters situated in a south-facing ridge of welded tuff on the margin of Paulina Marsh in the Fort Rock Basin of central Oregon. Poor preservation of perishable materials and the removal of much of the Middle Holocene deposits at the site with a backhoe during archaeological excavations carried out in the 1960s limit our knowledge of this period at the Connley Caves. Recent excavations conducted by the University of Oregon uncovered a small alcove...
Diversity and Unity: Different Crop Consumption in East Tianshan Mountains, Northwest China (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 region of east Tianshan Mountains, located in east edge of Central Asia, has a diverse natural environment that is suitable for a variety of subsistence. The first millennium BC was a period with fluctuating climate and rapid cultural interactions in this region. This study conducted...