Paleoethnobotany (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katharine Reinhart. Alexander Patterson. David Landon.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological excavations in 2021 recovered important new information about the Coles Hill Archaeological Site (19-PL-984), a Wampanoag site overlooking the waterfront in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Despite the location on a heavily developed urban lot, a preserved portion of the site featured intact stratigraphy yielding in situ cultural features, pottery...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Lentz. Venicia Slotten.

Archaeological investigations at Cerén, a Classic period Maya site in western El Salvador, have unearthed an abundance of carbonized bean remains, both Phaseolus vulgaris and P. lunatus. Surprisingly, the Cerén P. vulgaris bean remains were derived from both wild and domesticated populations. This find reveals that the Late Classic inhabitants continued to draw upon wild food sources even though they had clear access, as seen in the Cerén paleoethnobotanical record, to a full array of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tom Dillehay.

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. Archaeologists have long hypothesized the causes and conditions of the transition from foraging to food production. Of specific interest here are the social and ecological conditions generating the adoption of exotic plants. Some of the best-documented paleoecological and archaeological evidence for initial food production and the adoption...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rebecca Friedel. M. Kathryn Brown.

The importance of fire in Maya rituals is well-known, both archaeologically and ethnographically. Fire, which is symbolic of the life cycle in Maya ideology, has been used as a means of communicating with the supernatural world in order to manage specific aspects of everyday life, such as the success of the agricultural season. In the archaeological record, we find evidence for ancient fires as features consisting mostly of burnt plant remains, some of which resemble modern Maya fire altars both...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Barbara J. Heath. Kandace Hollenbach.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "New Avenues in the Study of Plant Remains from Historical Sites" , at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Our paper summarizes analyses of samples of carbonized seeds, nutshells, and plant parts and tissues which we use to investigate the relationships between people and plants in the foodways, economy, and ecology in Maryland and Virginia in the period from 1630 to 1720. Incorporating multiple contexts from five...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cinthia Campos-Hernandez.

This is an abstract from the "Advances in Macrobotanical and Microbotanical Archaeobotany Part 1" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For nearly a century, archaeologists have debated the subsistence adaptation of the Trincheras Tradition of Sonora, México. Nineteenth-century scholars hypothesized that they were foragers until the arrival of the Hohokam around 1300 CE. Having recently excavated Snaketown in the Phoenix basin, archaeologists had...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jonah Bullen.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicole Herzog. Lisbeth Louderback. Bruce Pavlik.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Taryn Johnson. Bryan Hockett. Anna Linderholm.

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....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eloi Berube. Cira Martínez López.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Castillo Acal.

This is an abstract from the "The Bolonchen Regional Archaeological Project: 25 Years of Research in the Puuc" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological investigations in the Bolonchen district have as one of their goals the understanding of the variation of the natural resource exploitation by the ancient settlers in the region. An approach that has been a relevant for reconstruction of the landscape and prehispanic forest management is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eric Rodríguez-Delgado.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Throughout Caribbean prehistory, the construction of public architecture in ceremonial contexts is linked to expressions of status and power over local communities and resources. The appearance of these features such as mounds and ballcourts (bateyes) are largely associated with the Early to Late Ceramic Period – broadly defined by long-distance cultural...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mary Adair.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Angelina Perrotti.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study uses pollen, fungal spores, charcoal, and human demographic models to investigate vegetation change from an iconic 61,000 year record at Lake Tulane, Florida. The pollen record shows oscillations between pine and oak-dominated vegetation, with Heinrich events aligning with peaks in pine, indicating warm, wet climates in central Florida during...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Walsh.

This is an abstract from the "The Housepit 54 Project at Bridge River, British Columbia: Multidisciplinary Contributions to Household Archaeology" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Building on previous research on the cultural transmission of material culture between generations at Housepit 54 (Prentiss et al. 2016; 2020a), this poster presents ongoing research exploring the possible transmission trajectories of lithic technologies across activity...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katelyn McDonough. Madeline Mackie.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Xinyi Liu.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Ciofalo. Devon Graves.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Staci Willis. Heather Thakar. Massimo Capulli.

This is an abstract from the "The Ties That Bind: Cordage, Its Sources, and the Artifacts of Its Creation and Use" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Across the globe and over the millennia, cordage has been used as a key element to fasten the hulls of wooden plank boats and ships. As such, cordage has been an integral element of naval technology. Furthermore, the communal nature of constructing sewn plank boats arguably puts cordage at the heart of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Victor Emmanuel Salazar Chávez. Jeffrey P. Blomster.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeffrey Blomster.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The emergence of sedentary and socio-politically complex societies represents a fundamental transformation in Mesoamerica. At the highland site of Etlatongo, in the Mixteca Alta of Oaxaca, Mexico, recent excavations have explored later Early Formative (1400 -1000 cal BCE) public space, a ballcourt, recovering a large assemblage of macrobotanical, faunal,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yufeng Sun.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shanti Morell-Hart.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Virginia Popper.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shanti Morell-Hart.

This is an abstract from the "Beyond Maize and Cacao: Reflections on Visual and Textual Representation and Archaeological Evidence of Other Plants in Precolumbian Mesoamerica" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Foraging, home gardening, and large-scale cultivation yielded products consumed at every level of ancient Maya societies, albeit in varying proportions. For decades, researchers have carefully documented miniscule botanical residues, from...