Paleoethnobotany (Other Keyword)
126-150 (657 Records)
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...
Cultural Evidence Indicates the Late Arrival of Modern Humans in Southern China during the Upper Pleistocene (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Technology, Production, and Social Changes in Chinese Archaeology" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cultural remains are important indicators of modern human presence in the Late Pleistocene across Eurasia. Recent debates on the initial appearance of modern humans in southern China focused on its timing, two different opinions could be summarized: pre-70 ka vs post-50 ka, while disputes on hominin taxonomy,...
The Curious Case of the Tauranga Bay Snapper Fishery: Otolith Isotopic Chemistry in Northern Aotearora (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Evolutionary and Ecological Perspectives on Oceanic Archaeology: Papers to Honor the Contributions of Melinda Allen" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During my doctoral studies under Professor Allen’s guidance, I sought to explore the long-term human ecodynamics of Māori peoples’ fisheries in northern Aotearoa. I hypothesized that decreasing sea surface temperatures during the Little Ice Age could have been one 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...
De quelites me como un taco: The Importance of Secondary-Growth Plants in Polyculture-Based Farming Strategies and Food Traditions at Etlatongo, Oaxaca (2024)
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. Whenever we think of Mesoamerican foods, it is easy to imagine maize. It is particularly true during the Early Formative period, when the first sedentary villages appear in the region. Maize has been used almost exclusively to explain and...
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...
Deep Learning and Pollen Detection in the Open World (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Advances in Macrobotanical and Microbotanical Archaeobotany, Part II" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Pollen-based paleoecological reconstructions rely on visual identifications that can be automated using computer vision. To date, most automated approaches have focused on taxonomic classification of pollen in cropped images. There are fewer protocols for pollen detection (i.e., localization) in whole-slide images. New...
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...
Design, Construction, and Evaluation of a Solar-Powered Mechanized Flotation System (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Flotation remains one of the most important methods by which paleoethnobotanists recover botanical remains from archaeological contexts. However, logistics in the field can make supplying mechanized flotation machines with water (and subsequently powering motorized pumps) a challenge. This poster details the process by which we utilized bilge pumps,...
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...
A Diachronic Perspective on Wetland Resource Scheduling in Michigan: Evidence from the Potagannissing River (2024)
This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Wetlands" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Nearly 15% of Michigan is covered by wetlands. These environments are widely regarded as critical components of Michigan's unique ecological makeup. From an archaeological perspective, the biological diversity, productivity, and dependability of these natural communities fulfill a variety of societal needs. Moreover, as a site for seasonal aggregation,...
Did a changing climate in the tropical South Pacific contribute to the eastward migration and settlement of Polynesia? (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Evolutionary and Ecological Perspectives on Oceanic Archaeology: Papers to Honor the Contributions of Melinda Allen" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The migration of humans into the eastern Pacific was rapid and focused around 900-1250 CE. Although the causes of this rapid migration are likely varied, we put forward new evidence to suggest that a change in the mean state of the tropical south Pacific from a La-Niña...
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 Inferences based on Starch Residues from O’Mallely Shelter, Southern Great Basin (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster presents a history of prehistoric plant use based on starches recovered from plant processing tools at O’Malley Shelter, Lincoln County, Nevada. O’Malley Shelter (26LN418) is an important archaeological site in the Clover Mountains near the Great Basin’s southern margin, with an 8,000-year long record of occupation. Extraction and analysis of...
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...
Dinning at the Colonial Frontier: The Maintenance of Erligang Foodways at Panlongcheng (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Resources and Society in Ancient China" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Located in the middle Yangtze region, the Panlongcheng site represents the southernmost extent of the Erligang civilization’s expansion during early Bronze Age China. While much scholarly work has concentrated on elucidating the site's significance and its implications for understanding the unique cultural expansion in ancient China, there has been...
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...
The Dogs of Housepit 54 (2025)
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. This study investigates the variable relationships between people and domestic dogs over time within Housepit 54 at the Bridge River site, British Columbia. While viewing domestication as an ongoing social process, this research aims to demonstrate how the roles of dogs...
Domestic Space and Food Production in the Mesoamerican Neotropics During the Early Holocene (2024)
This is an abstract from the "The Archaeobotany of Early Peopling: Plant Experimentation and Cultural Inheritance" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Discussions on the peopling of the tropics have tended to characterize tropical forests as barriers to early human foragers due to the difficulties in obtaining sufficient nutrition from hunting and foraging activities. New research on these pioneering settlers is transforming our understanding of...
Domesticated Forests? Interpreting Agroforestry Practices from Diachronic Trends in Firewood Collection at the Classic Maya City of Naachtun (2018)
What can be drawn from anthracological data to infer long-term socio-environmental dynamics among ancient Mayas is a question that has received little attention. At Naachtun (Northern Peten, Guatemala), we studied charcoal remains from archaeological contexts in relation with pedological data to reconstruct forest resources and land management through time. Since the beginning of Naachtun's occupation at the end of the Preclassic period (≈ AD 150), domestic firewood economy seems to have been...