Paleoethnobotany (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Crystal Dozier.

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. The work of Alston Thoms and colleagues has highlighted the importance of earth oven cooking technologies throughout the world, and especially within North America. One advantage of earth oven (heated rock) cooking is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only BrieAnna Langlie.

During times of social and political crisis humans’ most basic biological needs still need to be met: they need to eat. This means that during times of war, when state infrastructure breaks down and supply chains are threatened, people often take food security matters into their own hands. During 20th century conflicts, families ensured food security on the home front by building household gardens. Practically, the construction of war gardens resulted in decreased individual reliance on often...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Caroline Funk. Nancy Bigelow. Debra Corbett. Nicole Misarti.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Prehistoric large village midden sites in the Aleutian Islands provide soil chemistry and drainage environments optimal for the growth of plants that feature prominently in Unangan/Unangas traditional subsistence. Previous interpretations view this as fortuitous and non-deliberate. We argue that evidence suggests instead that plants useful in subsistence and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Killion.

Plant cultivation in and around residential locations and at greater distances from settlements are options early cultivators employed, supplemented by wild resources, to meet subsistence needs. The mix of plants, soils and cultivation practices varied by environment, distribution of resources, population density and other factors. This paper examines the role of gardens over the long transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture in tropical lowland environments. Ethnographic data,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shalen Prado. Adrianne Lickers Xavier. Andrew Roddick. Scott Martin.

This is an abstract from the "Cultivating Food, Land, and Communities" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. How can archaeological data contribute to Indigenous food sovereignty efforts and biocultural restoration of Indigenous landscapes? We present two projects from northern Turtle Island from vastly different ecologies (Saskatchewan and Ontario), where paleoethnobotanical research has been effective for connecting archaeologists, Indigenous scholars,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristina Gill. Kristin Hoppa.

The abundance and diversity of terrestrial plant resources on the islands off the Pacific coast of southern Alta and Baja California vary in terms of island biogeographic distribution, ranging from pine forests and oak/juniper woodlands, to chaparral, cactus scrub and grassland habitats, among others. These plant resources provided food, medicine, and raw materials for island populations. However, island plant resources have long been described in the literature as "depauperate," an idea based...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Beahm. Jodi Barnes. Elizabeth Horton.

The Arkansas Archeological Survey has been practicing citizen science and developing educational tools for engaging local communities in the study of the past since the 1960s. In this paper, we discuss recent efforts by the Survey to develop educational content specifically aimed at highlighting the history of plant use through time in the southeastern United States. The Survey received grant funds to develop the 5th grade social studies curriculum, Gathering, Gardening, and Agriculture:...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joshua Englehardt. Angélica Cibrian Jaramillo.

This is an abstract from the "Regional and Intensive Site Survey: Case Studies from Mesoamerica" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeogenetics, a term coined by Colin Renfrew in 2000, is a relatively new line of inquiry into the archaeological past. Archaeogenetic techniques use ancient DNA and genomic sequencing to reveal population-level data that may be used to elucidate processes central to archaeological research, such as group migrations...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Giedre Motuzaite Matuzeviciute.

More than 8000 years ago, a variety of crop species began to spread across Eurasia, reaching its edges approximately 4000 years later. The chain of mountains that stretches across Central Asia constituted a geographical obstacle that slowed down the dispersal process. Special high altitude adaptive strategies were required not only by humans, but also by plants due to changes in the length of the growing season, climatic conditions, UV intensity, among other factors. Therefore, the mountain...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aaron Mayer. Matthew Sayre.

In the field seasons of 2004-2007 Justin Jennings and his field crew conducted archaeological excavations at the Middle Horizon (600-1100A.D.) site of Tenahaha in the Cothuasi Valley of the Peruvian Andes. During 2013-2014 floatation samples from the site were analyzed in the Archaeology Laboratory at the University of South Dakota. The Tenahaha site contained five domestic areas from which macrobotanical data was collected and interpreted. It is believed that the Tenahaha necropolis was only...

DOCUMENT Citation Only R. J. Sinensky. Sarah Oas.

This is an abstract from the "Enduring Relationships: People, Plants, and the Contributions of Karen R. Adams" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For over three decades Dr. Karen R. Adams has been at the forefront of research on the origins and long-term evolution of maize (Zea mays subsp. mays) in the US Southwest and northwestern Mexico. Dr. Adams has approached untangling the complex and oft convoluted histories of maize in a collaborative and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Giacomo Gaggio. Paul Goldstein.

Much is known nowadays about the role of plants in Tiwanaku households and political economy, yet, their function in ceremonial contexts is still unclear. Unlike the state's heartland in the Bolivian altiplano, where preservation conditions are not always favorable for the systematic recovery of paleobotanical remains, excavations of Tiwanaku sites in the hyper-arid environment of the Moquegua valley in southern Peru have resulted in the recovery of a wide array of ancient organic finds,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Megan Belcher. Christina L. Youngpeter. Natalie G. Mueller. Alleen Betzenhauser.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In precontact eastern North America, Indigenous peoples domesticated a unique crop system called the Eastern Agricultural Complex (EAC) before the arrival of maize (Zea mays). The EAC likely sustained past Indigenous populations beginning around 3900 B.P., to approximately 600 B.P. The EAC fell out of cultivation prior to European contact, so their...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yufeng Sun. Melissa Ritchey. Xinyi Liu.

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Food and Foodways: Emerging Trends and New Perspectives" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the past 15 years, research into prehistoric food globalization has shed light on the timelines, routes, and tempos of crop diffusion across the Old World. This diffusion not only involved the spread of plants but also the reproduction and transformation of cultures, technologies, and ideologies associated...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bruce Manzano. Renee Bonzani.

This is an abstract from the "Broader Impacts and Teaching: Engaging with Diverse Audiences" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Active participation and hands-on analysis and activities in college-level classes can draw students with diverse interests into classes of archaeology. To move away from straight lecturing about archaeological principles, the authors developed a class on paleoethnobotany and zooarchaeology that actively involves students...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gayle J. Fritz. Karen R. Adams.

Chenopodium seeds are ubiquitous in archaeobotanical samples from sites across the U.S. Southwest, commonly interpreted as representing the harvest of wild populations or weedy plants that were encouraged to grow in garden plots and agricultural fields. Up to 75% of projects from various SW U.S. regions contained Chenopodium, and/or Amaranthus, and/or Cheno-am seeds. Archaeobotanists differ in how they recognize and report these seeds. At least 22 wild species of Chenopodium are native to one or...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Watson. Joshua Schnell. Shanti Morell-Hart. Andrew Scherer.

This is an abstract from the "Medicine and Healing in the Americas: Archaeological and Ethnohistorical Perspectives" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Botanical residues recovered from the proposed marketplace area of Piedras Negras have revealed rich information about healing and medicinal activities of Classic Period inhabitants. Excavations in this sector yielded a high quantity of identifiable plant remains in the same contexts as human dental...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Caitlin Holloway.

The depositional context of many high-latitude archaeological sites often inhibits preservation of hearth features and associated organic remains. When preserved, subsurface hearth features provide insight into the role of plant resources in prehistoric hunter-gatherer economies. This research addresses questions of taphonomy, paleoecology, and prehistoric plant use with archaeobotanical analysis of hearth features from sites located in Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve and Gates of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dana Bardolph. Brian Billman. Jesús Briceño.

Archaeologists have successfully used spatial analyses of different contexts (elite/non-elite, ritual/domestic, public/private, etc.) to examine the intersection of food-related activities with status, political economy, gender, ritual, and the public/private division. In this paper, I consider the intersections of food processing, ritual, and gendered labor through an examination of paleoethnobotanical data from Cerro León, a Gallinazo/Early Moche phase (A.D. 1-300) highland colony in the Moche...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Donna Ruhl.

This is an abstract from the ""Re-excavating" Legacy Collections" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Can't-see-the-forest-for-the-trees as a metaphor conveys that we sometimes cannot assess situations while we are in the midst of them. Archaeobotanists often report that the most ubiquitous plant type at a site is charred wood. But have we really assessed what these once trees represent: fuel, building remains, indirect evidence of food, or something...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexandria Mitchem.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The collection and transport of natural specimens during the long eighteenth century had political, intellectual, and ecological effects. Botanical gardens are key loci to examine the material histories of these processes. Bartram’s Garden, the most prominent botanical garden in North America during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tiffany Fulkerson. Shannon Tushingham.

The Manila site (CA-HUM-321) is a stratified prehistoric midden site with a long history of use by the Wiyot people. This study, the first of its kind from Humboldt Bay, reveals the results of constituent analyses of excavated materials. Fine-grained analysis of dietary residues from Manila reveals the earliest documented (1,309 cal BP) evidence of mass harvested foods, smelt fishing, and intensive shellfish procurement on the North Coast of California. Paleoethnobotanical analysis of seeds and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ryan Szymanski.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The last several millennia of cultural history in the western Kenyan highlands have been marked both by punctuated periods of considerable demographic and economic change, and by continuous in-situ processes of genetic, linguistic, and economic interaction and admixture. Historical linguistic and archaeological models of the peopling of this region have, among...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Naomi Miller. Chantel White.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists periodically encounter concentrations of uncharred plant remains in standing structures. Whether excavated or never actually buried, they are a challenge for interpretation. In addition to identification, the archaeobotanical tasks include determining the agent of deposition and the source and date of the material. This paper considers how...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jose Garay-Vazquez. Dorian Fuller. José Oliver.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeobotanical research of macro-botanical remains in the Caribbean is scarce due to notions of poor preservation in tropical landscapes. This shifted archaeobotanical research towards the analysis of micro-botanical remains because these types of analysis have been reported as more successful for recovering data of subsistence practices in the Neotropics....