Paleoethnobotany (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anya Gruber.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This talk will use archaeological pollen data from LA 20,000, a Spanish rancho site located approximately 12 miles from Santa Fe, New Mexico, to investigate how Pueblo and Spanish environmental alteration made long-term, complex changes to the landscape. By identifying and quantifying pollen taxa, this research will demonstrate how plant population...

DOCUMENT Citation Only BrieAnna Langlie.

In the Peruvian altiplano near Lake Titicaca during the Late Intermediate period (LIP; A.D. 1100 to 1450) peoples’ lives were overwhelmingly structured by warfare. Martial conflict between competing ethnic groups incited people to live defensively in fortified hilltop villages during the LIP. However, little is known about the agricultural practices and the internal sociopolitical dynamics of these fighting communities. Drawing on recent excavations and macrobotanical data collected from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Trevor Lamb.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists frequently encounter pits filled with charcoal and fire cracked rock in the archaeological record which testify to past culinary practice. However, it is challenging to determine how these pits were used to cook food from general observation alone. Here I employ paleoethnobotanical and zooarchaeological analyses to determine how pits were...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachel Dwyer.

For decades, paleoethnobotanical research almost exclusively concentrated on reconstructing past subsistence economies. At 2011’s SAA conference, I presented a paper entitled, Toward A Paleoethnomedicine. I suggested that paleoethnobotanical research should take inspiration from ethnomedicine (a subfield of ethnobotany) and concentrate on analyzing past people’s healing practices and performances. This paper presents a method to operationalize this concept, a technique for analyzing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dorian Fuller.

Recent archaeobotanical evidence has provided important, although limited evidence, for the steps on the domestication trajectory for Pearl Millet in western Africa (Mali, Mauretania) and Sorghum in eastern Africa (Sudan), during the middle Holocene (3000-1000 BC). Both were exploited by and domesticated by societies that in the Sahelian and northern Savannas, and practiced mobile herding alongside hunting and low-level cultivation, but full-scale agricultural dependence may not have emerged...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dorian Fuller.

This is an abstract from the "Questioning the Fundamentals of Plant and Animal Domestication" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Taking inspiration from Zeder’s notion of pathways to animal domestication (commensal, prey, directed), this presentation will outline equivalent pathways of plant domestication types, and suggest a range of species that can be grouped by these pathways. These pathways are united by issues of habit (annual, perennial),...

DOCUMENT Citation Only India Ella Dilkes-Hall. Stepanus Gung. Andika Arief Drajat Priyatno. Febryanto . Adhi Agus Oktaviana.

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. Liang Jon is a limestone rockshelter situated within the Batu Gergaji range located in Sangkulirang-Mangkalihat karst. In 2019, excavations revealed a rich archaeological sequence with a wide range of macrobotanical remains, including Pangium edule Reinw. (payang) endocarps. Payang is an important botanical resource to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexandria Mitchem.

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. In recent years, archaeobotanists have explored the potential of desiccated assemblages cached by rodents in historic standing structures. This paper analyzes one such dataset from Bartram’s Garden, established in 1728 in Philadelphia. The Bartram family, along with at least one enslaved and one indentured worker,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Harper Dine.

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. Rejolladas have long been identified as sites of specialized agricultural and ritual practice across the northern Maya lowlands. However, archaeological investigations of these cavernous, soil-rich features have been sporadic until relatively recently, and there is still much to be understood about the way people engaged...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Marston.

This is an abstract from the "Multispecies Frameworks in Archaeological Interpretation: Human-Nonhuman Interactions in the Past, Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The study of human-plant relationships in archaeology is rich and varied, including gathering, cultivation of wild species, domestication, intensive agriculture, and nonfood uses of plants. People-plant relationships in agricultural entanglements, however, have primarily focused on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erin McDonald.

The people of the Irish Iron Age are often referred to as ‘invisible’ due to their seeming absence from the archaeological record. Ceramics, so often associated with domestic activities, are not a part of the Iron Age material culture. Burials and domestic settlements dating to the Iron Age exist, but they are the exception to the generally sparse archaeological record. In the absence of sufficient material culture and settlement patterns, other means of studying the people of the Iron Age must...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine Chiou. Araceli Aguilar-Meléndez. Christine Hastorf. Andrés Lira-Noriega. Emiliano Gallaga Murrieta.

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. Dolores Piperno’s career has been defined by pioneering work in multidisciplinary and collaborative plant research. Following in her footsteps, this interdisciplinary team comprised of archaeologists/archaeobotanists, an ethnobotanist, and a biogeographer assembled to investigate the origins and domestication of Capsicum annuum var. annuum...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine Chiou. Luis Jaime Castillo.

The site of San José de Moro in the Jequetepeque Valley of the North Coast of Peru is renowned for the discovery of several "Priestess" burials containing women interred with the material accoutrements of the goddess figure from the Moche pantheon. As a burial ground for the Moche elite, San José de Moro presents an excellent case study for ritual performance with burial-related ceremonies taking place concurrently with feasting. In this paper, we discuss the plant evidence for large-scale feast...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristen Wroth. Dan Cabanes. Paul Goldberg. Vera Aldeias. Dennis Sandgathe.

Phytolith analysis can be used to investigate the relationship between hominins, plants, and environmental change. It has proven useful in understanding specific hominin behaviors (e.g., use of fire and fuel composition), and diachronic changes in plant species for paleoenvironmental reconstructions. The integration of phytolith analysis with soil micromorphology allows for an identification of the ways phytoliths were deposited in archaeological sites, and addresses both site formation...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristen Wroth.

Phytolith analysis at Roc de Marsal, a Middle Paleolithic cave site, SW France, is used to investigate both environmental change and hominin behavior. Specifically, the aims include correlating phytolith types with the microenvironmental context of the site, and how these conditions changed diachronically. We also explore the pyrotechnological skills of Neanderthals at the site, broad patterns of plant acquisition and use, and spatial differentiation. Preliminary analysis of phytolith samples...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephanie Hacker. Beatrix Arendt. Derek Wheeler. John Jones.

This research emphasizes the value of studying plant remains recovered from archaeological contexts while contributing to our understanding of the lifeways of enslaved African-Americans from late eighteenth -century Virginia. The primary objective of this research is to identify plants selected by enslaved field laborers living on the Home Farm Quarter of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello plantation. This study incorporates both macrobotanical and pollen analysis and presents a wide variety of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katheryn Twiss. Melina Seabrook. Michael Charles.

Archaeologists have been examining the great cities of ancient southern Mesopotamia for well over a century now, but as yet we have limited understanding of their subsistence economies. For decades researchers more or less ignored the wealth of faunal and botanical remains in and around ancient Mesopotamian architecture. Over the course of the twentieth century researchers began to recover animal bones and teeth, but as few digs dry-screened or floated their soils the resulting assemblages...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emuobosa Orijemie.

Palaeoenvironmental data obtained from coastal areas (wetlands) of southern Nigeria reveal three main periods of climatic changes from the Mid Holocene-Present namely (i) very wet (ca. 6,000-5,000 BP), (ii) dry (ca. 4,500-2,500 BP) and (iii) humid periods (ca. 2,500-Present). This paper explores the dynamic ways in which the culture of plant management and plant food resources in these marginal lands has been expressed within the context of environmental change. The similarities in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kiley Stoj. Karen Schollmeyer.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Examining climate patterns, archaeobotanical evidence, artistic depictions on pottery, and historic and modern uses of plants provides information on how Mimbres and Salado period farmers used local plant resources and influenced their distribution and availability. This presentation examines differences in archaeological plant remains found in Classic Mimbres...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Susan Smith. Karen Adams.

The plant record of Room 28 is filtered through a complex stratigraphy composed of early excavation backfill from adjacent rooms, Room 28 features and floor, and below to an older surface. Plant specimens from 11 macrobotanical, 7 flotation, 10 maize cob samples, and 13 pollen samples reveal an exceptionally rich record of the resources valued and used by Pueblo Bonito people. Their reliance on maize registers strongly, supplemented by a mix of native foods including pinyon nuts, cacti, cattail,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Rhode.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Bonneville Estates Rockshelter is a stratified multicomponent site located on the former highstand of Pleistocene Lake Bonneville in the eastern Great Basin. It contains well-dated and well-preserved record of human occupation through the last 13,000 years. Here I report on dietary plant remains retrieved from nearly 140 dated archaeological features...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna Chitwood. Dana Bardolph.

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. This paper presents the analysis of paleoethnobotanical data from excavations at a Classic Taino site (1000 CE–1490 CE) at Cinnamon Bay, a shoreline ritual site located on St. John in the United States Virgin Islands (USVI). Excavations began in 1992 when it was determined that the site was at risk of being lost to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristin Hoppa. Kristina Gill.

This paper considers both macrobotanical and starch grain evidence for terrestrial plant use at Diablo Valdez (SCRI-619/620) on Santa Cruz Island, California. This inland site consists of a rock shelter as well as an open-air living space, and was occupied from ca. 5900 years ago and into the Historic period. Macrobotanical remains were recovered from 140 liters of soil, while starch grain analysis was conducted on six bowl fragments. This paper contextualizes these results within a broader...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Luke Stroth. Mario Borrero. Geoffrey Braswell.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We describe the paleobotanical collection from Nim li Punit (AD 150 to 830), a small-scale center in the Toledo District, Belize. The samples were collected from Structure 50, a range building that we interpret to be a Late Classic (AD 700 to 830) elite domestic context. This was a time of growth and change for Nim li Punit, where new construction coincided...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Caleb Ranum.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The site of Alto Pukara is located on the Bolivian Altiplano near Lake Titicaca. It dates to the Middle Formative, a period which whitnessed the emergence of settlements, craft specialization, and hierarchical political development in the region. Excavations by Robin Beck in 2000 and 2001 uncovered two structures, which were identified as part of a...