Paleoethnobotany (Other Keyword)
451-475 (572 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Subsistence Crops and Animals as a Proxy for Human Cultural Practice" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Mounting archaeobotanical and archaeogenetic data show that the southwestern Amazon region had an important role to play in the history of South American maize dispersal, acting as a “secondary improvement center” for primitive lineages that arrived in the region during the Middle Holocene (>6500 BP). How these...
Preliminary Results from Paleoethnobotanical Analysis of Pit Features at the Morton Village Site (11F2), Central Illinois (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents the preliminary results of paleoethnobotanical analysis of flotation samples from 38 external pit features from the Morton Village Site (11F2), located in the Central Illinois River Valley (CIRV). Previous research at Morton Village provides strong evidence that the village was occupied contemporaneously by both Mississippian and Oneota...
Preliminary Results of Ancient Maya Marketplace Investigations at La Milpa, Belize (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Prehispanic Maya Marketplace Investigations in the Three Rivers Region of Belize: First Results" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. With support from a National Science Foundation Grant, fieldwork was conducted at the Ancient Maya site of La Milpa, located in the northwest corner of the Three Rivers Region. Archaeological matrix samples were collected from three areas within La Milpa for soil analysis as a method for...
Preliminary Results of Paleoethnobotanical Analysis at Quilcapampa, a Middle Horizon site in Arequipa, Peru (2017)
In this poster I present preliminary results and interpretations of paleoethnobotanical investigations at the site of Quilcapampa, located in the Siguas Valley, Department of Arequipa in south-central Peru. Recent AMS radiocarbon dates indicate Quilcapampa was occupied for a short period during the mid-eighth century AD, which places the site within the Middle Horizon (AD 600-1000). Based on site architecture and ceramic evidence, the site may represent a colonial installation of Wari Empire...
The Presence of Fraxinus in Hohokam Pithouses (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper will investigate the presence of ash wood (Fraxinus sp.) in the context of burned pit houses of the Hohokam culture by comparing the botanical remains in burned pit houses to remains from unburned pit houses from previous data recovery projects in Arizona. To further understand the purpose of Fraxinus in burned pithouses, previous ethnobotanical...
Preservation and Perception: Archaeobotanical Patterning and Site Formation Processes in Mycenaean Messenia (2018)
Despite the increased application of spatially intensive sampling for archaeobotanical remains at large Mycenaean sites in Greece, the recovered assemblages are typically small and show poor preservation. Here, we consider the macrobotanical assemblage recovered through flotation of more than 7000 L of sediment at the site of Iklaina, in Messenia, in conjunction with microbotanical remains (starches, phytoliths) to illuminate cultural and natural site formation processes that have either...
Preserving Oaxacan Foodways in the Face of Conquest: The Seed Bank at Cerro del Convento (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Oaxacan Cuisine" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The rich culinary traditions of Oaxaca were both enhanced through and catastrophically disrupted by Spanish incursions during the Colonial Period. However, in spite of many radical transformations in cooking techniques and ingredients, indigenous people of Oaxaca persisted in their use of certain foods and practices. This persistence sometimes required...
Prey Choice and Politics: Modelling Postclassic Maya Wood Selection at La Punta, Chiapas, Mexico (2018)
How did Postclassic Maya communities decide which tree species to harvest for firewood and timber in a diverse forest environment? Most studies of ancient tree selection have used the principles of optimal foraging to construct a baseline of expectations for interpreting archaeological charcoal datasets. This paper will explore the implications of such a model on the interpretation of wood charcoals from the site of La Punta in Chiapas, Mexico, while also considering how the political structure...
Pristine Forests of Southern Chile? Evidence for a Millennium of Anthropogenic Woodlands (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The relevance of the temperate forests of South America (35°S–55°S) have been acknowledged in ecological and biodiversity terms. Although evidence of human settlements in this vast territory goes back to ∼14,600 cal yr BP, these forests are commonly referred to as pristine or natural environments. In Southern Chile, paleoenvironmental studies indicate that...
Public Archaeology at Kathio National Historic Landmark: Structure and Archaeobotany of a Burned Earthlodge (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Kathio National Historic Landmark, in east-central Minnesota, is an important place within the ancestral homeland of the Dakota Nation. Petaga Point (21ML11) is one of the contributing sites within the landmark, and excavations there in the 1960s were a primary source for the Woodland Tradition ceramic sequence of the Mille Lacs locality. Elden Johnson...
Puebloan Subsistence Patterns on the Shivwits Plateau, North Rim of the Grand Canyon (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeology of the Grand Canyon-Parashant National Monument" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Based on fieldwork from the South Rim, Alan Sullivan has argued that ancient Puebloans in the Grand Canyon region practiced little or no corn agriculture. Instead, he proposes they relied on the gathering and processing of wild plants such as pinyon nuts, amaranth, and goosefoot. Here, we evaluate the applicability of this...
Quotidian and Ritual Use of Maize at Early Formative Etlatongo, Oaxaca, Mexico (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent research on subsistence systems in Early Formative (1600–900 BCE) Mesoamerican communities contest longstanding concepts linking the growth of early sociopolitical complexity with full-time agriculture. Lowland-focused studies have introduced mixed nonagricultural models in coastal regions that were able to support both sedentary groups and much larger...
Racism, Climate Change, and More-Than-Human Agency in Tropical West Africa (2023)
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. In this paper, I weave together archaeological and historical narratives about two plants in West Africa to explore the pitfalls and potentials of multispecies approaches. I argue that in West Africa, both individual plants and climate change have often been accorded more agentive...
Raised Field Agriculture in the Maya Lowlands: Archaeobotanical Remains from Birds of Paradise (2018)
Up until the late 1990s, researchers believed the Maya were solely reliant on slash and burn agricultural practices. However, discoveries of rectangular canal patterns in the margins of wetlands in the Maya lowlands of Guatemala, Belize, and Mexico shined light on a new agricultural practice: raised wetland fields. One example of wetland fields is found at the site Birds of Paradise (BOP) in the Rio Bravo region of northwestern Belize. The macrobotanicals recovered from the raised fields and...
Re-evaluating the Earliest Evidence for Wild Potato Use in South-Central Chile (2018)
The earliest evidence of wild potato use anywhere in the world comes from Monte Verde (southern Chile), where tuber fragments were recovered from hearths that directly date to 14,500 cal B.P. Those tubers were tentatively assigned to a wild potato species (Solanum maglia) based on their starch granule morphology, which, according to Ugent et al., could be distinguished from the granule morphology of the domesticated potato (S. tuberosum). Recently, that identification has been called into...
Reciprocal Feasting and Access to Foodstuffs at Huaca Colorada (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Bridging Time, Space, and Species: Over 20 Years of Archaeological Insights from the Cañoncillo Complex, Jequetepeque Valley, Peru, Part 1" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Feasting has long been acknowledged as a central element in Andean social and economic life. Crucial to this emphasis on feasting during the Late Moche period (AD 600–850) is the need for tribute and the redistribution of the goods brought in by...
Reconsidering Cereal Production and Consumption in the North Atlantic: A case study from Northern Iceland (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Mind the Gap: Exploring Uncharted Territories in Medieval European Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the Viking Age, the Norse settled Iceland, a sub-arctic volcanic island at the climatic margin of cereal production. These settlers brought with them a distinctive subsistence economy involving animal husbandry and cereal production, most notably barley. Barley (Hordeum vulgare) has been noted by...
Reconsidering Farming and Foraging in the Pre-Moche World (2017)
This paper examines the relationships between food, identity, and social inequality on the Prehispanic Peruvian North Coast through a paleoethnobotanical perspective. We reconstruct household culinary practices to address the roles that food played in the migrant experience of highlanders that settled in a traditionally coastal river valley. This migration occurs just prior to the consolidation of the Southern Moche polity, one of the earliest state polities in the Americas and characterized by...
Reconstructing Agricultural Decision Making from Paleoethnobotanical Remains (2015)
Paleoethnobotany has long been associated with the identification of crop plants and has led to important insights into domestication and the adoption of farming systems. New methods for the quantitative analysis of botanical remains, together with multiple allied datasets on human diet and environmental change, now allow paleoethnobotanists to generate empirical data on agricultural decision making in the archaeological record. The breadth of data now available to paleoethnobotanists includes...
Reconstructing Land-Use and Socio-environmental Change at Epiclassic Chicoloapan Using Plant Macroremain Analyses (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Central Mexico after Teotihuacan: Everyday Life and the (Re)Making of Epiclassic Communities" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The site of Chicoloapan Viejo represents a long-term occupation that spanned multiple cultural phases, each associated with changes in population size, settlement pattern, and sociopolitical organization. These changes were also accompanied by climatic fluctuations of varying intensity. This...
Reconstructing the Environmental History of El Paraíso, Chillón Valley (2018)
By Late Preceramic Perú (3000-2100 BC) lomas environments were largely abandoned in favor of riparian and littoral ecozones, and hunting and gathering subsistence strategies were increasingly replaced by agriculture. This change coincided with the emergence of several hallmarks of complexity: monumental architecture, specialization, and hierarchical organization. The role that environmental degradation or climate change played in this transition remains a subject of debate. This paper presents...
Reducing Large Data Sets Using Granger Causality: A Paleoecological Example from the Columbia Plateau (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents proxies of vegetation, climate, human population, and fire from late Holocene sediments from the Columbia Plateau (USA). Statisitical analyses such as multivariate regression and Granger Causality time series analysis are used to reduce complexity and illuminate the underlying structure of the data set. Results show that multivariate...
A Reexamination of Hurricane Hill Macrobotanicals (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Early Caddo ethnobotany is understudied compared to later periods due to a variety of factors, including preservation and sample size issues. The Hurricane Hill Site (41HP106) is an Early Caddo site with carbonized plant materials previously examined by Gary Crites and Eileen Goldborer. This study analyzed a subsample of Hurricane Hill macrobotanicals...
Reinterpreting Archaeobotany in Mainland Southeast Asia (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Paradigms Shift: New Interpretations in Mainland Southeast Asian Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the 1990s, two major archaeobotanical studies were undertaken which shape our understanding of subsistence and agriculture in Prehistoric Mainland Southeast Asia. Although most field archaeologists in Southeast Asia do not routinely collect samples for biological studies, archaeobotanical data has grown...
Relating to and through Food: Thinking about the Social Dimensions of Food through Cuisine and Commensality (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. The fundamental importance of food to mind, body, and society makes foodways important to our understanding of past social phenomenon. In this presentation, I highlight the importance of engaging with the social dimensions of food to address the multifaceted relationships between broader changes in the environment and political...