Paleoethnobotany (Other Keyword)
51-75 (572 Records)
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 cuisine of contemporary Oaxaca sprouted from deep roots. Archaic Period plant remains recovered from the MRG-6 rockshelter enhance prior work at Guila Naquitz and grant us insight into some of the managed and wild food plants still used in contemporary Oaxacan dishes. Over 70 different botanical taxa were identified from samples excavated at...
Archeobotany of the Lower Illinois Valley: The Legacy of Stuart Struever (2024)
This is an abstract from the "The Village, the Region, and Beyond: Stuart Struever (1931–2022) and the Lower Illinois River Valley Research Program" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 1960 Stuart Struever initiated an “Illinois Valley Archaeological Program” and devoted his research over the next decade to study of Middle Western Hopewell manifestations. He set out to test a hypothesis that the adoption of a simple mudflat agriculture conducted on...
Arts and Sciences of Ancient Plants at McMaster University (2017)
Since 2013, the McMaster Paleoethnobotanical Research Facility (MPERF) has explored questions surrounding the relationship between humans and plants, including plant cultivation and collection, consumption and social uses of flora, and interactions between people and landscape. Active projects address human-plant dynamics throughout different regions of Mesoamerica, South America, and Ontario, at time periods ranging from the Late Pleistocene through historic periods. With recent support from...
Assessing Botanical Diversity of Late-to-Terminal Classic Households at Xunantunich, Belize (2018)
Understanding household plant use can provide a wealth of data about subsistence practices, past agricultural systems, and strategies used to mitigate climatic stress. Plant use may also vary between households. By examining this variation, botanical data may yield further information on personal preference and cuisine differences between households. Aside from consumption for subsistence, plants were used for a wide range of activities conducted by individual households. Botanical datasets may...
Assessing Plant Use in the Early Upper Paleolithic: Macrobotanical Results From Mughr el-Hamamah, Jordan (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeogastronomy: Grocery Lists as Seen from a Multidimensional Perspective" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Mughr el-Hamamah (MHM) cave site, located on the Jordan Valley’s eastern flanks, contains a prehistoric layer associated with Early Ahmarian artifacts. AMS 14C dates bracket the Early Upper Paleolithic (EUP) occupation between ca. 45 and 39 ka cal BP and are comparable in age to Ahmarian-associated layers...
Assessing the Impacts of the Atlantic Slave Trade and American Crops on African Agriculture (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Approaches to Slavery and Unfree Labour in Africa" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Although the Columbian Exchange had a significant impact on local agroecologies, we still know very little about the African side of the exchange. This is particularly complex knot to unravel given that the Atlantic slave trade peaked during those same centuries. Both processes were to have major impacts on...
Aventura’s Watery Landscape: Communities of People, Water, Houses, and Ancestors (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Households at Aventura: Life and Community Longevity at an Ancient Maya City" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Water was essential for the longevity of ancient Maya cities, and Aventura was no exception. The site’s watery landscape consists of pocket bajos, defined as karstic depressions less than 2 km2 in area. While they are seasonally inundated today, this paper presents data from excavation, oral histories, and...
Beans of Power: Phaseolus and Late Preclassic Rulership on the Pacific Coast (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. Rulership in Mesoamerican societies was inextricably tied to generative aspects of agriculture. Becoming a focal point for the maintenance of cosmological order provided a pathway for asserting control of aspects of the natural world, like...
Beating Swords into Plowshares: The Role of Agricultural Colonization in Imperial Histories (2019)
This is an abstract from the "From Households to Empires: Papers Presented in Honor of Bradley J. Parker" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In his 2001 monograph, The Mechanics of Empire, Bradley Parker methodically utilized archaeological survey data and historical texts to track the Neo-Assyrian empire’s growth through the agrarian settlement of deportees in newly conquered territories. Parker’s emphasis on agricultural colonization marked an...
BETWEEN SERI, CAHITA AND TEPIMA: PALEOETHNOBOTANICAL RESEARCH ON THE CENTRAL COAST OF SONORA, MEXICO (2017)
The sixteenth century Spaniards that arrived at the Central Coast of Sonora described the region between the Río Sonora and the Río Yaqui, as a transitional territory between the Comcáac (Seri) nomadic bands of the coast, and the farmers of the river Yaqui (Yoeme) and Pima. Unfortunately, the archaeology of this region is very little known and very little is known about the prehistoric history of the area. Recent investigations at several sites in this area, have yielded a variety of...
Beyond Boiling and Baking? Cooking Plant Foods in the Early US Midsouth (2023)
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. In the Eastern Woodlands of North America, researchers tend to discuss cooking technologies of early foragers at the close of the Pleistocene and early Holocene in terms of nut processing rather than for use of...
Beyond Radiocarbon: Using AMS Samples to Assess Woody Plant Use at Tse-whit-zen (2017)
Paleoethnobotany, while not a nascent field, is still an underutilized research framework in Pacific Northwest (PNW) archaeology. But increasingly, PNW projects have incorporated macrobotanical analyses as a precursor to radiocarbon dating. Analysts provide taxonomic identifications of woody fuel remains and assist in selecting fragments from short-lived genera that will mitigate the old wood effect, thereby increasing the accuracy of dates. This paper assesses the utility of an anthracological...
Beyond the Biface: Revisiting Cobble Tool Use During the Cascade Phase at the Kelly Forks Work Center Site, Idaho (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Cascade Phase, spanning roughly 9000-5000 years BP, is defined by distinctive lithic technology and edge-ground cobbles. Archaeological data suggests mobile foragers temporarily camped in resource-rich areas during this period. Despite its recognition as a unique cultural period, our understanding of Cascade Phase lifeways, particularly resource use...
The Black Burned Bits of Prehistory: A Celebration of Dr. Karen R. Adams (2024)
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. This paper provides a brief overview of Karen Adams’s career and contributions, with a special emphasis on her extensive research and her legacy as a mentor to decades of junior scholars and budding archaeobotanists. Dr. Adams’s investigations into the long history of people-plant relationships in the US...
Botanical Resources in Ancient Costa Rican Cloud Forests (2023)
This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Tropical Montane Cloud Forests" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Paleoethnobotanical investigations at domestic contexts in Arenal, Costa Rica, reveal the plant resources utilized by past peoples living in a tropical montane cloud forest setting. Macrobotanical remains recovered through horizontal excavations of household structures at G-995 La Chiripa and G-164 Sitio Bolivar and flotation of soil...
Bread, Apples, and Cereal Grains: Analyzing a Collection of Carbonized Food from Robenhausen, Switzerland (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 results of research on a collection of food from Robenhausen, a lake-dwelling site southeast of Zurich. These specimens are part of a larger collection that was recovered in the late 19th century and is housed at the Milwaukee Public Museum. The material includes thirteen bread fragments, seventy-five apple pieces, and thousands of...
Bridging the Divides at Azoria: Environmental Archaeology at an Archaic Greek City (2018)
Excavations at the Archaic (7th-6th centuries B.C.) city of Azoria on Crete demonstrate the value of intensive environmental archaeology for understanding an historical Greek context. Texts document the important role of food and dining to ancient religion and politics; however, ancient authors presented a normative picture and excluded details they assumed were common knowledge. Studying plant and animal remains can "ground-truth" ancient sources on foodways and provide contextual nuances not...
Building a Novel Archaeobotanical Framework to Investigate the History of Plant Foods in Aboriginal Australia (2024)
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. With a wide variety of biomes and extreme fluctuations in water availability, Australia’s Channel Country saw Indigenous Australians develop a unique suite of subsistence strategies to live in this environment. Ethnohistoric accounts report combinations of semipermanent habitation and seasonal mobility, intensive seed...
Capturing the Fragrance of Ancient Copan Rituals: Floral Remains from Maya Tombs and Temples (2018)
Pollen analysis of Classic-period temple and tomb spaces in Copan’s Acropolis revealed a range of plants important to ancient Maya ritual practice. Some of these species were not represented in macroremains in ritual or household contexts. Scholars have described temple spaces as thick with the odor of burned offerings and copal, but added to this would also have been the fresh and heady fragrance of blooming buds and greenery, adding a fecund perfume to the areas of ritual supplication. These...
Carbonized Wood Remains from the Matacanela Site, Veracruz, Mexico (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Olmec Manifestations and Ongoing Societal Transformations in the Tuxtlas Uplands: A View from Matacanela" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper describes the carbonized wood remains recovered from fifty-five heavy fractions of flotation from seven units and fifty light fractions of flotation from six units collected during the excavations of the Matacanela Site in Veracruz, Mexico. Environmental comparisons are...
Catawba Foodways at Old Town: Loss and Discard of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (2016)
This paper analyzes botanical remains recovered at the Old Town site, a late 18th century occupation of the Catawba Nation, and integrates those data with faunal and ceramic analysis along with ethnographic and ethnohistorical sources to describe Catawba foodways. The Old Town occupation was defined by wars and a major epidemic, and was one of the places where the devastated Catawba peoples reformed and reconstituted their new identity. I examine the foodways at Old Town as part of the changing...
Caught Starch and Managed Hearths: Minimally Invasive and Restorative Methods in Gallina Paleoethnobotany (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. Concerns around sampling methodology, size, and adequacy endure in archaeobotany, centered on one persistent question—how much is enough? At the same time, archaeologists in many areas have become increasingly interested in minimally invasive and minimally destructive methods in response to ethical, community, and...
Ceremonial and Psychotropic Plants of the Tiwanaku (AD 500-1000): New Evidence for Erythroxylum Coca and Anadenanthera Colubrina from the Omo Temple in Moquegua, Peru. (2017)
The consumption of psychotropic substances is a ceremonial practice widespread worldwide since antiquity, however, archaeological evidence for the role of plants in rituals is scarce and interpretations are mostly derived from ethnographies and iconography. Among other methods of analysis, Paleoethnobotany is one of the most indicated for the finding of micro and macro remains involved in ceremonies. This paper presents the results of a Paleoethnobotanical analysis conducted at the site of Omo...
Challenges and Prospects of Richness and Diversity Measures in Paleoethnobotany (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Defining and Measuring Diversity in Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The measurement of the richness and diversity of archaeological plant remains recovered from sites is an essential, if not always explicitly recognized, aspect of paleoethnobotanical practice and interpretation. The range of different recovered plant taxa can be indicative of routes of taphonomic entry, diet breadth, local responses to...
Change and Continuity in Agricultural Production in Iraqi Kurdistan, ca. 4000 BCE–1000 CE (2018)
The archaeological site of Kani Shaie is a small (<3ha) tell site located in Iraqi Kurdistan not far from contemporary Sulaymaniyah. Archaeological evidence as well as radiocarbon dates procured from excavations at the site indicate in-habitation from at least 3500 BCE until the Middle Islamic period, ca. 1400 CE. Excavations in 2015 and especially 2016 included a substantial archaeobotanical sampling component, which entailed the sampling of every archaeological deposit and the subsequent...