Paleoethnobotany (Other Keyword)
501-525 (571 Records)
PEB practitioners are increasingly drawing from social perspectives which allow them to shift between concepts of diet and foodways. This increasingly social paleoethnobotany is bolstered by rigorous quantitative analyses of large datasets that facilitate the exploration of temporal and spatial nuances in ancient plant assemblages. This marriage between social theory, analytical rigor, and large datasets is further strengthened by the trend towards integrating multiple proxies of food data...
Sociocultural Trends and Innovations along 13,000 Years of Plant Use in the Atacama Desert, Chile (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Histories of Human-Nature Interactions: Use, Management, and Consumption of Plants in Extreme Environments" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the Atacama Desert, plant resources are scarce and unevenly distributed due to water availability. However, by compiling all the available archaeobotanical evidences since the late Pleistocene (ca. 13,000 BP) until the Inka epoch (ca. 450 BP) in a single database, we demonstrate...
Sowing the Seeds of Empire: Early Statecraft and the Emergence of Indigenous Agriculture on the Mongolian Steppe (ca. 250 BC–AD 150) (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. The end of the first millennium BC (ca. 250 BC–AD 150) marks the genesis of Xiongnu, eastern Eurasia’s first nomadic state, which emerged from central Mongolia to successfully integrate one of the largest-scale political configurations in prehistory. This transformative period also marks the appearance of Mongolia’s...
Sowing the Seeds of Empire: New Insights into Xiongnu Agriculture and Agronomy (2023)
This is an abstract from the "From the Altai to the Arctic: New Results and New Directions in the Archaeology of North and Inner Asia" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Xiongnu period (ca. 250 BC–AD 150) was a particularly transformative time in the history of the eastern Eurasian steppe. Intensive study of the dimensions of sociopolitical, technological, subsistence, and material cultural transformation associated with the emergence of the...
Spanning the Southern Appalachians and the Archaic-Woodland Transition: Comparing Patterns of Plant Use and Land Use in East Tennessee and Western North Carolina (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The transition from the Late Archaic to the Early Woodland periods in the Southern Appalachians is visible archaeologically by the widespread adoption of pottery, associated with changes in mobility. Here we compare changes in plant use on both sides of the mountains, which suggest that Late Archaic groups in East Tennessee cultivated native crops by 4000...
A Specialized City: Fatimid-Era Agriculture at Ashkelon (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Cultivating Cities: Perspectives from the New and Old Worlds on Wild Foods, Agriculture, and Urban Subsistence Economies" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The ancient city of Ashkelon was a major economic port in the Near East during the Early Islamic period (ca. 636–1200 CE). Located on the Mediterranean coast of modern-day Israel, it was a cosmopolitan city, an administrative center, and a stronghold in the coastal...
Spread of Maize into Temperate North America (2023)
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. Maize entered the southwestern United States nearly 2,000 years before maize agricultural practice is visible in the archaeological record on the Colorado Plateau. Previous work found that the early cultivated maize on the Plateau, 2,000-year-old samples from Turkey Pen Shelter, were already at least partially adapted,...
Stable Isotope Analysis of Charred and Desiccated Plant Remains from the North Coast of Peru (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Challenges and Future Directions in Plant Stable Isotope Analysis in Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. One of the key findings of early work that utilized isotopic analysis of macrobotanical remains was that charred remains seemed to produce reliable isotopic measurements, while uncharred (desiccated) remains did not. This early research contrasted charred remains from the highlands of Peru with uncharred...
Starch and Phytolith Analyses from Ceramic Residues in the Llanos de Mojos (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Llanos de Mojos in the Bolivian Amazon is a tropical savanna that saw increased archaeological attention beginning in the latter half of the 20th century. However, paleoethnobotanical research has been limited up until this decade despite significant results and great potential. Paleoethnobotanical inquiry in Mojos can enhance our understanding of...
Starch Grain Analysis of Late Pleistocene–Early Holocene Coprolites and Ground Stone from Two Northern Great Basin Rockshelters (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. Recent macrobotanical analyses of late Pleistocene rockshelters in the Great Basin have shown that plants have always made up a portion of Indigenous peoples’ diets. This is despite a relative lack of ground stone...
Starch Spherulites: What We Know and What Is Next for This Promising New Method of Paleoethnobotanical Analysis (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. Starch spherulites are a promising new paleoethnobotanical discovery. Well-studied in food sciences, starch spherulites form when amylose from plant starch recrystallizes in spherulitic morphology. This requires processing by humans (mainly through heat, although pH impacts this dynamic) in an aqueous environment. The...
Statistical Comparison of Vegetation Trends from Pollen Records in the US Southeast (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this presentation, vegetation changes during the late Holocene from both anthropogenic and climatic causes will be presented from several pollen coring locations in the southeast United States. These records will be compared and contrasted, along with a summary of previous work on change over time in taxonomic evenness, richness, and diversity. Prior...
Strategizing Food Security under Colonial Rule at Purun Llaqta del Maino, Chachapoyas, Peru (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. How does colonialism impact local food strategies? This paper considers this question at Purun Llaqta del Maino (PLM), Chachapoyas, Peru; a site with continuous occupation from the Late Intermediate Period (LIP; 1000-1450 AD), the Late Horizon (1450-1535), and the Early Spanish Colonial Period (1535-1700). Like many Andean regions, Chachapoyas was...
Strategizing Food Security under Colonial Rule at Transconquest Purun Llaqta del Maino, Chachapoyas, Peru (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. How does colonialism impact local food strategies? This paper considers this question at Purun Llaqta del Maino (PLM), Chachapoyas, Peru, a site with continuous occupation from the Late Intermediate period (LIP) (AD 1000–1450), the Late Horizon (1450–1535), and the Early Spanish colonial period (1535–1700). Like many Andean regions, Chachapoyas was...
Subsistence and Daily Needs at the Basketmaker Communities Project: Insights Through the Microscope from Plant Remains, Wood, and Pollen (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Adopting the Pueblo Fettle: The Breadth and Depth of the Basketmaker III Cultural Horizon" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Large archaeobotanical datasets concentrated in a specific region are rare, especially those representing multiple sites excavated over several years. The Basketmaker Communities Project is one such rare research program that resulted in the analysis of hundreds of macrobotanical, flotation, and...
Subsistence Economies Among Bronze Age Steppe Communities in the Southeastern Ural Mountains Region, Russia (2018)
The long-standing subsistence model for Bronze Age Steppe Communities in the Southeastern Ural Mountains Region has been defined as a sedentary agro-pastoral strategy with dominant use of livestock. However, based on recent studies, the nature and variability of the subsistence economy, especially wild plant resource exploitation for both humans and livestock, are not well understood. As sedentary pastoral communities, the relationship between increasing livestock productivity and decreasing...
Sustained Farming in the Nam River Valley, South-central Korea, through the Mumun/Bronze to early historical periods (2019)
This is an abstract from the "New Evidence, Methods, Theories, and Challenges to Understanding Prehistoric Economies in Korea" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This research examines agricultural management, particularly raised field farming from the Mumun/Bronze to early historical periods (3400–1600 cal. BP) along the Nam River in south-central Korea. The study of settlements on alluvial flatlands provides crucial information on early agricultural...
A Symbiotic Relationship between People, Plants, and Microbes: A Case Study on the Fermented Beverages from the Chahekou Site in North China during the Middle Neolithic Period (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Drinking Beer in a Blissful Mood: A Global Archaeology of Beer" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The making of fermented beverages is a complex process through the interaction among people, plants, and microorganisms, among other abiotic factors. In this process, microbes, as the primary catalyst, get all the agents gradually entangled in the fermentation process. During the middle Neolithic, there was an evident...
A Tale of Two Landscapes: Agricultural Evidence from a Classical/Hellenistic City and a Nearby Hellenistic Farmstead, Greece (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeobotanical results from a coastal 4th c. BC city and from a 2nd c. BC farmstead located 6 km away demonstrate two different agricultural strategies employed in coastal Thrace. While both sites show a reliance on cereals, the 2nd c. farmstead also contains substantial evidence for the cultivation of bitter vetch, lentils, and chickpeas, as well as...
Taskscapes and Social Sustainability: Archaeobotanical and Ethnohistorical Interpretations from the Chesapeake (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Deep History, Colonial Narratives, and Decolonization in the Native Chesapeake" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The “taskscape,” or a landscape comprised of actions and labor (Ingold 1993, 2000), provides a means for assessing the change and continuity of a place over time. Through the study of plant remains (including macrobotanical remains, phytolith residues, and starch grains), taskscapes from the Late Archaic...
A Taste for Tubers: The Circulation of the Familiar through the Ancient Titicaca Basin (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists track the social, political, and economic dynamics of the ancient Lake Titicaca basin through the circulation of people and things. Plant things, in particular, reveal food choices, quotidian diets and special meals, and broader trade relations before and after the settling of the urban center of Tiwanaku. In this paper, we discuss...
"Tell me what you are eating and I tell you who are you": Differences in Subsistence Systems of Elite and Non-Elite Gamo Society of the Ethiopia Highlands during Historical Times (2018)
There is little archaeobotanical data from Ethiopia, in this presentation, we will be comparing samples from two historic domestic archaeological sites spanning from late seventeen centuries to the late eighteen century A.D. within the same environment (Gamo highlands in Southern Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples Region (SNNPR), Ethiopia) with the intention of examining status differences through subsistence remains. The food habits of past human societies are of importance because the act of...
Terminal Pleistocene and Holocene Adaptive Strategies at the Paisley Caves, Oregon (2018)
There are key questions about the timing of the initial settlement of the northern Great Basin, how settlers adapted to the pluvial lake and wetland landscape they encountered upon arrival, and how these adaptations changed in response to Holocene climate change. The Paisley Caves in south-central Oregon provide a unique opportunity to investigate these questions. The caves produced the earliest evidence for human settlement of the Great Basin including coprolites containing human DNA dating to...
Testing Methods of Microbotanical Analysis on Samples from the Copan Valley, Honduras (2018)
The Copan Valley in western Honduras has been the subject of a number of studies concerning human-environmental interaction, with particular emphasis on questions of ancient sustainable practices and whether or not land-use mismanagement contributed to the end of the Maya dynasty at Copan. The current PARAC project seeks to identify the range of foods consumed by the inhabitants of the Copan Valley during the Late Classic to Postclassic period. This paper will describe analyses conducted on...
Thule Fuel Use at Cape Espenberg, Alaska, CE 1500-1700 (2016)
We examined fuel use practices at Cape Espenberg, Alaska, between 1500 and 1700 CE. We identified charcoal remains from two Thule-era houses of different ages and analyzed our results with univariate statistics. Results suggest that Cape Espenberg’s inhabitants were selective in choosing fuels, and discerned between different woody species, perhaps according to combustion properties. Furthermore, there appears to be a greater reliance on lesser-used fuel types in the younger of the two houses....