Paleoethnobotany (Other Keyword)
526-550 (571 Records)
In recent years, coastal Peru has seen an encouraging upwards trend in the number of archaeologists trained in the field of paleoethnobotany or archaeobotany. With growing numbers of practitioners in the field, it is crucial to remain vigilant of methodological concerns that are relevant not only to archaeobotanists as a whole, but particularly to those working in the unique environment of coastal Peru. In the interest of maximizing interpretative potential while maintaining the capability to...
“Tola Boayacu Puyu” (Upper Pastaza, Ecuador) in the understanding of the Amazonian urbanism and food consumption (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the last fifty years, from Amazonian Archaeology there has been a remarkable and growing debate about the origin and dispersion of the cultures of the area, their carrying capacity, population number and density, political structure, and links with the adjacent geographical areas, as the Andes to its western border. More recently, carrying capacity and...
Tom Dillehay's Contributions to Agricultural Origins and Development (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Dedication, Collaboration, and Vision, Part II: Papers in Honor of Tom D. Dillehay" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Tom Dillehay’s best-known research is probably his pioneering work at Monte Verde, Chile, which was primary in upending the “Clovis First” paradigm for the initial peopling of the Americas. Perhaps less well known is his research in Peru that provided crucial information on the age, location, settlement...
Tonto Creek Archaeological Project - Artifact and Environmental Analyses, Volume 2: Stone Tool and Subsistence Studies (2002)
The Tonto Creek Archaeological Project (TCAP), funded by the Arizona Department of Transportation (ADOT), was conducted by Desert Archaeology, Inc., in advance of the 1994-1996 realignment of Arizona State Route 188 in the Tonto Basin of east-central Arizona. From 1992 to 1996, portions of 27 archaeological sites were investigated. Site components ranged in date from the Middle Archaic period to the Late Historic era. Most dated to the Colonial, Sedentary, and early Classic periods, circa A.D....
Towards a Social Paleoethnobotany of Urbanization: Integrating Macrobotanical and Microbotanical Data to Explore Foodways at La Blanca, Guatemala (2018)
This paper uses macrobotanical and microbotanical remains to investigate the impacts of developing sociopolitical complexity on the foodways of Middle Preclassic inhabitants of the Pacific coast of Guatemala. I use these datasets to explore how urbanization affected food-related practices of residents of La Blanca (900-600 BCE). Macrobotanical remains from house floors facilitate comparisons between elite and commoner foodways, while starch grains and phytoliths extracted from grinding...
Towards a Synthesis of California Archaeobotany (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. I take a pan-regional frame of reference to address the impressive variability in more than 7,500 analyzed plant macroremains samples from the desert, coastal, and interior lowland and upland reaches of California. I focus on the effects of variation in habitat, including animal resources, especially fish and shellfish,...
Traditional Dishes and Culinary Improvisations: Elite Gastronomy in the Maya Area (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the past few decades, understandings of cuisine in the Maya area have been radically amplified by the use of new techniques. Some methods offer the opportunity to directly connect artifacts and features with actual plant food residues. The ability to recover microscopic residues of food from sediments, artifacts, and human teeth has revealed not only...
Traditional Dishes and Culinary Improvisations: Elite Gastronomy in the Maya Area (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. Over the past few decades, understandings of cuisine in the Maya area have been radically amplified with the use of new techniques. Some methods offer the opportunity to directly connect artifacts and features with actual plant food residues. The ability to recover microscopic residues of food from sediments, artifacts,...
The Traditional Nutrition Project: A Collaborative Study of Plant Foods to Understand Indigenous Foodways and Health in the Northern Great Basin (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Cultivating Food, Land, and Communities" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Foodways, culture, and health are closely intertwined. As such, food is a central aspect of Indigenous identity and the subject of much anthropological research. Traditional knowledge and archaeological records show that plants have always played important roles within Indigenous foodways in the Great Basin, yet nutritional information for those...
Transcending the Niche of a Wild Progenitor: An Ecological Niche Perspective on the Spread of Archaeological Soybeans in China (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study investigates the influence of climate change on the distribution and adaptation of wild soybeans and how it impacted ancient gathering/farming practices related to soybeans. Through quantitative pollen-based reconstruction and ecological niche modeling, it traces the effects of climate change on soybean domestication and post-domestication...
Transformative Trees: The Social and Ecological Impact of Woody Taxa in Prehistoric Southern Arabia (2018)
While trees are often integral to the ecology of certain landscapes, the propagation of specific woody taxa can also reflect significant social aspects imbued on anthropogenic spaces. Following the seminal work of Rita Wright, we are utilizing a comparative approach in this paper. We examined woody vegetation management by early food producing societies in two regions of southern Arabia: southeastern Arabia (modern-day northern Oman) and southwestern Arabia (modern-day southeast Yemen). Despite...
Transition from Hunting-Gathering to Agriculture in Amami and Okinawa Archipelagos, Japan (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Current Issues in Japanese Archaeology (2019 Archaeological Research in Asia Symposium)" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological research in Amami and Okinawa archipelagos in the southwestern part of Japan started more than one hundred years ago. One of the most important archaeological themes in this region has been when food production began here. Archaeologists have agreed that the subsistence economy of the...
Transported Landscapes and Globalized Foodways in the Settlement of Western Indian Ocean Islands (2024)
This is an abstract from the "The Archaeobotany of Early Peopling: Plant Experimentation and Cultural Inheritance" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Food is often used as a marker of social and cultural identity, reflecting deeply embedded traditions of taste, technology, and social relations. Crops that moved as part of migration and resettlement processes thereby often played more than an economic role, being central to the creation and negotiation...
Trees among the Cereal Fields: Arboriculture Reframed as Integral to the Food and Economic Systems of the Indus Civilization of South Asia ca. 3200–1500 BC (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Entangled Legacies: Human, Forest, and Tree Dynamics" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper I synthesize a big picture of how people in the Bronze Age Indus Civilization of South Asia engaged with trees as a vital resource, and how there was no single conception of trees as “wild” versus “domesticated,” “orcharded” versus “stand-alone,” “exotic” versus “native,” and potentially “owned” versus “communal.” While...
Trees and Tree Cultivation in the Prehistoric Aegean: A Synthesis of Archaeobotanical Data (2018)
Our presentation, based on an overview of archaeobotanical data from the Aegean from the Neolithic to the Late Bronze Age, attempts a synthetic approach to the cultivation of trees. This work is part of the PLANTCULT research project funded by the European Council Research (ERC Consolidator Grant, GA 682529). As archaeobotanical data we consider the macro-remains of fruits/seeds and burnt wood from archaeological sites. In addition, we use palynological information when available. Our goals are:...
Two Recently-Discovered Early Historic Examples of Chili (Capsicum annuum) from Arizona (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Specimens of chili (Capsicum annuum) are absent from prehistoric sites in the southwestern United States, but they are common in Spanish Colonial contexts. Building on a relatively recent review of northern Mexican prehistoric chili cultivation by Paul Minnis and Michael Whalen, we examine two recent chili finds in Arizona. The two finds may provide hints of...
Understanding a Post-Emancipation Haiti: A Paleoethnobotanical Analysis of 19th Century Plant Remains at the Palace of Sans-Souci (2023)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Excavations with The Milot Archaeological Project (MAP) have yielded significant information on the development of the Palace of Sans-Souci in northern Haiti. Strides have been made in understanding site chronology, the material culture within the palace, and regional/long-distant economic networks. However, little is known about...
Understanding the Transition to Villages: A Comparison of Maize between Basketmaker III Sites and an Early Pueblo I Village (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Comparative morphological and other analysis on maize samples informs us of crucial nutritionary changes in key Ancestral Puebloan cultural stages. The transition of the Basketmaker III (500-750 CE) period to the Pueblo I (750-950 CE) period in the Southwestern Utah archeological record is marked by distinct technological changes and larger, more densely...
Unentangling Hotspots and Episodes in Pre-domestication Cultivation of Cereals: Examples from West and East Asia (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. The growth of empirical archaeobotanical data has highlighted that domestication processes in cereals were spread out over both time (millennia) and space (100,000s rather than 10,000s of km2). Updated data from West Asian cereals and pulses, alongside Chinese millets and rice, are analyzed. These data allow...
Urban-palaeoecology of Cambodia's 'Middle Period' (2018)
The transition from the sprawling Angkor kingdom with its vast, low-density urban forms, to a constellation of smaller cities on the Mekong River was accompanied by profound changes to urban ecology and to landscapes – both in the failing low-density cities, and in the burgeoning trade-based centres that replaced them. Here, we present a paleo record of urban ecology that responds, in part, to changing population dynamics across Cambodia during the 15th to 19th centuries C.E. Implications for...
Urbanizing Forests: Paleoethnobotanical Research at the Royal Capital of Angkor, Cambodia (2016)
Upon his ascension to the throne, King Yaśovarman I (r. 889-910 AD) founded a new capital at Angkor in northwestern Cambodia that was to become the major center of the Khmer Empire and a dynamic religio-political landscape marked by extensive urbanization and environmental change. Religious institutions played a particularly important role in localized human-environment engagements while contributing to broader processes of polity-building. Drawing on historical ecology, this paper underscores...
Use of Aquatic and Stone Tools at Three Colombian Caribbean Sites near Canal del Dique (2016)
This work derives from research in the ongoing research project "Evaluation of Zooarqueológica de Concheros cerca al Canal del Dique". We present the preliminary results of the archaeological research of three sites sampled near Canal del Dique: Monsú (5000 a.C.), Puerto Hormiga (4000 a. C), and Leticia (a shellmound from the 12th century A.D.). Samples of animals remains were recovered from 1/8 inch mesh screening. These samples were analyzed for taxonomic, taphonomic, and quantification...
Use of Introduced and Native Plants by Early Humans in the Japanese Archipelago (2024)
This is an abstract from the "The Archaeobotany of Early Peopling: Plant Experimentation and Cultural Inheritance" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents recent archaeobotanical findings on the use of plants by early humans in the Japanese archipelago. The first humans arrived in the Japanese archipelago about 38,000 years ago. Although there are not many archaeobotanical records from this period, pine seeds, hazelnuts, and acorns have...
Use of Plants by Enslaved Laborers at Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage Plantation (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. From 1804 until 1865, The Hermitage was home to Andrew Jackson, his descendants, and over 130 enslaved men, women, and children, often invisible in the historical record, who labored in the fields of Jackson's cotton plantation near Nashville, Tennessee. After emancipation, freed households continued to live in the former domestic quarters. For three decades...
Using Ancient Plant Macroremains to Understand Resource Consumption in the Past and Present (2017)
Many people recognize the need for markedly different mode of living amid a growing body of scientific evidence that the current world population is environmentally unsustainable. Exploring ancient foodways and landscape management techniques may improve our ability to imagine highly productive modes of food production and resource consumption dissimilar to that of our current global reality. Here, I show how a reconstruction of macrobotanical and faunal remains builds a narrative of...