Paleoethnobotany (Other Keyword)
201-225 (461 Records)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists periodically encounter concentrations of uncharred plant remains in standing structures. Whether excavated or never actually buried, they are a challenge for interpretation. In addition to identification, the archaeobotanical tasks include determining the agent of deposition and the source and date of the material. This paper considers how...
The History of Archaeobotanical Research on the Island of Puerto Rico and Its Relationship with Notions of Poor Preservation of Macro-botanical Remains on Archaeological Contexts (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeobotanical research of macro-botanical remains in the Caribbean is scarce due to notions of poor preservation in tropical landscapes. This shifted archaeobotanical research towards the analysis of micro-botanical remains because these types of analysis have been reported as more successful for recovering data of subsistence practices in the Neotropics....
Hohokam Dry Farming along the South Mountains Bajada, South-Central Arizona (2018)
Hohokam communities who resided alongside the perennial rivers in south-central Arizona are renowned for the massive canals they engineered and operated, representing some of the largest preindustrial irrigation systems in the world. In light of such achievement, dry farming technologies and practices remain a lesser known component of the Hohokam agricultural landscape. This paper takes a close look at recent fieldwork around the South Mountains, an upland setting at the confluence of the Salt...
Holocene Vegetation Changes and Fuel Use in the Honduran Highlands: The Anthracological Sequence of El Gigante Rockshelter (11,000–1000 BP) (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Holocene pollen sequences have highlighted several episodes of vegetation opening in Central America since the Archaic period, which have often been related to the dispersal of nomadic slash-and-burn agriculturalists from the Central Mexican Highlands. However, few archaeobotanical data from archaeological sites have been available to date to examine...
How Advances in Archaeobotany Benefit Us All: Perspectives from Zooarchaeology, Bioarchaeology, and Isotope Research (2023)
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. The origin of agriculture in the American tropics drastically altered human societies and their environmental settings. Through the domestication of various plants for subsistence, medicine, and technological purposes, human populations grew and expanded at an unprecedented rate across the landscape from the Middle Holocene onward, spreading...
Human Adaptation to Middle Holocene Aridity in the Northwestern Great Basin: Coprolites and Season of Occupation at the Paisley Caves, Oregon (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The middle Holocene (9000–6000 cal BP) in the northwestern Great Basin is marked by warmer and drier conditions resulting in significant ecological change. There is archaeological evidence for population decline, highly mobile groups occupying temporary camps, and a focus on seasonally productive resources. Most sites are located on dunes or lake margins...
Human Adaptations to Environmental Change on the California Channel Islands (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Palaeoeconomic and Environmental Reconstructions in Island and Coastal Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper provides an overview of human adaptations to environmental change during 13,000 years of human occupation on the California Channel Islands. In particular, I consider how the range of economically important species shifted with changing environmental conditions and how different foraging...
Human Agency and Theory in West Africa: Understanding Early Forest Agriculture Dynamics during the Neolithic (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Essential Contributions from African to Global Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Despite the fact that the need to study early indigenous agricultural systems in Africa has long been recognized and reaffirmed in recent archaeological discussions, African agricultural practices are still being modeled using concepts, terminologies, questions, lines of evidence, and methods derived from research elsewhere in...
Identification of bast fibers from Samdzong, Nepal (2016)
Textile remains have been recovered from burials at the highland site of Samdzong, northwestern Nepal. The fabrics are desiccated exhibiting and high degree of preservation which is shown by the presence of cellular tissue pertaining to bast bundles. In this paper, we discuss methodological approaches towards the study of plant fibers and their surrounding tissues focusing on different techniques of microscopy. We will address advantages and limitations for transmitted and polarized light, as...
Identification of Wood Used at Daugherty Cave, WY (2019)
This is an abstract from the "How to Conduct Museum Research and Recent Research Findings in Museum Collections: Posters in Honor of Terry Childs" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. From 1954 to 1957 Dr. Frison excavated Daugherty Cave (48-WA-302). Various perishable artifacts were recovered from the site including moccasins, basketry, cordage, wood, hide and sinew. It is a Late Archaic to Late Prehistoric site on the west side of the Bighorn...
Identifying Crop Rotation during the Early Medieval Period in England: Charring Temperature, Contamination and Isotopic Boundaries (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. Farming practice changed in Medieval England, allowing a dramatic increase in cereal production. Historical documents describe 13th century agricultural practices as open-field collective farming including three-field crop rotation and use of the heavy plough. Our research investigates how and when such...
Imagined Forests: Woodlands and Wood Resources in Medieval Icelandic Literary, Documentary and Archaeological Sources (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SANNA v2.2: Case Studies in the Social Archaeology of the North and North Atlantic" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Medieval literary sources describe the Icelandic landscape when the first settlers arrived as ‘forested from the mountains to the shores’. It had previously been thought that the island was rapidly deforested after settlement, but recent research gives a much more nuanced picture of woodland history. It...
Imperial Context and Agricultural Content: Dimensions of Space and Practice in Agricultural Lifeways in Dhiban, Jordan, 500 CE – 1400 CE (2017)
In this paper the results of an archaeological case-study are presented to argue that considerations of space, taken here to be a physical location in Cartesian terms, are essential to identifying changes in agricultural practice in premodern imperial contexts. The recording of the location of samples intended for paleoethnobotanical analysis, whether through digital or other means, allows for more nuanced reconstructions of the depositional routes of archaeological plant remains. In turn, these...
The Implications of Amaranthaceae Cultivars at the Tiwanaku Site of Cerro San Antonio, Locumba, Perú (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Tiwanaku civilization (ca. A.D. 500-1100) originated in the Bolivian Altiplano (3800 masl) of the south-central Andes and grew frost-resistant crops, such as quinoa (Chenopodium quinoa), kiwicha (Amaranthus caudatus), and potatoes (Solanum tuberosum). Throughout the Middle Horizon (A.D. 600-1100), the Tiwanaku expanded into Peruvian coastal valleys (~900...
In the Weeds: Digging Deeply into the Paleoethnobotany of the early Colonial Chesapeake (2021)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Digging Deep: Close Engagement with the Material World" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. We share preliminary results of a comparative paleoethnobotanical analysis of carbonized macrobotanical remains recovered from archaeological sites in Maryland and Virginia spanning three periods (1630-1660, 1661-1700, 1701-1730) and four ecological zones. Samples from contexts with defined dates and precise locations...
Indexing Mobility in the Western Puerco Region of Arizona using Paleoethnobotanical and Architectural Evidence (2017)
The Western Puerco Region of East-Central Arizona contains a staggering diversity of architecture and material culture eluding to complex mobility practices that varied across time and space. Although archaeologists in the US Southwest/NW Mexico have explored the sociocultural and ecological underpinnings that influenced household mobility, and have identified numerous lines of evidence that indicate increasingly mobile or sedentary habitation strategies, archaeologists have not developed robust...
The Influence of Pastoral Cultivation Strategies and Novel Cuisines on Newly Introduced Crops in Central Asia during the Bronze and Iron Ages (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. When crops are spread into new landscapes, communities, and their associated subsistence practices and culinary preferences, the crops undergo substantial selective pressure. This pressure can come in the form of new environmental constraints, such as a different growing season, or cultural pressure from differences in preferred taste, productivity, or...
Interpreting Maya Economic Activity Using Paleoethnobotany (2017)
Paleoethnobotany is a subfield of archaeology that requires an extensive knowledge of archaeology and botany. Because highly specialized skills are required, presenting data can be difficult. Botanical data must be conveyed in a way that is understood by fellow archaeologists while adhering to standards of botanists. Conveying this information becomes even more difficult when we begin to combine micro and macro botanical methods. Botanical datasets can contribute to a wide range of topics that...
Introducing Paleoethnobotany to Machine Learning: A Case Study in the Genus *Capsicum (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Chili peppers (*Capsicum spp.) are an incredibly diverse and abundant crop across the Americas whose domestication began around 10,000 BP as a complex co-evolutionary process between humans and these plants. This genus has served many culinary, medicinal, and ritualistic uses throughout its evolution and diversification. With an interest in tracking the...
Investigating Ancient Maya Foodways in the Copan Valley, Honduras: Macrobotanical Analysis from Late Classic to Postclassic Middens in the Rio Amarillo East Pocket (2018)
Within the Copan Valley a dearth of macrobotanical assemblages have been analyzed, and most that were focused on the area within or close to the Acropolis. As part of a larger project investigating ancient practices of sustainability within the Copan Valley, macrobotanical remains recovered through flotation from two commoner communities, Site 29 and Quebrada Piedras Negras, Group C, in the Rio Amarillo East Pocket have been analyzed. Due to acidic soil in the area both bone and other types of...
Investigating the Dietary Economy of Ancient Margiana: Ongoing Archaeobotanical Research at Togolok 1 (2300–1700 BC) (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Advances and New Perspectives in Central Asian Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeobotanical research in Central Asia has expanded greatly in the last two decades, changing much about our understanding of past subsistence strategies and lifeways throughout the broader region. Archaeobotany is a crucial tool for gaining insight into the way that human/plant relationships shape and structure society. The...
Investigating the Principles of “Good Farming”: A Comparison of Traditional Agrarianism and Indigenous Land Use and Cultivation (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. In his long career as an agrarian writer, Wendell Berry has documented and endorsed the precepts of “good farming” as those that require care, knowledge, self-mastery, good sense, cultural memory, and fundamental decency. This carefully crafted set of practices stands in stark opposition to the aggressive colonial...
Iron Age Agriculture at the Multi-Component Site of Kakapel Rockshelter, Western Kenya (2019)
This is an abstract from the "African Archaeology throughout the Holocene" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The domestication of African cereals and origins and spread of plant agriculture in eastern Africa remain poorly understood. Questions about the timing of farming, crop packages, and correlations with migration events, endure largely due to a lack of paleobotanical recovery and high-resolution dating on inland eastern African sites. In this...
Is Traditional Pollen Analysis Obsolete? (2018)
For more than 100 years, palynologists have relied on the traditional method of pollen analysis to provide essential information on paleodiets, paleoenvironments, archaeology, and other research such as forensics. The past traditional method has focused on the of light and scanning electron microscopy and then used those results to obtain information and values which palynologists can use to interpret those. During the past decade, some scientists have turned to using other techniques such as...
Islands as gardens: plant translocations by Caribbean Indians as a dynamic and multiscalar form of cultural niche construction, with emphasis on Puerto Rico and the evidence for psychoactive/ritual plant use. (2016)
I consider pre-European plant introductions of exotic fruit trees and other useful plants as a multi-faceted reflection of indigenous plant use, culminating a mosaic of vegetative components in a constructed environment. I focus in particular on the plant constituents of the cajoba ritual complex, drawing especially on recent data from Tibes and Jácana (Puerto Rico), along with relevant ethnographic records from mainland South America that describe ethnobotanical practices associated with...