Paleoethnobotany (Other Keyword)
26-50 (572 Records)
When historic Alaskans chose a settlement site, access to adequate fuel was as important as the availability of food and water. Despite its importance fuel use in the Arctic and Subarctic has received relatively little attention. Work currently underway aims to clarify the criteria used to select fuel in ancient Alaska by testing two hypotheses. The Efficiency Maximization hypothesis, derived from the prey choice model of human behavioral ecology, proposes that Alaskans ranked woody taxa...
Ancient Landscapes of the Rocky Mountain Front: A View from the Billy Big Springs Site, MT (2018)
The northern Rocky Mountain Front contains critical information regarding human exploration and colonization of the continent. Yet, reconstructed paleo-landscapes in the region extending from southern Alberta to northern Montana have focused almost exclusively on the Pleistocene-Holocene transition. Billy Big Springs, a multi-component site located just east of East Glacier Park, provides new data on long-term natural (as old as 21,000 cal. BP) and cultural (post 14,000 to 700 cal. BP) landscape...
Ancient Maya Land Use: Water Management and Agricultural Production at Actuncan, Belize (2018)
Research conducted during the 2015-2017 Actuncan Archaeological Project field seasons revealed several land use strategies utilized during the Late and Terminal Classic periods, including terracing, agricultural plots, and cobble mounds. Excavations conducted in the Northern Neighborhood of Actuncan exposed two terracing methods: 1) terraforming, in which earthen berms created to facilitate water drainage and 2) two small agricultural plot systems filled with a large amount of redeposited...
Anthracological Analyses of the Iron Age Shell Middens Complex at Praia da Rocha, Inhambane, Mozambique (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2016, our teams carried out survey and excavation field work in the Inhambane Province, located in southern coastal Mozambique. At Praia da Rocha we have identified several previously unknown shell middens dated to the regional Iron Age (c. 700 BP). All sites are located within few hundred meters of each other and only one (Praia da Rocha 1) was, so far, ...
Appendix C: the Baca Flotation Analysis (1977)
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Applied Ethnobotany in Arid Lands: The Importance of Time, context and Collaboration (2017)
This paper contributes to the field of applied ethnobotany, which focuses on the role that knowledge, institutions and cultural perspectives play in resource management and conservation (based on Cunningham). Through different case studies to understand people and their use of wild desert plants, this paper stresses the importance of collaboration between disciplines, principally among biological and social sciences; and secondly between formally trained researchers, and local people and...
Approaching Equifinality: Pollen and Non-pollen Palynomorphs as Complementary Paleoecological Proxies (2018)
In analyses of paleoenvironmental records, the specific effects of climate/precipitation patterns and human landscape impacts on ancient ecologies can be difficult to discern. As largely substrate-specific in nature, fungal spores may serve as proxy for a range of phenomena, such as soil erosion, landscape burning, vegetation clearance, moisture availability, and the existence of particular plant types in a given area. Microbotanicals, including pollen, fungal spores, phytoliths, and...
Arboriculture, Translocated Flora, and Ecological Inheritance in the Marquesas Islands, East Polynesia (2018)
Contact-period accounts point to considerable variability in Polynesian agronomic production systems. In the Marquesas Islands, a mountainous island group in the eastern Pacific, food production in the proto-historic period was narrowly focused on tree cropping and breadfruit cultivation in particular. Early western visitors remarked on the archipelago’s large and thriving island populations, and their stable and productive arboricultural systems. In this paper, we present the results of a...
An Archaeobotanical Analysis of Four Prehistoric Central Thai Sites: the Preliminary Results (2016)
Thailand is a relatively new frontier for archaeobotanists, having suffered in the past from a shortage of archaeobotanical research. While archaeologists in Southeast Asia have begun to chart when and how rice and millet agriculture developed and spread, a clear picture of prehistoric agriculture in central Thailand has yet to emerge. This paper describes some preliminary results from a series of sites that have been occupied from ca. 2500 BCE to 500 CE. These are Non Pa Wai, Non Mak La, and...
An Archaeobotanical Analysis of the Upward Sun River Site, Central Alaska (2016)
Vegetation and plant resources can impact forager mobility and subsistence strategies. However, misconceptions about the preservation of organics in subarctic archaeological contexts and underestimations of the importance of plant resources to foraging societies limit paleoethnobotanical research in high-latitude environments. This research addresses these issues with analyses of archaeobotanical remains found in hearth features from multiple components (approximately 13,300 through 8,000 cal...
Archaeobotanical Data from Middle to Late Holocene Sites on the Central California Coast: Implications for Resource Use and Prescribed Burning (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Current Insights into Pyrodiversity and Seascape Management on the Central California Coast" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Our research team’s ongoing work on the Central Coast of California explores spatial and temporal changes in the use of natural resources by Native peoples and considers how archaeobiological data can be used to understand the history of traditional resource stewardship practices such as...
Archaeobotanical Evidence and Diachronic Changes in Foodways of Indigenous Groups in the Central Coast and San Francisco Bay Regions, California (2015)
The Central Coast and San Francisco Bay regions of California are areas of high climatic, ecological, and indigenous cultural heterogeneity. During the last two decades, archaeobotanical research in these regions has begun to document the contributions of botanical resources in indigenous foodways systems through time. In the San Francisco Bay Area, a large number of anthropogenic shell mounds were population aggregation sites used for thousands of years, and, for the period after ca. 1050 CE,...
Archaeobotanical Evidence of Swahili Cuisine at Unguja Ukuu, Zanzibar (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Food has an integral role in the formation of identity. Archaeobotanical techniques are an underutilized yet productive avenue through which we can understand African cuisines and identities, both past and present. This presentation will focus on the preliminary analysis of the archaeobotanical assemblage excavated from the site of Unguja Ukuu by the Urban...
Archaeobotanical Remains from the Roman Harbor Vada Volaterrana (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We present preliminary botanical data and interpretations from the ancient Roman harbor of Vada Volaterrana, located in the modern province of Livorno, Italy. The harbor was supported by a network of structures immediately surrounding the port at Vada's San Gaetano site. A 2015 GPR survey identified a series of rectangular buildings of unknown purpose in...
Archaeobotany Foodscapes (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. There is more than one way to gain insight about past Native American use of plants. The conventional approach is to collect archaeobotanical samples during archaeological excavations. Another perspective is to inventory the environments surrounding sites and communities to understand the foodscape that...
Archaeobotany of Food & Craft near Bono Manso, Ghana, during the Transition from Trans-Saharan to Atlantic Trade (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Kranka Dada is a village site on the periphery of Bono Manso, a complex polity occupied between the 14th – 17th centuries AD, at the height of the trans-Saharan trade and the shift to early Atlantic trade. Questions remain about the degree and nature of the involvement of sites like Kranka Dada in these different trade networks. In this paper, we offer...
Archaeobotany of Ka'ūpūlehu (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Thousands of charcoal specimens from 23 traditional Hawaiian sites throughout Ka’ūpūlehu Ahupua’a in north Kona were analyzed to see how kama’aina (“people of the land”) interacted with their environment. Fifty-one plant taxa, including 36 plants of Hawaiian origin and six Polynesian introductions, were identified. Combining charcoal identification and...
Archaeofauna and Archaeobotany studies in Northwestern South Asia: Past, Present, and Future (2017)
Both Zooarchaeological and Paleoethnobotanical studies have been carried out on animal and plant remains from archaeological sites in northwestern South Asia for at least a century. These investigations, while providing important insights into the hunter-gatherer and agro-pastoral economies of the region, have lagged behind those carried out in other parts of the world in both quantity and quality. Indigenous practitioners of both sub-disciplines are few, and interest in these aspects of...
Archaeological and Ethnographic Plant Use in Mongolia (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The history and prehistory of Mongolia and Central Asia is sometimes characterized as static nomadic pastoralism, with little to no change in resource use over hundreds of years. Many scholars have debunked this unnuanced image by showing the complexities of pastoral lifeways, as well as the adoption of other subistence strategies in areas traditionally...
Archaeological Data Recovery at AZ U:9:8 (ARS), A Prehistoric Hohokam Site Near Mesa Grande, Mesa, Maricopa County, Arizona (1987)
Site AZ U:9:8 (ARS) was initially defined by Archaeological Research Services, Inc. (ARS) on April 26, 1985. At that time, Salt River Project (SRP) was excavating a footings trench for a concrete panel wall to be erected around a well site, and the construction crew encountered and reported archaeological remains in one of the excavated trenches. ARS was then requested by SRP to inspect the exposed remains, and to provide recommendations for the disposition of any identified cultural materials....
Archaeological Evidence of Multiple Domestication of Rice (2018)
The first domestication of rice in the Yangtze river valley in China is recently informed by genetic, archaeological, palaeoenvironmental, and archaeobotanical data. Archaeological sites where rice remains between 10000 and 4000 BP have been unearthed are concentrated in the middle and the lower Yangtze valley, a distance of over 1000 km apart. This study focuses on the morphological and histological features of spikelet bases of rice between 8300 and 4800 BP found in the Liyang Plain of the...
Archaeological Excavations in the Carrizo Wash Valley, East-Central Arizona: Data Recovery on the Fence Lake Mine Transportation Corridor, Volume II (2004)
Between May 15 and October 11, 2002, SWCA Environmental Consultants (SWCA) conducted archaeological data recovery at 11 sites along the proposed Fence Lake Mine Transportation Corridor (FLTCA) between the New Mexico state line and the Coronado Generating Station in St. Johns, Apache County, Arizona. The project was conducted for the Salt River Project Agricultural Improvement and Power District (SRP). The lead federal agency was the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), Socorro Resource Area, New...
Archaeological Plant Remains from the Lower Xingu (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeology in the Xingu River Basin: Long-Term Histories, Current Threats, and Future Perspectives" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent archaeological excavations at the sites of Jacupí, Carrazedo, and Gurupá in the Lower Xingu in the Brazilian Amazon have implemented a significant program for the recovery of plant remains, resulting in a large archaeobotanical assemblage currently undergoing analysis. Recent...
Archaeology and Paleoethnobotany of The Indian Family Housing Site at Mission San Juan Bautista (2024)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Chronicles of Colonialism: Unraveling Temporal Variability in Indigenous Experiences of Colonization in California Missions", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Established in 1797, Mission San Juan Bautista was the fifteenth of the Spanish missions built in Alta California. From the time of its construction until its secularization in 1835, Indigenous peoples lived in, ate at, created homes around and fostered...
Archaic Ingenuity through Continuous Change (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Coloring Outside the Lines: Re-situating Understandings of the Lifeways of Earliest Peoples of the Circum-Caribbean" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaic groups worldwide are often categorized as less technically and culturally developed. However, their deep understanding of nature and their environment and ability to translate this knowledge to adapt to new circumstances proves otherwise. Paleoclimatic research in...