Paleoethnobotany (Other Keyword)
26-50 (657 Records)
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. This paper presents an analysis of botanical remains recovered from archaeological contexts at the Aventura site, located in what is now northern Belize. A total of 478 large carbonized plant fragments, 167 flotation samples, and 10 eDNA samples were included in this analysis. Samples were recovered from a...
Analytical Approaches for Identifying Ritual Contexts (2017)
Paleoethnobotanists continue to push plants into the realm of social archaeology, particularly in terms of examining how plants articulated with ancient ritual practices. The examination of the connection between plants and ritual, however, is not a straightforward process—researchers must first appropriately identify special contexts and/or foods, after which they must attribute meaning to the contexts and events they have identified. This presentation focuses on the first step – identification...
Analyzing Late Woodland Pipe Fragments from the Topper Site (38AL23): Exploring the Botanical, Social, and Ritual Intersections of Smoking (2018)
Three pipe fragments uncovered during a 2017 University of Tennessee excavation at the Topper Site (38AL23) in Allendale County, South Carolina have opened a window into the social and ceremonial practices of the site’s Late Woodland inhabitants. Morphometric, paleoethnobotanical, and residue analyses have enabled us to explore the societal role smoking played within this community. We compare the form, design, and contents of these fragments to similar artifacts from across the region and an...
Anatomy of an Arctic Archaeobotanical Analysis: Insights about Ancestral Inuvialuit Plant Use at Agvik, Banks Island, NWT (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Arctic Pasts: Dimensions of Change" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Despite extensive Inuit knowledge of and interest in plants, archaeobotanical studies are incredibly rare in the Arctic, representing a clear bias of archaeologists. The proliferation of community-engaged research in the north is helping to open an avenue to more archaeobotanical work. While fish and mammals certainly composed the bulk of the Inuit...
Ancient Alaskan Firewood Management Strategies and the Role of Selectivity: Preliminary Results (2018)
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 Environmental DNA: A Novel Approach to Investigating an Early Classic Period Hohokam Trash Mound Context (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Multidisciplinary Investigations of a Transitional Early Classic Period Hohokam Trash Mound at AZ U:9:319(ASM), Mesa, Arizona" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While various ethnographic and archaeological studies have shed light on different plant use in the Southwest, the breadth of plant use remains more enigmatic within the archaeological record. Like most artifacts studied in the archaeological record, ecofacts...
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...
The Andean Urban Center of Cajamarquilla: Environmental and Occupational Dynamics (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Central Andes saw a long and complex development of prehistoric urban life. Although considerable progress has been made in understanding this process, our assessment is still very fragmentary due to the lack of key data on centers that appear to have been pivotal at the regional scale. In this paper, I examine Cajamarquilla, a site (> 100 ha) on the...
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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Applications of Black Feminist Theory to Archaeobotanical Analysis: A Case Study of Belle Grove’s Enslaved Quarters (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Advances in Macrobotanical and Microbotanical Archaeobotany" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The contributions of enslaved African Americans to local formal economies have often gone unrecognized in previous historical and archaeological research; this is especially true concerning the actions of enslaved women. Black Feminist Theory allows researchers to consider the ways that Black women viewed and affected the...
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 and Faunal Remains from the Roman Harbor Vada Volaterrana (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this poster we present updated botanical and faunal 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...
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 Evidence Supports Indigenous Cucurbit Long-Term Use in the Mesoamerican Neotropics (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The squash family contains some of the most important crops cultivated worldwide. Squashes were among the first cultivated crop species, but little is known about how their domestication unfolded. We employ direct radiocarbon dating and morphological analyses of desiccated cucurbit remains from El Gigante Rockshelter, Honduras to reconstruct human...
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...