Paleoethnobotany (Other Keyword)
251-275 (461 Records)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent computational advances in the accessibility of robust statistical techniques used to estimate the biological richness and diversity of ecological communities using observational data provide a strong foundation for archaeological assessments of botanical richness and diversity using archaeobotanical data. While there is broad consensus amongst...
Meat, Transport, Fertilizer, and Meaning: Considering the Role of Camelids and Ritual in Moche Food Production (2018)
Camelids (i.e., llamas and alpacas) were domesticated in the Andean region of South America over 6000 years ago. Since then, camelids have occupied a place of central importance in Andean lifeways over the longue dureé. Nevertheless, while camelid pastoralism in the landscape of the highland Andes has been well documented ethnographically, ethnohistorically, and archaeologically, the intimate relationship between people and camelids in the Andean coastal valleys is less understood. In this...
Medieval Agricultural Practices in the "Champion" Region (2018)
During the early medieval state formation process, England’s political organization transformed from localized tribal groups to large and consolidated kingdoms. Farmers at early medieval settlements experienced a related increase in agricultural production demands, and they introduced improved agricultural technology such as replacing the light ard with the heavier moldboard plow. The midlands counties (commonly referred to as the core of the "Central Province" or "Champion" region) are often...
Mesoamerican Plants of the Night: A Paleoethnobotanical Perspective (2017)
The ancient Mesoamerican landscape has been extensively researched archaeologically, with the field of paleoethnobotany allowing for a better understanding of what plants the ancient people valued agriculturally and in their economic, ritual, medicinal and other daily practices. Typically, archaeologists interpret the archaeological record in terms of how the ancient peoples interacted with the artifacts and navigated through the landscape during the daytime. What about nightly practices? How...
Methodological Considerations for Examining the "Slave Diet" at Colonial Wine Producing Estates in Nasca, Peru (2015)
The 2012-2013 season of the Haciendas of Nasca Archaeological Project focused on the recovery of material correlates of domestic production, consumption, and discard from two Jesuit coastal haciendas, San Joseph and San Xavier, where the majority of the labor was enslaved and of African descent. Our systematic analysis of macrobotanical remains and sediment samples aimed at branching our understanding of: a) colonial foodways beyond the Native Andean/European dichotomy, as several years of...
Methodology In Paleoethnobotany: a Study In Vegetational Reconstruction Dealing With the Mill Creek Culture of Northwestern Iowa (1982)
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Micro-habitat Production in the Late Woodland Period (2018)
This paper presents the results of recent statistical analyses focused on relative plant species distributions among six Princess Point sites in Late Woodland Southern Ontario and explores potential markers of micro-habitat production in the region.
A Microbotanical View of Classic Period Households in Central Yaxuna, Yucatán, Mexico (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The ancient Maya city of Yaxuna was a political and economic center of the northern lowlands in the Middle to Late Preclassic periods (1000 BC–AD 250), and residents continued to occupy the city through the Classic period (AD 250–900) amid geopolitical shifts in the region tied to the rise of Coba and the Late Classic (AD 600–800) construction of a...
The Microscopic World and Curated Collections as Entry Points to Discuss Archaeological Stewardship with Multiple Publics (2016)
The very word “archaeology” conjures interest by the public generally. Finding meaningful ways to engage that interest, however, is less straight-forward for practitioners, educators, and researchers. Sitting within any given repository of archaeological materials are collections in need of additional documentation and analysis, some of which may have not been handled since the time of their initial excavation and curation. Additionally, while much can be learned through microbotanical...
Middle Formative Plant Use on the Taraco Peninsula, Bolivia (2015)
The Middle Formative (800-250B.C.) on the Taraco Peninsula was a period of burgeoning status and wealth differentiation that saw the rise of platform mound construction and the intensification of quinoa farming nearby the shores of Lake Titicaca. This paper will present data from a macrobotanical analysis of the site Alto Pukara, a 3.25 hectare village excavated in 2000 and 2001. A thorough examination of the distribution of charred plant remains across all contexts of a single structure will be...
Millets and Rice on the Move: Adaptive Strategies in the Past and Future (2017)
A growing tradition of archaeobotanical research, one that was pioneered by Steven Weber, is allowing us to form a picture of how millets and rice spread into Southeast Asia. Although rice continues to play an important role in the diet in this area, the use of millet has been slowly forgotten. These two different crops have been alternatively seen as a "cultural package" that coincided with the spread of farmer populations from Southern China, or adaptations to different ecological or climatic...
Modeling Early Medieval Agricultural Practices through Archaeobotany (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Farm to Table Archaeology: The Operational Chain of Food Production" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Medieval landscape archaeologists have described the Middle Saxon (650-850 AD) and Late Saxon (850-1100 AD) periods in England as times of increased agricultural production and economic expansion, but archaeobotanical analyses are not often integrated with these studies. Archaeobotanists have developed several methods...
Molecular archaeobotany from its early foundations onward: New questions and perspectives for the genomic era (2015)
Following the inception of ancient DNA-based research in the mid 1980’s, researchers began applying the new toolkit of archaeogenetics to a diverse range of questions surrounding human-plant interactions. These early studies laid the groundwork for the field of molecular archaeobotany, exploring aspects of selection and domestication, movement of crop plants alongside humans, and human impacts on ancient ecosystems. Some two decades later, ancient DNA researchers began experimenting with...
A Morphometric Approach to the Study of Archaeological and Modern Capsicum spp. Seeds Using Elliptical Fourier Analysis and Machine Learning Methods (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Traditional morphometric, or shape, analysis of archaeobotanical remains utilizes linear measurements taken in set axes of view (e.g., lateral) to generate quantitative assessments of morphological variation—mainly of carbonized disseminules—between taxa, or within a taxon. In contrast, landmark and semi-landmark analyses (LMA) apply statistical methods to...
The Mountain Path: Foraging Strategies and Inter-species symbiosis in the Beartooth Mountains, Montana (2023)
This is an abstract from the "A Further Discussion on the Role of Archaeology in Resource and Public Land Management" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Contemporary public land and wilderness management strategies in North America have long indulged the myth of the pristine, untouched ecosystem devoid of human interaction. Modern wilderness areas of the mountain West are not devoid of human influence; rather they represent ecosystems in which an apex...
Mountain, Steppes, and Barley: GIS Modeling of Human Environmental Interactions In the Armenian Highlands during the Bronze and Iron Ages (2018)
This poster investigates how Bronze and Iron Age communities around Mount Aragats, in central Armenia, managed their grassland environment through their subsistence strategies. I suggest that these distinct social and political societies not only participated in constructing a landscape of domestic cereal grains, such as barley and wheat, but also were participants in the ecology of this open mountain steppe environment dominated by Poaceae, Chenopodiaceae, and Artemisia. I investigate how the...
A multi-proxy approach to investigate human-plant interactions in Amazonia: A case study from the Llanos de Moxos (2015)
This paper summarises the results of a multiproxy study on the past human impact of Late Holocene peoples across different regions of the Llanos de Moxos. In the Monumental Mound Region, palaeoecological data show that the savanna soils were sufficiently fertile to support crops; maize being a predominant one. Macrobotanical remains from mound habitation sites in this region documented the presence of maize (Zea mays), squash (Cucurbita sp.), peanut (Arachis hypogaea), cotton (Gossypium sp.),...
Multi-scalar paleoethnobotany: farmstead variation and regional trends in Viking and Medieval North Iceland (2020)
This is a poster submission presented at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. This poster compares the multi-scalar (individual sites and whole regions) macrobotanical data of over 700,000 seeds from 41 Viking Age farmsteads in the Skagafjörður region of North Iceland to examine the benefits and challenges of using multi-scalar data for paleoethnobotanical analysis. During the Viking Age, the Norse settled Iceland, a sub-arctic volcanic island at the climatic...
A Multiproxy Analysis of Fire, Vegetation, Climatic, and Anthropogenic Activity during the Mid- to Late Holocene in the West Desert of Utah, United States (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Pollen from cave sediments within Hogup Cave and pollen and macroscopic charcoal found in a nearby 268 cm sediment core were analyzed and used as proxies to reconstruct the paleoecological and anthropogenic record of Hogup Cave and the surrounding region, found in the West Desert of Utah. The relationship between Paleoindians and their use of the...
Multiproxy Reconstruction of Human Diet in the Northern Great Basin: Coprolite Research at the Paisley Caves (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Human coprolites from archaeological contexts can provide valuable information about human health, dietary practices, and land-use patterns. Traditional coprolites studies have focused on identifying animal macrofossils and plant macrofossils and microfossils, but more recent research has shown the utility of biomolecular research (e.g., lipids, aDNA) for...
Multiscalar Investigations of Ridged Fields at the Menominee Reservation, WI (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Advancing the Archaeology of Indigenous Agriculture in North America" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Raised Indigenous agricultural features were once the most common earthworks in the American Midwest. Today, they are among the rarest. The Menominee Reservation in northern Wisconsin contains the densest concentration of ancient agricultural features in the American Midwest, providing a unique opportunity to study...
Multispecies Entanglements in Great Lakes Agricultural Landscapes: A Case Study from the Late Woodland Arkona Cluster Sites, Ontario (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Multispecies Frameworks in Archaeological Interpretation: Human-Nonhuman Interactions in the Past, Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper explores the multispecies entanglements in and along the edges of Western Basin maize fields ca. AD 1000–1300 in southern Ontario, Canada. As these communities became increasingly reliant on agriculture, their construction and management of new field landscapes catalyzed...
Naomi F. Miller and Applied Paleoethnobotany of Southwest Asia (2017)
Naomi F. Miller’s work exemplifies the paleoethnobotanical approach towards understanding human interactions with botanical landscapes in the past using archaeological remains, rooted in theoretical traditions of American anthropological archaeology. On the occasion of her Fryxell Award in Interdisciplinary Research from the SAA, we reflect on her body of published research and active fieldwork to draw out five themes that highlight areas in which Miller has made significant contributions to the...
The Nature and Status of Paleoethnobotany: Methods and Approaches for Understanding Site Formation Processes (2015)
Paleoethnobotany is a diverse discipline, with practitioners around the globe. A systematic discussion of methods and approaches is beyond the scope of this presentation. I focus instead on an issue concerning paleoethnobotanical practice and inference that cross-cuts the kinds of materials being studied, or the geographic or topical focus of research: deposition and preservation of plant remains. Determining what kind(s) of human behaviors and natural processes led to deposition and...
New Archaeobotanical Data from the Late Pleistocene Occupations of McDonald Creek (2021)
This is an abstract from the "McDonald Creek and Blair Lakes: Late Pleistocene-Holocene Human Activity in the Tanana Flats of Central Alaska" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. What can archaeobotany tell us about past landscapes and human behavior at McDonald Creek during the Late Pleistocene? Since 2016, systematic charcoal and phytolith sampling has been performed at McDonald Creek with the following aims: (1) reconstruct the ligneous vegetation...