Paleoethnobotany (Other Keyword)
326-350 (572 Records)
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...
Modes of Labor Organization and Variations of Pastoral Economies across East Asia during the Second Millennium BCE (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Ancient Pastoralism in a Global Perspective" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. There has been considerable recent momentum in documenting pastoral communities in the past who engaged with multi-resource subsistence strategies, including both husbandry and cultivation. This paper explores the potential conceptual conflict between cultivation and pastoral activities in the context of labour budget and surplus accumulation....
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...
New Directions for Pollen and Phytolith Analysis in Historic New England (2022)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "New Avenues in the Study of Plant Remains from Historical Sites" , at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Microbotanical analysis has been historically underutilized at colonial-era sites in New England. This talk will discuss the use of pollen and phytolith at three historic sites in coastal Massachusetts: Brewster Gardens and Burial Hill Plymouth; the Doane Family Homestead in Eastham; and Ben Luce Pond on...
New Evidence Concerning the Chronology and Paleoethnobotany of Salts Cave, Kentucky (1987)
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New Frontiers in Ancient Diet & Nutrition. Developing innovative methods for quantitative compositional analysis of desiccated archaeobotanical remains. (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. This methodological paper presents on the development of new chemical methods to obtain functional, nutritional, and antinutritional compositional data from desiccated archaeobotanical specimens. It discusses the potential, pitfalls, possible applications, and significance of novel approaches to quantitatively assess the...
A New Hypothetical Framework of Understanding the Evolution of Agriculture in the Lower Yangzi Region (2018)
Although a number of studies in recent years have contributed fresh knowledge to our understanding of the origins and development of agriculture in the Lower Yangzi, updated data have made this issue even more complicated. The empirical evidence shows very little information about any hunter-gatherers who might have lived in this area and indicates that, 10,000 years ago, humans first appeared here as successful resource managers or niche constructors. The human ecosystem characterized by...
New Insights from Old Wood: A Case Study from the Southeastern United States (2018)
In the southeastern United States, as well as in North America more broadly, archaeological wood charcoal continues to be an underutilized data source. In this paper, I review previous North American studies and models of prehistoric fuelwood collection. I use these past studies to highlight how wood charcoal data might contribute new insights on the archaeological record. I also present findings from a recent analysis of wood charcoal from three sites in the North Carolina Piedmont. This new...
New Insights into the Consumption of Cultigens for "Archaic" Age Populations in Cuba: The Archaeological Site of Playa el Mango, Rio Cauto, Granma (2018)
The use of cultigens and wild plants by pre-historic populations has been well established for many regions of the circum-Caribbean and Greater Antilles. However, in the case of Cuba, the largest island in the Caribbean, the evidence is scarce. In this paper, we examine the population of Playa El Mango (Cauto Region, Eastern Cuba), traditionally understood by Cuban archaeologists as "fisher-gatherers", to examine subsistence practices using a combination of starch evidence from dental calculus,...
New Investigations at Russell Cave, Alabama (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Russell Cave (1Ja181), located in Jackson County, Alabama, contains one of the longest prehistoric occupational sequences known in the southeastern U.S., spanning approximately 9,000 years. Excavations were conducted by the Chattanooga Chapter of the Tennessee Archaeological Society (1953-1955) the Smithsonian Institute in conjunction with the National...
New Life for Old Samples: Investigating the Paleoethnobotanical Record from Tijeras Canyon (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeology, Cultural Heritage, and Public Education at Tijeras Pueblo, New Mexico" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. University of New Mexico field school excavations carried out at Tijeras Pueblo in the Sandia Mountains by Jim Judge and Linda Cordell from 1971 to 1976 left a legacy of more than than 2,000 botanical samples, consisting of maize, flotation samples, wood samples, and macrobotanical specimens. Apart from a...
A New Locus for Avocado Domestication in Mesoamerica: Evidence for 8,000 Years of Human Selection and Tree Management at El Gigante, Honduras (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Beyond Maize and Cacao: Reflections on Visual and Textual Representation and Archaeological Evidence of Other Plants in Precolumbian Mesoamerica" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent research demonstrates that ancient Mesoamericans engaged in forest management long before they domesticated maize. Our research from El Gigante provides additional evidence for the antiquity of tree management practices in several...
New Methods for the Identification of Prehistoric Resins in the Southwest and Great Basin, USA: Proof of Concept (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Plant Exudates and Other Binders, Adhesives, and Coatings in the Americas" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The use of various organic resins as mastics and sealants in prehistoric North America is well documented in the archaeological and ethnographic literature. While the utilization of the creosote lac resin by people in western North America is known, resinous materials discovered in archaeological contexts are most...