Paleoethnobotany (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anya Gruber.

The local environment at LA 20,000 played a major role in influencing what kinds of activities could take place at the ranch built by Spanish colonizers in the 17th century. Palynological analysis is used here to understand how the environment changed over the course of the colonial era and, in turn, inform what types of activities were performed at the site. My research identifies and quantifies plant taxa using palynology in order to understand land use at LA 20,000, a 17th century rancho site...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anya Gruber.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This talk will use archaeological pollen data from LA 20,000, a Spanish rancho site located approximately 12 miles from Santa Fe, New Mexico, to investigate how Pueblo and Spanish environmental alteration made long-term, complex changes to the landscape. By identifying and quantifying pollen taxa, this research will demonstrate how plant population...

DOCUMENT Citation Only BrieAnna Langlie.

In the Peruvian altiplano near Lake Titicaca during the Late Intermediate period (LIP; A.D. 1100 to 1450) peoples’ lives were overwhelmingly structured by warfare. Martial conflict between competing ethnic groups incited people to live defensively in fortified hilltop villages during the LIP. However, little is known about the agricultural practices and the internal sociopolitical dynamics of these fighting communities. Drawing on recent excavations and macrobotanical data collected from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachel Dwyer.

For decades, paleoethnobotanical research almost exclusively concentrated on reconstructing past subsistence economies. At 2011’s SAA conference, I presented a paper entitled, Toward A Paleoethnomedicine. I suggested that paleoethnobotanical research should take inspiration from ethnomedicine (a subfield of ethnobotany) and concentrate on analyzing past people’s healing practices and performances. This paper presents a method to operationalize this concept, a technique for analyzing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dorian Fuller.

Recent archaeobotanical evidence has provided important, although limited evidence, for the steps on the domestication trajectory for Pearl Millet in western Africa (Mali, Mauretania) and Sorghum in eastern Africa (Sudan), during the middle Holocene (3000-1000 BC). Both were exploited by and domesticated by societies that in the Sahelian and northern Savannas, and practiced mobile herding alongside hunting and low-level cultivation, but full-scale agricultural dependence may not have emerged...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dorian Fuller.

This is an abstract from the "Questioning the Fundamentals of Plant and Animal Domestication" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Taking inspiration from Zeder’s notion of pathways to animal domestication (commensal, prey, directed), this presentation will outline equivalent pathways of plant domestication types, and suggest a range of species that can be grouped by these pathways. These pathways are united by issues of habit (annual, perennial),...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Marston.

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. The study of human-plant relationships in archaeology is rich and varied, including gathering, cultivation of wild species, domestication, intensive agriculture, and nonfood uses of plants. People-plant relationships in agricultural entanglements, however, have primarily focused on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erin McDonald.

The people of the Irish Iron Age are often referred to as ‘invisible’ due to their seeming absence from the archaeological record. Ceramics, so often associated with domestic activities, are not a part of the Iron Age material culture. Burials and domestic settlements dating to the Iron Age exist, but they are the exception to the generally sparse archaeological record. In the absence of sufficient material culture and settlement patterns, other means of studying the people of the Iron Age must...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine Chiou. Araceli Aguilar-Meléndez. Christine Hastorf. Andrés Lira-Noriega. Emiliano Gallaga Murrieta.

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. Dolores Piperno’s career has been defined by pioneering work in multidisciplinary and collaborative plant research. Following in her footsteps, this interdisciplinary team comprised of archaeologists/archaeobotanists, an ethnobotanist, and a biogeographer assembled to investigate the origins and domestication of Capsicum annuum var. annuum...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine Chiou. Luis Jaime Castillo.

The site of San José de Moro in the Jequetepeque Valley of the North Coast of Peru is renowned for the discovery of several "Priestess" burials containing women interred with the material accoutrements of the goddess figure from the Moche pantheon. As a burial ground for the Moche elite, San José de Moro presents an excellent case study for ritual performance with burial-related ceremonies taking place concurrently with feasting. In this paper, we discuss the plant evidence for large-scale feast...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristen Wroth. Dan Cabanes. Paul Goldberg. Vera Aldeias. Dennis Sandgathe.

Phytolith analysis can be used to investigate the relationship between hominins, plants, and environmental change. It has proven useful in understanding specific hominin behaviors (e.g., use of fire and fuel composition), and diachronic changes in plant species for paleoenvironmental reconstructions. The integration of phytolith analysis with soil micromorphology allows for an identification of the ways phytoliths were deposited in archaeological sites, and addresses both site formation...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristen Wroth.

Phytolith analysis at Roc de Marsal, a Middle Paleolithic cave site, SW France, is used to investigate both environmental change and hominin behavior. Specifically, the aims include correlating phytolith types with the microenvironmental context of the site, and how these conditions changed diachronically. We also explore the pyrotechnological skills of Neanderthals at the site, broad patterns of plant acquisition and use, and spatial differentiation. Preliminary analysis of phytolith samples...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephanie Hacker. Beatrix Arendt. Derek Wheeler. John Jones.

This research emphasizes the value of studying plant remains recovered from archaeological contexts while contributing to our understanding of the lifeways of enslaved African-Americans from late eighteenth -century Virginia. The primary objective of this research is to identify plants selected by enslaved field laborers living on the Home Farm Quarter of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello plantation. This study incorporates both macrobotanical and pollen analysis and presents a wide variety of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katheryn Twiss. Melina Seabrook. Michael Charles.

Archaeologists have been examining the great cities of ancient southern Mesopotamia for well over a century now, but as yet we have limited understanding of their subsistence economies. For decades researchers more or less ignored the wealth of faunal and botanical remains in and around ancient Mesopotamian architecture. Over the course of the twentieth century researchers began to recover animal bones and teeth, but as few digs dry-screened or floated their soils the resulting assemblages...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emuobosa Orijemie.

Palaeoenvironmental data obtained from coastal areas (wetlands) of southern Nigeria reveal three main periods of climatic changes from the Mid Holocene-Present namely (i) very wet (ca. 6,000-5,000 BP), (ii) dry (ca. 4,500-2,500 BP) and (iii) humid periods (ca. 2,500-Present). This paper explores the dynamic ways in which the culture of plant management and plant food resources in these marginal lands has been expressed within the context of environmental change. The similarities in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kiley Stoj. Karen Schollmeyer.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Examining climate patterns, archaeobotanical evidence, artistic depictions on pottery, and historic and modern uses of plants provides information on how Mimbres and Salado period farmers used local plant resources and influenced their distribution and availability. This presentation examines differences in archaeological plant remains found in Classic Mimbres...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Susan Smith. Karen Adams.

The plant record of Room 28 is filtered through a complex stratigraphy composed of early excavation backfill from adjacent rooms, Room 28 features and floor, and below to an older surface. Plant specimens from 11 macrobotanical, 7 flotation, 10 maize cob samples, and 13 pollen samples reveal an exceptionally rich record of the resources valued and used by Pueblo Bonito people. Their reliance on maize registers strongly, supplemented by a mix of native foods including pinyon nuts, cacti, cattail,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Rhode.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Bonneville Estates Rockshelter is a stratified multicomponent site located on the former highstand of Pleistocene Lake Bonneville in the eastern Great Basin. It contains well-dated and well-preserved record of human occupation through the last 13,000 years. Here I report on dietary plant remains retrieved from nearly 140 dated archaeological features...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristin Hoppa. Kristina Gill.

This paper considers both macrobotanical and starch grain evidence for terrestrial plant use at Diablo Valdez (SCRI-619/620) on Santa Cruz Island, California. This inland site consists of a rock shelter as well as an open-air living space, and was occupied from ca. 5900 years ago and into the Historic period. Macrobotanical remains were recovered from 140 liters of soil, while starch grain analysis was conducted on six bowl fragments. This paper contextualizes these results within a broader...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Luke Stroth. Mario Borrero. Geoffrey Braswell.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We describe the paleobotanical collection from Nim li Punit (AD 150 to 830), a small-scale center in the Toledo District, Belize. The samples were collected from Structure 50, a range building that we interpret to be a Late Classic (AD 700 to 830) elite domestic context. This was a time of growth and change for Nim li Punit, where new construction coincided...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Caleb Ranum.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The site of Alto Pukara is located on the Bolivian Altiplano near Lake Titicaca. It dates to the Middle Formative, a period which whitnessed the emergence of settlements, craft specialization, and hierarchical political development in the region. Excavations by Robin Beck in 2000 and 2001 uncovered two structures, which were identified as part of a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Justin Reamer.

Landscapes are formed by diverse human actions and interactions with their surroundings through the performance of various tasks, or what Ingold referred to as the "taskscape." Recently archaeologists have turned their attentions to a previously neglected aspect of the landscape created through quotidian tasks, the agricultural field. These studies, however, tend to focus on preserved built structures still visible in the modern landscape. Direct study of agricultural fields in Eastern North...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Deborah M. Pearsall.

"Plants and People in Ancient Ecuador: The Ethnobotany of the Jama River Valley" explores the interrelationships between the prehistoric residents of a small valley in coastal Ecuador (South America) and the dry tropical forest habitat in which they lived. The book has three related objectives. First, "Plants and People in Ancient Ecuador" is an ethnobotany, a work that explores how, through the medium of cul­ture, people shape and are shaped by the world in which they live. I take as my...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carolina Belmar.

This is an abstract from the "Histories of Human-Nature Interactions: Use, Management, and Consumption of Plants in Extreme Environments" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Research on the use of plants among hunter-gathering groups has made visible the use of a predictable and ubiquitous resource that is locally and seasonally available, and that count with multiple potential uses. Recent studies at the Baño Nuevo 1 site (Aisén, Chile) have revealed...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sophie Reilly.

Paleoethnobotanists study human-plant interactions in the past, including the role of plants in ancient foodways. Microbotanical remains (phytoliths and starch grains) enable the identification of many plants because their morphology can be diagnostic to the family, genus, and species. Microbotanical samples can be extracted from specific artifacts, such as ceramics, enabling a better understanding of their use. Paleoethnobotanists can thus discern associations between certain vessel types and...