Paleoethnobotany (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Seetha Reddy.

Despite considerable diversity in plant communities across coastal and inland California, the region’s hunter-gatherers often have been viewed as having broadly similar plant resource orientation. This paper reassess this perspective by explicitly examining spatial and temporal variation in plant use west of the Sierra Nevada. In doing so, the study capitalized on a growing body of paleoethnobotanical data to explore similarities and differences in plant food resource emphasis across six main...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Salinas Acero. Jennifer Salinas.

The process of domestication has interested archaeologists working in the Andes for decades but for many years problems of preservation and access to certain analyses have caused a lag in the recovery of concrete evidence. Although, previous research carried out in the 1970’s and 1980’s at the preceramic sites of Tequendama, Aguazuque, and Zipacon on the altiplano of the Eastern Cordillera of Colombia yielded a wealth of paleoenvironmental, tool use, and faunal data, few botanical remains were...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dana Bardolph. Amber VanDerwarker. Marcie Venter.

This is an abstract from the "Olmec Manifestations and Ongoing Societal Transformations in the Tuxtlas Uplands: A View from Matacanela" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Although there has been much speculation about the nature of agriculture along the Formative and Classic period Gulf Coast of Mexico, the local and regional subsistence economies of these periods remain poorly understood, particularly for Classic-period sites. In this paper, we...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shanti Morell-Hart.

Botanical residues recovered from the Piedras Negras kingdom have yielded rich information about activities and economies of ancient inhabitants. Data for this paper were derived from large-scale excavations targeting Classic Period craft production areas, defensive features, and dwellings. Evidence of agricultural practices as well as the collection of wild and fallow-dwelling plants has been revealed through charred seeds and other botanical residues. The recovered archaeobotanical remains...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jannifer Gish.

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DOCUMENT Citation Only Haibin Gu.

Based on the comprehensive analysis of grain shape and embryos of carbonized rice from archaeological sites, the author draws conclusions as follows: a. There is a difference in shape of spikelet base between cultivated rice and wild rice, but it is difficult to make comparable measurements. Therefore, it is possible to identify rice by using the characteristics of the spikelet base based on one’s experience, but it is difficult to make comparisons between different researchers. b. According to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only GeorgeAnn DeAntoni. Peter Nelson. Rob Cuthrell.

The purpose of my paper is to present a paleoethnobotanical study of a late prehistoric Central California site (located in Sonoma County) that reconstructs the pre-contact landscape via the identification of wood charcoal remains. The analysis of charcoal and the low-impact paleoethnobotancial methodologies utilized in this study provide the basis for generating hypotheses about how Native peoples interacted with the local environment while also considering how the landscape may have changed...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Harper Dine.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The ancient Maya utilized a range of landscape modifications for agricultural production, including terraces and raised fields. These agricultural strategies were tied into food systems that also included taxation and tribute, all significant components of a political economy that may have reflected autonomy, exploitation, or both. Using a paleoethnobotanical...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maia Dedrick. Patricia McAnany. Adolfo Batún Alpuche.

This is an abstract from the "Rethinking Persistent Places: Relationships, Atmospheres, and Affects" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper focuses on the past 500 years of nearly continual human presence on the lands held today by residents of Tahcabo, Yucatán, Mexico. Previous work addressed why town residents continued to persist in this area despite the violence of colonialism. One answer pointed to significant human relationships with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jose Iriarte. Mark Robinson. Shira Maezumi. Daiana Travassos. Denise Schaan.

In this presentation, we discuss pre-Columbian Amazonian Dark Earth (ADE) polyculture agroforestry systems and its implications for management and conservation efforts on Amazonian sustainable futures under current threat from climate change and development. We present and compare new multi-proxy paleoclimate, palaeoecological and archaeobotanical data from two mid to late Holocene records of land use history of ADE in Santarem (Lower Amazon) and the Itenez Forest Reserve (SW Amazonia). Our data...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sonia Zarrillo.

Genetic studies suggest a single domestication event for cacao (Theobroma cacao L.) in the Upper Amazon of southeastern Ecuador and northeastern Peru and then transported by humans northwards to Central America and Mexico. As such, we should expect to find the earliest archaeological evidence of cacao use in the tropical forests of South America. This paper presents starch granule evidence for the use of cacao dating to 3500-3300 Cal BC from the Santa Ana - La Florida site in the Upper Amazon of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katharine Reinhart. Alexander Patterson. David Landon.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological excavations in 2021 recovered important new information about the Coles Hill Archaeological Site (19-PL-984), a Wampanoag site overlooking the waterfront in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Despite the location on a heavily developed urban lot, a preserved portion of the site featured intact stratigraphy yielding in situ cultural features, pottery...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Lentz. Venicia Slotten.

Archaeological investigations at Cerén, a Classic period Maya site in western El Salvador, have unearthed an abundance of carbonized bean remains, both Phaseolus vulgaris and P. lunatus. Surprisingly, the Cerén P. vulgaris bean remains were derived from both wild and domesticated populations. This find reveals that the Late Classic inhabitants continued to draw upon wild food sources even though they had clear access, as seen in the Cerén paleoethnobotanical record, to a full array of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tom Dillehay.

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. Archaeologists have long hypothesized the causes and conditions of the transition from foraging to food production. Of specific interest here are the social and ecological conditions generating the adoption of exotic plants. Some of the best-documented paleoecological and archaeological evidence for initial food production and the adoption...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rebecca Friedel. M. Kathryn Brown.

The importance of fire in Maya rituals is well-known, both archaeologically and ethnographically. Fire, which is symbolic of the life cycle in Maya ideology, has been used as a means of communicating with the supernatural world in order to manage specific aspects of everyday life, such as the success of the agricultural season. In the archaeological record, we find evidence for ancient fires as features consisting mostly of burnt plant remains, some of which resemble modern Maya fire altars both...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Barbara J. Heath. Kandace Hollenbach.

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. Our paper summarizes analyses of samples of carbonized seeds, nutshells, and plant parts and tissues which we use to investigate the relationships between people and plants in the foodways, economy, and ecology in Maryland and Virginia in the period from 1630 to 1720. Incorporating multiple contexts from five...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cinthia Campos-Hernandez.

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. For nearly a century, archaeologists have debated the subsistence adaptation of the Trincheras Tradition of Sonora, México. Nineteenth-century scholars hypothesized that they were foragers until the arrival of the Hohokam around 1300 CE. Having recently excavated Snaketown in the Phoenix basin, archaeologists had...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jonah Bullen.

This is an abstract from the "Mogollon, Mimbres, and Salado Archaeology in Southwest New Mexico and Beyond" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the thirteenth century, the southwestern United States underwent extensive demographic shifts, including migration and drastic social upheaval. From this context what archaeologists call the Salado ideology emerged in southern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico in the fourteenth century from the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicole Herzog. Lisbeth Louderback. Bruce Pavlik.

The processes, antecedents, and outcomes associated with plant domestication have been central themes in archaeological and interdisciplinary research for the last century. While domesticates can often be readily distinguished from their wild progenitors both genetically and morphologically, the steps leading to domestication (transport, selective harvest, deliberate seed dispersal, active plant management, i.e. cultivation) can be difficult to track archaeologically. Techniques for identifying...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Taryn Johnson. Bryan Hockett. Anna Linderholm.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Coprolites are increasingly the subject of multiproxy analyses, but there is need to determine how the data, results, and interpretation of coprolite contents could differ depending on the methods chosen. This study presents a comparison of DNA metabarcoding and macroremains analysis performed on ten coprolites from Bonneville Estates Rockshelter, Nevada....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eloi Berube. Cira Martínez López.

This is an abstract from the "Checking the Pulse: Current Research in Oaxaca Part I" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper examines the plants used as mortuary offerings at the Zapotec city of Monte Albán (500 BCE–900 CE). After their passing, the deceased became Ancestors able to offer protection to their descendants. I explore the possibility that food (specifically plants) might have helped to provide and strengthen a bridge between the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Castillo Acal.

This is an abstract from the "The Bolonchen Regional Archaeological Project: 25 Years of Research in the Puuc" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological investigations in the Bolonchen district have as one of their goals the understanding of the variation of the natural resource exploitation by the ancient settlers in the region. An approach that has been a relevant for reconstruction of the landscape and prehispanic forest management is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mary Adair.

This is an abstract from the "New and Ongoing Research on the North American Plains and Rocky Mountains" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Maize, or corn, was one of the dominate crops to many North American Plains tribes, contributing beyond subsistence to origin beliefs, rituals, ceremonies, and trade. Given this, archaeologists seek to recreate the evolutionary processes by which maize became an important element in the economy of Plains...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katelyn McDonough. Madeline Mackie.

This is an abstract from the "Hearths, Earth Ovens, and the Carbohydrate Revolution: Indigenous Subsistence Strategies and Cooking during the Terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene in North America" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Understanding how Indigenous communities used plants during the Pleistocene is fundamental to addressing questions about long-term ecological relationships, dietary practices, and adaptive strategies. Pleistocene plant...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Xinyi Liu.

This is an abstract from the "Cultivating Cities: Perspectives from the New and Old Worlds on Wild Foods, Agriculture, and Urban Subsistence Economies" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent investigation has shown that between 5000 and 1500 cal BC, the Eurasian and African landmass underpinned a continental-scale process of “globalization” of food and foodways. By 1500 cal BC, the trans-Eurasian exchange of cereal crops brought together previously...