The cutting edge of American Palaeoethnobotany

DOCUMENT Full-Text Naomi Miller.

The "big issue" of my career has been long-term human impact on the environment, an inherently processual concern. Working on ancient west Asian plant remains, ethnographic analogy and modern vegetation analogs helped me explain how the the demand for energy lead to deforestation and increasing dung fuel use, both of which are traceable through archaeobotanical study. Seeds preserved in dung fuel, in turn, allow us to identify agropastoral practices that created new environmental niches for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bruce Smith.

Recent advances in archaeobotany are discussed, and emerging research domains and future challenges are outlined. Particular emphasis is paid to the challenges of replication of results, and the curation of archaeobotanical collections for future researchers. SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Logan Kistler.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jose Iriarte. Francis Mayle. Ruth Dickau. Bronwen Whitney. John Carson.

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.),...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Neil Duncan.

How does one honor the greatest generation of paleoethnobotany? It should not be difficult. What they have accomplished is no less than establishing paleoethnobotany as fundamental archaeology. Their cutting edge approaches succeeded in keeping scientific methodology in archaeology throughout the discipline’s theoretical paroxysms, all the while keeping the "ethno" in paleoethnobotany. The next generation of paleoethnobotanists is already building on their mentors’ successes by further advancing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Deborah Pearsall.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Minnis.

It is a daunting task to make decades of research appear to be consistent and coherent when it is often ad hoc and opportunistic. During the past four and one-half decades I have tried to meld ethnobotany and archaeology with three themes focusing my work: food, anthropogenic ecology, and the value of research beyond archaeology. On the other hand, I have tended to avoided deep cultural contexts also and methodological issues. I will discuss each of these, not only for the past, but for the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Marston.

Paleoethnobotany has long been associated with the identification of crop plants and has led to important insights into domestication and the adoption of farming systems. New methods for the quantitative analysis of botanical remains, together with multiple allied datasets on human diet and environmental change, now allow paleoethnobotanists to generate empirical data on agricultural decision making in the archaeological record. The breadth of data now available to paleoethnobotanists includes...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amber VanDerwarker.

PEB practitioners are increasingly drawing from social perspectives which allow them to shift between concepts of diet and foodways. This increasingly social paleoethnobotany is bolstered by rigorous quantitative analyses of large datasets that facilitate the exploration of temporal and spatial nuances in ancient plant assemblages. This marriage between social theory, analytical rigor, and large datasets is further strengthened by the trend towards integrating multiple proxies of food data...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dolores Piperno.

Paleoethnobotanical research the past two decades from around the world makes it clear that multi-proxy data including from genetic and paleoecological approaches are necessary for understanding plant exploitation, domestication, and spread of agriculture. Recently, bio-archaeologists using such kinds of multidisciplinary endeavors have come to understand that addressing prehistory is also relevant to understanding species adaptation and survival in future environments. This paper discusses...