Frontiers of Plant Domestication

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Williams.

This is an abstract from the "Frontiers of Plant Domestication" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The prehistoric domesticate C. berlandieri var. jonesianum is well documented in the archaeobotanical record of eastern North America from ca. 3,800 BP to European contact when it fell out of use. The seed morphology of the domesticate resembles other new world Chenopodium domesticates (C. quinoa and C. berlandieri subsp. nuttalliae) and is distinct from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Karen Adams. Anna Graham.

This is an abstract from the "Frontiers of Plant Domestication" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Although the histories of major New World plant domestications of beans, corn, squash, gourd, and tobacco are well-known, histories of regional plant domestications from local wild plants are not. In the pre-Hispanic U.S. Southwest, a wild late winter/early spring-ripening annual grass known as Little Barley (Hordeum pusillum Nutt.) became a crop of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Natalie Mueller.

This is an abstract from the "Frontiers of Plant Domestication" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the past decade, a growing group of biologists, ecologists, and anthropologists have proposed a paradigm-shifting revision to the modern synthesis of evolutionary theory: the extended evolutionary synthesis (EES). The EES seeks to foreground developmental plasticity, epigenomics, and niche construction as evolutionary drivers. The EES is helping...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robin Allaby. Roselyn Ware. Logan Kistler.

This is an abstract from the "Frontiers of Plant Domestication" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Domesticated crops show a reduced level of diversity that is commonly attributed to the ‘domestication bottleneck’; a drastic reduction in the population size associated with sub-sampling the wild progenitor species and the imposition of selection pressures associated with the domestication syndrome. A prediction of the domestication bottleneck is a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Logan Kistler. Fabio de Oliveira Freitas. Marcelo Simon. Robin Allaby.

This is an abstract from the "Frontiers of Plant Domestication" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cassava (‘manioc' or ‘yuca' regionally) is a staple food for 800 million people worldwide. It was domesticated in the southwestern Amazon ~7,000 years ago, and archaeobotanical evidence suggests that it dispersed widely, including through Central America, shortly thereafter. In the present day, it is most widely grown in Brazil and throughout sub-Saharan...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Spengler.

This is an abstract from the "Frontiers of Plant Domestication" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Scholarship is reframing the study of plant evolution under cultivation to focus on the effects of complex human harvesting practices (seed predation), increased human population size, and sedentism, while turning away from conscious human selection. Research has pointed out that parallelism in domestication is linked to seed-dispersal mechanisms, but...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jazmín Ramos Madrigal. M. Thomas P. Gilbert.

This is an abstract from the "Frontiers of Plant Domestication" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological and genetic evidence from modern and ancient maize (Zea mays) samples indicate that maize initially reached the southwestern United States (U.S.) by around 4,000 years ago via a highland Mexican route, followed by a second introduction via the Pacific coast, around 2,000 years ago. However, maize diffusion routes northward from the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Wendy Hodgson. Andrew Salywon.

This is an abstract from the "Frontiers of Plant Domestication" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The importance of agaves to Mesoamerica and its cultures has long been recognized, providing food, fiber and beverage. However, their significance to these cultures has overshadowed and distorted the plants’ role for indigenous peoples north of the U.S. - Mexico border. Pre-Columbian farmers grew no less than six and possibly as many as eight or more...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mana Hayashi Tang. Xinyi Liu. Gayle Fritz. Zhijun Zhao.

This is an abstract from the "Frontiers of Plant Domestication" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent advances in paleoethnobotanical research reveal that plants have been critical to the human diet for longer and in more diverse ways than previously assumed. This paper addresses the relative dearth of paleoethnobotanical information on the early uses of vegetatively propagated plants in China, despite their significant representation in modern...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Salywon. Wendy Hodgson.

This is an abstract from the "Frontiers of Plant Domestication" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Botanical exploration over the last thirty years in Arizona has revealed at least six putative domesticated agaves still surviving in their archaeological context. These agaves share characteristics of relictual domesticated plants including clonality, reduced genetic diversity compared to wild agaves and reduced seed set or complete sexual sterility....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine Chiou.

This is an abstract from the "Frontiers of Plant Domestication" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Chili peppers (Capsicum spp.) are one of the extremely rich and varied crop genetic resources of the Americas. The independent domestication of five chili pepper species (C. annuum, C. baccatum, C. chinense, C. frutescens, and C. pubescens) across the Neotropics beginning around 10,000 BP was an intricate co-evolutionary process between these piquant...