Frontiers of Plant Domestication

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Frontiers of Plant Domestication," at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Domestication of plants and animals is the most transformative process in human history, and occurred independently on all inhabited continents during the Holocene. As integrative new analytical approaches are combined in modern archaeobotanical research, our understanding of plant domestication worldwide is being re-shaped to reflect nuanced ideas surrounding plant-human interactions and co-evolution. This session explores the frontiers of plant domestication research in three key areas: i) ‘Lost crops’ around the world – the impacts and legacies of crops and agrobiodiversity known only through the archaeological record, ii) archaeobotanical frontiers – new theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of domestication; and iii) molecular insights into plant domestication in the genomic age.