Histories of Human-Nature Interactions: Use, Management, and Consumption of Plants in Extreme Environments

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Histories of Human-Nature Interactions: Use, Management, and Consumption of Plants in Extreme Environments" at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Historically, humans in every environment on Earth have incorporated plants into their lives, with a wide variety of purposes: dietary, medicinal, ritual, to construct their homes, and craft their tools, among others. Nonetheless, for several extreme environments (e.g., desert or temperate bioclimates), plants have not received the same attention in the archaeological research as other resources. An example of this is how these areas are usually portrayed as marginal, distant lands, where cultivars arrived late and where people adopted these products of human developments and innovations from other, richer areas. In this session, we want to explore these narratives, confront them with research done in extreme regions, and uncover new histories for the human-plant relationships in these kind of environments. Topics such as adaptation of imported cultivars, innovations in cultivation techniques, and local processes of manipulation of wild resources and landscapes will form part of the central discussion. This symposium will strive to incorporate extreme bioclimates from all over the globe, and the whole chrono-cultural sequence, understanding that the developments of the present ecosystems, diets, and cosmologies associated with plants did not start with agriculture but are rather several long-term cultural processes that have their roots in hunter-gatherer populations.