Subsistence Crops and Animals as a Proxy for Human Cultural Practice
Part of: Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)
This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Subsistence Crops and Animals as a Proxy for Human Cultural Practice" at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.
Agroecological systems can be thought of across three dimensions: (1) plant and human biology, (2) the local biotic and abiotic community, and (3) human cultural practice. Modern agroecological systems are the result of millennia of negotiations between human practices, population biology, and environmental conformation. Archaeological practices allow us to observe these processes over time and space using landscape approaches to understand management practices and past environments, stylistic analysis to inform cultural understanding, and ancient DNA to interrogate biological changes as these systems developed.
Other Keywords
Paleoethnobotany •
Subsistence and Foodways: Domestication •
Neolithic •
Environment and Climate •
Subsistence and Foodways •
Paleoecology •
Cultural Transmission •
stable isotope analysis •
Indigenous •
ancient DNA
Geographic Keywords
North America (Continent) •
United Mexican States (Country) •
Hidalgo (State / Territory) •
Colima (State / Territory) •
Queretaro (State / Territory) •
Michoacan (State / Territory) •
Mexico (State / Territory) •
Morelos (State / Territory) •
Jalisco (State / Territory) •
Nayarit (State / Territory)
Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-10 of 10)
- Documents (10)
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The Adoption of Agriculture in the Tehuacan Valley, Mexico: Stable Isotope Data for 10,000 Years of Environmental and Dietary Change (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Subsistence Crops and Animals as a Proxy for Human Cultural Practice" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. An enduring focus in anthropological research concerns the causes for adoption of agriculture in multiple regions across the globe near the onset of the Holocene. The Tehuacan Valley of Puebla, Mexico, represents a unique location to explore long-term trends of human-plant coevolution as the dry climate of the valley...
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Indigenous Land Use and Cultural Burning in the Amazon Rainforest Ecotone (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Subsistence Crops and Animals as a Proxy for Human Cultural Practice" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The southwestern Amazon Rainforest Ecotone is the transitional landscape between the tropical forest and seasonally flooded savannahs of the Bolivian Llanos de Moxos. These heterogeneous landscapes harbor high levels of biodiversity and some of the earliest records of human occupation and plant domestication in...
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Investigating the Principles of “Good Farming”: A Comparison of Traditional Agrarianism and Indigenous Land Use and Cultivation (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Subsistence Crops and Animals as a Proxy for Human Cultural Practice" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In his long career as an agrarian writer, Wendell Berry has documented and endorsed the precepts of “good farming” as those that require care, knowledge, self-mastery, good sense, cultural memory, and fundamental decency. This carefully crafted set of practices stands in stark opposition to the aggressive colonial...
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Lakescapes/Landscapes in the Prehispanic Basin of Mexico: Recent Evidence for Early Subsistence Adaptations (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Subsistence Crops and Animals as a Proxy for Human Cultural Practice" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent studies of both macrobotanical and microbotanical remains associated with early populations in the Basin of Mexico provide broader evidence for plant use and contribute to understanding of the range of subsistence components available to these communities. From a methodological perspective, the complementary...
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The Location for the Origin of Domesticated Sorghum in Africa: A Brief Review of Some Cultures in the Sahara, Nile, and Sahel (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Subsistence Crops and Animals as a Proxy for Human Cultural Practice" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent analyses have established the location for the origin of domesticated sorghum occurring in the far eastern Sahel of Sudan during the fourth millennium BC associated with the Late Neolithic Butana Group. For over a half century, sorghum domestication has been hypothesized as occurring somewhere in the Sahelian...
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Maize Adaptation to Changing Environments (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Subsistence Crops and Animals as a Proxy for Human Cultural Practice" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. All organisms must contend with rapidly changing environments in the face of climate change in order to ensure the survival of the population (Hoffmann and Sgrò 2011). Domesticated plants, with a 10,000 year history of adapting to new environments, provide an excellent model for understanding genetic responses to...
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Preliminary Insights into the Biocultural Trajectory of Maize in Southwestern Amazonia (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Subsistence Crops and Animals as a Proxy for Human Cultural Practice" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Mounting archaeobotanical and archaeogenetic data show that the southwestern Amazon region had an important role to play in the history of South American maize dispersal, acting as a “secondary improvement center” for primitive lineages that arrived in the region during the Middle Holocene (>6500 BP). How these...
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Spread of Maize into Temperate North America (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Subsistence Crops and Animals as a Proxy for Human Cultural Practice" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Maize entered the southwestern United States nearly 2,000 years before maize agricultural practice is visible in the archaeological record on the Colorado Plateau. Previous work found that the early cultivated maize on the Plateau, 2,000-year-old samples from Turkey Pen Shelter, were already at least partially adapted,...
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Unentangling Hotspots and Episodes in Pre-domestication Cultivation of Cereals: Examples from West and East Asia (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Subsistence Crops and Animals as a Proxy for Human Cultural Practice" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The growth of empirical archaeobotanical data has highlighted that domestication processes in cereals were spread out over both time (millennia) and space (100,000s rather than 10,000s of km2). Updated data from West Asian cereals and pulses, alongside Chinese millets and rice, are analyzed. These data allow...
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Was Setaria Domesticated in Tehuacan? (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Subsistence Crops and Animals as a Proxy for Human Cultural Practice" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Excavation of Coxcatlan cave recovered remains of Setaria cf. macrostachya. Analysis suggested early increase in abundance of florets (so-called seeds) in deposits associated with El Riego Phase contexts and later decrease in Coxcatlan Phase deposits. Callen observed a size increase of Setaria florets recovered from...