Advancing the Archaeology of Indigenous Agriculture in North America
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 "Advancing the Archaeology of Indigenous Agriculture in North America" at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.
Advances in paleoethnobotanical analysis over the last several decades have allowed archaeologists to gain an understanding of crop domestication and intensification, diet breadth, food storage, processing, and cooking practices, and even changes in subsistence strategies in response to climate change and warfare. While these analyses have focused on the production and consumption of agricultural foods, their scope is limited to post-harvest activities. This is only part of the picture, as Indigenous farmers spent a large portion of their time planning, brokering land, prepping fields, planting, and tending. Nevertheless, the location of fields and methods of planting and irrigation are often overlooked. To fully comprehend the scale of the labor, knowledge, and power wielded by Indigenous farmers to organize complex systems of agriculture, archaeologists must shift our focus to ask where and how crops were grown. The papers in this session explore these questions through geoarchaeological, environmental, ethnographic, and experimental methods to further advance our understanding of Indigenous agriculture.
Other Keywords
Agriculture •
Paleoethnobotany •
Mississippian •
Subsistence and Foodways •
Ceramic Analysis •
Woodland •
Material Culture and Technology •
Subsistence and Foodways: Domestication •
nixtamalization
Geographic Keywords
United States of America (Country) •
North America (Continent) •
Missouri (State / Territory) •
Kentucky (State / Territory) •
Illinois (State / Territory) •
Wisconsin (State / Territory) •
Indiana (State / Territory) •
Michigan (State / Territory) •
Nebraska (State / Territory) •
Kansas (State / Territory)
Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-5 of 5)
- Documents (5)
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Cultivating Lost Crops: New Insights on the Domestication of Goosefoot (Chenopodium berlandieri) from a Common Garden Experiment (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Advancing the Archaeology of Indigenous Agriculture in North America" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In precolumbian eastern North America, archaeological evidence indicates that Indigenous peoples domesticated a unique crop system called the Eastern Agricultural Complex (EAC) before the arrival of maize (Zea mays) from what is now Mexico. The EAC is thought to have sustained past Indigenous people in eastern North...
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Evidence for Ridge and Furrow Agriculture at Angel Mounds in Southern Indiana (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Advancing the Archaeology of Indigenous Agriculture in North America" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Evidence of agriculture during the Mississippian period in the Midwest derives largely from the identification and analysis of cultivar macrobotanicals from refuse contexts. However, research that investigates how and where crops were grown on Midwestern sites is scant. As a result, few sites have been identified that...
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Looking for Evidence of Corn Processing (Nixtamalization) at Angel Mounds (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Advancing the Archaeology of Indigenous Agriculture in North America" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Mississippian peoples (circa eleventh–fourteenth centuries CE) in the midwestern and southeastern United States have long been proven to be and defined by their maize agricultural practices. Due to the nutritional deficiencies of subsisting solely on maize as a crop when unprocessed, researchers have linked all maize...
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Modeling Mississippian Subsistence: Diet and Food Production at Angel Mounds, Indiana (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Advancing the Archaeology of Indigenous Agriculture in North America" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Agricultural research in archaeology has predominantly focused on the presence or absence of food refuse, dietary data from isotopic studies, or the origins of agriculture. Fewer studies exist that focus on how crops were actually grown and what yields would be needed to viably support a specific population,...
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Multiscalar Investigations of Ridged Fields at the Menominee Reservation, WI (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Advancing the Archaeology of Indigenous Agriculture in North America" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Raised Indigenous agricultural features were once the most common earthworks in the American Midwest. Today, they are among the rarest. The Menominee Reservation in northern Wisconsin contains the densest concentration of ancient agricultural features in the American Midwest, providing a unique opportunity to study...