Advancing the Archaeology of Indigenous Agriculture in North America

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.