The Archaeobotany of Early Peopling: Plant Experimentation and Cultural Inheritance

Part of: Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "The Archaeobotany of Early Peopling: Plant Experimentation and Cultural Inheritance" at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Plants, and their products, are key to our lives. They provide the basis for foods, medicines, technologies, architecture, and well-being practices. Our interaction with plants in the present is supported by a wealth of cultural and ecological knowledge built up over millennia of living in different environments around the world. In this symposia, we will engage with current and emerging evidence for the early use of plants, focusing on the movement of early humans and our closest ancestors into new environments globally. This process of colonization incorporates interaction with new plant species, vegetation communities, and landscapes. As such it draws both on culturally inherited ecological knowledge and the ability to learn and experiment. We aim to foster discussion about this process and the archaeobotanical techniques required to examine it, and to consider the relationship of these early interactions to long-term trajectories of human-environment interaction.

Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-13 of 13)

  • Documents (13)

Documents
  • Circa 12,000-Year-Old Fiber Technologies in the Atacama Desert (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Camila Alday.

    This is an abstract from the "The Archaeobotany of Early Peopling: Plant Experimentation and Cultural Inheritance" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Plants have been used for making fabrics for thousands of years (Hardy 2007; Hardy et al. 2020; Hurcombe 2008; Kvavadze et al. 2009, Nadel et al. 1994), and many species have been gathered and eventually cultivated for this purpose (Barber 1992; Gleba and Harris 2019; Rast-Eicher et al. 2021). Evidence...

  • Domestic Space and Food Production in the Mesoamerican Neotropics During the Early Holocene (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Robinson. Keith Prufer. Nadia Neff. Richard George. Douglas Kennett.

    This is an abstract from the "The Archaeobotany of Early Peopling: Plant Experimentation and Cultural Inheritance" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Discussions on the peopling of the tropics have tended to characterize tropical forests as barriers to early human foragers due to the difficulties in obtaining sufficient nutrition from hunting and foraging activities. New research on these pioneering settlers is transforming our understanding of...

  • Early and Middle Holocene Food Choices, Farming, and Diet Quality in the Neotropical Maya Area (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Keith Prufer. Dolores Piperno. Nadia Neff. Mark Robinson. Douglas Kennett.

    This is an abstract from the "The Archaeobotany of Early Peopling: Plant Experimentation and Cultural Inheritance" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Despite a century of research into the lives and diets of the northern neotropics’ earliest populations, our understanding of food production and consumption and its impact on diet quality remains relatively impoverished. We present a first view of data generated from archaeological sites in the Maya...

  • Early Plant Food Use and Processing: Insights from Madjedbebe Rockshelter, Northern Australia (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only S. Anna Florin. Andrew Fairbairn. May Nango. Djaykuk Djandjomerr. Chris Clarkson.

    This is an abstract from the "The Archaeobotany of Early Peopling: Plant Experimentation and Cultural Inheritance" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A broad spectrum diet, including the exploitation of a variety of wild plant foods, has historically been considered a pre-cursor to the origins of agriculture. However, increasing evidence globally points to the use of a range of plant foods, including seeds and underground storage organs, by...

  • Early Social Life of Andean Tuber and Seed Domestication (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Christine A. Hastorf. Maria Bruno. Alejandra Domic. José Capriles.

    This is an abstract from the "The Archaeobotany of Early Peopling: Plant Experimentation and Cultural Inheritance" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture initiated fundamental changes in the way people interacted with plant communities in areas beyond their places of origin. The South American Andes is one domestication center that provided two of the world’s most important crops: potatoes and...

  • Early Use of High-Altitude Tubers in the Eastern Cordillera of Colombia (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Sonia Archila Montanez. Martha Mejía Cano.

    This is an abstract from the "The Archaeobotany of Early Peopling: Plant Experimentation and Cultural Inheritance" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper we discuss the importance of high-altitude tubers to early peopling of northern Andean area of South America and their role in the colonization of environments like Bogota plain that resulted in different ways of inhabiting and transforming the region during the early and middle Holocene....

  • From the Mountains to the Sea: A Deep-Time Perspective on the Heritage of Foods in Papua New Guinea (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Fairbairn. Glenn Summerhayes. Matthew Leavesley. Sue O'Connor.

    This is an abstract from the "The Archaeobotany of Early Peopling: Plant Experimentation and Cultural Inheritance" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Papua New Guinea’s (PNG) geography ranges from the high alpine mountains of its Highland provinces to remote oceanic islands and is home to a diverse spectrum of subsistence practices, most notably intensive tuber-focused horticulture, but also arboriculture and polycultures featuring many endemic...

  • Mapping Heat: Pinpointing Early Human Interactions with Chili Pepper in Mexico (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine Chiou. Araceli Aguilar-Meléndez. Christine Hastorf. Andrés Lira-Noriega. Emiliano Gallaga Murrieta.

    This is an abstract from the "The Archaeobotany of Early Peopling: Plant Experimentation and Cultural Inheritance" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Our project investigates the origins and domestication pathways of the Mesoamerican chili pepper (Capsicum annuum var. annuum L.). Undertaken by an interdisciplinary team and relying on a tripartite methodological framework, this study employs morphometric analyses of extant and archaeological Capsicum...

  • The Origins of Amazonian Cuisine: Archaeobotanical Study of Hunter-Gatherer Subsistence Systems in Limoncillos, Colombia (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only J. Julian Garay-Vazquez. Gaspar Morcote-Rios. Francisco Javier Aceituno. Mark Robinson. José Iriarte.

    This is an abstract from the "The Archaeobotany of Early Peopling: Plant Experimentation and Cultural Inheritance" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Previously, it was thought that Amazonian Rainforests presented a barrier for the early colonists of the South American continent. Moreover, these environments were regarded as having few sources of calories and were not inhabited until food production systems were established by humans elsewhere. Recent...

  • Prehistoric Hunter-Gatherer Plant Food Use in the Northern Zagros: New Evidence from Carbonized Plant Macro-remains (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Ceren Kabukcu.

    This is an abstract from the "The Archaeobotany of Early Peopling: Plant Experimentation and Cultural Inheritance" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Research on plant remains over the past two decades increasingly point to the importance of plant foods in Paleolithic hunter-gatherer subsistence. In this paper I will present recent results of archaeobotanical research on carbonized plant macro-remains from late-Middle, Upper Paleolithic and...

  • Transported Landscapes and Globalized Foodways in the Settlement of Western Indian Ocean Islands (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Alison Crowther. Chantal Radimilahy. Tabibou Ali Tabibou. Mark Horton. Nicole Boivin.

    This is an abstract from the "The Archaeobotany of Early Peopling: Plant Experimentation and Cultural Inheritance" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Food is often used as a marker of social and cultural identity, reflecting deeply embedded traditions of taste, technology, and social relations. Crops that moved as part of migration and resettlement processes thereby often played more than an economic role, being central to the creation and negotiation...

  • Use of Introduced and Native Plants by Early Humans in the Japanese Archipelago (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Hiroo Nasu.

    This is an abstract from the "The Archaeobotany of Early Peopling: Plant Experimentation and Cultural Inheritance" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents recent archaeobotanical findings on the use of plants by early humans in the Japanese archipelago. The first humans arrived in the Japanese archipelago about 38,000 years ago. Although there are not many archaeobotanical records from this period, pine seeds, hazelnuts, and acorns have...

  • Vegeculture Agriculture in the Ethiopian Highlands: The Archaeobotany of Enset (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Cristina Castillo. Dorian Fuller.

    This is an abstract from the "The Archaeobotany of Early Peopling: Plant Experimentation and Cultural Inheritance" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Although Ethiopia is remembered for famines in recent decades, the zone of vegecultural agriculture in the southwest has largely avoided food insecurity. Here agricultural systems are usually centered on Ensete ventrocosum, a tree-like vegecultural starch crop, an endemic staple food for 20 million...