The Archaeobotany of Early Peopling: Plant Experimentation and Cultural Inheritance

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.