Archaeophycology: New (Ethno)Archaeological Approaches to Understand the Contribution of Seaweed to the Subsistence and Social Life of Coastal Populations

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Archaeophycology: New (Ethno)Archaeological Approaches to Understand the Contribution of Seaweed to the Subsistence and Social Life of Coastal Populations" at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Seaweeds have been occasionally documented in archaeological sites with outstanding preservation conditions, and though they have received minor attention from an archaeological perspective, coastal archaeology is heightening interest in these resources as a significant portion of the archaeological record of coastal areas that might be systematically dismissed. To the scarce historical information and their poor preservation, we might add theoretical and ideological aspects that result in the invisibilization of these resources (such as their current use by Indigenous societies). Furthermore, many coastal environments (such as the Arctic or coastal deserts) exhibit poor terrestrial plant production, which may result in an increased consumption of seaweeds, a unique, valuable, ubiquitous, and low-risk resource. Seaweed foraging practices constitute the expression of the continuity of a gathering way of life deeply rooted in coastal environments, thus traditional ecological knowledge related to seaweeds is essential for evaluating harvesting methods and their potential uses today. This symposium aims to provide an overview of the current state of a field focused on seaweeds, including several approaches ranging from contributions concerning all the different methodologies that can be used to detect seaweeds in the archaeological record or experimental archaeology to cross-cultural ethnographic approaches.