Enduring Relationships: People, Plants, and the Contributions of Karen R. Adams

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 "Enduring Relationships: People, Plants, and the Contributions of Karen R. Adams" at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This symposium honors the outstanding research and mentorship contributions of Dr. Karen R. Adams in archaeology, paleoethnobotany, and the plant sciences. Dr. Adam’s broad research contributions include significant work on archaeobotanical sample collection and analysis techniques, interdisciplinary work on Indigenous maize landraces, and influential work on the cultivation, domestication, and movement of plants native to the US Southwest and Northwest Mexico. For nearly five decades, she has been at the forefront of analyzing and interpreting diverse archaeological plant remains, the results of which are reported in nearly 150 peer-reviewed publications and hundreds of technical reports. Beyond this, Dr. Adams has also excelled as a mentor to young scholars, particularly in her role guiding and training three decades of environmental interns in paleoethnobotanical methods and interpretation at the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center in southwestern Colorado. In this session, colleagues and former students present research and applied work inspired by and celebrating Dr. Adam’s unparalleled career.

Other Keywords
Paleoethnobotany • Subsistence and Foodways • Ancestral Pueblo • Maize • History Of Archaeology • Early Agriculture • Archaic • Mississippian • ancient DNA • Niche construction

Geographic Keywords
United States of America (Country) • North America (Continent) • USA (Country) • New Mexico (State / Territory) • Oklahoma (State / Territory) • Arizona (State / Territory) • Texas (State / Territory) • Sonora (State / Territory) • Chihuahua (State / Territory) • Baja California (State / Territory)

Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-9 of 9)

  • Documents (9)
Documents
  • Ancient Genomics Is Archaeobiology (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Kelly Swarts.

    This is an abstract from the "Enduring Relationships: People, Plants, and the Contributions of Karen R. Adams" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeo- or paleoethnobiology is the study of how humans interact with their environment; the most extreme and intimate expression of this relationship is domestication. Domesticates are not only a biological organism, with their own unique evolutionary trajectories that they bring into domestication, but...

  • Archaeobotany Foodscapes (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Susan Smith.

    This is an abstract from the "Enduring Relationships: People, Plants, and the Contributions of Karen R. Adams" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. There is more than one way to gain insight about past Native American use of plants. The conventional approach is to collect archaeobotanical samples during archaeological excavations. Another perspective is to inventory the environments surrounding sites and communities to understand the foodscape that...

  • The Black Burned Bits of Prehistory: A Celebration of Dr. Karen R. Adams (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Oas. R. J. Sinensky.

    This is an abstract from the "Enduring Relationships: People, Plants, and the Contributions of Karen R. Adams" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper provides a brief overview of Karen Adams’s career and contributions, with a special emphasis on her extensive research and her legacy as a mentor to decades of junior scholars and budding archaeobotanists. Dr. Adams’s investigations into the long history of people-plant relationships in the US...

  • Goin’ on Forever: A Retrospective on Karen Adams and Relationships with Maize (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only R. J. Sinensky. Sarah Oas.

    This is an abstract from the "Enduring Relationships: People, Plants, and the Contributions of Karen R. Adams" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For over three decades Dr. Karen R. Adams has been at the forefront of research on the origins and long-term evolution of maize (Zea mays subsp. mays) in the US Southwest and northwestern Mexico. Dr. Adams has approached untangling the complex and oft convoluted histories of maize in a collaborative and...

  • Human-Environment Research at the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center: The Legacy of Dr. Karen R. Adams (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Susan Ryan.

    This is an abstract from the "Enduring Relationships: People, Plants, and the Contributions of Karen R. Adams" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Initiated by Dr. William Lipe and Ian (Sandy) Thompson in the late 1980s, the goals of the Environmental Archaeology Program at the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center are to study the effects of human occupations on the natural environment, how people socially mediate environmental change, and to contribute...

  • Karen Adams and Early Agricultural Period Research: A Synthetic Approach Using Niche Construction Theory (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Hard. John Roney.

    This is an abstract from the "Enduring Relationships: People, Plants, and the Contributions of Karen R. Adams" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the last 30 years Early Agricultural period research has documented a series of substantial early farming settlements in four river valleys: the Santa Cruz in the Tucson Basin, the Río Boquilla at La Playa in northern Sonora, the Río Casas Grandes in northern Chihuahua, and the Upper Gila River in...

  • Karen Adams: Scholar, Collaborator, and Friend (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Suzanne Fish.

    This is an abstract from the "Enduring Relationships: People, Plants, and the Contributions of Karen R. Adams" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Karen Adams richly deserves recognition as a premier, foundational Southwest archaeobotanist, a status personally and professionally celebrated by the organizers of today’s session in her honor and by her past term as President of the Society of Ethnobiology. Few other researchers in the field approach her...

  • Keeping Up Productivity: Persistence of "Lost" Crops in the Trans-Mississippi South (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Gayle Fritz.

    This is an abstract from the "Enduring Relationships: People, Plants, and the Contributions of Karen R. Adams" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Most crops in the Eastern Agricultural Complex were no longer members of Native American farming systems when Europeans first took note. Reasons usually proposed for the fall-off entail advantages of maize over the pre-maize cultigens, with heightened defensibility of close, compact fields being another...

  • Oral Histories of Southwestern Paleoethnobotanists: A Karen Adams and Vorsila Bohrer Appreciation (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Abigail Dockter.

    This is an abstract from the "Enduring Relationships: People, Plants, and the Contributions of Karen R. Adams" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Paleoethnobotany, the study of past relationships between people and plants, rapidly developed new methods and priorities in examining plant remains from archaeological contexts during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Oral histories from two paleoethnobotanical researchers, Dr. Karen...