From the Agricultural to the AI Revolution: Analytical Advances in Paleoethnobotany

Part of: Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "From the Agricultural to the AI Revolution: Analytical Advances in Paleoethnobotany" at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Microbotanical approaches have transformed our understanding of past human relationships with the environment. Recent discoveries have been driven by methodological advances and encompassing novel theories, technologies, computational methods, and statistical approaches. Fine-grained environmental data analyzed at microscopic scales—such as pollen, phytoliths, starch grains, and microcharcoal—are essential to build a more-complete narrative about past, present and future human impacts on the world around us. Innovation in sample collection, extraction, detection, identification and interpretation push the boundaries of what is possible; increased efficiencies counterbalance the time and resource constraints associated with microbotanical studies, while new data sources and analytical scales and approaches can transform how we interpret the past. Posters in this session showcase methodological creativity that thinks outside the box, embracing new technologies and analytical perspectives to highlight novel approaches to overcome universal challenges in archaeological and palaeobotanical research. These include but are not limited to the development and refinement of laboratory protocols, multi-scalar perspectives incorporating microbotanical remains, innovative approaches to build larger datasets and the use of machine learning and artificial intelligence to develop fully-automated sample-to-data pipelines.

Other Keywords
Paleoethnobotany • Phytoliths • Landscape Archaeology • digital archaeology

Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-5 of 5)

  • Documents (5)
Documents
  • Precision and Progress: Using Deep Learning to Identify Wild vs. Domestic Multi-Cell Wheat Phytoliths (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Lachlan Kyle-Robinson.

    This is an abstract from the "From the Agricultural to the AI Revolution: Analytical Advances in Paleoethnobotany" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Distinguishing between wild and domestic cereal remains is central to understanding the adoption of agriculture in the Southern Levant. Phytoliths, robust silica casts of plant cells, are a critical line of evidence for early plant use. Manually identifying phytoliths however, is prone to human error....

  • A Rapid and Reproducible Protocol for Soil Macrocharcoal Analysis (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Javier Ruiz-Pérez.

    This is an abstract from the "From the Agricultural to the AI Revolution: Analytical Advances in Paleoethnobotany" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The study of charcoal fragments preserved in soils and sediments allows us to reconstruct fire histories, enhancing our understanding of past vegetation dynamics and human-plant-fire interactions. However, most existing procedures for charcoal extraction and analysis are incompletely described and hence...

  • Scaling up Phytolith Analysis; A Novel Workflow for the Application of Artificial Intelligence in Large Data Sets (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Kate Dudgeon.

    This is an abstract from the "From the Agricultural to the AI Revolution: Analytical Advances in Paleoethnobotany" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Phytoliths are a key proxy for understanding a wide range of research questions in archaeological and paleoenvironmental research. However, the workflow from phytolith extraction to analysis is time consuming, laborious and costly, constraining sample numbers and the potential of phytoliths to provide...

  • Starch and Phytolith Analysis of Drinking and Cooking Wares from Early Bronze Age IV Tell Qarqur, Syria (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Anne Johnakin.

    This is an abstract from the "From the Agricultural to the AI Revolution: Analytical Advances in Paleoethnobotany" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This project investigates cooking and brewing techniques from Early Bronze Age IV Tell Qarqur using starch and phytolith residue analysis methods. The ceramic samples are from two contexts: Area A: a kitchen with stores of bitter vetch and Area E: a suspected temple site. Both contexts were chosen for...

  • Striking the Perfect Balance: Employing a Hybrid Approach to Rapidly Generate Phytolith Training Data (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Melanie Pugliese.

    This is an abstract from the "From the Agricultural to the AI Revolution: Analytical Advances in Paleoethnobotany" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Manual identification of phytoliths is time consuming and prone to error. Deep Learning (DL) algorithms are transforming this methodology, significantly reducing analysis time and increasing accuracy. However, developing an effective DL workflow to identify phytoliths depends on the manual acquisition...