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

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.