New Perspectives on the use of Yucca in the arid Southwest: archaeobotany and experiment

Summary

Macrofloral analysis conducted on sites concentrated in the northwestern Permian Basin (southeastern New Mexico) recovered evidence of charred yucca (Yucca sp.) leaf bases in numerous features. Ethnographically various yucca plant parts are mainly associated with fiber and food processing. The presence of these remains in solitary hearth features distributed on the arid landscape of southeastern New Mexico suggests use of these plants simply as tinder. Yucca plants represent a natural and easily accessible element in this environment. Experimental burning of whole yucca plants was carried out to better understand the ignition properties of dry yuccas and to identify charred plant remains that would be common in the archaeological record. In addition, scanning electron microscope imagery was used to compare the microscopic anatomy of archaeological and modern yucca reference materials. Results of this study were plotted, using GIS, on the landscape to show distribution of these remains compared to all of the feature samples examined within the project area. In addition, hundreds of AMS radiocarbon dates on charred yucca leaf bases and other remains from features that contained charred yucca also were obtained, indicating burning this common native plant by people crossing this landscape consistently for a few thousand years.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Anthropic activity markers: archaeology and ethnoarchaeology   •
• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage