Archaeobotanical Evidence and Diachronic Changes in Foodways of Indigenous Groups in the Central Coast and San Francisco Bay Regions, California

Summary

The Central Coast and San Francisco Bay regions of California are areas of high climatic, ecological, and indigenous cultural heterogeneity. During the last two decades, archaeobotanical research in these regions has begun to document the contributions of botanical resources in indigenous foodways systems through time. In the San Francisco Bay Area, a large number of anthropogenic shell mounds were population aggregation sites used for thousands of years, and, for the period after ca. 1050 CE, archaeological evidence indicates increased sedentism and sociopolitical complexity among Bay Area groups. Elsewhere on the Central Coast, these attributes are not as apparent. By the onset of Spanish colonization in the late 18th century, indigenous peoples in both of these regions employed fire-based landscape management practices that transformed vegetation structure over large areas. This paper presents an overview of the current state of archaeobotanical research in the two regions, describes how archaeobotanical data contributes to research on changing foodways and sociopolitical systems, and considers how archaeobotanical data may make greater contributions to these topics through future research.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• The Evolution of Intensive Plant Use by Complex Hunter-Gatherers: Archaeobotanical Records from California

Keywords

Spatial Coverage