Passing the Paleo Drug Test: Testing for Medicinal Plant Use in the Paleoethnobotanical Record

Summary

For decades, paleoethnobotanical research almost exclusively concentrated on reconstructing past subsistence economies. At 2011’s SAA conference, I presented a paper entitled, Toward A Paleoethnomedicine. I suggested that paleoethnobotanical research should take inspiration from ethnomedicine (a subfield of ethnobotany) and concentrate on analyzing past people’s healing practices and performances. This paper presents a method to operationalize this concept, a technique for analyzing paleoethnobotanical data to detect past medicinal plant usage. The general observations from ethnobotany/ethnomedicine about modern medicinal plant use gives researchers an idea of expected observations in the paleoethnobotanical/ paleoethnomedicine record. A common practice in macrofloral analyses is to calculate the ratio of a plant group (food, nut shell, charcoal etc.) in order to provide evidence of the certain activities at a site. This paper presents a new ratio extrapolated for plant observations from archaeological contexts and includes the results of a pilot study based on the paleoethnobotanical data from Birka and other Late Iron Age/Medieval sites in east central Sweden.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 22447