An Examination of Circum-Alpine Lake Dwelling Botanicals at the Milwaukee Public Museum

Summary

The lake dwelling sites of circum-Alpine Europe were discovered by the archaeological community in the mid-19th century and their artifacts were dispersed to museum collections in the United States and Europe. The Milwaukee Public Museum houses one such collection, which includes zoological material, textile fragments, tools, and carbonized botanicals and food. This paper focuses on the collection of plants and food, which come from Robenhausen, a lake-dwelling site south of Zurich. In studying this collection, there are a variety of factors that preclude traditional paleoethnobotanical methods. First, the protocol for handling carbonized botanicals from waterlogged sites is to maintain their moisture content, which is an impossibility in this context. In addition, since these excavations were carried out in the 1800s, artifacts were removed from the site without regard for stratigraphy and excavations were funded through the sale of Lake Dwelling objects, making quantification of these assemblages impossible. This paper examines the Milwaukee Public Museum’s collection of botanical and food remains, given the limitations inherent in the study of waterlogged carbonized material excavated before modern paleoethnobotanical methods were developed. In addition, this paper/poster works toward the development of a methodology that can be applied to similar paleoethnobotanical museum collections.

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): 22639