Food Production in the Borderlands: Paleoethnobotanical Investigations of the Western Basin Tradition in Ontario

Summary

This paper presents the results of a paleoethnobotanical analysis of the early Late Woodland (A.D. 1000–1300) Western Basin Tradition (WBT) sites informally known as the Arkona Cluster. Relatively little is known about WBT human-plant interaction as compared to their maize-bean-squash cultivating Iroquoian neighbors. Culture-historical models of the WBT are proving to be outdated, overemphasizing the supposed difference between WBT ‘hunter-gatherer’ subsistence strategies and Iroquoian farming. Recent isotopic analyses have suggested archaeologists have been underestimating the amount of maize consumed among the WBT peoples at this time, and limited excavation and botanical analysis has hindered the revision of our understanding of their subsistence practices. Plant remains from the Arkona Cluster sites, however, show WBT peoples were indeed cultivating maize, calling into question our conceptualization of their food production, landscape construction, and mobility. Paleoethnobotanical methods were employed to elucidate plant-human interaction of these culturally-distinct peoples residing at the periphery of Iroquoian territory and influence. This paper will present macrobotanical data from flotation sampling, as well as micro-fossil (starch grain) data from ceramic and groundstone residues to provide more meaningful cross-cultural comparisons of food production during the early Late Woodland period in Ontario.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 20730