In the Garden: Studies in the American Neotropics

Summary

Gardens are spaces where households grow plants for food, medicine, and beauty. They provide subsistence as well as economic benefits. However, gardens are more than just economically functional. Gardens are also spaces where families interact and children are socialized, gender and status are negotiated, and ancestral memories are maintained. Archaeologically, soil chemistry, archaeobotany, and spatial analysis have enabled us to identify the locations of gardens, but addressing more anthropologically oriented questions is necessary to situate these important spaces within the household.

This presentation will discuss the history of garden studies in the American Neotropics, how archaeologists have refined their methods in identification and analysis, and how they have attempted to address more theoretical and anthropological questions. I will then present both ethnographic and archaeological data from the Precolumbian Maya site of Chan in Belize, the contemporary Lacandon Maya community of Lake Mensabak in Chiapas, Mexico, and several Precolumbian sites in Gurupá and Caxiuanã, Brazil to demonstrate how we can move beyond questions of identification to discussions of meaning.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 21884