Documenting Domestication 2.0

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Questioning the Fundamentals of Plant and Animal Domestication" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Published in 2006, the edited volume Documenting Domestication: New Genetic and Archaeological Paradigms presented case-study examples of cutting-edge approaches to documenting the domestication of plant and animal species. The twelve years since the publication of this book have seen remarkable advances in our ability to track domestication using archaeobiological, genetic, and archaeological markers. Perhaps more importantly, our understanding of this complicated process has also deepened over this time – how it begins, how it unfolds, and how the pace and direction of domestication varies in different plant and animal species, and in different cultural contexts. This presentation reviews these advances considering first the improvements in defining domestication. It then reviews the range of approaches to documenting its progress in both plants and animals. It stresses the importance of being able to tie individual markers explicitly and exclusively to some aspect of the domestication process. It also emphasizes the value of multi-marker approaches to documenting domestication that bring together genetic, archaeobiological, and archaeological data to monitor the process of domestication in plants and animals.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Questioning the Fundamentals of Plant and Animal Domestication   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23061