Living Plants and Animals as an Archaeological Resource

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Current Research on Virginia Plantations: Reexamining Historic Landscapes" , at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Living things have much to tell archaeologists. This paper will discuss ongoing research on the ways living things can be approached archaeologically, with case studies drawn from historic landscapes in Virginia. Living plants and animals can be considered as individual artifacts, as landscape-scale systems, and as analogs for populations that are no longer extant. By a combination of these approaches, living plants and animals have the potential to inform a wide range of archaeological scholarship. Two case studies are presented from Virginia, one describing vegetation survey in a wooded landscape and one examining modern sheep populations to better understand eighteenth-century sheep. These techniques can provide valuable new information that is not accessible by traditional archaeological methods.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Current Research on Virginia Plantations: Reexamining Historic Landscapes   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2022

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology