Tubers, Grain, and Everything In Between: Mesoamerican Applications of Dolores Piperno’s Research

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Fryxell Symposium in Honor of Dolores Piperno" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Over the past several decades, Dolores Piperno has made broad contributions to archaeology and deep contributions to paleoethnobotany. Her published work includes studies on the origins of agriculture in the Neotropics, the presence of cooked plants in Neanderthal diets, the process of domestication, the use of wild cereals in the Upper Paleolithic, the use of horticulture in Central America, the anthropogenic changes in vegetation at Amazonian sites, and the dispersals of various cultigens including chiles, squashes, rice, and root and tuber crops. Her methodological advancements and historical reconstructions have made their way into a network of researchers spanning six continents and several academic generations. In the first part of this paper, I track the impacts of Piperno’s research across various fields, including her collaborations with paleoanthropologists, soil scientists, historians, and geneticists. In the second part of the paper, I focus on Piperno’s work with food residues, describing some of my own findings from microbotanical analyses in southeastern Mesoamerica. The analysis of microbotanical residues has revealed a world of plant use—including roots and tubers—usually invisible through other means. Such studies are transforming the way we think about agricultural practice and relationships with the landscape—as well as ancient cuisine.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Fryxell Symposium in Honor of Dolores Piperno   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35712.0