How Advances in Archaeobotany Benefit Us All: Perspectives from Zooarchaeology, Bioarchaeology, and Isotope 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.

The origin of agriculture in the American tropics drastically altered human societies and their environmental settings. Through the domestication of various plants for subsistence, medicine, and technological purposes, human populations grew and expanded at an unprecedented rate across the landscape from the Middle Holocene onward, spreading and exchanging cultivated species across two continents. Agricultural dependence on crops allowed for the development of sedentism and modification of local ecosystems. These activities affected the local flora, fauna, and even physiological aspects of the humans themselves, as health and demographics shifted in response to changing subsistence strategies. The seminal archaeobotanical work of Dolores Piperno, including her contribution to advancing both methodological and theoretical aspects of the discipline, have had profound implications for how we interpret archaeological data. Here we provide key examples of how Piperno’s work has influenced interdisciplinary studies of human-environment interactions in the American tropics, from the perspective of faunal, isotope, and human osteological analyses.

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): 35588.0