Preliminary Insights into the Biocultural Trajectory of Maize in Southwestern Amazonia

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Subsistence Crops and Animals as a Proxy for Human Cultural Practice" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Mounting archaeobotanical and archaeogenetic data show that the southwestern Amazon region had an important role to play in the history of South American maize dispersal, acting as a “secondary improvement center” for primitive lineages that arrived in the region during the Middle Holocene (>6500 BP). How these people-maize interactions played out over time and space is still unclear due to significant gaps that exist in the archaeological and archaeobotanical evidence, exacerbated by unfavorable organic matter preservation. Meanwhile, the presence of an indigenous maize landrace with unusual primitive traits, endemic to the region, offers a tantalizing testimony to thousands of years of these accumulated interactions. This presentation draws on several lines of evidence to first review what we do and don’t know about maize evolution and its role in the lives and resource management systems of southwestern Amazonian groups. It then offers recent data in the form of phytolith, starch grain, and residue analyses that point to differences in the cultural uses of maize over time—factors likely to have played a role in the biocultural trajectory of this crop.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Subsistence Crops and Animals as a Proxy for Human Cultural Practice   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36502.0