Early and Middle Holocene Food Choices, Farming, and Diet Quality in the Neotropical Maya Area

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeobotany of Early Peopling: Plant Experimentation and Cultural Inheritance" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Despite a century of research into the lives and diets of the northern neotropics’ earliest populations, our understanding of food production and consumption and its impact on diet quality remains relatively impoverished. We present a first view of data generated from archaeological sites in the Maya Mountains of southern Belize where a decade of research is fundamentally changing how we view early human relationships with food in tropical environments. These data come from dietary isotopes derived from ancient humans and fauna combined with data from microbotanical starch grains extracted from ancient dental calculus and grinding stones as well as modern domesticated and wild edible plants. These data were generated with an emphasis on quality control for dietary proxies. We see evidence for consumption of root crops by 10,000 cal BP and seed, yam, and squash crops by 7500 cal BP, including maize. These developments suggest a protracted period of subsistence farming lasting at least 5,000 years before investments in surplus agricultural production drove major demographic shifts starting after 4000 cal BP.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The Archaeobotany of Early Peopling: Plant Experimentation and Cultural Inheritance   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39716.0