Vegeculture Agriculture in the Ethiopian Highlands: The Archaeobotany of Enset

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.

Although Ethiopia is remembered for famines in recent decades, the zone of vegecultural agriculture in the southwest has largely avoided food insecurity. Here agricultural systems are usually centered on Ensete ventrocosum, a tree-like vegecultural starch crop, an endemic staple food for 20 million people. Our current research combines archaeobotanical work with genetics and ethnographic work with colleagues from Royal Botanic Gardens Kew and at UCL Institute of Archaeology. This paper provides the first results of an archaeobotanical methodology to identify Ensete and infer its domestication and evolution through a focus on phytoliths. Fifty enset leaf samples, including wild and cultivated landraces, have been processed to compare phytolith extraction methodologies, phytolith variation, and morphometric traits, offering new criteria for separating Ensete and recognizing variation related to plant part, growth environment, and domestication.

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)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39880.0