The Forest Foods of Ancient Arenal, Costa Rica

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Beyond Maize and Cacao: Reflections on Visual and Textual Representation and Archaeological Evidence of Other Plants in Precolumbian Mesoamerica" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Paleoethnobotanical investigations at two different domestic structures in Arenal, Costa Rica, reveal the plant resources utilized by past peoples living in this volcanically active setting from 1500 BCE to 600 CE. Over 100 different genera of trees have been recovered and identified between the two sites, over half of which produce edible fruits, leaves, or vegetative material. These results demonstrate that the people of ancient Arenal were knowledgeable arboriculturalists who did not rely heavily on agriculture for their subsistence practices and would have been able to collect from a variety of trees for their subsistence needs. While cacao is a prominent tree within the wood charcoal assemblage at both sites, other notable fruit trees include achiote, avocado, cashew, cherry/plum, fig, guava, hogplum/jocote, mamey, nance, palms, ramon, sapodilla, and soursop/guanabana. Trees would have been able to withstand minor volcanic eruptions, whereas low-lying vegetation such as milpa agricultural fields would not have survived such conditions. The macrobotanical results suggest that the ancient inhabitants employed mixed strategies for subsistence and may have preferred food resources that would have remained accessible during times of ecological stress.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Beyond Maize and Cacao: Reflections on Visual and Textual Representation and Archaeological Evidence of Other Plants in Precolumbian Mesoamerica   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37756.0