Karen Adams and Early Agricultural Period Research: A Synthetic Approach Using Niche Construction Theory

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Enduring Relationships: People, Plants, and the Contributions of Karen R. Adams" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In the last 30 years Early Agricultural period research has documented a series of substantial early farming settlements in four river valleys: the Santa Cruz in the Tucson Basin, the Río Boquilla at La Playa in northern Sonora, the Río Casas Grandes in northern Chihuahua, and the Upper Gila River in southeastern Arizona. These four valleys can be viewed as part of a larger Early Agricultural Period Riverine Phenomenon. Karen Adams’s collaborations with us and other teams have played a critical role in developing this rich record. We use these data to argue that the developments in these four valleys are consistent with niche construction theory as outlined by Bruce Smith and Melinda Zeder. We briefly review these four cases, and suggest that niche construction theory is a useful, but incomplete, framework for understanding these processes. We conclude by showing that Karen Adams's thoughtful and meticulous paleobotanical contributions were fundamental to a new understanding of these watershed developments in the archaeology of Northwest Mexico and the US Southwest.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)   •
• Enduring Relationships: People, Plants, and the Contributions of Karen R. Adams

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39208.0