Plants Are Friends and Food: Reinterpreting Fort Ancient Plant Use through Indigenous Ontologies and Traditional Ecological Knowledge

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Cultivating Food, Land, and Communities" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Paleoethnobotanical analyses over the past several decades have shed light on the subsistence practices, agricultural strategies, and environmental interactions of members of the Fort Ancient culture, an Indigenous society that thrived in the Ohio Valley from the eleventh to the eighteenth centuries. Largely absent from these conversations, however, are discussions of non-comestible uses of plants or considerations of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK). By combining different sources of knowledge, a more holistic view of plant usage by Fort Ancient peoples may be established—one that allows us to better understand relationships between people and plants in the past and present. In this paper, we synthesize the existing literature on Fort Ancient paleoethnobotany and reinterpret patterns that historically have been more grounded in human behavioral ecology approaches of dietary choices and resource management by drawing on perspectives from Native ethnobotanists. We conclude with our goals for a future community-based research program that marshals paleoethnobotanical analysis in the Fort Ancient region in relation to contemporary food sovereignty efforts and ecological reconstructions that have the potential to inform modern conservation protocols.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)   •
• Cultivating Food, Land, and Communities

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39566.0