Caught Starch and Managed Hearths: Minimally Invasive and Restorative Methods in Gallina Paleoethnobotany

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Advances in Macrobotanical and Microbotanical Archaeobotany, Part II" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Concerns around sampling methodology, size, and adequacy endure in archaeobotany, centered on one persistent question—how much is enough? At the same time, archaeologists in many areas have become increasingly interested in minimally invasive and minimally destructive methods in response to ethical, community, and other research design constraints. How might these preoccupations work together? This paper explores what minimally invasive, less invasive, and restorative field archaeobotany might be, and what these “impact-scaled” methods might be able to say. In other words, how much (and what) are the data gathered using these methods is enough? Taking previous work in survey-based macrobotanical collection as a starting point, I present a pilot effort in incorporating paleoethnobotanical analysis into a broader project in the American Southwest. Focusing on the Gallina region of the Ancestral Pueblo world, I present a catch-and-release survey starch extraction project. Articulated with archival research and macrobotanical samples from both disturbed and intact contexts of a looted site, I consider how these variously invasive collection practices, each suited to specific community and landscape contexts, might work together toward greater archaeobotanical understanding of a relatively under-studied area within a data-rich region.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Advances in Macrobotanical and Microbotanical Archaeobotany, Part II   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39971.0