From Maize Presence to Maize Incorporation: An Integrated Bioarchaeological Approach for Exploring Early Histories of Maize in the Eastern Woodlands

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Recent research has highlighted the difficulties with identifying the presence of early maize in the bioarchaeological and palaeoethnobotanical records of the Eastern Woodlands. Simon et al. (2021) found that there is no hard evidence of Middle Woodland maize for the region, and the earliest verified maize is now synchronous with the chronological framework outlined by Larsen et al. (1991) based on dental caries data. This paper outlines an integrated exploratory approach using dental caries and carbonate-apatite carbon spacing (δ13Cca-co) data from archaeological bone for investigating early microhistories of maize, focused upon the tidal fresh portion of the James River drainage in coastal Virginia.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 40347.0