Agitating for Good Outcomes: A New Protocol for Improved Recovery of Floral and Faunal Remains

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Advances in Macrobotanical and Microbotanical Archaeobotany" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Archaeobotanical recovery in environmental settings with heavy clay and gley deposits is often challenging due to the difficuty of processing such sediments by flotation or wet-sieveing. Following good results from an initial experiment to improve visibility of floral and faunal remains in a gley deposit from Late Neolithic deposits at Maliq, Albania, we embarked on systematic experimentation to test a non-incasive method to improve processing times and efficiency for challenging sediments. We tested this method, which uses a new mode of agitation, with both 1) experimental samples prepared in the lab with carbonized seeds and wood and 2) archaeological samples from the late Fort Ancient Hahn Site in southwestern Ohio, which allowed examination of recovery rates for floral and faunal remains. In both cases, the new method provided better recovery with minimal assemblage fragmentation. Significantly, this new method can be easily incorporated into ongoing field recovery systems around the world to improve recovery of floral and faunal remains.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Advances in Macrobotanical and Microbotanical Archaeobotany

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 52628