Dryland Foraging and Resilience in the Archaic Period at San Esteban Rockshelter, SW Texas: Phytolith Perspectives

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.

Recent excavations at San Esteban Rockshelter in the Chihuahuan Desert of SW Texas have revealed a long history of occupation beginning early in the Paleoindigenous period through Early and Late Archaic periods. This deep-time sequence offers the possibility of tracking human plant foraging practices from the Late Pleistocene through the Holocene, a timeframe which was characterized by dramatic changes in climate from a cool/moist Younger Dryas and early Holocene to a hot/dry mid-Holocene Altithermal, and then a return to cooler-moister conditions in the late Holocene. The rich phytolith record at the site has yielded evidence for plant use that demonstrates the resilience of pre-agricultural populations in this region throughout these episodes of environmental change. Phytolith evidence shows extensive use of wetland, woodland, and grassland resources, as well as exploitation of wild millets, indicating a complex pattern of foraging and long-term traditions in ecological knowledge.

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): 52005