New Archaebotany from the Augusta Site, Kentucky, Expands Our Understanding of Fort Ancient Plant Use and Its Role in Mortuary Ritual

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.

Fort Ancient plant use from ca 1000 to 1750 CE is well-understood from numerous sites in the middle Ohio River Valley of Kentucky, Ohio, and Indiana. The Fort Ancient people living on the fringes of Mississippi chiefdoms grew eight-row corn and Phaseolus beans, while deemphasizing nuts and native starchy-oily seeded native cultigens. This plant-use system represents part of an identity that was distinctive from their Mississippian neighbors. Plant remains recently recovered from the Augusta site (Bracken County, Kentucky) diverge from the well-known Fort Ancient plant use profile. At Augusta, an unusual wood charcoal collection is dominated by American elm. The unexpected presence of Midwestern 12 corn, trace amounts of native cultigens, a high ubiquity of Phaseolus beans, an unusually wide range of fleshy fruits, and the appearance of pecan are all consistent with mortuary feasting, where visitors brought, prepared, consumed, and disposed of the remnants of out-of-ordinary foods at a ritual setting. This paper describes and discusses this new archaeobotanical development, specifically how samples from specialized activity contexts can expand our understanding of an ancient Indigenous plant use system.

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): 52847