Ancient Plants and People: Contemporary Trends in Archaeobotany

Description

Mangroves and rice, six-row brittle barley and einkorn wheat. Ancient crops for prehistoric people. What do they have in common? All tell us about the lives and cultures of long ago, as humans cultivated or collected these plants for food. Exploring these and other important plants used for millennia by humans, Ancient Plants and People presents a wide-angle view of the current state of archaeobotanical research, methods, and theories. Food has a public and private role, and it permeates the life of all people in a society. Food choice, production, and distribution probably represent the most complex indicators of social life, and thus a study of foods consumed by ancient peoples reveals many clues about their lifestyles. But in addition to yielding information about food production, distribution, preparation, and consumption, plant remains recovered from archaeological sites offer precious insights on past landscapes, human adaptation to climate change, and the relationship between human groups and their environment. Revealing important aspects of past human societies, these plant-driven insights widen the spectrum of information available to archaeologists as we seek to understand our history as a biological and cultural species. Often answers raise more questions. As a result, archaeobotanists are constantly pushed to reflect on the methodological and theoretical aspects of their discipline. The contributors discuss timely methodological issues and engage in debates on a wide range of topics from plant utilization in hunter-gatherers and agriculturalists to uses of ancient DNA. Ancient Plants and People provides a global perspective on archaeobotanical research, particularly on the sophisticated interplay between the use of plants and their social or environmental context. Cover Title Page, Copyright Contents Acknowledgments Preface Introduction 1. Sample-Size Estimation and Interassemblage Quantification in Archaeobotany 2. Regional Exchanges in Southeastern Arabia during the Late Pre-Islamic Period: Phytolith Analysis of Ceramic Thin Sections from ed-Dur (UAE) 3. Examining Agriculture and Climate Change in Antiquity: Practical and Theoretical Considerations 4. Swahili Urban Food Production: Archaeobotanical Evidence from Pemba Island, Tanzania 5. Plant Food Subsistence in Context: An Example from Epipaleolithic Southwest Anatolia 6. Vegetation Proxy Data and Climate Reconstruction: Examples from West Asia 7. Significance of Prehistoric Weed Floras for the Reconstruction of Relations between Environment and Crop Husbandry Practices in the Near East 8. Historical Aspects of Early Plant Cultivation in the Uplands of Eastern North America 9. Routine Activities, Tertiary Refuse, and Labor Organization: Social Inferences from Everyday Archaeobotany 10. Of Crops and Food: A Social Perspective on Rice in the Indus Civilization 11. Anthracological Research on the Brazilian Coast: Paleoenvironment and Plant Exploitation of Sambaqui Moundbuilders 12. Rice of Asian Origin 13. A Review of the Research on the Origin of Six-Row Barley 14. Maize Cob Phytoliths as Indicators of Genetics and Environmental Conditions Editors and Contributors Index