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Many studies over the past few decades have demonstrated the importance of using multiple lines of data when studying ancient plant use in a given region. This is especially true in the humid tropics, where plant taxonomic diversity is high and organic preservation is often poor due to accelerated rates of biological and chemical decay. The post-depositional preservation of each major type of botanical...
We outline a method that both incorporates quantitative and qualitative elements and positions ethnoarchaeological analogy at the center of analysis and interpretation. Exploring ethnographic analogs provides models that assist in the articulation of disparate data, such as paleoethnobotanical and zooarchaeological remains, and frameworks for interpretation of stable isotopic results. Our approach...
For pragmatic reasons, separate specialists usually analyze plant and animal remains recovered in archeological sites. Animal bones and charred plant remains are the products of very different organisms and tissues, fragment differently, and are identified using very different characters (see Peres, this volume; Wright, this volume). Even so, a primary concern of the Taraco Archaeological Project...
Composed largely of mollusc shells resulting from food procurement activities, coastal shell middens have been regarded as valuable sources of information about past human exploitation of coastal and marine resources. It is less widely appreciated that these sites, which lie at the interface between the sea and the land, have significant potential to inform us about the terrestrial environment and...
The subsistence practices of early hunter-gatherers are predominantly presented with a familiar gloss: hunters primarily targeted larger game, while gatherers collected available wild plant foods. This treatment obscures the wide variation of foraging practices in which early hunter-gatherers engaged, both in terms of tactics employed and in terms of the resources used. Much of this gloss can be attributed...
In the Old World, the contribution of paleoethnobotanical and zooarchaeological studies tends to be better appreciated in prehistoric rather than historic archaeology. In the absence of written information, using plant and animal remains in the reconstruction of the natural environment and its culturally idiosyncratic forms of exploitation is of evident significance. Given the different taphonomic...
The many case studies in this volume have addressed the integration of plant and animal data in myriad ways. As the final case study, this chapter picks up where the methods chapter on multivariate analysis left off (VanDerwarker, Chapter 5, this volume; see also Hollenbach and Walker, this volume), using principle components analysis to consider the covariation of paleoethnobotanical and zooarchaeological...
We first met in 2004, a pivotal time in both our careers. We had both recently finished our PhD work (Peres in 2001 at the University of Florida, VanDerwarker in 2003 at the University of North Carolina), we were both actively searching for academic jobs, and we were both incredibly serious about holistic approaches to food and diet. We began our earnest conversation in the small village of Tres...
The main goal of zooarchaeology, as a specialty within archaeology, is to interpret human and environment interactions based primarily on the animal remains recovered from archaeological sites. This chapter is not meant to be a comprehensive text on zooarchaeology; rather it is a guide to some of the analytical methods and terminology that are used commonly by practitioners of zooarchaeology. While...
This chapter summarizes the current perspectives on paleoethnobotany, and the methods and techniques involved in the analysis of archaeological plant remains. The topic is not new, and for nearly three quarters of a century, paleoethnobotanists have not only contributed substantially to a broad range of archaeological questions, but have also complied detailed guides and summaries of state-of-the-art...
Numerous simple measures are available for integrating both archaeological plant and animal data. It is difficult to provide a complete coverage of all these measures in this chapter for lack of space (for further reading see Grayson 1984; Hastorf and Popper 1988; Reitz and Wing 2008). Hence, the focus is on simple yet common measures that can be used to characterize both types of data, producing...
Multivariate analyses, such as correspondence analysis (CA) and principal components analysis (PCA), have gained prominence in archaeology over the past several decades, with applications to a variety of archaeological datasets, including subsistence data (Hollenbach 2005; VanDerwarker et al. 2007; Whitridge 2001, 2002; see also Hollenbach and Walker, this volume and Peres et al., this volume). These...
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