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5 - “Doing” paleoethnobotany in the tropical lowlands: adaptation and innovation in methodology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 November 2009

Peter W. Stahl
Affiliation:
State University of New York, Binghamton
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Summary

Archaeological research in the New World tropics has many different foci. Investigating the nature of subsistence practices in this diverse region, especially the transition to agriculture, figures prominently among these. However, recovering direct evidence of subsistence (for example, the remains of plants used by people), is a formidable challenge facing archaeologists who work in the neotropics. Preservation of macroremains (seeds, tubers, wood, corn cob fragments and the like) is limited to charred materials in all but the most arid settings. Even when charring occurs, macroremains may be highly fragmented due to expansion and contraction of soils, making their detection and recovery difficult during excavation. The problems of identifying such fragmented materials are rendered more complex by the high species diversity of the tropical flora. This necessitates a large botanical comparative collection and the occasional application of specialized identification techniques, such as scanning electron microscopy (Pearsall 1989).

Problems of preservation, recovery, and identification of botanical remains are not unique to paleoethnobotanists working in the neotropics, but the environments of the moist lowlands seem to “conspire” to create the worse possible conditions for recovering subsistence data. As Mangelsdorf remarked in his review of Agricultural Origins and Dispersals, in which Carl Sauer (1952) proposed the riverine zone of the moist tropical forest as a likely hearth of agricultural origins:

His two principal hearths occur in regions where few archaeological remains have so far been found and where the climate almost precludes the long-time preservation of herbaceous cultigens… Indeed if one sought, as an exercise in imagination, to design a completely untestable theory of agricultural origins and dispersals, it would be difficult to improve upon this one (Mangelsdorf 1953).

Type
Chapter
Information
Archaeology in the Lowland American Tropics
Current Analytical Methods and Applications
, pp. 113 - 129
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1995

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