Ancient Plants and People: Contemporary Trends in Archaeobotany - Softcover

9780816533602: Ancient Plants and People: Contemporary Trends in Archaeobotany

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0816533601 ISBN 13: 9780816533602

Publisher: University of Arizona Press, 2016

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 both a public and a 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 by 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.

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Book Description:

Plant remains recovered from archaeological sites provide precious insight on past landscapes, human adaptation to climate change, the relationship between human groups and their environment, as well as food production, distribution, preparation and consumption. These, in turn, bring to light important aspects of past human societies, widening the spectrum of information available to archaeologists to understand our history as a biological and cultural species. With the answers, however, often come more questions and the need for better knowledge. As a result of this very engaging and dialectic research environment, archaeobotanists are incessantly pushed to reflect on the methodological and theoretical aspects of their discipline.

With Ancient Plant and People we would like to provide a wide-angle perspective on archaeobotanical novel research from around the world. The book explores up-to-date discussion on methodological issues, large debates on plant utilization in hunter-gatherers and agriculturalists and the diverse research themes in archaeobotany, from ancient DNA to phytoliths and carbonised remains.

Ancient Plant and People is intended for a wide audience, from undergraduate students in Archaeology, Anthropology and Geography to scholars and students of the Plant Sciences with an interest in long-term environmental change and economic Botany. This book is also intended as a reference guide for professional archaeologists and anthropologists.

About the Author:

Marco Madella is an ICREA research professor in environmental archaeology at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra and at the IMF—Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) in Barcelona, and he has been director of studies in archaeology and anthropology at St. Edmund’s College (Cambridge).

Carla Lancelotti is a researcher at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona.

Manon Savard is a professor of geography and archaeology at the Universit� du Qu�bec � Rimouski, where she is a founding member of a laboratory of archaeology and heritage.

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