Plants, Animals and People Archaeobiology Discussion Group

2013/2014, our fourth year, will hopefully start up in September! Meetings are 1st and 3rd Tuesdays of the month.

May 21, 2013 [origins of agriculture, Near East]

Asouti, Eleni and Dorian Fuller
2013 A Contextual Approach to the Emergence of Agriculture in Southwest Asia Reconstructing Early Neolithic Plant-Food Production. Current Anthropology 54(3), no pagination yet. [on line]

May 7, 2013 [cancelled due to Jury Duty]

April 16, 2013 [phytoliths]

Shillito, Lisa-Marie
2013 Grains of truth or transparent blindfolds? A review of current debates in archaeological phytolith analysis. Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 22(1): 71-82. [on line]

April 2, 2013 [cancelled due to SAA, Honolulu!]

March 19, 2013 [transition to agriculture: US Southwest]

Roth, Barbara J. and Andrea Freeman
2008 The Middle Archaic Period and the Transition to Agriculture in the Sonoran Desert of Southern Arizona. Kiva 73(3): 312-353. [on line]

March 5, 2013 [Thailand]

Weber, Steve, Heather Lehman, Timothy Barela, Sean Hawks, David Harriman
2010 Rice or millets: early farming strategies in prehistoric central Thailand. Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences 2(2): 79-88. [on line]

February 19, 2013 [pig domestication]

Ottoni, Claudio, Linus Girdland Flink, Allowen Evin, Christina Geörg, Bea De Cupere, Wim Van Neer, László Bartosiewicz, Anna Linderholm, Ross Barnett, Joris Peters, Ronny Decorte, Marc Waelkens, Nancy Vanderheyden, Françis-Xavier Ricaut, Canan Çkırlar, Özlem Çevik, A. Rus Hoelzel, Marjan Mashkour, Azadeh Fatemeh Mohaseb Karimlu, Shiva Sheikhi Seno, Julie Daujat, Fiona Brock, Ron Pinhasi, Hitomi Hongo, Miguel Perez-Enciso, Morten Rasmussen, Laurent Frantz, Hendrik-Jan Megens, Richard Crooijmans, Martien Groenen, Benjamin Arbuckle, Nobert Benecke, Una Strand Vidarsdottir, Joachim Burger, Thomas Cucchi, Keith Dobney, and Greger Larson
2013 Pig Domestication and Human-Mediated Dispersal in Western Eurasia Revealed through Ancient DNA and Geometric Morphometrics. Molecular Biology and Evolution [on line]

February 5, 2013 [staple finance]

D'Altroy, Terence N. and Christine A. Hastorf
1984 The Distribution and Contents of Inca State Storehouses in the Xauxa Region of Peru. American Antiquity 49: 334-349 [on line]

January 15, 2013 [Göbekli]

Peters, Joris and Klaus Schmidt
2004 Animals in the symbolic world of Pre-Pottery Neolithic Göbekli Tepe, south- eastern Turkey: a preliminary assessment. Anthropozoologica 39: 179-218. [on line]

December 18 [seasonality from teeth]

Henton, Elizabeth
2012 The combined use of oxygen isotopes and microwear in sheep teeth to elucidate seasonal management of domestic herds: the case study of Çatalhöyük, central Anatolia. Journal of Archaeological Science 39(10):3264-3276. [on line]

December 4 [Copan pollen analyses]

Abrams, Elliot M. and David J. Rue
1988 The Causes and Consequences of Deforestation among the Prehistoric Maya. In Human Ecology 16(4): 377-395. [on line]

McNeil, Cameron L., David A. Burney, and Lida Pigott Burney
2010 Evidence disputing deforestation as the cause for the collapse of the ancient Maya polity of Copan, Honduras. In PNAS 107(3): 1017-1022. [on line]

November 13 [niche construction]

Smith, Bruce
2011 A Cultural Niche Construction Theory of Initial Domestication. Biological Theory 6:260-271. DOI 10.1007/s13752-012-0028-4

November 6 [South America camelid domestication]

Moore, Katherine
2012 Early Domesticated Camelids in the Andes. Paper prepared for the 2012 American Anthropological Association meeting.

October 16 [isotopes and transhumance/nomadism]

Mashkour, Marjan, Hervé Bocherens, and Issam Moussa
2005 Long distance movement of sheep and goats of Bakhtiari nomads tracked with intra-tooth variations of stable istoopes (13C and 18O). In Diet and Health in Past Animal Populations, eds. J. Davies, M. Fabis, et al., 113-124

Bentley, R. Alexander and Corina Knipper
Transhumance at the early Neolithic settlement at Vaihingen (Germany). Unpublished Word document.

October 2, 2012 [grease]

Manne, Tiine
2012 Vale Boi, 10,000 Years of Upper Paleolithic Bone Boiling. In The Menial Art of Cooking: Archaeologial Studies of Cooking and Food Preparation, eds. Sarah Graff and Enrique Rondriguez-Alegria. University Press of Colorado, Boulder.

September 18, 2012 [more on storage; see DeBoer 1988 below, too.]

Kuijt, I.
2011 Home is where we keep our food: the origins of agriculture and late pre-pottery Neolithic storage. Paléorient 37.1: 137-152.

May 1, 2012 [origins of agriculture: BSR, OFT, NCT]

Zeder, Melinda A.
2012 The Broad Spectrum Revolution at 40: resource diversity, intensification, and an alternative to optimal foraging explanations. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology online March 2012.

April 17, 2012 [Eurasia]

Lieberman, Victor
2008 Protected rimlands and exposed zones: reconfiguring premodern Eurasia. Comparative Studies in Society and History 50(3): 692-723.

April 3, 2012 [pastoralism]

Outram, Alan K., Alexei Kasparov, Natalie A. Stear, Victor Varfolomeev, Emma Usmanova, and Richard P. Evershed
2012 Patterns of pastoralism in later Bronze Age Kazakhstan: new evidence from faunal and lipid residue analyses Journal of Archaeological Science online Feb. 2012.

March 20, 2012 [millet]

Frachetti, Michael D., Robert N. Spengler, Gayle J. Fritz and Alexei N. Mar'yashev
2011 Earliest direct evidence for broomcorn millet and wheat in the central Eurasian steppe region. Antiquity 84: 993-1010.

Hunt, H.V., M. Vander Linden, X. Liu, G. Motuzaite-Matuzeviciute, S. Colledge, and M.K. Jones
2008 Millets across Eurasia: Chronology and context of early records of the genera Panicum and Setaria from archaeological sites in the Old World. Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 17 (Supplement 1): 5-18. (This one focuses on millet and has more archaeobotanical detail than the March 6 reading.)

March 6, 2012 [Spread of agriculture in Eurasia, focus on starch]

Jones, Martin, Harriet Hunt, Emma Lightfoot, Diane Lister, Xinyi Liu, and Giedre Motuzaite-Matuzeviciute
2011 Food Globalization in Prehistory. World Archaeology 43(4): 665-675.

February 28, 2012 (rescheduled) [Isotopes and birthplace of llamas, Inka]

Knudson, Kelly J. , Kristin R. Gardella, Jason Yaeger
2012 Provisioning Inka feasts at Tiwanaku, Bolivia: the geographic origins of camelids in the Pumapunku complex. Journal of Archaeological Science 39(2):479-491.

February 7, 2012 [Isotopes]

Fiorentino, Girolamo, Valentina Caracuta, Grazia Casiello, Francesco Longobardi and Antonio Sacco
2012 Studying ancient crop provenance: implications from d13C and d15N values of charred barley in a Middle Bronze Age silo at Ebla (NW Syria). Rapid Communications in Mass Spectrometry 26: 327-335.

January 17, 2012 [Agriculture Demographic Transition]

Bocquet-Appel, Jean-Pierre
2011 The Agricultural Demographic Transition During and After the Agriculture Inventions. Current Anthropology 52, S4: S497-S510.

December 6, 2011 [Big History]

November 15, 2011 [storage]

DeBoer, Warren
1988 Subterranean Storage and the Organization of Surplus: The View from Eastern North America. Southeastern Archaeology 7(1): 1-20.

Logan, Amanda and A. Catherine d'Andrea
2011 Oil palm, arboriculture, and changing subsistence practices during Kintampo times (3600-3200 BP, Ghana). doi:10.1016/j.quaint.2010.12.004 Quaternary International (In press at this time: doi:10.1016/j.quaint.2010.12.004)

November 1, 2011 [more early agriculture]

Marshall, Fiona and Lior Weissbrod
2011 Domestication Processes and Morphological Change: Through the Lens of the Donkey and African Pastoralism. Current Anthropology 52, S4: S397-S413.

Logan, Amanda and A. Catherine d'Andrea
2011 Oil palm, arboriculture, and changing subsistence practices during Kintampo times (3600-3200 BP, Ghana). doi:10.1016/j.quaint.2010.12.004 Quaternary International (In press at this time: doi:10.1016/j.quaint.2010.12.004)

October 18, 2011 [more early agriculture]

Larson, Gregor
2011 Genetics and domestication. Important questions and new answers. Current Anthropology 52, S4.

Vigne, Jean-Denis et al.
2011 The Early Process of Mammal Domestication in the Near East. [ Current Anthropology 52, S4

October 4, 2011 [niche construction and early agriculture]

Smith, Bruce D. 2007 Niche construction and the behavioral context of plant and animal domestication. Evolutionary Anthropology 16: 188-199.

Kuijt, Ian and Anna Marie Prentiss
2009 Niche construction, macroevolution, and the Late Epipaleolithic of the Near East. In Macroevolution in Human Prehistory, pp. 253-271, eds. A.M. Prentiss et al. Springer Science +Business Media. DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-0682-3_10.

September 13, 2011 [forager food: plants, animals]

Cordain, Loren, Janette Brand Miller, S Boyd Eaton, Neil Mann, Susanne HA Holt and John D Speth
2000 Plant-animal subsistence ratios and macronutrient energy estimations in worldwide hunter-gatherer diets. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 71: 682-692.

Ströhle, Alexander and Andreas Hahn
2011 Diets of modern hunter-gatherers vary substantially in their carbohydrate content depending on ecoenvironments: results from an ethnographic analysis. Nutrition Research 31: 429-435.

April 19, 2011 [food and evolution; last meeting of the academic year]

Monge, Janet M.
in press If there is food, we will eat: an evolutionary and global perspective on human diet and nutrition.

April 5, 2011 [early agriculture]

Bowles, Samuel
2011 Cultivation of cereals by the first farmers was not more productive than foraging. PNAS 108(12):4760-4765.

March 1 and March 15, 2011 [starch]

Zarrillo, Sonia, Deborah M. Pearsall, J. Scott Raymond, Mary Ann Tisdale, and Dugane J. Quon
2008 Directly dated starch residues document early formative maize (Zea mays L.) in tropical Ecuador. PNAS 105(13):5006-5011

Perry, Linda, Ruth Dickau, Sonia Zarrillo, Irene Holst, Deborah M. Pearsall, Dolores R. Piperno, Mary Jane Berman, Richard G. Cooke, Kurt Rademaker, Anthony J. Ranere, J. Scott Raymond, Daniel H. Sandweiss, Franz Scaramelli, Kay Tarble, James A. Zeidler
2007 Starch fossils and the domestication and dispersal of chili peppers (Capsicum spp. L.) in the Americas. Science 315:986-988.

Henry, Amanda G., Alison S. Brooks, and Dolores R. Piperno
2011? Microfossils in calculus demonstrate consumption of plants and cooked foods in Neanderthal diets (Shanidar III, Iraq; Spy I and II, Belgium).PNAS Early Edition

February 15, 2011 [irrigation]

Spooner, Brian
1974 Irrigation and Society. The Iranian Plateau. In Irrigation's Impact on Society, eds. T.E. Downing and M.Gibson, pp. 43-57. Anthropological Papers of the University of Arizona 25. University of Arizona Press, Tucson.

Another possibility, though more detailed, is Brian's article in the Encyclopedia Iranica on irrigation: abyari

February 1, 2011 [residue analysis]

Evershed, Richard P.
2008 Organic residue analysis in archaeology: the archaeological biomarker revolution. Archaeometry 50(6): 895-924. Available online

January 18, 2011 [Jacques Cauvin and the Origins of Agriculture]

Miller, Naomi F.
2011 Questions raised by Naissance des divinités / naissance d'agriculture. [draft submitted to Paléorient
Now published as: 2011 Reconciling Nature and Culture after Naissance des divinités / naissance d'agriculture. Paléorient 37.1: 61-74. [Download pdf]

December 7, 2010 [Natufian feasting]

Munro, Natalie and Leore Grosman
2010 Early evidence (ca. 12,000 B.P.) for feasting at a burial cave in Israel. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 107(35): 15362-66. online

Olszewski, Deborah I.
2010 On the margins: Early Natufian in the Wadi al-Hasa region, Jordan. Eurasian Prehistory 7:89-101.

November 16, 2010 [starch]

Revedin, A., B. Aranguren, R. Becattini, L. Longo, E. Marconi, M.M. Lippi, N. Skakun, A. Sinitsyn, E. Spiridonova, and J. Svoboda
2010 Thirty thousand-year-old evidence of plant food processing. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 107(44): 18815-19. online

Dolores R. Piperno, Ehud Weiss, Irene Holst and Dani Nadel
2004 Processing of wild cereal grains in the Upper Palaeolithic revealed by starch grain analysis. Nature 430: 670-673. online

Wilson, Julie, Karen Hardy, Richard Allen, Les Copeland, Richard Wrangham and Matthew Collins
2010 Automated classification of starch granules using supervised pattern recognition of morphological properties. Journal of Archaeological Science 37(3):594-604.

November 2, 2010 [cultural meaning of animals]

Shipman, Pat
2010 The Animal Connection and Human Evolution. Current Anthropology 51:519-538. online

Leach, Edmund
1964 Anthropological Aspects of Language: Animal Categories and Verbal Abuse. In New Directions in the Study of Language, ed. E. H. Lenneberg, pp. 23-63. MIT Press, Cambridge.

October 19, 2010 [cultural meaning of animals and domestication]

Marciniak, Arkadiusz
2008 Communities, households and animals. Convergent developments in Central Anatolian and Central European Neolithic. Documenta Praehistorica XXXV: 93-109.

October 5, 2010 [origins of agriculture]

Smith, Bruce D.
2001 Low-Level Food Production. Journal of Archaeological Research 9: 1-43.

Zeder, Melinda A. and Bruce D. Smith
2009 A Conversation on Agricultural Origins Talking Past Each Other in a Crowded Room. Current Anthropology 50: 681-691. online

Christian, David: Big History
online

September 21, 2010-Organizational meeting


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