Plants, Animals and People Archaeobiology Discussion Group

Meetings in 2021/2022, our twelfth year (!) are ordinarily the 1st and 3rd Tuesdays [or Wednesdays, depending] of the month. Pandemic schedule: 11 am-noon, 1st & 3rd Wednesdays.

February 16, 2022 [cuisine and cultivars]

Ritchey, Melissa M., Yufeng Sun, Giedre Motuzaite Matuzeviciute, Shinya Shoda, Anil K. Pokharia, Michael Spate, Li Tang, Jixiang Song, Haiming Li, Guanghui Dong, Petra Vaiglova, Michael Frachetti and Xinyi Liu
2022 The wind that shakes the barley: the role of East Asian cuisines on barley grain size. World Archaeology. DOI: 10.1080/00438243.2022.2030792

February 2, 2022 [canine distemper]

Uhl, Elizabeth W., Charles Kelderhouse, Jane Buikstra, Jeffrey P. Blick, Brad Bolon, and Robert J. Hogan
2019 New World origin of canine distemper: Interdisciplinary insights. International Journal of Paleopathology 24: 266-278.

January 19, 2022 [more stone tools and early agriculture]

Mazzucco, Niccolo
2021 Stones that made food. A lithic viewpoint on food production practices in the early Mediterranean Neolithic. Food and History 19 (1-2): 255-273.

Hamon, Caroline
2021 A revolution in food preparation? Grinding and pounding plants in the first farming communities of Western Europe and the Mediterranean region. Food and History 19 (1-2): 275-298.

December 1, 2021 [stone tools and early agriculture]

Ibáñez-Estévez, Juan J., Patricia C. Anderson, Amaia Arranz-Otaegui, Jesús E. González-Urquijo, Anne Jörgensen-Lindahl, Niccolò Mazzucco, Fiona Pichon, Tobias Richter
2021 Sickle gloss texture analysis elucidates long-term change in plant harvesting during the transition to agriculture. Journal of Archaeological Science 136,105502.

November 17, 2021 [garden archaeology]

Figueiral, Isabel, Pascale Chevillot, Sophie Martin, Sarah Ivorra, Françoise Paone, Elsa Sagetat-Basseuil, Brigitte de Luca, and Josiane Cuzon
2021 (Sub)urban gardens from Provence (Southern France, 14th-17th century) and the presence of Ricinus communis. Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 30: 313-329.

November 3, 2021 [wild, domestic, market sources of animal products]

Zierden, Martha A. and Elizabeth J. Reitz
2009 Animal use and the urban landscape in colonial Charleston, South Carolina, USA International Journal of Historical Archaeology 13(3): 327-365.

October 20, 2021 [rat isotopes & human diet]

Guiry, E. J. and B.C. Gaulton
2016 Inferring human behaviors from isotopic analyses of rat diet: A critical review and historical application. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 23(2): 399-426.

October 6, 2021 [fermented food]

Shoda, Shinya
2021 Seeking Prehistoric Fermented Food in Japan and Korea. Current Anthropology 62 (supp. 24) . (or https://doi.org/10.1086/715808 )

September 22, 2021 [species model for domestication]

Bates, Jennifer
2021 Is domestication speciation? The implications of a messy domestication model in the Holocene. Agronomy 2021, 11, 784.

May 5, 2021 [insects]

Dussault, Frédéric, Allison Bain, and Genevieve LeMoine
2014 Early Thule winter houses: An archaeoentomological analysis. Arctic Anthropology 5: 101-117.

April 21, 2021 [methodology: integrating different data sets]

Heiss, Andreas G. and Hans-Peter Stika
2013 Making the incomparable comparable? A new attempt of the semi-quantitative evaluation of large-scale archaeobotanical data. Poster (I assume International Work Group in Palaeothnobotany).

Stika, Hans-Peter and Andreas G. Heiss
2013 Plant cultivation in the Bronze Age. In The Oxford Handbook of the European Bronze Age, eds. H. Fokkens and A. Harding. DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199572861.013.0019.

Effinberger, Henrike
2018 The plant economy of the Northern European Bronze Age--more diversity through increased trade with southern regions. Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 27: 65-74.

April 7, 2021 [parrots]

Capriles, José M., Calogero M. Santoro, Richard J. George, Eliana Flores Bedregal, Douglas J. Kennett, Logan Kistler, and Francisco Rothhammer
2021 Pre-Columbian transregional captive rearing of Amazonian parrots in the Atacama Desert. PNAS 118: 15 e2020020118 .

March 17, 2021

Kislev, Mordechai and Efraim Lev
2019 Dietary and health issues of the inhabitants of the Middle Paleolithic Kebara Cave. In Kebara Cave, Mt. Carmel, Israel. The Middle and Upper Paleolithic Archaeology Part II, eds. L. Meignen and O. Bar-Yosef. American School of Prehistoric Research Bulletin 51, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, pp. 149-164. Cambridge MA. .

February 17, 2021

Ceren Kabukcu, Eleni Asouti, Nadja Pöllath, Joris Peters, and Necmi Karul
2021 Pathways to plant domestication in Southeast Anatolia based on new data from aceramic Neolithic Gusir Höyük. Nature Research Scientific Reports|(2021) 11:2112.

February 3, 2021

Asouti, Eleni, Douglas Baird, Ceren Kabukcu, Kate Swinson, Louise Martin, Aroa Garcia-Suárez, Emma Jenkins, and Kamal Rasheed
2020 The Zagros Epipalaeolithic revisited: New excavations and 14C dates from Palegawra cave in Iraqi Kurdistan. PLOS ONE. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0239564

January 20, 2021 [Bronze Age trade contacts]

Scott, Ashley, Robert C. Power, Victoria Altmann-Wendling, Michal Artzy, Mario A.S. Martin, Stefanie Eisenmann, Richard Hagan, Domingo C. Salazar-García, Yossi Salmon, Dmitry Yegorov, Ianir Milevski, Israel Finkelstein, Philipp W. Stockhammer, and Christina Warinner
2020 (2021) Exotic foods reveal contact between South Asia and the Near East during the second millennium BCE. PNAS January 12, 2021118(2)e2014956117 .

December 16, 2020 [emmer wheat]

Gottfried, Xander
2020 "It's Hip to be Ancient: The Rise, Persistence and Rediscovery of Emmer Wheat". unpublished manuscript.

December 2, 2020 [grazers and the origins of agriculture]

Mueller, Natalie, Robert N. Spengler III, Ashley Glenn, and Kunsang Lama
2020 Bison, anthropogenic fire, and the origins of agriculture in eastern North America. Anthropocene Review.

Spengler, Robert N. III and Natalie Mueller
2019 Grazing animals drove domestication of grain crops. Nature Plants 5: 656-662.

November 18, 2020 [zoonosis]

Bos, K.I. et al. et al. et al. et al.
2014 Pre-Columbian mycobacterial genomes reveal seals as a source of New World human tuberculosis. Nature Research Letter. DOI:10.1038/nature13591

November 4, 2020

Diffey, Charlotte, Reinder Neef, Jürgen Seeher, and Amy Bogaard
2020 The agroecology of an early state: new results from Hattusha. Antiquity 94: 1204-1223 . (DOI:10.15184/aqy.2020.172)

October 21, 2020 [dairy]

Chakraborty, Kalyan Sekhar, Greg F. Slater, Heather M.-L. Miller, Prabodh Shirvalkar and Yadubirsingh Rawat
2020 Compound specific isotope analysis of lipid residues provides the earliest direct evidence of dairy product processing in South Asia. Scientific Reports 10 (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-020-72963-y.

October 7, 2020 [origin of agriculture, west Asia]

Abbo, S. and A. Gopher
2020 Plant domestication in the Neolithic Near East: The humans-plants liaison. Quaternary Science Reviews 242: 106412.

September 16, 2020 [date palm]

Sallon, Sarah, Emira Cherif, Nathalie Chabrillange, Elaine Solowey, Muriel Gros-Balthazard, Sarah Ivorra, Jean-Frédéric Terral, Markus Egli, and Frédérique Aberlenc
2020 Origins and insights into the historic Judean date palm based on genetic analysis of germinated ancient seeds and morphometric studies. Science Advances 2020 6: eaax0384, 5 February 2020.

See also: "Aided by Modern Ingenuity, a Taste of Ancient Judean Dates," NYT Sept. 8, 2020.

March 3, 2020 [dogs]

McKechnie, Iain, Madonna L. Moss, and Susan J. Crockford
2020 Domestic dogs and wild canids on the Northwest Coast of North America: Animal husbandry in a region without agriculture? Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 60 (2020) 101209.

December 3, 2019 [birds]

Kadowaki Seiji, Lisa Maher, Marta Portillo, Rosa M. Albert, Chie Akashi, Farhad Guliyev, Yoshihiro Nishiaki
2015 Geoarchaeological and palaeobotanical evidence for prehistoric cereal storage in the southern Caucasus: the Neolithic settlement of Göytepe(mid 8th millennium BP) Journal of Archaeological Science 53: 408-425. DOI: 10.1080/00231940.2017.1420612

November 19, 2019 [birds]

Cordero, Robin M.
2018 Puebloan agriculture and its impact on the migratory behavior of birds. Kiva 84: 85-109. DOI: 10.1080/00231940.2017.1420612

November 5, 2019 [starch critique]

Mercader, Julio, Tolutope Akeju, Melisa Brown, Mariam Bundala, Matthew J. Collins, Les Copeland, Alison Crowther, Peter Dunfield, Amanda Henry, Jamie Inwood, Makarius Itambua, Joong-Jae Kim, Steve Larter, Laura Longo, Thomas Oldenburg, Robert Patalano, Ramaswami Sammynaiken, María Soto, Robert Tyler, and Hermine Xhauflair
2018 Exaggerated expectations in ancient starch research and the need for new taphonomic and authenticity criteria. Facets 3: 777-798. DOI: 10.1139/facets-2017-0126

October 15, 2019 [dung identification et al.]

Koromila, Georgia, Panagiotis Karkanas, Yannis Hamilakis, Nina Kyparissi-Apostolika, Georgia Kotzamanie, and Kerry Harris
2018 The Neolithic tell as a multi-species monument: Human, animal, and plant relationships through a micro-contextual study of animal dung remains at Koutroulou Magoula, central Greece. Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 19: 753-768. DOI: 10.1016/j.jasrep.2018.03.011

October 1, 2019 [Neolithic cooking]

Fuller, Dorian Q. and Lara Gonzalez Carretero
2018 The archaeology of Neolithic cooking traditions: archaeobotanical approaches to baking, boiling and fermenting. Archaeology International 21: 109-121. DOI: 10.5334/ai-391

September 17, 2019 [Göbekli grain foods]

Dietrich L, Meister J, Dietrich O, Notroff J, Kiep J, Heeb J, et al.
2019 Cereal processing at Early Neolithic Göbekli Tepe, southeastern Turkey. PLoS ONE 14(5): e0215214 .

May 1, 2019 [dung]

Dunseth, Zachary C., Daniel Fuks, Dafna Langgut, Ehud Weiss, Yoel Melamed, Don H. Butler, Xin Yan, Elisabetta Boaretto, Yotam Tepper, Guy Bar-Oz, Ruth Shahack-Gross
2019 Archaeobotanical proxies and archaeological interpretation: A comparative study of phytoliths, pollen and seeds in dung pellets and refuse deposits at Early Islamic Shivta, Negev, Israel. Quaternary Science Reviews 211: 166-185.

April 17, 2019 [Natufian beer]

Li Liu, Jiajing Wang, Danny Rosenberg, Hao Zhao, György Lengyel, Dani Nadel
2018 Fermented beverage and food storage in 13,000 y-old stone mortars at Raqefet Cave, Israel: Investigating Natufian ritual feasting. Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports: 21: 783-793.

April 3, 2019 [ethnoarchaeology]

Alonso, Natàlia
2019 A first approach to women, tools and operational sequences in traditional manual cereal grinding. Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences [Nature].

2018 Dental calculus indicates widespread plant use within the stable Neanderthal dietary niche. Journal of Human Evolution 119: 27-41.

March 20, 2019 [Neanderthal diet]

Power, Robert C., Domingo C. Salazar-García, Mauro Rubini, Andrea Darlas, Katerina Harvati, Michael Walker, Jean-Jacques Hublin, and Amanda G. Henry
2018 Dental calculus indicates widespread plant use within the stable Neanderthal dietary niche. Journal of Human Evolution 119: 27-41.

Jaouen, Klervia , Michael P. Richards, Adeline Le Cabec, Frido Welker, William Rendu, Jean-Jacques Hublin, Marie Soressi, and Sahra Talamo
2019 Exceptionally high 'd'15N values in collagen single amino acids confirm Neandertals as high-trophic level carnivores. PNAS 116(11): 4928-4933.

February 6, 2019 [more on the vine]

Bouby, L., P. Marinval, and J.-F. Terral
2018 From secondary to speculative production? The protohistory history of viticulture in southern France. In Plants and People, Choices and Diversity through Time, eds. A. Chevalier, E. Marinova, and L. Peña-Chocarro, pp. 175-181.

Also, the introduction to the section by Bouby & Ruas (p. 141-149)

January 23, 2019 [pastoralism for the llama and alpaca crowd]

Grant, Jennifer and Kevin Lane 2018 The political ecology of late South American pastoralism: an Andean perspective A.D. 1,000-1,615. Journal of Political Ecology 25: 446-469.

December 4, 2018 [grape charcoal]

Limiera, Bertrand, Sarah Ivorra, Laurent Bouby, Isabel Figueiral, Lucie Chabal, Manon Cabanis, Mohammed Ater, Thierry Lacombe, Jérome Ros, Laurent Brémond, and Jean-Frédéric Terral
2018 Documenting the history of the grapevine and viticulture: A quantitative eco-anatomical perspective applied to modern and archaeological charcoal. Journal of Archaeological Science 100: 45-61.

November 6, 2018 [maize in the Northeast]

Pfeiffer, Susan, Judith C. Sealy, Ronald F. WIlliamson, and Suzanne Needs-Howarth
2016 Maize, fish, and deer: Investigating dietary staples among ancestral Huron-Wendat villages, as documented from tooth samples. American Antiquity 81: 515-532.

Extra for those interested

Hart, John P., Hetty Jo Brumbach, Lisa M. Anderson, and Susan Winchell-Sweeney
2017 Maize and pits: late prehistoric occupations of the Hurley Site in the Esopus Creek Valley, Ulster County, New York. Archaeology of Eastern North America 45: 133-160.

October 16, 2018 [residue]

Roffet-Salque, Mélanie, Julie Dunne, David T. Altoft, Emmanuelle Casanova, Lucy J.E. Cramp, Jessica Smyth, Helen L. Whelton, and Richard P. Evershed
2017 From the inside out: Upscaling organic residue analyses of archaeological ceramics. Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 16: 627-640.

October 2, 2018 [empire]

Rosenzweig, Melissa S. and John M. Marston
2018 Archaeologies of empire and environment. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaa.2018.08.004.

April 18, 2018 [climate / transition to agriculture]

Roberts, Neil, Jessie Woodbridge, Andrew Bevan, Alessio Palmisano, Stephen Shennan, Eleni Asouti
2018 Human responses and non-responses to climatic variations during the last Glacial-Interglacial transition in the eastern Mediterranean. Quaternary Science Reviews.

April 4, 2018 [textiles in archaeology]

Boyd, Brian
2018 Ecologies of fiber-work: Animal technologies and invisible craft practices in prehistoric Southwest Asia. Quaternary International 468: 250-261.

March 7, March 21: cancelled due to weather events in Philadelphia [Çatalhöyük]

Bogaard, Amy, Dragana Filipović, Andrew Fairbairn, Laura Green, Elizabeth Stroud, Dorian Fuller, and Michael Charles
2017 Agricultural innovation and resilience in a long-lived early farming community: The 1,500-year sequence at Neolithic to early Chalcolithic Çatalhöyük, central Anatolia. Anatolian Studies 67: 1-28. [Link]

February 21, 2018 [beer]

Valamoti, Soultana Maria
2017 Brewing beer in wine country? First archaeolobotanical indications for beer making in Early and Middle Bronze Age Greece. Vegetation History and Archaeobotany.

February 7, 2018 [for archaeobotany methodology, ethnoarchaeology

Weisskopf, Alison
2016 Elusive wild foods in South East Asian subsistence: Modern ethnography and archaeological phytoliths. Quaternary International.

January 17, 2018 [for archaeobotany methodology]

Farahani, Alan, Benjamin W. Porter, Hanna Huynh, and Bruce Routledge
2016 Crop storage and animal husbandry at Early Iron Age Khirbat al-Mudayna al-'Aliya (Jordan): A paleoethnobotanical approach. In The Archaeology of Agro-Pastoralist Economies in Jordan, ed. K.M. McGeough, pp. 27-88. Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research 69.

December 5, 2017 [pastoralism in Anatolia]

Hammer, E. and B. Arbuckle
2017 10,000 years of pastoralism in Anatolia: A review of evidence for variability in pastoral lifeways. Nomadic Peoples 21.2 (Ancient Pastoralisms): 214-267. [Link]

November 21, 2017 [Happy Thanksgiving]

November 7, 2017 [dogs]

Lupo, K. D.
2017 When and where do dogs improve hunting productivity? The empirical record and some implications for early Upper Paleolithic prey acquisition. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 47: 139-151.

Marshall-Pescini, S., S. Cafazzo, Z. Virányi, and F. Range
2017 Integrating social ecology in explanations of wolf-dog behavioral differences. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences 16: 80-86.

October 14, 2017 [paleoethnomedicine]

Richer, Suzi and Benjamin Gearey
2017 The Medicine Tree: Unsettling palaeoecological perceptions of past environments and human activity. Journal of Social Archaeology 17: 239-262.

October 3, 2017 [Anthropocene and conservation]

Roberts, Patrick, Chris Hunt, Manuel Arroyo-Kalin, Damian Evans and Nicole Boivin
2017 The deep human prehistory of global tropical forests and its relevance for modern conservation. Nature Plants 3, article no. 17093.

September 19, 2017 [1st meeting]

April 19, 2017 [SAA papers]

Miller, Naomi F.
2017 Social and spiritual landscapes in ancient Mesopotamia.

Toro, Fabian, Chantel White, and Joyce White
2017 Developing a legacy collection of traditional rice cultivation: Implications for archaeobotanical study.

April 5, 2017 [Experimental food and cooking]

Morrison, Jerolyn
2016? Cook it up and dish it out! A sensory experience: An approach to experimental archaeology, pp. 6-10, with tasty lentil stew provided, thanks Jerolyn! See also Minoan Tastes.

March 15, 2017 [dog, maize, and isotope]

Allitt, Sharon, R. Michael Stewart and Timothy Messner
2008 The utility of dog bone (Canis familiaris) in stable isotope studies for investigating prehistoric maize consumption: A preliminary study. North American Archaeologist 29:339-363.

March 1, 2017 [Chantel White presentation from Hittite wine conference]

Biwer, Matthew E. and Amber M. VanDerwarker
2015 Paleoethnobotany and ancient alcohol production: A mini-review. Ethnobiology Letters 6: 28-31.

February 15, 2017 [maize; Old World, New World archaeobotany]

Brown, Terence A.
2010 Differing approaches and perceptions in the study of New and Old World Crops. In Histories of Maize in Mesoamerica, eds. J.E. Staller, R.H. Tykot, and B.F. Benz, pp. 14-19. Left Coast Press.

February 1, 2017 [salmon]

Thornton, Thomas, Douglas Deur, and Herman Kitka, Sr.
2015 Cultivation of salmon and other marine resources on the northwest coast of North America. Human Ecology 43: 188-199. DOI 10.1007/s10745-015-9747-z

McKechnie, Iain and Madonna L. Moss
2016 Meta-analysis in zooarchaeology expands perspectives on Indigenous fisheries of the Northwest Coast of North America. Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 8: 470-485.

January 18, 2017 [niche construction, globalization]

Boivin, Nicole L., Melinda A. Zeder, Dorian Q. Fuller, Alison Crowther, Greger Larson, Jon M. Erlandson, Tikm Denham, and Michael D. Petraglia
2016 Ecological consequences of human niche construction: Examining long-term anthropogenic shaping of global species distributions. PNAS 113 (23): 6388-6396.

December 6, 2016 [origin of agriculture, west Asia]

Asouti, Eleni and Andrew S. Fairbairn
2010 Farmers, gatherers or horticulturalists? Reconstructing landscapes of practice in the Early Neolithic. In Landscapes in Transition, eds. Bill Finlayson and Graeme Warren, pp. 161-172. Oxbow Books.

November 15, 2016 [rice]

Fuller, D.Q. Rouse
2011 Pathways to Asian Civilizations: Tracing the Origins and Spread of Rice and Rice Cultures. Rice 4: 78. doi:10.1007/s12284-011-9078-7

November 1, 2016 [pastoralism, nomads in Central Asia]

Spengler, Robert N. III, Barbara Cerasetti, Margareta Tengberg, and Lynne M. Rouse
2014 Agriculturalists and pastoralists: Bronze Age economy of the Murghab alluvial fan, southern Central Asia. Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 23: 805-820.

Extra, for those interested in the cultural and culinary background on millet in Central Asia, see this work by former PAP group member Julia McLean, "Steppe, Seed, & Supper: An Ethnoarchaeological Approach to Plant Foodways in Kazakhstan," available through Scholarly Commons.

October 18, 2016 [Epipaleolithic Wetlands, Levant]

Ramsey, Monica N. and Arlene M. Rosen
2016 Wedded to wetlands: Exploring Late Pleistocene plant-use in the Eastern Levant. Quaternary International 396 (7): 5-19.

October 4, 2016 [Hallen Çemi bird bones]

Zeder, Melinda A. and Megan D. Spitzer
2016 New insights into broad spectrum communities of the Early Holocene Near East: The birds of Hallan Çemi. Quaternary Science Reviews 151: 140-159. Available without subscription

September 20, 2016 [recent field work by members]

Deb Olszewski (Sudan) and Chantel White (Jordan) gave short presentations of recent field work, and Kate Moore showed us some nifty mammoth bones.

May 3, 2016 [storage]

Peña-Chocarro, Guillem Pérez Jordà, Jacob Morales Mateos & Lydia Zapata
2016 Storage in traditional farming communities of the western Mediterranean: Ethnographic, historical and archaeological data. Environmental Archaeology 20: 379-389.

Extra, for those interested:

Winterhalder, B., C. Puleston, and C. Ross
2016 Production risk, inter-annual food storage by households and population-level consequences in seasonal prehistoric agrarian societies. Environmental Archaeology 20: 337-348.

April 20, 2016 [teosinte to maize]

Webster, David L.
2011 Backward bottlenecks: ancient teosinte/maize selection. Current Anthropology 52:77-104.

Piperno, Dolores R., Anthony J. Ranere, Irene Holst, Jose Iriarte, and Ruth Dickau
Starch grain and phytolith evidence for early ninth millennium B.P. maize from the Central Balsas River Valley, Mexico. PNAS 106(13): 5019-5024.

April 6, 2016 [cancelled due to SAA, Orlando!]

March 16, 2016 [isotopes, Neolithic fertilizer]

Vaiglova, P., A. Bogaard, M. Collins, W. Cavanagh, C. Mee, J. Renard, A. Lamb, A. Gardreisen, and R. Fraser
2014 An integrated stable isotope study of plants and animals from Kouphovouno, southern Greece: a new look at Neolithic farming. Journal of Archaeological Science 42: 201-215.

March 2, 2016 [Marsh Arabs]

Reed Goodman gave a presentation about recent fieldwork associated with excavations at Ur- a trip through the marshes.

February 17, 2016 [Ur and date palms]

Van De Mieroop, Marc
1992 Old Babylonian Ur: Portrait of an Ancient Mesopotamian City. Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Studies 21.

Ellison, Rosemary, Jane Renfrew, Don Brothwell, and Nigel Seeley
1978 Some Food Offerings from Ur, Excavated by Sir Leonard Woolley, and Previously Unpublished. Journal of Archaeological Science 5:167-177.

February 3, 2016 [pastoralism & niche construction]

McClure, Sarah B.
2015 The Pastoral Effect. Niche Construction, Domestic Animals, and the Spread of Farming in Europe. Current Anthropology 56.

December 8, 2015 [pollen from Herod's garden]

Dafna Langgut, Kathryn Gleason and Barbara Burrell
2015 Pollen analysis as evidence for Herod's Royal Garden at the Promontory Palace, Caesarea. Israel Journal of Plant Sciences.

November 17, 2015 [Cahokia uncharred seeds]

Lopinot, Neal H., Timothy Schilling, Gayle J. Fritz, and John E. Kelly
2015 Implications of Plant Remains from the East Face of Monks Mound. Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology 40: 209-230.

November 3, 2015 [dog domestication]

Morell, Virginia
2015 From Wolf to Dog. Scientific American (July): 61-67.

Morey, Darcy F. and Rujana Jeger
2015 Paleolithic dogs:Why sustained domestication then? Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 3: 420-428.

October 20, 2015 [Ohalo & weeds]

Snir A, Nadel D, Groman-Yaroslavski I, Melamed Y, Sternberg M, Bar-Yosef O, et al.
2015 The Origin of Cultivation and Proto-Weeds, Long Before Neolithic Farming. PLOSone 10(7): e0131422. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0131422.

October 6, 2015 [summer 2015 archaeobiological activities of group members]

September 22, 2015 [Teotihuacan carnivores & isotopes]

Sugiyama, Nawa, Andrew D. Somerville, and Margaret J. Schoeninger
2015 Stable Isotopes and Zooarchaeology at Teotihuacan, Mexico Reveal Earliest Evidence of Wild Carnivore Management in Mesoamerica. PLOSone DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0135635.

May 6, 2015 [Ohalo]

Snir, Anit, Dani Nadel, and Ehud Weiss
2015 Plant-food preparation on two consecutive floors at Upper Paleolithic Ohalo II, Israel. Journal of Archaeological Science 53: 61-71.

April 15, 2015 [cancelled due to SAA, San Francisco!]

April 1, 2015 [Sudan, el Kurru]

Cartwright, Caroline
2001 The plant remains. Chapter 13 in Life on the Desert Edge, Seven Thousand Years of Settlement in the Northern Dongola Reach, Sudan, ed. D.A. Welsby, pp. 556-567. BAR International 980 (II).
[and N.F. Miller, Presentation about recent trip to Kurru, Sudan]

March 17, 2015 [domestication research]

Zeder, Melinda
2015 Core questions in domestication research. PNAS

March 4, 2015 [animal domestication]

Zeder, Melinda
2012 Pathways to animal domestication. In Biodiversity in Agriculture: Domestication, Evolution, and Sustainability, eds. R.L. Bettinger et al. Cambridge University Press, pp. 227-259.

Larson, Greger and Dorian Q. Fuller
2014 The evolution of animal domestication. In Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics 66: 115-136. doi: 10.1146/annurev-ecolsys-120213-091620

February 18, 2015 [stable isotopes]

Fiorentino, Girolamo, Juan Pedro Ferrio, Amy Bogaard, José Luis Araus, and Simone Riehl
2015 Stable isotopes in archaeobotanical research. Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 24: 215-227. DOI: 10.1007/s00334-014-0492-9

February 4, 2015 [Maya resilience]

Scarborough, Vernon
2014 The alternative economy: Resilience in the face of complexity from the Eastern Lowlands. Archeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association 24: 124-141. DOI: 10.1111/apaa.12033

January 21, 2015 [Mongolia, starch]

Liu, Li, Lisa Kealhofer, Xingcan Chen, and Ping Ji
2014 A broad-spectrum subsistence economy in Neolithic Inner Mongolia, China: Evidence from grinding stones. The Holocene 24(6): 726-742. DOI: 10.1177/0959683614526938

December 2, 2014 [dental caries and sweets]

Soltysiak, Arkadiusz
2014 Frequency of Dental Caries as a Proxy Indicator of Mobility: The Case of the Khabur Basin Human Populations. In Paleonutrition and Food Practices in the Aancient Near East: Towards a Multidisciplinary Approach, eds. L. Milano and F. Bertoldi, pp. 53-70. Sargon, Padova.

November 18, 2014 [Nubia early agriculture]

Madella, M., J.J. García-Granero, W.A. Out, P. Ryan, and D. Usai
2014 Microbotanical Evidence of Domestic Cereals in Africa 7000 Years Ago. PLOS | one DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0110177 [on line]

November 4, 2014 [Fayum fish]

Linseele, Veerle, Wim Van Neer, Sofie Thys, Rebecca Phillipps, René Cappers, Willeke Wendrich, Simon Holdaway
2014 New Archaeozoological Data from the Fayum "Neolithic" with a Critical Assessment of the Evidence for Early Stock Keeping in Egypt. PLOSone [on line]

October 21, 2014 [stable C & N isotopes and pastoralism]

Lightfoot, E., G. Motuzaite-Matuzeviciute, T.C. O'Connell, I.A. Kukushkin, V. Loman, V. Varfolomeev, X. Liu, and M.K. Jones
2014 How "Pastoral" is Pastoralism? Dietary Diversity in Bronze Age Communities in the Central Kazakhstan Steppes. Archaeometry, available on-line, doi: 10.1111/arcm.12123

October 7, 2014 [animal domestication]

Benjamin S. Arbuckle, Sarah Whitcher Kansa, Eric Kansa, David Orton, Canan Çakırlar, Lionel Gourichon, Levent Atici, Alfred Galik, Arkadiusz Marciniak, Jacqui Mulville, Hijlke Buitenhuis, Denise Carruthers, Bea De Cupere et al.(!)
2014 Data Sharing Reveals Complexity in the Westward Spread of Domestic Animals across Neolithic Turkey. PLOSone [ on line]

September 16, 2014 [movies! secondary products processing]

Annie Chan, Naomi F. Miller presented video clips from Turkey and China. For more information, go to the Penn Museum blog links: Naomi's movies and Annie's posts of July 21 and August 27.

May 6, 2014 [origin of agriculture...again!]

Gremillion, Kristen J., Loukas Barton, and Dolores R. Piperno
2014 Particularism and the retreat from theory in the archaeology of agricultural origins. PNAS 11 (7). [on line]

April 15, 2014 [Proteomics and cheese]

Yimin Yang, Anna Shevchenko, Andrea Knaust, Idelisi Abuduresule, Wenying Li, Xingjun Hu, Changsui Wang, Andrej Shevchenko
2014 Proteomics evidence for kefir dairy in Early Bronze Age China. Journal of Archaeological Science 45: 178-186. [on line]

April 1, 2014 [Anthropogenic forests]

Asouti, Eleni and Ceren Kabukcu
2014 Holocene semi-arid oak woodlands in the Irano-Anatolian region of Southwest Asia: natural or anthropogenic? Quaternary Science Reviews 90:158-182. [on line]

March 18, 2014 [raised fields in South America]

Whitney, B.S., R. Dickau, F. E. Mayle, J. H. Walker, J. D. Soto, and J. Iriarte
2014 Pre-Columbian raised-field agriculture and land use in the Bolivian Amazon. The Holocene 54(5):569-606. [ on line]

March 4, 2014 [Maya Cultivation & Complexity]

Johnson, Kevin J.
2003 The intensification of pre-industrial cereal agriculture in the tropics: Boserup, cultivation lengthening, and the Classic Maya. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 22: 126-161. [on line]

February 4, 2014 [Olmec Cultivation & Complexity]

Killion, Thomas W.
2005 Nonagricultural Cultivation and Social Complexity: The Olmec, Their Ancestors, and Mexico's Southern Gulf Coast Lowlands. Current Anthropology 54(5): 569-606. [on line]

January 14, 2014 [development of food traditions in ancient India]

Fuller, Dorian
2005 Ceramics, seeds and culinary change in prehistoric India. Antiquity 79: 761-777. [on line]

December 17, 2013 [U.S. Southwest, early agriculture and commensals]

Dean, R.M.
2005 Site-Use Intensity, Cultural Modification of the Environment, and the Development of Agricultural Communities in Southern Arizona. American Antiquity 70(3): 403-431. [on line]

December 3, 2013 [phytolith & spherulite, Neolithic]

Portillo, Marta, Seiji Kadowaki, Yoshihiro Nishiaki, Rosa M. Albert
2014 Early Neolithic household behavior at Tell Seker al-Aheimar (Upper Khabur, Syria): a comparison to ethnoarchaeological study of phytoliths and dung spherulites. Journal of Archaeological Science 42: 107–118. [on line]

November 19, 2013 [Epipaleolithic (Natufian) feasting]

Yeshurun, Reuven, Guy Bar-Oz, and Dani Nadel
2013 The social role of food in the Natufian cemetery of Raqefet Cave, Mount Carmel, Israel. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 32(4): 511-526. [on line]

Hayden, Brian,Neil Canuel, and Jennifer Shanse (supplementary reading)
2013 What Was Brewing in the Natufian? An Archaeological Assessment of Brewing Technology in the Epipaleolithic. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 20: 102-150. [on line]

November 5, 2013 [origins of agriculture, China]

Bettinger, Robert L., Loukas Barton, and Christopher Morgan
2010 The origins of food production in north China: a different kind of agricultural revolution. Evolutionary Anthropology 19: 9-21.

October 15, 2013 [chocolate!]

Soleri, Daniela, Marcus Winter, Steven R. Bozarth, and W. Jeffrey Hurst
2013 Archaeological residues and recipes: exploratory testing for evidence of maize and cacao beverages in Postclassic vessels from the Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico. Latin American Antiquity 24: 345-362.

September 23, 2013 [evolution of cuisine in Eurasia]

Fuller, Dorian Q. and Mike Rowlands
2011 Ingestion and food technologies: maintaining differences over the long-term in west, south and east Asia. In Interweaving Worlds, Systemic Interactions in Eurasia, 7th to 1st Millennia BC, eds. T.C. Wilkinson, S. Sherratt, and J. Bennet, pp. 37-60. Oxbow Books. [on line]

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]

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, 2012 [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, 2012 [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, 2012 [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, 2012 [South America camelid domestication]

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

October 16, 2012 [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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