People, Plants, and Landscapes: Studies in Paleoethnobotany

Introduction

Introduction KRISTEN J. GREMILLION The Development and Research Potential of Paleoethnobotany When Richard Yarnell's dissertation was published as Aboriginal Relationships Between Culture and Plant Life in the Upper Great Lakes Region in the University ofMichigan Museum ofAnthropology's Anthropological Papers Series in 1964, archaeological evidence for prehistoric plant use was still relatively limited in quality and quantity. Although detailed ethnobotanical information was available for some areas in and near the Eastern Woodlands (e.g., Densmore 1928; Gilmore 1977;Wilson 1987; see also references in Yarnell 1964), these studies were largely descriptive and synchronic. In the absence of written records, changes in patterns of plant use could not be effectively described or explained for prehistoric periods without the aid of large collections of archaeological plant remains. Widespread acknowledgment ofthe relevance of subsistence remains to important questions of cultural change and their routine, systematic collection using specialized techniques such as flotation (Struever 1968) still lay a decade or more in the future when Yarnell received his doctoral diploma (see Watson, this volume). Thus, despite its role in bringing together anthropological and botanical knowledge, the research potential of paleoethnobotany was at that time realized in only a limited way. Partly because of the inadequacy of the paleoethnobotanical data base, agriculture in the Eastern Woodlands was generally understood to have been relatively late and Mesoamerican-inspired. Although tantalizing glimpses of an indigenous "premaize" agricultural tradition had been available at least since Jones (1936) and Gilmore (1931) published their accounts of and speculations about the botanical remains from dry rockshelters in the rugged uplands ofthe Ozarks and eastern Kentucky, most remained unconvinced of the cultural significance of this early evidence of farming (Gremillion 1993b). Crucial support for the independence and economic importance of I 2 Introduction this indigenous agricultural tradition gradually built during subsequent decades as techniques for recovering, dating, observing, measuring, and classifying archaeological plant remains (many of them involving interdisciplinary collaboration beyond the traditional botany-archaeology axis) were developed and refined. Pivotal roles in this process were played by Yarnell's documentation of changing seed size in sunflower and sumpweed (Yarnell 1972, 1978) and his analyses of archaeobotanical assemblages from Salts Cave (Yarnell 1969, 1974a, 1974b). However, it was not until the 1980s that the long-standing hypothesis ofan "Eastern Agricultural Complex" acquired firm empirical support and widespread acceptance from new research and techniques in the areas of dating, microscopy, phytotaxonomy, and morphometrics (Gremillion 1993b; Yarnell 1994). The idea that food production originated in one or a very few locations has gradually been replaced by recognition of the likelihood of parallel evolution of the human-plant relationships that result in domestication (Rindos 1984). Similar trends in the explanation of agricultural origins are evident in treatments of many world regions (Cowan and Watson 1992; Gebauer and Price 1992; Harris and Hillman 1989). The uses to which paleoethnobotanical data were put in explaining past subsistence behavior were initially limited, not only by a dearth of data, but also by the degree and character ofinterest in ecological problems in North American anthropology. In the 1930S, when Jones and Gilmore were proposing an indigenous agricultural tradition based on their rockshelter finds (Gilmore 1931;Jones 1936), paleoethnobotanical research had a decidedly descriptive bias. Interpretation was geared toward the reconstruction of past agricultural systems and the timing of their development or introduction rather than employment of ecological concepts to explain the archaeological record of plant use. This orientation remained the norm, at least in the Eastern Woodlands, until the 1950S, when Julian Steward began to make significant inroads into the understanding of relationships between culture and environment. His approach, cultural ecology (Steward 1955), was critical in stimulating archaeologists to seek explanation of parallel events, such as agricultural origins, in similar ecological circumstances. In the biological sciences, ecosystems ecology was enjoying the peak of its vogue during the 196os, and many of the principles that were proving useful to ecologists (see for example Odum 1971) were soon appropriated by anthropologists eager to explore human-environment interactions. Freely 3 Introduction borrowing concepts such as succession, stability, and diversity, archaeologists in particular became increasingly enamored of the homeostatic models developed in ecology, which seemed to offer a broadly applicable key to explaining past subsistence change. The work of Flannery (1965, 1969, 1971) was especially beneficial in leading archaeologists to a recognition of the complexity of relationships between environmental and cultural factors and in isolating critical causal components of the...