Current Northeast paleoethnobotany

Abstract

otanists, and archaeologists. My short symposium had turned into a day-long affair. During the months leading up to the conference, 1 responded to over 50 requests for information about the sym¬ posium from as far away as California and England. What all of this told me is that there is a lot of active paleoethnobotanical research going on the Northeast, and, just as importantly, it also told me that there is a great deal of interest in the results of that research. The Northeast has been almost invisible as paleoethnobotany has grown to be an important discipline in Eastern Woodlands archaeology. This volume is presented as an attempt to raise the visibility of paleoeth¬ nobotanical research being carried out in the Northeast. As such, although most of the chapters are concerned in one way or another with prehis¬ toric agriculture, there is no single paleoethnob¬ otanical theme guiding the volume's content. Not all of the symposium participants were able to contribute chapters to the volume, but a number of individuals active in Northeast pale¬ oethnobotanical research that did not participate in the symposium were able to contribute chap¬ ters. Original contributors to the symposium,

New Dates from Old Collections: The Roundtop Site and Maize-Beans-Squash Agriculture in the Northeast

“…Much to my surprise at the time, the bean, twig, and one of the maize dates clustered around cal A.D. 1300, while the other maize date was a few centuries younger (Table 1; Hart, 1999). It was at this point that I thought it would be a good idea to go back to the pottery collections from features 30 and 35 to determine if the Feature 35 A.D. 1300 dates were in error, Ritchie's original date was in error, or features 30 and 35 really represented different occupations of the site.…”

“…Burhham-Shepard). Stars denote sites with AMS dates reported in Hart (1999) and Hart and Scarry (1999). Figure after Hart and Scarry (1999).…”

“…Given the importance of the Feature 35 domesticates in the literature and the now standard use of accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) to directly date domesticate remains in the Northeast (e.g., Bendremer et al, 1991;Cassedy and Webb, 1999;Crawford et al, 1997;Hart andAsch Sidell, 1996, 1997;Petersen and Asch Sidell, 1996), I thought it would be a good idea to directly date them. This would, I thought, help to confirm the timing of the maize-beans-squash association and clarify the temporal relationship of the Roundtop maize relative to maize from other sites in New York that had yielded earlier dates (Bendremer and Dewar, 1994;Cassedy and Webb, 1999).…”

“…Interestingly, in Ritchie's lab notes is a hand-written table initialed W.A.R. that assigns pottery types and cultural ascription by feature (Hart, 1999). In this table, Ritchie identified these sherds as Levanna Corded Collar and Owasco Corded Collar.…”

“…The simple answer is that because without them we lose the opportunity to question and evaluate the interpretations of our predecessors and to create new data to address new questions that arise as methods and theories change. In what follows I relate how this proposition was driven home to me when I began to investigate an old collection housed in the New York State Museum (Hart, 1999). I also summarize how the results of those investigations led me to additional collections-based research that fundamentally changed our knowledge of the history of maize-beans-squash agriculture in the Northeast (Hart and Scarry, 1999).…”