Diversity-Disturbance Relationships in the Late Archaic Southwest: Implications for Farmer-Forager Foodways

Abstract

The analysis of more than 1,300 flotation samples from thousands of excavated cultural features dating to the San Pedro phase (1220–730 BC) at the Las Capas site in southern Arizona provides evidence of long-term continuity and change in plant cultivation and collection practices in response to environmental disturbances during the Late Archaic period (2100 BC–AD 50). Although preceramic foodways in the region are widely considered to have been stable for roughly 2,500 years following the introduction of maize prior to 2100 BC, analyses of macrobotanical data reveal that moderate-intensity flood events during the Middle San Pedro phase (930–800 BC) preceded the greatest richness and diversity of harvested plants, while reliance on maize was reduced. In contrast, in periods with little environmental disturbance maize was more dominant, with less diversity in other cultivated and foraged plants. Novel cultivation, processing, and foraging practices were initiated in response to disturbance but persisted after floodplain conditions stabilized. It is argued that the reciprocal relationship between disturbance and botanical diversity is integral for understanding the long-term resilience of Late Archaic foodways and that this relationship is best modeled using ecological theories termed the Intermediate Disturbance Hypothesis and the Intermediate Productivity Hypothesis.

Sowing the Seeds of Future Research: Data Sharing, Citation and Reuse in Archaeobotany

“…It has been recently argued that a tool-driven scientific revolution in the use and sharing of code is emerging in archaeology (Marwick & Schmidt 2019). Two examples of archaeobotanical papers which have shared their code are d'Alpoim Guedes et al (2015) and Sinensky and Farahani (2018). Such work in standard archaeobotany is limited, but related examples include the creation of a R package for morphometric analysis (Bonhomme et al 2014), and the use and sharing of code to analyse climate archaeology (d'Alpoim Guedes, Jin & Bocinsky 2015) and stable isotope analysis results from charred plant remains (Styring et al 2017).…”

Mobility, Lineage, and Land Tenure: Interpreting House Groups at Early Agricultural Settlements in the Tucson Basin, Southern Arizona

“…Early Agricultural settlement was structured by the fundamental tensions between a nascent commitment to canal irrigation and the constraints of preceramic technologies, which limited caching and cooking of dried maize. Early farmers were pragmatically flexible about the dietary prominence of cultivars versus wild staples (Diehl 2015;Diehl and Waters 2006;Sinensky and Farahani 2018). Diet breadth remained high throughout the Early Agricultural period, and early farmers did not invest in durable architecture at their frequently flooded, intermittently occupied settlements (Diehl and Waters 2006;Gregory and Diehl 2002;Gregory and Nials 2005).…”

Diversity-Disturbance Relationships in the Late Archaic Southwest: Implications for Farmer-Forager Foodways – Addendum

“…The following changes have been made to the originally published version of this article (Sinensky and Farahani, 2018): Supplemental Table 2 has been updated to include an attribution column, and Supplemental Text 1 and Supplemental Text 2 have been updated to reflect the change in Supplemental Table 2.…”