Social Perspectives on Ancient Lives from Paleothnobotanical Data

This volume addresses the complex relationships between human beings and their environment through the analysis of botanical, zoological, and geological data in archaeological contexts. At the heart of these broader issues is how human societies have interacted with their environment for their daily needs through good and other resource procurement. In order to understand this current situation in a longer-term perspective, researchers are turning to environmental archaeology studies to see how human societies across various spans of time and diverse cultural regions dealt with dynamic environments. In this volume, the contributors bridge differences between the natural and social sciences through more socially-focused interpretations of rich botanical, faunal, and geological datasets. The contributions present environmental archaeological datasets and how these are used to study how humans have mediated their relationship with the natural world and in the process imbued it with meaning that shaped the practices of their daily lives. The focus on lived lives is presented in discussions of changing food practices, environmental management strategies, and considerations of how social relationships such as gender, age, and status altered the roles that agents played in the past. These diverse cases vary across space and time: they cover Europe, Western Asia, North and South America and span time periods that encompass early hunter-gatherers, the transition to food production and later complex societies. ?