Search results for ""author christine a. hastorf""

We are both immensely pleased to have played supporting roles in the archaeological research that led to this volume. As a faculty member at the Universidad del Centro (Huancayo) in the 1960s and later at the Universidad Nacional de San Marcos (Lima), Matos Mendieta developed a special interest in the Upper Mantaro and adjacent Tarma drainages, and during the 1960s and 1970s, he carried out general reconnaissance and several excavations in the area between Lake Junin and Huancayo. Matos Mendieta began his field research in the Sierra Central as part of the "Proyecto Andino de Estudios Arqueologicos" sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution. As a fellow at the Smithsonian Institution in the mid-1960s, Matos Mendieta began to interact more closely with North American scholars; during this period, he began to encourage and facilitate the interests of several US. -based archaeologists in the Peruvian Sierra Central, including Craig Morris, John Murra, and Donald Thompson, who were beginning fieldwork at and around the Inka provincial center of Huanuco Pampa north of Lake Junin, and David Browman, who in 1969 carried out one of the very first systematic archaeological surveys in highland Peru over parts of the main Mantaro Valley between Huancayo and Jauja.

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Paleoethnobotany offers powerful tools for reconstructing past cultures by examining the interaction of human populations with the plant world. Plant remains from archaeological sites can provide information for a number of disciplines: archaeologists may use such remains to examine how plants were used, how agriculture changed over time, or how plant offerings in burials signaled social status; ecologists and botanists may use them to study morphological changes in plants due to domestication. Combining case studies and theoretical discussions, Current Paleoethnobotany presents the first full discussion of the major stages and problems of paleoethnobotanical research, from designing and testing equipment, such as flotation machines, to quantification and interpretation. The volume explores a wide range of issues concerning collection techniques, analytical procedures, and interpretive models that will provide accurate information about past human societies from plant remains. The contributors offer data on specific regions as well as more general background information on the basic techniques of paleoethnobotany for the nonspecialist. Throughout, they explicitly examine the assumptions underlying paleoethnobotanical methods and the ways in which those assumptions affect anthropological and ecological research questions. Based on a symposium presented at the 1985 meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, Current Paleoethnobotany moves beyond a technique-oriented view of paleoethnobotany to successfully integrate current thinking about both procedures and research goals. The contributors demonstrate the potential value of the field of paleoethnobotany and open the way for further discussion and improvement.

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