ANCIENT FOOD SCRAPS IN ROCKSHELTER CLARIFY SHIFT TO FARMING

JUNE 28TH, 2023
POSTED BY SHELLY LEACHMAN-UCSB

Botanical macrofossils, such as maize cobs, avocado seeds, and rinds, from the El Gigante rockshelter in western Honduras offer clues Holocene life in hunter-gatherer societies.



Above, modern avocado and corn. (Credit: Getty Images)

El Gigante is among only a handful of archaeological sites in the Americas that contain well-preserved botanical remains spanning the last 11,000 years. Considered one of the most important archaeological sites discovered in Central America in the last 40 years, El Gigante was recently nominated as a UNESCO World Heritage site.

“No other location shows, as clearly as El Gigante,” state UNESCO materials about the site’s universal value, “the dynamic character of hunter-gatherer societies, and their adaptive way of life in the Central American highlands, and in Mesoamerica broadly during the early and middle Holocene.”

Now, anthropologists Douglas Kennett and Amber VanDerwarker of UC Santa Barbara, UCSB postdoc Richard George, and colleagues from other institutions have excavated and analyzed botanical macrofossils from El Gigante using modern technologies. Their results appear in the journal PLOS ONE.



Macrobotanical remains from El Gigante. (Credit: Thomas Harper/UCSB)

“Our work at El Gigante demonstrates that the early use and management of tree crops like wild avocado and plums by at least 11,000 years ago,” Kennett says, “set the stage for the development of later systems of aboriculture that, when combined with field cropping of maize, beans, and squash, fueled human population growth, the development of settled agricultural villages, and the first urban centers in Mesoamerica after 3,000 years ago.”

More:
https://www.futurity.org/el-gigante-macrofossils-2937592-2/