Collaborative Research: Origins of Food Production in the Northern Neotropical Lowlands

The origin of food production was an important catalyst for the emergence of complex societies, institutional inequality, and social organization in the northern neotropics. Yet, to date, there is little understanding of when key crops (i.e., maize, manioc) were first consumed by humans, how intensively they were used through time, and how wild seed and root crops were integrated into a regional diet.

Recent advances suggest that agriculture was well established by the middle Holocene in greater Amazonia, but we lack comparable data in the northern neotropics, even though we know there was significant migration and interaction between these regions. The project will document the processing and consumption of plant foods throughout the Holocene and produce new microbotanical libraries of modern plants from the region for comparative research.

Many of the key crops studied are today globally important commodities and central features of diets across neotropical contexts making the study of their origins a matter of global importance.

This project will carry out microbotanical analysis of starch grains and phytoliths obtained from grinding stones and dental calculus from archaeological contexts dating between 12,500 and 1,000 cal BP. To obtain these samples project members will conduct excavations at two remote rockshelter sites in a broadleaf neotropical forest where excellent preservation of organic materials has been previously demonstrated.

Chronological control will be maintained with radiocarbon dates on charcoal and bone. Microbotanical data will be used to identify processing and consumption of domesticated and wild plant foods and to determine when specific cultigens such as maize and manioc were incorporated into the human diet. These data will also be used to study the changing importance of these domesticates relative to other wild taxa.

Data will be shared with descendent communities though formal consultations and translations of published articles into local languages. This project will also promote the training of women and underrepresented students in the sciences.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.