The emergence of an incipient city represents not only a moment in time, but also the beginnings of a social experiment. Aggregated living introduced new challenges such as the need to feed more mouths than ever before. Yet studying responses to these challenges becomes difficult in the case of early cities as excavations of these contexts do not provide adequate temporal and/or spatial resolution to assess change over time. This dissertation examines subsistence strategies at the archaeological site of La Blanca (900-500 BCE), a Middle Preclassic period incipient city on the Pacific coast of Guatemala with a long history of household excavations. I analyze macrobotanical and microbotanical plant remains from La Blanca to assess both the types of foods used to feed inhabitants and the distribution of intra-site food processing activities across time and space. The analysis of plant remains can provide unique insights into social differentiation in comparison to other commonly used indices, such as the distribution of prestige goods. I rely on Pierre Bourdieu’s theoretical construct of social fields to disentangle the study of economic ranking based on prestige goods from economic activities pursued by households. Rather than grouping households by elite or commoner status first and then comparing plant remains second, I look to the plant data first to assess their own non-binary insights into social relations. My research uses Exploratory Data Analysis to investigate spatial and temporal patterning. I integrate a wide variety of techniques including paleoethnobotanical methods (macrobotanical, starch granule, and phytolith analysis), spatial statistics, and Bayesian analysis of radiocarbon dates to conduct intra-site and inter-site comparisons of plant data from the La Blanca site. My results present novel perspectives on subsistence planning in early cities and long-term changes in the regional subsistence practices of Pacific Mexico and Guatemala during the Preclassic period. Spatial statistics reveal that domestic contexts at La Blanca are clustered, identifying five neighborhoods and one additional area with a more complex use history. Comparisons of botanical remains from these six locales indicate that their uses changed over time. Moreover, temporal comparisons illustrate that diversification played a key role in meeting subsistence needs during the Conchas D subphase, the most populous period of the early city’s occupation. Inter-site comparisons with other Early and Middle Preclassic sites on the Pacific Coast indicate that, contrary to expectations, maize intensification predated the initial urbanization of the region. La Blanca also represents the highest taxonomic diversity of the sequence, revealing that diversification is more characteristic of early urbanism on the Pacific Coast than previously considered. Analysis of plant use as a social field does not provide strong evidence of differences in household subsistence strategies by economic ranking, but instead highlights key differences by spatial cluster that are more indicative of early efforts at city planning.

Understanding the relationship between agricultural intensification and ancient sociopolitical complexity is a question that has long resonated with archaeological research interests. This dissertation explores the dynamics of food production, migration, and sociopolitical change in relation to the consolidation of the complex, hierarchically organized Southern Moche polity of north coastal Peru during the Early Intermediate Period, or EIP (400 B.C. – A.D. 800). I incorporate archaeobotanical, environmental, and ethnohistorical evidence to address changes in food production, processing, and consumption over five cultural horizons to critically re-evaluate existing models of Moche sociopolitical development, with a bottom-up perspective of the laborers in rural households whose agricultural production supported the growth and florescence of this complex society.

A diachronic comparison of paleoethnobotanical data sampled from five EIP habitation sites in the Moche Valley reveals that dramatic increases in agricultural production by coastal (costeño) and highland (serrano) groups occurred prior to the expansion of the Moche state in the A.D. 300s. The plant data suggest that complex political dynamics involving tribute relationships and suprahousehold commensal events were already in place during the Gallinazo phase (A.D. 1-200). Highland and coastal peoples likely established mutually beneficial relationships that revolved around food and farming during this period, including fiestas, religious gatherings, and work parties (masa). I argue that Moche leaders built upon existing political institutions in which rural households were already engaged in intensive agricultural production, which included maize but also other field cultigens and tree crops.

The intensification of food-processing demands over time also suggests that changes in women’s social status may have been tied to increases in processing demands, as women were subjected to new labor increases, time constraints, and scheduling conflicts. Detailed intrasite spatial analysis of a highland colony site reveals that women prepared food in private, behind-the-scenes contexts for supra-household events and public displays that were performed on patio terraces at high status compounds. These women may have prepared food for these public events totally apart from, and without being included, in such events. I interpret the restriction of visibility, with women processing maize and other foodstuffs out of view behind kitchen walls, as part of increased gender segregation that often accompanies processes like agricultural intensification.

The micro-scale approach employed in this study departs from the current, prevailing studies of political, economic, and ideological phenomena at larger ceremonial centers on the Peruvian north coast. This project reveals how a seemingly mundane category of archaeological data (archaeobotanical data) can shed light on myriad social processes related to the negotiation of ethnic identities, gender relations, and domestic labor more broadly, and reframe our understandings of Moche sociopolitical development specifically.

In this dissertation I explore the complexities of culture contact and colonialism through the lens of daily foodways to evaluate cultural interaction and entanglements between disparate cultural groups. Focusing on provincial sites of the Middle Horizon (A.D. 600 – 1000) Wari Empire in the south-central Peruvian Andes, I incorporate macrobotanical and microbotanical remains to investigate not only how food was a medium through which Wari colonists and indigenous groups negotiated the colonial encounter on the Wari frontier, but also use food to interpret the nature of the contact. Plant presence, processing and discard activities, architectural features, and artifacts associated with household structures form the basis of analysis for characterizing site foodways. This examination of plant-based food activities informed my interpretation of Wari provincial cuisine and serves as a means to evaluate how cultural negotiations were experienced by both colonizer and indigenous groups on the frontier.

A qualitative comparison of spatial patterns of archaeobotanical remains from three provincial Wari sites, including Cerro Baúl in the Moquegua Valley, Quilcapampa in the Siguas Valley, and Hatun Cotuyoc in the Lucre Basin, serves as the foundation for developing provincial Wari cuisine. Similarities and differences in the patterning of plant remains and associations between plant types, site architecture, artifacts, and space, were identified at these provincial Wari sites. Although environmental factors, interregional trade, and local colonial entanglements likely limited the production and distribution of certain plants, I argue the identified foodways shared between the sites represent a collective Wari provincial cuisine. This provincial cuisine could have produced and maintained a cohesive Wari identity on the borderlands and frontiers of the empire.

The Wari pattern of plant use at Cerro Baúl was compared to those of the local indigenous Huaracane at the site of Yahuay Alta in the Moquegua Valley to determine if foodways may have served as a medium of culture contact. The plant data suggest that upon Wari incursion into the Moquegua Valley the Wari and Huaracane communities shared food traditions. Specifically, at Yahuay Alta (Huaracane site) I recovered large quantities of molle drupes (Schinus molle), a plant I assert is a primary element of Wari provincial foodways. I argue that during this period of Wari colonization and culture contact, the Huaracane adopted the Wari practice of brewing chicha de molle. Interestingly, the identified pattern of molle use at Yahuay Alta differs from the Wari sites, suggesting the indigenous Huaracane adopted the Wari practice of brewing chicha de molle but did so on their own terms by integrating the practice into an existing set of social, economic, and political organizations.

The approach to culture contact and colonialism employed in this dissertation departs from previous studies by considering quotidian foodways as a salient element of cultural interaction in the past. From a regional perspective this research characterizes provincial foodways in the Wari Empire using the remains of daily household and public meals to further develop research of provincial identity and food production.

This dissertation research addresses two central questions: 1) what conditions promote warfare? 2) how do people cope with conflict? I seek to answer these questions by developing and employing osteological, stable isotope, and statistical methods, and using theoretical models from Human Behavioral Ecology (HBE).

The four dissertation chapters presented here articulate distinct but related aspects of warfare and concern casual forces, subsistence trade-offs, and well-being. The dissertation builds towards the third and fourth chapters, which evaluate the two primary questions of this research: 1) what variables explain the emergence and persistence of warfare? and 2) how do individuals manage the tradeoff between the risk of food shortages and the risk of wartime violence? Chapter three will focus on the climatological, demographic, and sociopolitical conditions that explain variability in warfare, and how these conditions may promote violence from an evolutionary perspective. Chapter four explores the ways in which the risk of interpersonal violence (RIV) structures the costs and benefits of alternative subsistence strategies and their attendant health impacts. Further, it investigates the factors that influence individual variability in risk-preference. Chapters one and two set the stage for the latter half of the dissertation by investigating 1) evidence for internecine warfare in the study region, and heterogeneity in the risk of interpersonal violence, and 2) changes in pathology, mortality, and longevity by engaging with the osteological paradox using a multimethod approach.

These topics are explored using a case study population of agropastoralists from the Late Intermediate period (950 – 1450 C.E.; LIP) Nasca highlands of Peru. To accomplish dissertation goals, my research must demonstrate that 1) the LIP Nasca highland population experienced chronic, internecine warfare which produced high probabilities of interpersonal violence; 2) increasing pathological burden is the result of elevated biological stress rather than increasing longevity or robusticity; 3) variability in violent conflict can be explained by changes in socioecological and demographic variables, and 4) wartime changes in subsistence practices and dietary stress can be understood as optimal strategies that attempt to balance the risk of food insecurity with the risk of interpersonal violence.

Chapter one focuses on using osteological data and formal quantitative analyses to test various hypotheses concerning the character of conflict in the Nasca highlands region. This chapter develops and tests osteological expectations of what patterns should be observed if LIP violence is defined by intra-group violence, ritual conflict, intermittent raiding, or internecine warfare. This chapter will also highlight heterogeneity in violent mortality to assess whether certain subgroups were targeted for violence, or whether violence is best explained by the concept of social substitutability.

Chapter two assesses changes in morbidity, mortality, and longevity during the LIP. We leverage recent multimethod approaches to address the implications of the osteological paradox, which revealed profound equifinality in interpretations of health from skeletal samples. The goal of this chapter is to evaluate how conditions during the LIP impacted the general well-being of the population as well as variability in the risk of disease and death.

Chapter three investigates individual motivations for participating in warfare from an evolutionary perspective, and how they relate to the emergence and spread of conflict on large spatiotemporal scales. I derive and test hypotheses that predict how political transitions, climate change, dietary stress, and demographic pressure structure the payoffs for conflict and interact to promote warfare.

Chapter four develops and tests a risk sensitive HBE model that outlines how the local economy, while designed to reduce the risk of food shortages in the arid Andean environment, nevertheless puts individuals at increased risk of violence during wartime. The model specifies resource returns and violence avoidance as an explicit tradeoff, whereby the probability of violence can be mitigated at the cost of food security and vice versa. This chapter seeks to develop a model that can explain how populations and individuals cope with subsistence needs during times of war, especially when local environmental conditions promote subsistence strategies that put individuals at a high risk of interpersonal violence.

Questions of social reorganization, the adoption and spread of novel technologies, and subsistence shifts have long been of interest to archaeologists, but especially those working in both California and the Great Basin. Over the last 1,500-1,000 years in Payahuunadü, today known as Owens Valley, significant social and political changes have been observed archaeologically for the populations who resided in this area. Our greater understanding of these large-scale social changes as observed archaeologically dovetail well with paleoethnobotanical studies in the region. However, two issues related to the body of paleoethnobotanical data available for the region are identified and addressed in this dissertation: 1) the region lacked a comprehensive synthesis of paleoethnobotanical data and 2) most of the archaeological investigation have been limited to the Highway 395 corridor, which has resulted in uneven coverage of plant use data, especially on the valley shore (e.g., along the shores of Owens Lake). This dissertation has three goals: 1) to synthesize existing data with regards to plant use from the late Newberry period (c. 3300 years Before Present [BP]) through the Contact period (c. 150 years BP); 2) to better understand how ancient residents of Owens Valley used locations in the valley beyond the modern-day Highway 395 corridor; and 3) to examine the adoption and spread of bow-and-arrow and ceramic technologies, two events separated by roughly 600 years, through a paleoethnobotanical lens. To address these goals, I have synthesized existing paleoethnobotanical datasets for the region to create a comprehensive dataset, as well as analyzed extant archaeological materials from four lakeside sites for inclusion in the regional dataset: 1) CA-INY-3806/H, 2) INY-7448, 3) INY-8768, and 4) INY-5207. This study considers the role resource intensification plays in social phenomena, including the sharing and storing of resources, and risk management and privatization, which have greater implications for the cascading effects of new technology, subsistence intensification, and social reorganization in the region. The spread of the bow-and-arrow around 1500 BP is hypothesized to have contributed to a social reorganization partially oriented around pinyon intensification. Thus, we would expect an increase in pinyon usage (as measured by an increase in archaeological pinyon abundance) between the Newberry and Marana periods. Similarly, if Newberry-era residents “underused” plants (Bettinger 2015:43), we might expect a more extensive, generalized plant assemblage in that era; this could look like greater usage of roots and tubers, which are often less energetically costly than seeds (Gremillion 2014). Later in time, correlated with the spread of pottery (c. 600 BP), privatization of other plant food is proposed to have happened in tandem with changes in land use, towards an increase in logistical mobility and use of more distant resources (Eerkens 2012b). In terms of land use, an increase in logistical foraging (where a forager travels afield in search of food before returning to a central base camp) could look like exploitation of environments beyond the immediate setting of the residential site. For example, in the Haiwee period, where foraging was potentially less logistical, we would expect there to be a higher degree of correlation between site environment (i.e., the environmental setting of the residential camo) and plant food environment (the environmental setting where the specific plant food is found). Residents of wetland sites would use more wetland plants, and upland sites would use more upland plants. In the more logistical Marana period, we would not necessarily expect this pattern; wetland sites could have plant foods from upland environs, and vice versa. The Owens Valley is located in eastern California, along the eastern escarpment of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. This dissertation focuses on two periods in late Owens Valley prehistory: the Haiwee Period (1400-650 BP) and the Marana Period (650-150 BP), the latter which ended at Contact with Euro-American settlers. The earlier Newberry Period (3500-1400 BP) is also included to some degree, as it several important cultural characteristics emerged during that time relevant to the discussion from the other two time periods. This dissertation presents the results of the synthesized regional paleoethnobotanical dataset, which includes data from 40 sites dating between 3500 and 150 years BP. Lakeside plant use is specifically highlighted, via analyses from the four sites analyzed for this dissertation (previously listed). I specifically investigate ways in which people used these sites differently between the Haiwee and Marana periods, and what we can learn about settlement, mobility and seasonality of use from these datasets. The synthesis of prehistoric plant use in the Owens Valley (Chapter 5) was based upon all documented archaeobotanical assemblages to date, and further aimed to evaluate how plant use (e.g., use of seeds) changed between the Newberry and Late Marana periods, how the intensification of pinyon is reflected in plant use data on the valley floor, and how the intentional plant use by the inhabitants of the valley reflect how the changes in land and habitat use through time are reflected in people’s plant use. Plant foraging in the Newberry period seems to represent a generalized, logistically-oriented practice. Valley residents pursued a range of plant resources across the landscape, and brought those resources back to their base camp, leaving the ecologically varied plant assemblage seen archaeologically at Newberry occupations, including widespread, non-intensive use of pinyon. Plant use in the Haiwee period bears some striking similarities to the Newberry but with one notable exception: the rise in pinyon. By the Late Marana period, roughly 250-300 years ago, the domination of small seeds across assemblages, and presumably their use by valley floor residents, skyrocketed. Pinyon was still present, in amounts similar to previous times, but it seems clear that the plant subsistence focus of people living on the valley floor was seeds. Analyses of the data from the Lakeside sites in the study (INY-7448, -5207, -3806/H, and -8768; Chapter 6) was aimed to investigate if there was a difference in plant use by those living at lakeside sites vs. those who did not, if these sites were subject to seasonal occupation, if local plant use trends conformed to the valley overall, and if wetland plants were specifically targeted by residents. One of the most striking trends is the relatively low percentage of weedy pioneers throughout time. At lakeside sites, in some contrast to other regional sites, seeds did not comprise a significant portion of the diet until the Late Marana period. Wetland plant resources were differentially targeted by site residents. By the Late Marana period, it seems likely that lakeside sites were annually reoccupied, perhaps as places where pottery was cached and wetland seed foods were gathered and processed. However, by the early Haiwee period, pinyon had already been incorporated into the diet of lakeside residents, in such amounts as to suggest pinyon was being intensified by people. The primary contribution of this dissertation has been the generation of an extensive, synthetic dataset (Appendix A), comprising all known data regarding plant use in Owens Valley prehistory, building on previous research (Pierce 2002). The secondary contribution has been to add to the discussion of changing social and political organization in late prehistory, by looking at a crucial line of evidence – plant use visible through paleoethnobotanical analyses. This dissertation represents one more step toward improving our understanding how the residents of Payahuunadü made dynamic use of their surrounding landscape between 1500 BP and 150 BP, establishing a regional dataset that can provide a jumping off point for future researchers.

The Chumash, complex marine hunter-gathers of the Santa Barbara Channel region, have occupied both the northern Channel Islands and parts of the California mainland for around 13,000 years (Johnson et al. 2000). On the islands, where there are no terrestrial game animals, there is a dichotomy of marine faunal and terrestrial floral resources. Whereas fish, shellfish, and marine mammals are abundant in the waters surrounding the islands, terrestrial plants are less abundant and diverse than on the mainland. Nonetheless, dense shell middens throughout the northern Channel Islands attest to the fact that islanders regularly transported marine resources to interior and high elevation locations. The use of interior sites as residences (rather than logistical encampments) is most pronounced during the Middle Holocene (5500-1500 BC), after which there is a shift to permanent, coastal settlements (Kennett 2005). Scholars have hypothesized that this interior settlement pattern could be motivated by access to freshwater, toolstone, plants, travel routes, defensive locations, or locations used for community aggregation (Glassow 2014; Kennett 2005; Orr 1968; Perry and Delaney-Rivera 2011; Perry and Glassow 2015).

There are several lines of indirect evidence suggesting that plant resources were important during the Middle Holocene, including the development of the mortar and pestle circa 3850-3050 BC (Glassow 1997a), higher frequencies of plant processing tools deposited as grave goods (Hollimon 1990, 2001), and higher rates of dental caries (associated with carbohydrate rich plant foods) in burial populations (Walker and Erlandson 1986). Recent macrobotanical studies on the northern Channel Islands (e.g., Gill 2015; Martin 2010; Martin and Popper 2001; Reddy and Erlandson 2012; Thakar 2014) provide direct evidence that many ethnographically important plant resources were locally available, and were used throughout prehistoric occupation; however, none of these studies explicitly address the role of terrestrial resources in Middle Holocene settlement patterns.

The current study combines faunal and macrobotanical data from three interior Middle Holocene sites with starch granule residue analysis of groundstone artifacts from these and other interior Middle Holocene sites. The low densities of macrobotanical remains recovered do not support the long-held belief that interior sites were used to exploit terrestrial plant resources; indeed, the minimal seeds identified are largely from plants with ethnographic uses as medicine, rather than food. However, starch granules, including acorn (Quercus spp.), pine (Pinus muricata) and cherry (Prunus illicifolia), indicate that ethnographically important food resources were being processed at interior sites, but are not preserving in the macrobotanical record. Starch granules identified in this study provide the first direct evidence of what plants different types of groundstone were used to process on the northern Channel Islands. Moreover, this study demonstrates the value of integrating multiple lines of evidence to provide a more holistic understanding of prehistoric foodways, and sets baseline expectations for future paleoethnobotanical research in this region.