Crossing the Borders: New Methods and Techniques in the Study of Archaeological Materials from the Caribbean

194 / Newsom
in the south- central region around ca. a.d. 1200. A transdisciplinary paleoecological
and environmental approach would help to resolve at the very least the environmental
context of this particular issue.
4. My experience with Florida wet sites has been that they typically reveal much
more quantitatively and qualitatively of the archaeobotanical record due to the characteristically
more complete preservation of plant remains. Particular examples include
bowel contents (last meals), plant- fiber clothing, wooden implements, and other items
associated with human burials (Newsom 2002), and highly perishable seed types, for
example, squash seeds that demonstrate a longitudinal record of plant domestication
(Newsom 1987). Dry terrestrial deposits at a Calusa site yielded a few fragments of
gourd/ squash seed, whereas the adjacent, contemporaneous and older wet deposits
yielded numerous complete or nearly complete specimens that could be identified to
finer resolution. Moreover, the dry component produced only fragments of carbonized
wood, whereas the waterlogged deposits had both the charcoal as well as hundreds of
specimens of uncarbonized wood débitage, the debris of woodworking operations carried
out in a specific activity area (something for which there otherwise was no direct
evidence at the site) (Newsom and Scarry in press; Newsom et al. in press).
5. Being shared with paleontology and paleobotany, which similarly take incomplete
evidence and work forensically to recover as much salient information as possible
to reconstruct past taxonomic and biological relationships.
6. In recent years there has been a lot of discussion in paleontology about multipleeffect
factors and in general the difficulties and inconsistencies of identifying taxa according
to morphological characteristics, lacking genetic or other supporting data.
7. Also, whereas wood anatomy, and seed/ fruit and pollen morphological studies
all have the benefit of being able to draw upon long previous years of research by wood
anatomists, botanists, and palynologists— thus an expansive information base of published
floras, keys, and replicate studies— there is no equivalent body of previous research
for starch grain and phytolith analysis. Researchers working with starch and
phytoliths have to work very hard to build original baseline data for direct comparison
(e.g., see Pagán Jiménez 2005b). Moreover, unlike seeds and pollen, the morphologies
and anatomies of which are intimately tied to the reproductive biology and dispersal
mechanisms of the plant taxa (and in many cases also to their associated and coevolved
faunal dispersers), starch and phytoliths form from internally deposited substances
that culminate in durable structures bound within plant tissues and are not subject to
quite the same evolutionary selective pressures, thus fewer of the mechanisms that result
in taxonomically distinct morphologies. This adds another layer of difficulty and
caution where these two data sets are concerned.
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