Elizabeth is interested in archaeobotanical evidence of human engagements with forested landscapes in particular. She is interested in seed, wood, and starch grain analysis, and is currently working in northern New Mexico on evidence of Gallina period food, firewood, and building practices.
In the late 15th and early 16th centuries CE, the Upper Mantaro Valley in central Peru was the site of massive and rapid political change: communities were colonized first by the Inka, who set a provincial capital there at the site of modern day Jauja, and then mere decades later by the Spanish, who set their own first capital at that same location. This project investigates the impacts of such swift, large-scale change on the daily lives of the region’s inhabitants. Specifically, this work examines two lines of evidence – ceramics and domestic architecture – which were made and used...
Milly earned her B.A. in Anthropology from the University of Alabama in 2021. She is interested in the emergence of plant domestication in the Andes along with the intersection of land use/management strategies and Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK). Milly is currently working on the analysis of archaeobotanical materials from Chiripa, Bolivia.
Jennifer Salinas’ research involves human-plant relations, foodways, and the origins of plant cultivation in the New World. Her current dissertation research focuses on a hunter-gatherer community at the site of Ubaté (5, 500 B.P.) on the Eastern Cordillera of Colombia. Methodologically, her work rests on the integration of different paleoethnobotanical approaches: macrobotanicals, starch grains, and phytoliths.
