Macro Botanical Analysis Project

Project Lead: Hannah Hoover| Organization: Brays Island Stewardship Fund

Brays Island has a wealth or artifacts collected from various archeological surveys on the property. Working with local archeologists, we are taking a closer look at these collections. This particular project is designed to further analyze the marco-botanical collections and food scraps to learn more about the daily lives of people who lived on Brays several thousand years ago.

Project Description

In 2023, the Brays Nature Center partnered with Hannah Hoover – a PhD candidate at the University of Michigan – to look closer at the Brays Island Archeological Collections gathered in 1988-1990. Her work has helped us apply new knowledge to better understanding these collections and the peoples that used Brays Island before us. These efforts will be put together in a report and will be displayed at the Brays Island Nature Center.

To look even closer at some artifacts, Hannah has put together a proposal using advanced techniques to analyze macro botanical remains from the Brays Island Collection. In addition to helping us better understand what people were eating and how they were using the Brays landscape many centuries ago, this project will also help contribute to unique information to archeologists through out eastern North America. For more in-depth details about the project, click here to see the detailed proposal.

Methods

This project will employ several different techniques to analyze specific artifacts from the Brays Island archeological collection. These techniques include:

Faunal Analysis: Faunal remains are what is left behind when an animal dies. This may include bones, shells, hair, chitin, scales, hides, proteins and DNA. Because of the acidity of Lowcountry soils, vertebrate faunal remains rarely preserve in the archaeological record. At archaeological sites on Brays Island, the vertebrate faunal assemblage consists of teeth and small bone fragments. These items will be analyzed using four methods: macro-analysis, ZooMS, lipids/proteomics, and stable-isotopes.
Paleoethnobotanical Analysis: Paleoethnobotany is the study of human and environment interactions through the recovery and analysis of ancient plant remains.
Radio-carbon Dating: Radio-carbon dating is an absolute dating method used by archaeologists to estimate the age of objects, cultural features, and archaeological sites. While it often can’t pinpoint specific years, reference materials and calibration tools can refine radiocarbon dates down to as little as a few decade period. Pairing radio-carbon dating with faunal and paleoethnobotanical research will provide insight into when changes in diet happened. This will allow us to compare sites on Brays Island to one another and to other cultural sites in the region.

Why this is Important?

Foodways––how we produce, prepare, and consume food––are an important part of structuring human societies. Foodways are also intricately linked to identity construction and expression, and throughout time, have supported key shifts in human sociocultural evolution. For example, the shift from hunter-gather lifestyles to more settled or ‘village’ lifestyles approximately 1500 years ago in the southeast US was punctuated by changes in food availability, food storage, and food preparation. Archaeological study of past foods, particularly plant and animal remains, provide insight into how people engaged and modified their local environments through both small-scale activities like daily food procurement and large-scale environmental terraforming.

Despite its value to local and regional understandings of human history, study of foodways on the Atlantic Coast has lagged behind other regions of the United States. This is due in part to sandy and often shallow cultural deposits that have faced almost near destruction from centuries of plowing. Survey of the Brays Island Plantation from 1988-1990 by Florida Archaeological Services (FAS) identified and systematically sampled intact cultural features (e.g., refuse pit, storage pit, hearth, household structures) from over 48 archaeological sites. The preservation of these features is rare for the region. They also contained numerous plant and animal remains from which we can glean unparalleled insight into six millennia of Lowcountry foods and how they supported social, economic, and environmental dynamics.