Event: FRIDAY SEMINAR:Intimate plants: Constructing past identities through people’s relationships with their food

Speaker:

Christine A. Hastorf

University of California, Berkeley

Abstract:

Plants have been the most common non-human set of species that people have engaged with over human existence.  While most people speak of domesticating plants, they too have domesticated us.  They have formed intimate relations with us, having convinced our ancestors to settle down and care for them.  At times they have become kin, moving in with us and sustaining us, like a good grandmother. How can we see these intimate relationships with plants in the past, given that they are often scarce in archaeological sites? By thinking about plants in more social ways we can begin to get closer to people’s choices, values and engagements with plants as we accept that this has been an intimate relationship since the before the palaeolithic times.

Bio:

Christine Hastorf is a professor of Anthropology at the University of California Berkeley. She is a leading scholar in the field of paleoethnobotany. She is currently the director of the McCown UC Berkeley archaeobotany laboratory and the Archaeology Research Facility at UC. Berkeley. As archaeologist, she led archaeological work in the Andean region of South America since 1980 with focus on plantpeople relationship. Her published books include Agriculture and the Onset of political inequality before the Inka; Empire and domestic economy; Heads of State: Icons, Power, and Politics in the Ancient and Modern Andes. Her most recent book is the Social Archaeology of Food:Thinking of food in Prehistory.