Paleoethnobotany

In the spring of 1996 Christine Hastorf led a team of mainly UC Berkeley students and ARF affiliates to Chiripa, Bolivia where they surveyed, excavated and analyzed Formative material at the site on the shores of Lake Titicaca. These strata date to between 1500 BC and AD 400. For more detail see ARF Newsletter Vol. 4 no. 1 in the spring of 1997. They plan on returning in 1998 to more excavations at the site.

Later in the summer she worked at the site of Çatal Höyük. This excavation project is directed by Ian Hodder of Cambridge University. There, with Julie Near, a graduate student in Anthropology at UCB, she organized the archaeobotanical extraction procedures and processing for the season. During the year, she worked with Anja Wolle of the project, to design a data base structure to input the botanical remains as well as dovetail with the other data sets on the site. The sampling strategies will be relatively stable over the next few years. This long term project will be excavating at the site for the next 20 years. Christine returned in August of 1997 as well.

During the school terms Christine was on sabbatical leave as a by-fellow at Churchill College at Cambridge University, England. There, in addition to ongoing work on these two projects, she researched and wrote on paleoethnobotany, south-central Andean Formative political and social trends, gender issues, and food studies, both theoretically and archaeologically. She participated in a AAA symposium of food and inequality, participated in a paper on Chiripa at the Society for American Archaeology (SAA's) and co-organized a SAA forum on paleoethnobotanical methods.

Recent Publications

1994 Corn and Culture in the Prehistoric New World, edited by S. Johannessen and C.A. Hastorf. Westview Press, Minnesota Anthropology Series, Boulder Colorado.

1994 Toward Reconstructing Ancient Maize: Experiments in Processing and Charring with S. Goette, M. Williams, and S. Johannessen. Journal of Ethnobiology, 14(1):1-21.

Last modified 3 November 1999.