{"title":"“An instrument of grace”: Archaeological and ethnographic studies of homegardens in the American Neotropics","authors":"Andrew R. Wyatt","doi":"10.1016/j.jaa.2022.101469","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Homegardens are spaces where food, medicine, construction materials, and plants of aesthetic value are grown, both for household consumption, but also for sale in markets to supplement household income. Importantly, they are also spaces of cultural significance; gardens are spaces where many household activities are enacted, where household income is supplemented, where cultural memory is maintained. Archaeological explorations of garden spaces, particularly in the Neotropics, have successfully utilized soil chemical, archaeobotanical, and spatial analysis in identifying the location of cultivated spaces in relation to household structures. Having refined our ability to identify homegarden spaces, we can focus on anthropologically oriented questions regarding gender, status, political economy, and identity. In this special issue we are looking beyond gardens as simply utilitarian and functional spaces, and seeing them as places that have social, cultural, personal, and psychological importance. This introductory article will present some of the past and current research on homegardens and provide avenues for future archaeological research.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":47957,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Anthropological Archaeology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.0000,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Journal of Anthropological Archaeology","FirstCategoryId":"90","ListUrlMain":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0278416522000770","RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"ANTHROPOLOGY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Homegardens are spaces where food, medicine, construction materials, and plants of aesthetic value are grown, both for household consumption, but also for sale in markets to supplement household income. Importantly, they are also spaces of cultural significance; gardens are spaces where many household activities are enacted, where household income is supplemented, where cultural memory is maintained. Archaeological explorations of garden spaces, particularly in the Neotropics, have successfully utilized soil chemical, archaeobotanical, and spatial analysis in identifying the location of cultivated spaces in relation to household structures. Having refined our ability to identify homegarden spaces, we can focus on anthropologically oriented questions regarding gender, status, political economy, and identity. In this special issue we are looking beyond gardens as simply utilitarian and functional spaces, and seeing them as places that have social, cultural, personal, and psychological importance. This introductory article will present some of the past and current research on homegardens and provide avenues for future archaeological research.
期刊介绍:
An innovative, international publication, the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology is devoted to the development of theory and, in a broad sense, methodology for the systematic and rigorous understanding of the organization, operation, and evolution of human societies. The discipline served by the journal is characterized by its goals and approach, not by geographical or temporal bounds. The data utilized or treated range from the earliest archaeological evidence for the emergence of human culture to historically documented societies and the contemporary observations of the ethnographer, ethnoarchaeologist, sociologist, or geographer. These subjects appear in the journal as examples of cultural organization, operation, and evolution, not as specific historical phenomena.