Plants and People: Foraging to Farming Foodway Transition from Late Archaic to Early Woodland in Western North Carolina, U.S.A.

During the Late Archaic to Early Woodland Transition, 3,200 years B.P. [Before Present], some gathering communities in the Eastern Woodlands began to increase their cultivation of plants. While archaeologists have located several sites in the Upper Tennessee River Valley and near the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee that explicitly show an increase in plant cultivation, less research has focused on the North Carolina Appalachian Summit Region. This paper uses paleoethnobotanical data and spatial analysis of site locations to explore cultivation and settlement patterns in Jackson and Swain Counties, North Carolina. Data include site locations obtained from the North Carolina Office of State Archaeology to spatially analyze the preference of site location from 149 Late Archaic and 66 Early Woodland sites in combination with paleoethnobotanical remains from one Late Archaic site (31JK291) in Jackson County and an Early Woodland site (31SW596) in Swain County, in addition to plant data from previously analyzed sites. Focusing on plant cultivation as a means of change highlights this predominately female economic and social activity giving insight into the knowledge transfer and cultural shifts within foodways. This research will aim to provide more evidence to understand the motivation and results of the cultural change from the Late Archaic to Early Woodland in the Appalachian Summit by looking through the lens of both landscapes and human-plant relationships.