People in Archaeobotany Laboratory
Archaeological macroplant material is analyzed in the Archaeobotany Laboratory. The Materials Analysis Laboratory (a wet lab) allows for microbotanical analysis, especially of pytoliths.Location: 65 Kroeber Hall
- Christine Hastorf, Professor
- Christine Hastorf focuses on social life, political change, agricultural production, foodways, and the methodologies that lead to a better understanding of the past through the study of plant-use. She has written on agricultural production, cooking practices and what shifts in these suggest about social relations, gender relations surrounding plant use, the rise of complex society, political change and the symbolic use of plants in the legitimation of authority, fuel use and related symbolism, and plant domestication as part of social identity construction and ritual and social identity. She is particularly interested in wild plant use as compared to domesticates, identifying the stages in plant processing, their participation in social construction, and especially their participation and reflection of the symbolic and the political, in addition to the playing out of the concept of culture in the natural world.