Christine Hastorf, Professor

Anthropology, Archaeology, Archaeobotany Laboratory

Food and agriculture, archaeology, political complexity, gender, paleoethnobotany; Andes.

Profile

I became involved in anthropological research concerned with long-term human-plant relationships in 1979. I have been teaching these subjects at UC Berkeley since 1994. Within archaeology, I have focused primarily on the Andean region of South America. I am involved in studying highland Andean societies, first with the later prehistory and the Inka social and political world, with a research focus in the Mantaro Valley, central Peru. Beginning in 1992 I initiated a field project on the southern shores of Lake Titicaca in Bolivia.  In that project called the Taraco Archaeological Project, we are focusing on earlier temporal phases, studying the first permanent settlements up to the expansion of Tiwanaku. While most of the research has been at the Formative site of Chiripa, we have also have been excavating at a range of sites that span the time up to Tiwanaku. We are interested in studying the domestic daily world of the residents, but also of their social and ritual worlds as well as the larger interactive regional  system. Between 1993 and 2001 I was involved in research at the Neolithic village site of Çatal Höyük, where I focused on the  paleoethnobotanical side of that project.

My laboratory and methodological expertise is what is called paleoethnobotany or archaeobotany--the study of plants used by humans in the past. I direct the UCB McCown Archaeobotany Laboratory where a series of analytical projects are ongoing. Students working with me have a chance to join in on current laboratory and field projects. We include both undergraduates and graduates in both types of research. While my main work has been with macrobotanical remains, both seeds and tubers.  The laboratory also has the capacity to analyze wood, phytoliths and starch samples, in addition to documenting internal cellular morphology in identification.  We have several type collections covering plants from the highlands of South America and Mexico.  Further I have been involved in stable isotope research and our laboratory also works with the stable isotope laboratory that is on campus here.

The projects I have been involved in focus on social life, political change, agricultural production, foodways, and the methodologies that leads us to a better understanding of the past through the study of plant-use. I have 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. Furthermore, I have written a series of pieces on paleoethnobotanical methodology. I am 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.

Representative Publications

2001 Past Ritual and the Everyday, Kroeber Anthropological Society, University of California-Berkeley.

2001 Empire and Domestic Economy, Plenum Publ. Corp. New York.  edited by T. N. D'Altroy and C. A. Hastorf.

1993 Agriculture and the Onset of Political Inequality before the Inka. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

1988 Current Paleoethnobotany: Analytical Methods and Cultural Interpretations of Archaeological Plant Remains, ed. by C. Hastorf and V. Popper. University of Chicago Press.
articles:
2005 Food, meals and daily activities: The habitus of food practices at Neolithic Çatalhöyük.  Submitted to American Antiquity,  by Sonya Atalay and Christine A. Hastorf.

2005 The Upper (Middle and Late) Formative in the Titicaca Region, In Advances in Titicaca Basin Archaeology-I, edited by Charles Stanish, Amanda B. Cohen, and Mark Aldenderfer. Pp. 65-94. Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, University of California-Los Angeles.

2003 Andean Luxury Foods: special food for the ancestors, the deities and the elite Antiquity. 77:110-119.
 

2003 Prehispanic plant use and agriculture at Tiwanaku: social and political implications. In Tiwanaku and its hinterland vol 2, edited by Alan Kolata, Smithsonian Institution Press pp. 384-403, by Melanie Wright, Heidi Lennstrom and Christine A. Hastorf.

2001 Making the invisible visible: The hidden jewels of archaeology, In Fleeting identities: Perishable material culture in Archaeological Research, ed. by Penelope B. Drooker, Center for Archaeological Investigations, Occasional Paper no. 28. Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, pp. 27-42.

1999. Early Settlement in Chiripa, Bolivia: Research of the Taraco Archaeological Project 57 (editor). Contributions of the Archaeological Research Facility Monograph Publications.

1999. Recent Research and Innovations in Paleoethnobotany. Journal of Archaeological Research 7(1): 55-103.

1998. The Cultural Life of Early Domestic Plant Use. Antiquity 72:773-782.

1998. The Cultural Implications of Crop Introductions in Andean Prehistory. In The Prehistory of Food. edited by C. Gosden and J. Hather, eds. London: Routledge.
 

1996. Gender, Space and Food in Prehistory. In Contemporary Archaeology in Theory. edited by R.W. Preucel and I. Hodder,. Pp. 460-484. Oxford: Blackwell Press.

1996. Expanding Perspectives on Prehistoric People/Plant Relationships with Sissel Johannessen. In Contemporary Archaeology in Theory. R. W. Preucel and I. Hodder, eds. Pp. 61-78. Oxford: Blackwell Press.
 

1995. Interpretation in Context: Sampling and Analysis in Paleoethnobotany American Antiquity 60(4):701-721.Heidi Lennstrom and Christine A. Hastorf.