CCAC Synthetic Archaeobotany Table: All Charred Plant Taxa and Parts Identified

This table provides a complete list of identified charred plant taxa recovered from systematically collected flotation and opportunistically gathered macrofossil samples from 43 Central Mesa Verde area Ancestral Puebloan settlements occupied ca. AD 420-1280 that were excavated by Crown Canyon Archaeological Center. For information concerning archaeobotanical analysis methods and identification criteria see references for Adams 2004 and Adams and Murray 2004 in the Crow Canyon Archaeobotanical Remains Reference document. This table only presents identified charred plant remains. Uncharred specimens, apart from a handful of domesticated seeds, are not included in this table, as these plant remains are most often post-occupational intrusions (see Adams 2004, paragraph 6). This table includes both scientific and common names of identified botanical remains and a list of all plant parts recovered. In addition, plant lifeform and seasonality information for reproductive plant parts are provided for each taxon. All taxonomic nomenclature follows that of A Utah Flora (Welsh et al. 1987) with updated scientific nomenclature drawn from the PLANTS Database (USDA, NRCS 2021). For every instance where the scientific nomenclature of a taxon was updated from previous publications (e.g, Ericameria sp.) the current scientific names are listed with the previous scientific names in parentheses. Plant taxa or parts marked with asterisks(*) were only recovered as opportunistically collected macrofossil specimens. Identifications in this table are presented with two levels of confidence. The first, “absolute” identifications, are made to the species level. For an identification to be absolute, all local species of the relevant genus have been examined and the specimen in question appears identical to the named species. At the second confidence level, “-type” signifies that the specimen closely resembles the morphological characteristics of the named taxa, but that other plants in the local environment might have similar-looking parts (see Adams 2004, paragraph 11).