Poster Session #2
Presentation Type
Poster
Faculty Mentor’s Full Name
Dr. Meradeth Snow
Faculty Mentor’s Department
Anthropology
Abstract / Artist's Statement
Housepit 54 is a long-lived pithouse that forms part of the ancient Bridge River village in the Mid-Fraser region of southern British Columbia, Canada. It was one of over eighty pithouses in a village occupied intermittently for over a millennia by the ancestors of the Upper St’át’imc people. Prior to the gold rush, the St’át’imc, a group of complex hunter-fisher-gathers, also cultivated plants that were indigenous to this region. Present at the site are “mystery” seeds of an unknown species, which is both ubiquitous and abundant in the archaeobotanical assemblages from the floors of Housepit 54 (Lyons et al 2017), and are also present in many other village sites in the Mid-Fraser region. The purpose of my research was to determine the identity of the species of these mystery seeds in order to infer pre-contact patterns of trade, subsistence, and resource management among the St’át’imc and neighboring indigenous communities, a topic that is highly understudied. Following extraction, the chloroplast DNA was amplified using PCR. Amplification was checked on a 2% agarose gel, followed by PCR cleanup using ExoSAP-IT, and sent to the Murdoch Sequencing Core on the University of Montana campus to complete Sanger sequencing of the sample. Once the sample was returned to the lab, the resulting sequence was analyzed using Sequencher software and compared to similar sequences with the BLAST tool in the GenBank database to determine if a match could be made to an identified sequence that allows for species identification.
Category
Social Sciences
The Identification of 'Mystery' Seeds from Bridge River, BC
UC South Ballroom
Housepit 54 is a long-lived pithouse that forms part of the ancient Bridge River village in the Mid-Fraser region of southern British Columbia, Canada. It was one of over eighty pithouses in a village occupied intermittently for over a millennia by the ancestors of the Upper St’át’imc people. Prior to the gold rush, the St’át’imc, a group of complex hunter-fisher-gathers, also cultivated plants that were indigenous to this region. Present at the site are “mystery” seeds of an unknown species, which is both ubiquitous and abundant in the archaeobotanical assemblages from the floors of Housepit 54 (Lyons et al 2017), and are also present in many other village sites in the Mid-Fraser region. The purpose of my research was to determine the identity of the species of these mystery seeds in order to infer pre-contact patterns of trade, subsistence, and resource management among the St’át’imc and neighboring indigenous communities, a topic that is highly understudied. Following extraction, the chloroplast DNA was amplified using PCR. Amplification was checked on a 2% agarose gel, followed by PCR cleanup using ExoSAP-IT, and sent to the Murdoch Sequencing Core on the University of Montana campus to complete Sanger sequencing of the sample. Once the sample was returned to the lab, the resulting sequence was analyzed using Sequencher software and compared to similar sequences with the BLAST tool in the GenBank database to determine if a match could be made to an identified sequence that allows for species identification.