Stefania Wilks is one of Dr. Reuven Sinensky’s 2025 archaeobotany interns in the Environmental Archaeology Lab on Crow Canyon’s campus. She’s also a Ph.D. student at the University of Utah where she studies microbotanical residues extracted from ground stone tools to interpret which plants people in the past chose to process and consume.

This summer, Stefania has been hard at work analyzing charred plant remains (also known as macrobotanicals) from the Haynie site in the Mesa Verde region. These remains include beautifully preserved corn cobs, kernels, and other carbonized plant fragments that have survived for centuries thanks to ancient cooking fires and preservation conditions.

Macrobotanicals are the larger, visible plant remains recovered from archaeological sites, such as seeds, nutshells, corn cobs, and even bits of wood or roots. Unlike microscopic pollen or starch granules, these charred remains can often be identified to species level, providing direct evidence of the plants people were growing, eating, or storing. They help archaeologists trace agricultural practices, seasonal harvesting, and food preparation techniques.

Archaeobotany isn’t just about science–it’s also about storytelling. At the Haynie site, macrobotanical research in the Environmental Archaeology Lab is revealing how Ancestral Puebloan communities cultivated and consumed maize, a plant that remains sacred and central to many Pueblo communities today. Each kernel, seed, or burned nutshell tells us something about how people lived, what they valued, and how they sustained themselves in the high desert landscape of the Southwest. We share a few examples further down in this post.

Stefania’s work helps piece together this story and deepens our understanding of the enduring relationships between people, plants, and place. In honoring these ancient agricultural traditions, we also celebrate the living legacies of Indigenous communities whose knowledge and connection to this place and these plants continue to thrive today.

Photo Captions:

#1: This is a charred branchlet of a juniper tree. Each pointed segment is a leaf (called a scale) arranged on the branchlet. The space between each tick-mark on the scale bar below the branchlet represents 1 millimeter. This branchlet is ~4mm long. Charred juniper branchlets in macrobotanical samples may represent the use of Juniper trees as fuel in the production of fire.

#2: This seed is from a plant commonly referred to as Banana Yucca. Each spring, beautiful stalks of white flowers produce large fruits filled with seeds almost 1 centimeter in length. The fruits were eaten fresh, roasted, or dried and pounded into a starchy flour by people in the past. This plant is native to the Southwest and is often used as an ornamental in arid landscape design today.

#3: Carbonized maize kernels appear in the archaeological record as tiny, glossy macrobotanicals.

#4: Maize cupules are the cup-shaped sockets found on a corn cob that hold individual kernels in place. They are a part of the cob structure and are particularly useful in archaeological contexts because they can be well-preserved and can also be used for radiocarbon dating.