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Paleo-ethno-what?
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Paul Minnis of the University of Oklahoma in Norman is obsessed with a chile seed. He found it buried last summer, two meters below ground, in a pile of trash left behind a millennium ago by indigenous people in northwestern Chihuahua, Mexico.
"The chile seed came from a trash deposit under the floor of a room, suggesting it was deposited before the room was built," says Minnis. For this researcher, it offered a keyhole-sized peek at a mysterious past.
Minnis is a professor of archaeology and paleoethnobotany, a field that got its first big boost in the 1960s when archaeologists realized that not all plant remains rot. "Once we started looking for plant remains, we found them," Minnis says. He and his colleague, Michael Whalen of the University of Tulsa, have spent years excavating around Casa Grandes in northwestern Chihuahua, Mexico. Minnis estimates that there are currently about 50 paleoethnobotanists working in North America.
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