Economic Utility of Geophytes in the Intermountain West

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With National Science Foundation support Dr. James O'Connell will conduct research to determine the economic utility of non-domesticated geophytes (the underground storage organs of perennial plants) to reconstruct their potential role in prehistoric subsistence patterns. Based on ethnographic data it is clear that geophytes were widely eaten by hunting and gathering groups. Many in the US West incorporated multiple species into their diets. Scientists however do not know how much nutrition individual species provide, how difficult they are to obtain or how much energy must be expended to collect them. The extent to which benefits exceed costs is unknown. Through controlled experimentation Dr. O'Connell will address these issues. He and his colleagues will assemble a comprehensive data base on ethnographic patterns of geophyte exploitation throughout the Great Basin region and then conduct a series of experiments designed to quantify the costs of collecting and processing seven widely-used geophyte taxa. They will also generate new, more reliable data on the nutritional utility of these taxa. Recent research suggests that changes in geophyte exploitation may have been implicated in several key developments in human evolutionary history, from the emergence of Homo erectus to the appearance of intensified storage-based economies world-wide in the last ca 150,000 years. Exploration of these changes has, until recently, been hampered by the difficulty of tracking geophyte use archaeologically. Advances in trace element and physical residue analysis promise to improve this situation, although the inductive nature of these techniques inevitably limits their results. The analytic framework of optimal foraging theory which Dr. O'Connell will employ should help circumvent this limitation since it provides a basis for developing theoretically well warranted potentially testable predictions about geophyte exploitation under a wide range of circumstances. The data which Dr. O'Connell collects will explore this potential though investigation of ethnographic and recent prehistoric geophyte use in the Intermountain West. It will then provide the basis for extrapolation further back into human prehistory.