Economic Utility of Geophytes in the Intermountain West

在国家科学基金会的支持下，詹姆斯·奥康奈尔博士将进行研究，以确定非驯化的地下植物（多年生植物的地下储存器官）的经济效用，以重建它们在史前生存模式中的潜在作用。根据人种学数据，很明显，地下植物被狩猎和采集群体广泛食用。美国西部的许多人将多种物种纳入他们的饮食。然而，科学家们不知道单个物种提供了多少营养，它们有多难获得，或者需要花费多少能量来收集它们。收益超过成本的程度尚不清楚。通过控制实验，O'Connell博士将解决这些问题。他和他的同事们将在整个大盆地地区收集一个关于地下植物开发的人种学模式的综合数据库，然后进行一系列旨在量化收集和处理七种广泛使用的地下植物分类群的成本的实验。它们还将产生关于这些分类群的营养效用的新的、更可靠的数据。最近的研究表明，地下植物开发的变化可能与人类进化史上的几个关键发展有关，从直立人的出现到过去约15万年来世界范围内以储存为基础的经济的出现。直到最近，对这些变化的探索一直受到考古学上追踪地下植物使用的困难的阻碍。微量元素和物理残留物分析的进展有望改善这种情况，尽管这些技术的归纳性质不可避免地限制了它们的结果。O'Connell博士将采用的最佳觅食理论的分析框架应该有助于规避这一限制，因为它为在广泛的情况下开发理论上有充分保证的潜在可检验的预测提供了基础。O'Connell博士收集的数据将通过对山间西部的民族志和最近的史前地下植物使用的调查来探索这种潜力。然后，它将为进一步追溯到人类史前史提供基础。

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.