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，以确定非驯化地球植物(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，地球植物被狩猎和采集群体广泛食用。美国西部的许多人在他们的饮食中加入了多种物种。然而，科学家们不知道单个物种提供了多少营养，它们获得它们有多困难，或者必须花费多少能量来收集它们。收益超过成本的程度尚不得而知。通过对照实验，奥康奈尔博士将解决这些问题。他和他的同事们将收集整个大盆地地区地球植物开发的人种学模式的综合数据库，然后进行一系列实验，以量化收集和处理七个广泛使用的地球植物分类群的成本。它们还将产生关于这些分类群营养效用的新的、更可靠的数据。最近的研究表明，地球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150,000年来世界范围内以强化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追踪地球植物用途的困难。痕量元素和物理残留物分析的进展有望改善这种情况，尽管这些技术的诱导性不可避免地限制了它们的结果。奥康奈尔博士将采用的最优觅食理论的分析框架应该有助于绕过这一限制，因为它为在广泛的情况下开发理论上有充分根据的、潜在的可验证的关于地球植物开发的预测提供了基础。奥康奈尔博士收集的数据将通过对西部山间地区的人种学和最近史前地球植物使用情况的调查来探索这一潜力。然后，它将为进一步推算到人类史前提供基础。

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.