Paleoethnobotany at LSP-1 Rockshelter, Lake County, OR: Assessing the dietary diversity of plant foods in Holocene diet

Summary

Over the past five field seasons, collaborative research at the LSP-1 rockshelter in Oregon’s Warner Valley conducted by the University of Nevada, Reno archaeological field school and Bureau of Land Management has revealed a record of human occupation spanning the Holocene. While faunal remains are prominent in the deposits, nutritional information can also be derived from pollen and seed data at LSP-1. This paper presents the results of paleoethnobotanical analysis with respect to diet breadth and foraging of locally available plant taxa during the Early (~11,000-7,600 BP), Middle (~7,600-3,000), and Late Holocene (~3,000-contact). These data contribute to a growing body of research identifying plant resources targeted by people living in the Warner Valley. Additionally, data generated by this study also have the potential to provide insight into the nutrient intake associated with preferred plant foods and to facilitate our understanding of hunter-gatherer dietary diversity over the course of several millennia in the northern Great Basin.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Celebrating the 100th Anniversary of the Death of Primitive Economic Man: Nutritional Archaeology for the 21st Century

Keywords

Spatial Coverage