Native Irrigation in Owens Valley: The 2000 Year Back-story

Summary

Owens Valley is unique in that the Native Paiute were recorded as using irrigation to promote growth of certain crops such as taboose, Cyperus esculentus. This paper looks at the archaeological occurrence of the taboose tuber and other archaeobotanical remains in Owens Valley to explore the issue of whether Native irrigation would have made sense for this hunter-gatherer group. For roughly the last 2000 years of prehistory the Owens Valley archaeological record shows a cycle of alternating successful subsistence adaptations and population growth with each shift in subsistence denoting more labor input resulting in higher yields or outputs. It is argued based on well documented patterns from the archaeobotanical record, that irrigation would have been a logical step in the intensification cycle prior to disruption by Euroamerican contact.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• The Evolution of Intensive Plant Use by Complex Hunter-Gatherers: Archaeobotanical Records from California

Keywords

Spatial Coverage