Foraging for bulbs in the Cape Floristic Region

Summary

Underground storage organs (USOs) serve as a staple source of carbohydrates for many hunter-gatherer societies. While the way of life of hunter-gatherers in South Africa’s Cape is no longer in existence, there is extensive historical and archaeological evidence of hunter-gatherers’ use of such plants as foodstuffs. This is to be expected, given that the Cape supports the largest concentration of plants with USOs globally. To meet the goals of the Paleoscape project, the importance of evaluating the USO resources of the area is a crucial part of modelling the resources that would have been available to hunter-gatherers during glacials. In the past, optimal foraging models were built on data collected from observing hunter-gatherer foraging, this is impossible in the Cape due to the lack of hunter-gatherers. To this end we evaluate the foraging potential of USOs by identifying how abundant edible biomass is in a coastal setting of the southern Cape, how easily it is gathered, and how nutritious it is based on experimental methods. From preliminary experiments we demonstrate that USOs are a readily available food resource in the southern Cape landscape and that they more than likely played a critical role in providing food for early humans.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Building the hunter-gatherer’s paleoscape on the South African coast: Environment, landscape, and foraging resources   •
• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage