Geophyte Exploitation in Northern Great Basin: Starch Granule Analysis of Bedrock Metates in Warner Valley, Oregon

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Hearths, Earth Ovens, and the Carbohydrate Revolution: Indigenous Subsistence Strategies and Cooking during the Terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene in North America" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Geophytes store starch in underground organs considered highly valued food resources across many human societies. For example, Indigenous people in the northern Great Basin plan social activities around the seasonal foraging of bulbs, roots, and tubers. Despite such obvious dietary importance, however, the antiquity of geophyte use in the Great Basin remains difficult to establish. The soft tissues of herbaceous underground storage organs do not preserve in the archaeological record. Therefore, most studies rely on indirect evidence to infer geophyte consumption by hunter-gatherers during the late Pleistocene/early Holocene, particularly in the northern Great Basin. Furthermore, researchers suggest that repatinated bedrock metates (i.e., milling features on bedrock exposures), commonly found among upland archaeological sites, reflect long-standing use for seasonal plant gathering and processing over the last 12,000 years. Our study tests this hypothesis by analyzing starch residue extracted from bedrock metates with varying degrees of repatination at three archaeological sites in the uplands of Warner Valley, Oregon. Starch granules from geophytes, specifically Lomatium spp., were identified on metate surfaces at all three sites, thereby providing direct evidence for the collection and processing of geophytes. These results support previous hypotheses regarding the seasonal foraging of geophytes by Paleoindians in the Great Basin.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Hearths, Earth Ovens, and the Carbohydrate Revolution: Indigenous Subsistence Strategies and Cooking during the Terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene in North America   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36298.0