Harvesting strategies as evidence for 4000 years of camas ( Camassia quamash ) management in the North American Columbia Plateau

Abstract

One of the greatest archaeological enigmas is in understanding the role of decision-making, intentionality and interventions in plant life cycles by foraging peoples in transitions to and from low-level food production practices. We bring together archaeological, palaeoclimatological and botanical data to explore relationships over the past 4000 years between people and camas ( Camassia quamash ), a perennial geophyte with an edible bulb common across the North American Pacific Northwest. In this region throughout the late Holocene, people began experimenting with selective harvesting practices through targeting sexually mature bulbs by 3500 cal BP, with bulb harvesting practices akin to ethnographic descriptions firmly established by 1000 cal BP. While we find no evidence that such interventions lead to a selection for larger bulbs or a reduction in time to maturity, archaeological bulbs do exhibit several other domestication syndrome traits. This establishes considerable continuity to human intervention into camas life cycles, but these dynamic relationships did not result in unequivocal morphological indications of domestication. This approach to tracking forager plant management practices offers an alternative explanatory framework to conventional management studies, supplements oral histories of Indigenous traditional resource management and can be applied to other vegetatively propagated species.

Pop-up restoration in colonial contexts: applying an indigenous food systems lens to ecological restoration

“…Garry oak ecosystems were managed for, among other reasons, camas production. Archeological evidence spanning the early-mid Holocene highlights camas (and hazelnut, Corylus cornuta) as principal plant food resources across the Pacific Northwest (Aikens, 1993;Armstrong et al, 2018;Carney et al, 2021). Historical and ethnographic evidence indicated that camas was one of the most important food staples for Quw'utsun, and that it formed an essential commodity of Quw'utsun economies and trade relationships with other Coast Salish groups on the mainland and up the Fraser River (Lyons and Ritchie, 2017).…”

Strengthening Relationships to Traditional Foodways: Adapting Food Practices Through Camas Cultivation Experiments on the Fort Hall Indian Reservation

“…In addition to gathering bulbs, Indigenous Peoples cared for, and continue to care for, camas patches through harvest itself, replanting of small bulbs, weeding of surrounding vegetation, applying natural fertilizers, and burning (Gritzner 1994;Sultany, Kephart and Eilers 2007;Weddell n.d.), and such practices have been shown to have positive impacts on camas populations (Stucki, Rodhouse and Reuter 2021). Historical camas management strategies, such as selective harvesting and replanting, speak to Indigenous peoples' cultivation of the plant for millennia (Carney et al 2021;Lepofsky and Lertzman 2008).…”

How ancestral subsistence strategies solve salmon starvation and the “protein problem” of Pacific Rim resources

“…ure prominently in key Plateau archaeological sequences (e.g., Ames & Marshall, 1980;Lepofsky & Peacock, 2004, p. 115;Peacock, 1998; see also Fulkerson & Tushingham, 2021, table 3; and references therein), and are recognized as being perhaps even more important than salmon in driving many regional cultural changes (Ames & Marshall, 1980). On the Southern (Columbia) Plateau, there is evidence of root procurement and processing as early as 6500-5500 BP, of widespread intensification by around 4500 BP (Andrefsky, 2004;Andrefsky et al, 2000;Goodale et al, 2004;Thoms, 1989), and selective harvesting by 3500 BP (Carney et al, 2021). In the Canadian (Northern) Plateau, root exploitation intensifies prior to the formation of aggregated villages (i.e., before 3300 BP).…”