Exploring the use of red elderberry ( Sambucus racemosa) fruit on the southern Northwest Coast of North America

Abstract

Plant foods have generally played only minor roles in archaeological models of subsistence practices on the Northwest Coast of North America. Important paleoethnobotanical data have been generated within the region over the last several decades, but have been little explored and underutilized. In this article, we examine the use of red elderberry fruit at site 35-TI-1, a late Holocene village on the northern Oregon coast, where more than 68,000 seeds from this fruit have been recovered. Despite the fruit and its seeds being somewhat toxic, red elderberry was widely used both ethnographically and during earlier periods. Its ease of harvest, nutritional value compared to other fruits, and the need to remove its toxic seeds prior to consumption result in red elderberry being well represented in the region's paleoethnobotanical record. Also, toxins in the seeds may inhibit their decomposition, allowing uncharred seeds to survive for several hundred years. While the role of plant foods in ancient foods is hard to assess, such difficulties are not limited to plant foods and should not result in them being considered minor elements of prehistoric subsistence.