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.
Highlights
For almost all human groups through time and space, geophyte plants offer important and reliable sources of carbohydrates, nutrients and economic products
Understanding geophyte management practices in foraging societies and when these entanglements between climate, environment and food resources become deeply embedded in sociocultural systems is crucial to our collective knowledge of what happens when management does not lead to selection or domestication [6]
We show that harvesting strategies changed throughout our 4000year study period, and further illustrate that such human–plant interactions resulted in a stable yet dynamic subsistence system in which people and camas coexisted in a symbiotic relationship that did not result in dependence on humans for reproduction or other phenotypic change
Summary
For almost all human groups through time and space, geophyte plants offer important and reliable sources of carbohydrates, nutrients and economic products. Geophytes, with their edible underground storage organs, are hypothesized to have been of critical importance to early hominin development [1] and use by Homo sapiens has been documented as early as 170 000 years ago [2]. The domestication process itself is viewed as the result of phenotypic and genetic changes in cultivars that are different from unmanaged populations [10], a process made even more difficult to study with the low chances of geophyte preservation in the archaeological record. The phenotypic and genetic changes we see today in contemporary domesticated plant species are probably the end results of various conscious or unconscious decisions and behaviours occurring over millennia [16]
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