Carney Molly, Tushingham Shannon, McLaughlin Tara, d'Alpoim Guedes Jade
Department of Anthropology, Washington State University, College Hall, Pullman, WA 99164, USA.
Department of Natural Resources, Kalispel Tribe of Indians, PO Box 39, Usk, WA 99180, USA.
R Soc Open Sci. 2021 Apr 14;8(4):202213. doi: 10.1098/rsos.202213.
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 (), 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.
最大的考古谜团之一在于理解觅食人群在向低水平粮食生产实践过渡以及从低水平粮食生产实践过渡回来的过程中，决策、意向性和对植物生命周期的干预所起的作用。我们汇集了考古学、古气候学和植物学数据，以探究过去4000年里人们与北美太平洋西北部常见的一种多年生地下结果植物——卡马斯（camas）之间的关系。在全新世晚期的整个这一地区，人们在公元前3500年左右开始通过挑选性成熟的球茎进行选择性收获实践，到公元前1000年时，类似于人种志描述的球茎收获实践已稳固确立。虽然我们没有发现证据表明此类干预导致了对更大球茎的选择或成熟时间的缩短，但考古发现的球茎确实展现出了其他一些驯化综合征特征。这确立了人类对卡马斯生命周期干预的相当连续性，但这些动态关系并未导致明确的驯化形态迹象。这种追踪觅食者植物管理实践的方法为传统管理研究提供了一个替代的解释框架，补充了本土传统资源管理的口述历史，并且可以应用于其他无性繁殖物种。
