Re: Stone Age Americans cooking find

Jack Linthicum wrote:
On Dec 27, 7:09 am, "Jean" <jean.len...@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Jack Linthicum a écrit dans le message
<7e258119-0bf9-45b7-89a1-a25699842...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>...
On Dec 25, 3:21 pm, Mike R <michaelrugg...@xxxxxxx> wrote:



On Dec 23, 12:03 pm, Catherine Jefferson <spamt...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Mike R wrote:
<snip, but read>
Camas was mashed and pounded with a mortar and pestle into a dough
shaped into loaves and baked. The ovens have been dated from between
7000 BCE up to 1600 AD. The food fell out of favor due to long cooking
times, take longer to grow and provide fewer calories per pound than
corn.
Not everywhere. Camas bulbs remained the staple carbohydrate in the
diet of many tribes in the Pacific Northwest coast into historic times,
and was then replaced by European carbohydrates, mostly wheat, not corn.
Camas is still eaten on occasion by the tribes there; I ate it when
attending an event hosted by a local tribe along the Columbia River.
By the way, Camas is a wild food, gathered not grown, at least in the
Pacific Northwest. The tribes in that especially rich biome were aware
of agriculture, but never used it to any significant degree. (I believe
a few of them cultivated tobacco, but no food crops.) The Pacific
Northwest coast had a complex culture and relatively large population
without agriculture, I believe one of the few places in the world where
humans managed to develop a non-stone-age culture and population levels
without agriculture.
--
Catherine Jefferson <ar...@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Personal Home Page * <http://www.devsite.org/>
The SpamBouncer * <http://www.spambouncer.org/>
Thanks for the update and additional information Catherine, that was
very interesting,
Mike Ruggeri
http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-earlyfoods27-2008dec27%2C0...
869.story
From the Los Angeles Times
When the woolly mammoth ran out, early man turned to roasted
vegetables
Ovens made of super-heated rocks allowed primitive humans to cooks
lily bulbs, wild onions and other plants for days to make them edible.
By Thomas H. Maugh II

December 27, 2008

Long before early humans in North America grew corn and beans, they
were harvesting and cooking the bulbs of lilies, wild onions and other
plants, roasting them for days over hot rocks, according to a Texas
archaeologist.

The evidence for this practice has long been known of in fire-cracked
rock piles found throughout the continent, but archaeologists have
tended to ignore it "because a new pyramid or a Clovis arrow point is
much sexier," said archaeologist Alston V. Thoms of Texas A&M
University.

In two reports published online this week in the Journal of
Anthropological Archaeology and the Journal of Archaeological Science,
Thoms reported that cooking on hot rocks first became a substitute for
cooking on hot coals about 9,000 to 10,500 years ago, then had a
sudden jump in popularity about 4,000 years ago.

The reason for the changes: population growth that required the
exploitation of new food resources.

"Whatever they were eating before did not require prolonged cooking,"
Thoms said. But beginning about 10,000 years ago, "people couldn't
live off the cream of the land anymore." The megafauna that had been a
prime food source -- such as the woolly mammoth -- were becoming
extinct, and other mammals were becoming harder to find. People had to
turn to plants.

Meadowlands and forest edges were filled with lilies, wild onions and
perhaps two dozen other wild plants ready for the harvesting. The
bulbs of these plants are about as nutritious as sweet potatoes, but
their energy is locked up in a dense, indigestible carbohydrate called
inulin. The only way to make the bulbs digestible is to roast them for
two days or longer.

SNIP

ODD!!
We collect and eat wild onions most of the year. They require no cooking at
all to be edible. That seems to
be the case with edible wild lilies also.

Lily, White Trout (Erythronium albidum) - The corms (tubers) are edible raw.
Good source for the chemistry of plantshttp://sun.ars-grin.gov/duke/plants.html
JL

Maybe you should send Dr. Thomas a email describing the way it works,
there is a lot of speculation in archaeology that seems to be
unnecessary. He did something 10-11 years ago about "hot rocks", it
may be an obsession. He seems to be at the University of Texas.

Alston V. Thoms appears to be at Texas A&M, College Station, Texas, and doesn't seem to be part of the University of Texas system.

Here is a link to Thoms' "Publications" page on the TA&M web site:

http://anthropology.tamu.edu/faculty/directory.php?ID=230&LOC=2

It includes three links to one large summary work (over 1100 pages in all) for which Thoms is the Principal Investigator:

ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND PALEOECOLOGICAL INVESTIGATIONS AT THE RICHARD BEENE SITE, SOUTH-CENTRAL TEXAS, 2007

It is in two main volumes, with a third volume, Appendix B, showing a whole bunch of data:

Volume I: Paleoecological Studies, Cultural Contexts, and Excavation Strategies

Volume II: Archaeological Studies, Synthesis, and Appendixes

APPENDIX B PROVENIENCE DATA

In volume I, Chapter 8: CULTURAL CONTEXTS: ETHNOHISTORIC AND ARCHAEOLOGICAL RECORDS (starting on p. 123, which is p. 145 in the .pdf), written by Thoms, he discusses the Spanish records (starting with good old Head of the Cow -- Cabeza de Vaca), and then moving on to a discussion on p. 135 (or p. 157 of the .pdf) of "Fire-Cracked Rock Features and Their Functions".

There is an interesting illustration of four different types of 'hot rock' cooking, figure 8.4 on p. 136 of Vol. I (p. 158 of the ..pdf).

The concluding remarks from Chapter 8, Vol. I (p. 137 of the work, or p. 159 of the .pdf):


"Ethnohistoric and archaeological records attesting
to Native American land-use practices in the middle
Medina Valley indicate that, in general, the kinds
of settlement and subsistence patterns reported by
Cabeza de Vaca extended into the distant past. For
the last 10,000 years or so, the region’s inhabitants
appear to have been mobile hunters and gatherers
who inhabited many of the same places on the landscape,
arguably lived in wickiup structures that left
little in the way of archaeological remains, and relied
heavily on deer, rabbits, prickly-pear, and root
foods. These staples were undoubtedly supplemented
by many other foods, including pecans, river
mussels, fish, and a wide variety of other animals.
It remains to be determined just what foods were
cooked in FCR features known to be present
throughout the Applewhite Reservoir area. The degree
to which stone-boiling was practiced needs to
be addressed systematically. In any case, intensive
procurement and processing of root foods has been
incorporated into the present project’s working
model for land-use systems. If the large FCR features
found at several Early and Middle Archaic sites
in the area (McGraw and Hindes 1987; McCulloch
et al. 2008) are indicative of plant-food processing,
some form of “specialized” plant collecting may
have been well underway by 4000–5000 B.P. in the
middle Medina Valley. Recent discoveries of earth
ovens and charred camas bulbs more than 8000 years
old (Collins 1998; Dering 2003; Schroeder and
Oksanen 2002) suggest that the onset of hot-rock
cookery and baking lily bulbs in Texas extends back
to the early Holocene, as is the case in other parts of
North America."

I admit to not having read these volumes yet. But it seems as though the 'hot rocks' business may not be so much an obsession for Thoms as the result of long work on at an apparently very important site.

Hope to read more tomorrow, when I'm not cross-eyed with weariness.

HTH.

--
Tom "Go Pack" McDonald
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: OT: 1 MILLION People to Defeat Barack Obama
    ... It's more of a problem for places we export food to. ... inflation turf because they and their kids need to eat. ... constrained people in the US can be by food prices. ... There have been times in the past when Texas was like 3% and everybody ...
    (sci.electronics.design)
  • Re: OT: 1 MILLION People to Defeat Barack Obama
    ... It's more of a problem for places we export food to. ... I have a very good grip on the development of costs, ... Utility bills have gone up, health premiums have gone up, gas ... The most recent number for unemployment I saw for Texas is 8.2%. ...
    (sci.electronics.design)
  • Re: Bush is either a liar, or an idiot, or both.
    ... >NOLA refugees and are setting them up in apartments which FEMA will ... The apartment complex owners have agreed to ... it got them to Texas. ... Sometimes I even put it in the food. ...
    (sci.electronics.design)
  • Re: OT-Welcome to the Obama economy
    ... Christmas toys, car parts, dog food and any other items they wanted ... some $0.10 item and get the change in cash. ... As to the "The H.E.B. stores in Mathis and Beeville, Texas routinely let ...
    (rec.outdoors.rv-travel)
  • Re: El Cos Marketing Campaign
    ... The EL ROCKS! ... Rooms, Sportsbook, food, even service seems better. ... Big Mikey ...
    (alt.vacation.las-vegas)