Keeping It Living: Traditions of Plant Use and Cultivation on the Northwest Coast of North America

3 / Intensification of Food Production on the Northwest Coast and Elsewhere

Chapter 3 Intensification of Food Production on the Northwest Coast and Elsewhere kenneth m. ames The techniques of plant food production described in the chapters that follow are very likely the result of an evolutionary process known as intensification, or, in other words, producing more food. The causes and possiblee ªectsof increasingfoodproductionarecentralresearchquestiontomany disciplines, Northwest Coast anthropology and archaeology among them. This chapter examines intensification on the Northwest Coast and among complex hunter-gatherers. I first very briefly outline several issues in the archaeology of the Northwest Coast and of complex hunter-gatherers to which intensification of food production is directly relevant. In the sections that follow , I place the concept of intensification in a broader perspective, both in terms of theory and application. From this general consideration of intensi- fication,Idiscusstheintensificationof plantfoodproductionontheNorthwest Coast using models either developed by evolutionary ecologists or based on their work. One set of models is quite general in its application, and a second set of two models specifically focuses on the intensification of root harvesting . The archaeological record for intensification is then examined against the predictions of the general models. Following that discussion, I review the evidence for the intensification of root food production on the Intermontane Plateau of south central British Columbia and Interior Washington and Idaho. I also review the evidence for plant use during the Locarno Beach and Marpole phases of the Gulf of Georgia region of the southern Northwest Coast. Issues in Northwest Coast Social and Economic History It has only been within the last thirty years that the subsistence economies and ecology of Northwest Coast peoples have been of central concern to anthropologists and archaeologists working on the coast. Prior to that time, the coast was assumed to be an exceptionally rich and productive place, one 67 that permitted, but did not cause, the development of Northwest Coast societies . Wayne Suttles (e.g., 1962, 1968) and others (Vayda 1961) placed the interplay among the coast’s dynamic environments and coastal peoples’ complex social organization at the center of anthropological inquiry in the early 1960s. Knut Fladmark (1975) put salmon production at the center of archaeological investigations of the evolution of Northwest Coast societies in 1975. Nineteenth-century Northwest Coast societies are world-famous for, among other things, their extraordinary art. Other attributes of these societies include complex forms of sedentism (people living in one place yearround ); large towns and villages; some degree of occupational specialization among at least some groups; and ranking of their members. These are all traits that anthropologists and other social theorists long assumed were associated exclusively with agriculture; that, indeed, in order to develop, they require the high levels of food production that only agriculture can produce. These traits can be placed together under the term “social complexity.” Since Northwest Coast peoples were not farmers, as classically defined, then how did they evolve social complexity? The question that Suttles tried to answer remains: What are the relationships between subsistence production, ecology, and social complexity on the Northwest Coast (and, by extension, among other, so-called “complex hunter-gatherers” in the world)? The issues arising from these questions have been extensively reviewed elsewhere , and the reader is referred to Ames (1994) for a thumbnail sketch of them. However, to introduce both this chapter and those that follow, I will quite briefly outline some of the research questions immediately relevant here (for more complete discussions, and bibliographies, see Ames [1994], Ames and Maschner [1999], and Matson and Coupland [1995]). social complexity: intensification and food storage For most of the past century, researchers around the world have assumed a direct link between the evolution of complex societies (such as those on the Northwest Coast, as well as modern society, the Roman Empire, etc.) and increased levels of food production in the form of farming. It was long held that hunter-gatherers simply could not produce enough food to create the surpluses required to enable the development of social complexity. In a significant intellectual shift, it is now recognized that intensification of food production can lead to social complexity, regardless of economy. All the debates about intensification on the Northwest Coast, until this volume , focus on the role and relative importance of salmon. Many researchers regard increasing salmon production as the crucial economic change driving almost all other social and economic changes in the long history of the coast’s peoples. Others, myself included...