Calculating the Cultural Significance of American Indian Plants: Paiute and Shoshone Ethnobotany at Yucca Mountain, Nevada

Ethnobotanical studies are of interest to ethnographers, ethnobotanists, and cultural historians who study the prehistoric, historic, and contemporary contribution of plants to the sociocultural adaptations of American Indian people. A critical research issue is evaluating the differential contribution of plants to American Indian adaptive strategies. This article takes the first quantitative plant evaluation model and combines it with field data from the Yucca Mountain, Nevada, ethnobotany study to explore the utility of this model for evaluating the cultural significance of botanical resources to contemporary American Indian peoples.

[1]  H. Dobyns.  Piman Indian Historic Agave Cultivation , 1988 .

[2]  H. Kuhnlein,et al.  Camas (Camassia spp.) and riceroot (Fritillaria spp.): Two liliaceous “root” foods of the Northwest Coast Indians , 1983 .

[3]  Dennis E. Breedlove,et al.  Principles of Tzeltal Plant Classification , 1975 .

[4]  J. C. Beatley.  Vascular Plants of the Nevada Test Site and Central Southern Nevada: Ecologic and Geographic Distributions , 1976 .

[5]  D. Posey,et al.  Ethnoecology as Applied Anthropology in Amazonian Development , 1984 .

[6]  W. Mason,et al.  Agriculture Among the Paiute of Owens Valley , 1976 .

[7]  J. Alcorn.  Huastec Mayan Ethnobotany , 1984 .

[8]  D. W. Peri,et al.  Ethnobotanical Mitigation, Warm Springs Dam - Lake Sonoma, California , 1983 .

[9]  N. Etkin.  Ethnopharmacology: Biobehavioral Approaches in the Anthropological Study of Indigenous Medicines , 1988 .

[10]  R. Stoffle,et al.  AMERICAN INDIANS AND NUCLEAR WASTE STORAGE: THE DEBATE AT YUCCA MOUNTAIN, NEVADA , 1988 .

[11]  N. Turner,et al.  Ethnobotany of the Nitinaht Indians of Vancouver Island. , 1983 .

[12]  H. Kuhnlein,et al.  Nutritional significance of two important root foods (springbank clover and pacific silverweed) used by native people on the coast of British Columbia , 1982 .

[13]  G. Nabhan,et al.  Ethnobotany of Devil's Claw (Proboscidea parviflora ssp. parviflora: Martyniaceae) in the Greater Southwest , 1986 .

[14]  R. Felger,et al.  People of the Desert and Sea: Ethnobotany of the Seri Indians , 1985 .

[15]  H. Kuhnlein,et al.  Determining the availability of traditional wild plant foods: An Example of Nuxalk foods, Bella Coola, British Columbia , 1985 .

[16]  J. Steward.  Basin-Plateau Aboriginal Sociopolitical Groups , 1938 .