Posted on 08/23/2010 2:31:44 PM PDT by decimon
If you had a dinner invitation in Utah’s Escalante Valley almost 10,000 years ago, you would have come just in time to try a new menu item: mush cooked from the flour of milled sage brush seeds.
After five summers of meticulous excavation, Brigham Young University archaeologists are beginning to publish what they’ve learned from the “North Creek Shelter.” It’s the oldest known site occupied by humans in the southern half of Utah and one of only three such archaeological sites state-wide that date so far back in time.
BYU anthropologist Joel Janetski led a group of students that earned a National Science Foundation grant to “get to the bottom” of a site occupied on and off for the past 11,000 years, according to multiple radiocarbon estimates.
“The student excavators worked morning till night in their bare feet,” Janetski said. “They knew it was really important and took their shoes off to avoid contaminating the old dirt with the new.”
In the upcoming issue of the journal Kiva, Janetski and his former students describe the stone tools used to grind sage, salt bush and grass seeds into flour. Because those seeds are so tiny, a single serving would have required quite a bit of seed gathering. But that doesn’t mean whoever inhabited North Creek Shelter had no other choice.
Prior to the appearance of grinding stones, the menu contained duck, beaver and turkey. Sheep became more common later on. And deer was a staple at all levels of the dig.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.byu.edu ...
Same old grind ping.
Green jello, I'm sure.
And fry sauce.
If you can't grow wheat, barley or rice, I imagine that sage would do the same thing. Sage tea, flour and other derivatives have been well-known in Native American circles for both food and herbal-medicinal purposes for generations.
Interesting Utah facts. You could probably make beer out of it, too, if you tried hard enough.
My wife is trying to get me back on that diet. I wonder if it tastes better than flax?
From the wiki:
“The plant is highly allergenic to humans, and can cause dermatitis if applied to the skin of sensitive individuals. The plant’s volatile oils are metabolized in the liver into toxic compounds which can cause internal blood clotting and the formation of micro-thrombi in the liver and digestive tract.
“Native Americans used sagebrush administered internally as a medicine to halt internal bleeding caused by battle wounds and childbirth. The plant is very toxic to internal parasites and was used to expel worms. The plant’s oils are toxic to the liver and digestive system of humans if taken internally, with the toxic symptoms subsiding 24-48 hours after ingesting the plant.
“A tea made from sagebrush was used internally and as a topical dressing to treat infections by Native Americans in the Mountain West of North America. Woven sagebrush was used to make sandals in prehistory.”
Utah is a veritible pot of stew when it comes to archeology/antropology.
Just because something is found “in Utah” does not necessarily mean the “Mormons did it.”
Since Lake Bonneville covered a large part of the state (as well as Nevada), it stands to reason that many (some, several) native tribes depended on it for their livlihood, in some way or another.
There are many peoples who lived in the area. The idea is to find them and discern how they functioned within the constraints that the land allowed them.
That must be why they’re all dead today.
I don’t think Mormons were a big part of the population 10,000 years ago. I didn’t realize it had a great big lake all over the place. Fish!
Exactly. Whatever they were doing with their sagebrush mush, they weren’t using it for food. I know a guy who had an infected bite when he was a kid. His granny made him drink sagebrush tea. He held it down for almost 4 seconds before losing it, but his infection finally cleared up.
They called it aspic in those days.
I recently went to a seminar and field trip on edible and medicinal plants of the UTE tribe. It was held in Rocky Mountain National Park and was a wonderful eye-opener. One of the things I came away with was that it was damn hard work to feed yourself.
I'll bet it was. I doubt that people lived much better than animals and probably with similar mortality. Have a bad year and you don't make it through the winter.
In the southwest, typically I would think of maize, squash, and maybe amaranth or quinoa.
“I’ll bet it was. I doubt that people lived much better than animals and probably with similar mortality. Have a bad year and you don’t make it through the winter.”
I was amazed at the knowledge of medicinal plants they had. I’ve been a student of medicinal and edible plants for many years and the extent of the knowledge surprised me. We walked a mile down a trail in RMNP and it took eight hours for the seminar leader to explain all the medicinal herbs and edible plants.
The leader of the seminar missed an important tribal gathering to give this seminar of which I was the only conservative, redneck male. All of the Park Service employees were ‘couples’. They got paid for being there on our dime.
I'd rather grind the dried sage leaves, add a few dried juniper berries, and use it in the stuffing for the wild turkey, thank you very mush!
Just a-maizes me what our ancestors ate...and survived, at least long enough to breed.
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