Harlan's Crops and Man. H. Thomas Stalker

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СКАЧАТЬ for a considerable number of plants used by the native people of North American, the Australian Aborigines, and gatherers in tropical zones. Some plants are deadly poisonous without treatment, others only unpleasant. Several acorn species are sweet and need no treatment, while others contain various amounts of tannins. Among California Native Americans, some of the bitterest oaks were the most popular; when properly leached, the original tannin content did not cause any harm. Tribes on the edge of the “acorn belt” were often more selective since they did not depend much on acorns and did not want to go to the trouble of leaching. Leguminous seeds, Solanaceous fruits, Dioscorea spp., and Aroid tubers are still among the more common poisonous foods consumed by gatherers.

Detoxification is usually by heat, leaching, or both. The plant material is frequently reduced by grinding or pounding in a mortar to facilitate treatment. Boiling water may be poured through the meal, the material may be boiled in several changes of water, or sometimes prolonged soaking in cold water is enough. Some foods are roasted, pounded, and then leached. Sieves, strainers, cloth sacks, wooden troughs, or sandbeds may be produced for the purpose. Pottery is not necessary; water may be boiled in baskets, hides, wooden boxes, or pits in the ground by dropping fire‐heated rocks into the water.

      Gatherers not only know how to make poisonous foods safe, but they also know a great deal about drugs, narcotics, medicines, fish poisons, arrow poisons, gums, resins, glues, dyes and paints, bark cloth, and woods for spears, arrows, bows, shields, fire sticks, and canoes. They have also used their botanical knowledge in spinning and weaving, basket‐making, and constructing household utensils, fish traps and weirs, masks, figurines, and ceremonial objects.

      The Australian Aborigine was fond of chewing a wild tobacco (mostly Nicotiana suaveolens Lehm.). Wood of Acacia salicina Lindl. was burned to provide ash to mix with the quid. Why this particular species out of dozens of Acacia? Johnston and Cleland (1933) analyzed the ash and found it extraordinarily high in calcium sulfate, “sulfuric anhydride 30.09% and lime 40.70%.” The alkaloids are more soluble in alkaline solutions. Perhaps any source of lime would do, but the practice reminds one of the custom in India of burning heartwood of Senegalia catechu (L. f.) P. J. H. Hunter and Mebb (syn: Acacia catechu (L.f.) Wild, Oliv.) to obtain “cutch” which is mixed with other ingredients and used when betel nuts are chewed.

      Another masticatory of the Aborigines was Duboisia hopwoodii (F. Muell) F. Muell. This is of a different order of drug potency and contains hyoscyamine and norhyoscyamine, with scopolamine in the younger leaves (Johnston & Cleland, 1933). Both narcotics were confounded under the general name “pituri” and were important articles of trade over great distances; “shields, boomerangs, spears and other articles being sent in return for them.”

      In the late 19th century, Father Trilles, a French missionary to Gabon, West Africa, observed pygmies making arrow poison. The process was long, complex, and dangerous, for the poisons were extremely potent. Ingredients of 10 different plants were used; eight were poisonous and two were gums to be impregnated with poison and stuck to the arrow heads. Two animal poisons were also included: beetle larvae and venom of a horned viper. The procedure is described in The Hunting Peoples by Coon (1971) who added this comment:

A tourist driving along a forest‐lined road, seeing an elderly, diminutive black man clad in a bark‐cloth breechclout, would have no reason to suspect that this child of nature knew the properties of many medicinal plants, some still undescribed in Western science, and how to combine them for their greatest effect. With the forest and marsh his pharmacy, his laboratory a secret nook in the shade of tall trees, and a minimum of equipment, the Pygmy poison‐maker performs a delicate, dangerous, and highly skilled sequence of operations as exacting as some modern professions.

      An indication of ecological sophistication is reported by Levitt (1981) for Aborigines of Groote Eylandt. Some common grasses were used as “calendar plants”—when grains of Chrysopogon spp. are ripe, it is time to dig yams; or when grains of Heteropogon triticerus R. Br. start to shatter, it is time to dig yams; and when all grains have fallen, it is time to stop. When Heteropogon contortus (L.) P. Beauv. ex Roem. & Schult. begins to flower, the rainy season will soon be over. Other hunter‐gatherers receive similar signals from their knowledge of plant growth and reproduction.

      The more one studies the wealth of plant lore of gathering peoples the more one is impressed by the extent and coverage of their botanical knowledge. Man knows what he needs to know or learns what he must or else he dies. The security and stability of gathering economies are from necessity, rooted in an extensive body of information about plants.

Manipulation of Vegatation

      Kangaroo Island lies off the south coast of Australia. It had once been inhabited by Aborigines, but they left or died out long before European contact. The woody vegetation had become a virtually impenetrable thicket, while the nearby mainland with the same climate supported an open, grassy woodland. This comparison gives us some understanding of the extent of Aboriginal control over the vegetation. To this day, if areas are uninhabited for an extended period, the woody vegetation thickens up, and the Aborigines find the landscape uncomfortable and spiritually dangerous (Chase, 1989). After repeated burnings, the land again shows the stamp of human occupancy and the Aborigines feel more comfortable and spiritually safe. The Aborigines have more or less domesticated the landscape by skillful use of fire and complain that the white man lets the land get “dirty” (Lewis, 1989). Jones (1969) called it “firestick farming.”

The Aborigines did more than clear land by burning. They diverted water to flood forests in the dry season: “We like to see plenty of water in the jungle all the time, for birds of all kinds gather near it, and the food plants that we like grow better” (Campbell, 1965). They constructed water‐spreading devices for the rainy season (Lourandos, 1980), and they ditched to increase the supply of eels and other fish (Walters, 1989). In the course of digging up wild root crops, they churned up large areas to the point they resembled plowed fields. Sir George Grey wrote (1841):

      In the Province of Victoria, as already stated, I have seen tracts of land several square miles in extent, so thickly studded with holes, where the natives have been digging up yams (Dioscorea) that it was difficult to walk across it. Again, in the sandy desert country which surrounds for many miles, the town of Perth, in Western Australia, the different species of Haemadorum are very plentiful.

      The borderline between gathering and farming becomes very hazy at this point. Douglas Yen referred to such activities as Aboriginal agronomy (Yen, 1989). Perhaps the key difference here between foraging and farming is that no native Australian plant was actually domesticated, otherwise hunter‐gatherers do about everything farmers do.

      The Great Basin Native Americans did about the same, burning vegetation, sowing seeds, and irrigating tracts of land (Downs, 1964). Indeed, fire was used to modify vegetation just about anywhere that vegetation could be burned, and the practice may well have gone back to Acheulean times (Hallam, 1975). There are some immediate returns from the practice; animals fleeing fires are more vulnerable to the spear and the bow, but the major returns are delayed. New shoots, unencumbered by old growth attract grazing animals; the ash provides some fertility for regrowth; heat renders phosphorus more available; woody vegetation is retarded and herbaceous plants increase; wild seed harvests are enhanced; roots and tubers escape injury in the dry season and thrive as competition is reduced. The landscape is tamed, but the plants and animals were not.

Food Plants in Ritual and Ceremony

      Some California tribes, heavily dependent on acorns for food, conducted an annual spring ceremony, usually in April, for the purpose of increasing the crop. The participants went out at night, visited specified trees, and implored them to yield abundantly. The trees were supposed to respond (Loeb, 1934).

First‐fruit СКАЧАТЬ