Bulbs and Biographies, Pine Nuts and Palimpsests: Exploring Plant Diversity and Earth Oven Reuse at a Late Period Plateau Site

Earth ovens, hearths, and middens are common archaeological features in western North America that contain the residues of everyday activities. Ethnographic and archaeological research indicates that these in-ground food preparation features were frequently reused over many months and years. These quotidian features therefore can be productively thought of as having use-lives or biographies. Here we present a framework for interpreting these archaeological food preparation feature biographies and the palimpsest nature of earth oven features. We illustrate the value of this framework through paleoethnobotanical analysis of archived soil samples from a bulk food processing site on the Columbia-Fraser Plateau in northeastern Washington State. While this site and other food preparation sites throughout the Plateau are largely interpreted as remains of intensive geophyte processing, our finds indicate that a wide range of economic plants were processed at this location, indicative of a dynamic and flexible subsistence system. We suggest that residents and visitors to the Pend Oreille Valley from ca. 2700 to 500 cal BP frequently returned to and reused earth oven features as they processed multiple plant food taxa including nodding onion ( Allium cernuum ), camas ( Camassia quamash ), goosefoot chenopod seeds (cf. Chenopodium atrovirens ), and pine nuts ( Pinus spp.). We see a biographical approach as a potential solution to the common “palimpsest problem” and suggest that this framework may be a fruitful way of investigating multiple food preparation recipes, methods, and events, as well as adding paleoenvironmental datasets to biographical or life-history archaeological rhetoric.