Farmers who forage: interpreting paleofecal evidence of wild resource use by early corn farmers in the North American Southwest

Abstract

This paper describes and interprets the results of multiple analyses conducted on human paleofeces from Turkey Pen Ruin, an early Ancestral Pueblo farming site in Cedar Mesa, Utah. Analyses of pollen and macroscopic contents were performed on 44 specimens; DNA testing for several faunal and botanical dietary constituents was also conducted on select samples (n = 20) using targeted PCR analysis. These data were used to assess what foods supplemented the predominant dietary staple—maize (Zea mays). Resources were evaluated based on caloric efficiency and nutritional value to gain insight into what motivated these late Basketmaker II period (ca. AD 1-400) farmers to continuously rely so heavily on corn, in lieu of incorporating a higher proportion of foraged resources into their diet. This project confirms a very high level of maize reliance (likely around 80% of the diet) as established by earlier studies. However, these results also show common inclusion of wild resources that are much less calorically efficient than the type of maize farming practiced here, including weedy plants commonly associated with agricultural fields. This suggests early farmers on Cedar Mesa were pushed by low environmental productivity to rely on farming, and to include low-ranked wild resources to calorically and nutritionally augment their maize-based diet. These findings also indicate that farmers were harvesting much more than corn from their fields, and that the productivity of the anthropogenic ecological niche created by farming activities may have influenced supplemental foraging choices, as well as the degree of labor dedicated to fields.