Acorn eating and agricultural origins: California ethnographies as analogies for the ancient Near East.

Since cereals and legumes were successful domesticates, archaeologists and botanists have investigated early domestication with particular emphasis on these plants. What about other foods, which may have been staples in their own time, for which we have no simple continuity into a later subsistence in the classic region of Near Eastern domesticates? The mediterranean climate, and the lifeways, of California provide an analogy.

Introduction

Near Eastern prehistorians have long speculated about the staple resources that sustained pre-agrarian groups from whom the earliest farmers were descended. One theory holds that many Natufian groups, pre-Neolithic hunter-gatherers in the Levant, probably depended heavily on acorn harvests from expanding Mediterranean oak woodlands (e.g. Bohrer 1972: 152; Moore 1991: 290; Olszewski 1993; Rosenberg 1990: 399, 410). Other archaeologists have emphasized a combination of intensive cultivation of wild cereals, seeds and nut harvests (Henry 1989: 34, 54; Bar-Yosef & Belfer-Cohen 1991: 192). The actual plant remains have seldom been recovered that could unequivocally demonstrate which plant foods Natufians harvested and processed in the critical centuries prior to agriculture. Therefore, archaeologists typically rely on indirect evidence, including ethnographic analogies, to model Natufian plant economy. This study examines the ethnographic and ecological evidence used in reconstructing Natufian subsistence in the Mediterranean zone. In particular, discussion of the role of balanophagy, or acorn-eating, in hunter-gatherer economies in other mediterranean ecosystems serves to introduce some potentially valuable perspectives in reconstructing land and resource use in the ancient Near East. (In this paper (upper-case) Mediterranean refers to the circum-Mediterranean sea, while (lower-case) mediterranean describes any of the five geographic regions with mediterranean-type climates and vegetations.)

Natufian groups inhabited the western horn of the Fertile Crescent northeast to the big bend of the Euphrates river and traditionally have been regarded as the most likely incipient agriculturalists of all the pre-Neolithic populations in the Near East. The plant subsistence base of their predecessors is largely unknown, except for the remarkable recovery of a rich diversity of edible wild grasses, seeds and fruits, including acorns, from one Kebaran site (19,000 b.p.) (Kislev et al. 1992). Pioneered by Kebaran groups, the use of mortars, pestles and hand-grinding stones (mullers) continued among Natufians, whose sedentary life-style at the end of the Pleistocene (Henry 1985; Bar-Yosef & Belfer-Cohen 1991: 187-8; Tchernov 1991) manifested communities up to 150 people (Hassan 1981: 91) and sites that were the largest of any to date.

There is little direct evidence as to which plants Natufians ate. Flotation results have been published from Natufian deposits at Tell Mureybet and Tell Abu Hureyra in modern Syria, Wadi Jilat 7 and Wadi Hammah in modern Jordan, and Hayonim Cave in Israel. These sites, arguably occupied by peoples practising very different subsistence strategies (Olszewski 1993: 429), yielded a wide range of wild seeds, fruits and nuts, but no acorns. Only Wadi Hammah and Hayonim Cave, however, lie within an expected range of former Mediterranean oak-forest where acorns might once have been an abundant resource. Tell Abu Hureyra, like Tell Mureybet, lies well beyond the reconstructed former ranges of Mediterranean oak woodlands (Hillman et al. 1989: 257; Bottema & van Zeist 1990).

Wild cereals appeared as unequivocally dominant dietary components only at Tell Mureybet during the early Neolithic period (van Zeist & Bakker-Heeres 1984 (1986): 176-8; Anderson-Gerfaud et al. 1993: 192). Nuts, but not acorns, occurred in all five Natufian sites as a minor component of the plant remains. Preliminary results from within the Mediterranean forest zone at Wadi Hammah do not indicate the presence of acorns (Edwards et al. 1988: 547-58; Susan Colledge pers. comm.); and the remains from Hayonim Cave represent only four species -- wild barley, wild almonds, lupins and possibly peas (Hopf & Bar-Yosef 1987: 117-20). Given depositional, preservation and sampling biases, this evidence cannot be interpreted to mean that nuts held only minor importance in the diet. If acorns from the oak species growing in Mediterranean woodlands were routinely exposed to fire through pre-agrarian food preparation, archaeologists expect that they will eventually be recovered as they have been in Kebaran and Neolithic contexts (Kislev et al. 1992; Helbaek 1964: 122-3; Helbaek in Kirkbride 1966: 63; Kislev 1988: 80).

Other attempts to reconstruct Natufian diets have relied on indirect evidence such as isotopic and chemical indicators from skeletons (Schoeninger 1981; Sillen 1981; Sillen & Lee-Thorp 1991; Smith et al. 1984: 126), tool types and the polish on tools (Anderson 1991; Unger-Hamilton 1991), grinding stones (Kraybill 1977; H.E. Wright 1977; K. Wright 1992), storage pits, and ethnographic and ecological analogies. None of the artefact and skeletal studies conclusively has demonstrated the importance of different plant foods in the diet, although dental evidence indicates that stone-ground food increased during the Late Natufian period (Smith et al. 1984: 124; P.A. Smith 1991: 431). With the expansion of deciduous oak forests at the end of the Pleistocene (Baruch & Bottema 1991), grinding stones and storage pits, the archaeological record of the Natufians seems compatible with a model of acorn-eating, but significantly, this assumption remains unproven. Ethnographic analogy still offers the most compelling argument for a model of acorn-eating by complex foragers prior to agriculture.

The Natufian balanophagy model

An acorn-eating model derives from two complementary arguments -- one ethnographic, the other ecological. Ethnographic observers of modern transhumant pastoralists have frequently documented the use of acorns as a condiment or famine food (Bent 1891; Groser 1888; Hole 1978; 1979; Solecki 1968: 56; Stark 1934; Tristram 1873; Wilson 1932; Younker 1985; 1989). Reports of acorn use for bread-flour are widespread throughout the Mediterranean basin (e.g. Driver 1953: 60; Lewthwaite 1982: 219; Younker 1985; 1988). As Mediterranean oak woodlands expanded as a consequence of Late Pleistocene climatic change, acorns would have been increasingly available (Henry 1989: 34, 55; Moore 1985: 13; Solecki 1968). Although pastoralists today occupy areas with some ecological similarities to those inhabited by Late Natufian complex foragers, analogies between pastoralists and foragers falter when the differences in their economic strategies, structured around production and consumption respectively, are compared (Cribb 1991: 21; Ingold 1992: 798). That pastoralists eat acorns may demonstrate that complex foragers could also do so, but this simple similarity ignores the causes of acorn dependency. Causal connections are critical to a strong analogical inference that would inform archaeologists probing subsistence patterns prior to agriculture (Wylie 1982: 394-5; Gould & Watson 1982). Clearly, the appropriate analogy for Late Natufian complex foragers would be with foragers practising the same behaviour (depending on acorns for subsistence) in ecologically similar environments. Using such an analogy, archaeologists can identify other material and social attributes linked to acorn consumption. These relationships form a model against which the archaeological record may be compared.

TABLE 1. Steps in North American acorn-processing methods.

         acorn processing stages
eastern tradition          western tradition

gathering                  gathering
shelling                   shelling
                           grinding
                           leaching
boiling, roasting          boiling

sources: Basgall 1987; Gayton 1948; Swanton 1971.

The ethnographic analogy of California Indians

A number of foraging cultures around the world may have exploited acorns (e.g. Crawford 1992: 18; B. Smith 1992: 102). Ethnographic examples of cultures dependent on acorns are restricted to two clearly separate traditions (Eastern Woodlands and California) known to differ in processing techniques (Gifford 1936 (1971): 305; Swanton 1979: 366-7; Hudson 1976: 286; H.H. Smith 1932: 401-2; 1933: 100; Basgall 1987: 27-9; Jackson 1991: 304-5), which affect the likelihood of acorn preservation in the archaeological record. Of these two traditions, California offers an appropriate ecological setting for an analogy with purported acorn-dependency among Natufian groups in the Near East.

Most indian groups in southern California lived in a mediterranean-type ecosystem more comparable to that of the Levant than any other on earth (Raven 1973; Deacon 1983; Axelrod 1973). Evolutionary convergence has produced vicarious taxa (Mooney & Dunn 1970; Naveh 1967), and major differences between similar mediterranean ecosystems are largely the product of different histories of land use (Aschmann & Bahre 1977; Mooney et al. 1972). Ecological conditions in prehistoric, non-agrarian southern California provide important models for ecological conditions in the Levant prior to the introduction of agriculture, which so dramatically affected the evolution of Mediterranean vegetation in the Near East. Relationships between resource availability, labour, population densities, sedentism, territoriality and acorn consumption in California offer ecological models for the Natufian Near East.

California's impressive ethnographic record has influenced prehistorians for decades. In addition to the accounts left by early Spanish explorers and missionaries, several generations of ethnographers recorded the recollections of Indians who survived the Mission system and its demise in the wake of colonial ranching and prospecting (e.g. Harrington n.d.; Merriam 1905; Kroeber 1925; Cook (1943) 1976; 1955; Gayton 1948a; 1948b; Gifford 1967). Such testimony, while valuable, has been increasingly challenged as a poor representation of the preceding millennia of native Californians. California Indians at the turn of the century had adjusted in many ways to the presence of Europeans and Americans and their transformations of the indigenous landscape. European suppression of the indigenous practice of regularly firing woodland and grassland encouraged the spread of annuals, mature chaparral (mediterranean evergreen-oak scrubland), and destroyed the native perennial grasslands, which never recovered from the onslaught of cattle, sheep and annual European weeds (Burcham 1957; Frenkel 1977; Heady 1977; Lewis 1973; White 1967). After wild oats invaded and forever transformed perennial grasslands (Heady 1977: 497), this annual grassland was subsequently degraded by overgrazing. Thus, by the time many ethnographers emphasized acorns as the most dependable, staple resource in the diet (Baumhoff 1963), Indian cultures were already vanishing, and groups that remained eked out a marginal existence at the periphery of white American ranches on land transformed (Burcham 1957; Heady 1977; McCorriston 1992).

TABLE 2. Geographical and climatic similarities between California and the
Near East.

climatic features                      geographic features

prevailing winds (westerlies)          nutrient-poor soils
determine precipitation                western coasts of continents

hot, dry summers                       edges of tropical deserts

cool, wet winters                      latitudes 31 |degrees~-42 |degrees~

young climates (c. 10,000 years)       backed by mountain ranges

disappear during glacial phases        convergently evolved vegetation types

The degree to which southern California Indian groups depended on acorn harvests varied greatly through time and according to other resource availability, in part determined geographically (Basgall 1987: 39). Traditional views of Californian subsistence have placed heavy emphasis on the acorn harvest as a storable staple (Baumhoff 1963; Driver 1953: 56). Recent evidence suggests that in most areas, prehistoric peoples made very limited, if any, use of acorns during the earliest periods of occupation; intensification of acorn use appears to have developed during later prehistoric and protohistoric times (McHenry & Schulz 1978; Schulz 1981; Dickel et al. 1984; Basgall 1987). Since practically no plant remains from early period sites have been published (see Basgall 1987: 9-30; Schulz & Johnson 1980; Hammett 1991: 190-97), the prevailing argument for acorn use and its increase centres on the earliest appearance and subsequent increase of mortar and pestle grinding technology (Basgall 1987: 30; Glassow et al. 1988: 67). Other nuts and seeds, not acorns, may have played an increasingly important role in foraging economies until the late prehistoric and early historic periods when substantial acorn use, along with other plant foods (Lawton & Bean 1968; Miksicek n.d.; Shipek 1989; Treganza 1947; Timbrook 1986), is archaeobotanically attested in some regions (Hammett 1991).

The Central Valley

California's Central Valley, virtually unexplored by the Spaniards before the early 1800s (Cook 1960: 239; Castillo 1989: 382), offers the closest biogeographical and ecological similarities to the region of the early Holocene Levant (Naveh 1967; 1984; Sankary 1971; cf. Beck & Haase 1974; Nahel 1981; UNESCO-FAO 1963; 1969) where Natufian culture seems to have been concentrated (Henry 1989; Belfer-Cohen 1991). The Central Valley floor and slopes originally were grassland and oak parkland, although enormous numbers of cattle introduced to the Central Valley by the mid 1850s (Burcham 1957: 144-5) forever altered vegetation and the aboriginal land management that had maintained the Central Valley oak parkland (Heady 1977; Lewis 1973). From 1860 onward socio-economic practices were severely disrupted by Anglo-American ranching (Gayton 1948b: 143). In the prehistoric and early historic periods, however, acorn-eating in the Central Valley offers a model for Natufian economy in a similar ecosystem. Both Central Valley populations and the Natufians lacked shellfish and other marine resources that coastal populations enjoyed (Jones 1991: 435; Arnold 1991: 995; Sillen & Lee-Thorp 1991: 405).

In the Central Valley, the proportions of grinding stones and bedrock mortars inferentially associated with acorn processing increased through time (Moratto 1984: 154, 196). It is impossible to determine the effect of increasing sedentism on the increase in heavy immobile equipment (Jackson 1991), but archaeologists do recognize an increase in sedentism, population densities, territoriality, social complexity, and bioarchaeological indications of resource stress during late prehistory (Dickel et al. 1984: 442). This correlation has also been identified in the prehistoric record of coastal and island groups (Lambert & Walker 1991; Walker 1986; 1989).

Experimental studies have show that acorn processing, especially using the leaching technique in California, requires a greater labour input than other plant foods (Basgall 1987: 28-9) and, unlike, may require collective labour (Hammett 1991: 165). (Note that a recalculation using Basgall's own figures of yield per hour of individual labour indicate that the return rates of acorns compared to some return rates for other plant foods cited for the Alyawara (O'Connell & Hawkes 1981: 123, 125) are even poorer than the published figures suggest (perhaps a publication error?).) The high cost of acorn exploitation and its increase in tandem with increased population size and density suggest that an acorn-based economy appeared in response to decreased mobility, territorial demarcation, resource imbalance and the onset of organizational complexity (Basgall 1987: 45). Once instituted, 'the potential for storage is great, and the nutritional payoffs are more than adequate' (Basgall 1987: 41).

Implications for the Near East

Based on the California analogy, can we assume that acorns, merely because they were available, provided an important resource for Late Natufians? If the ecological constraints in California influenced food-procurement strategies there, then we must investigate similar ecological constraints elsewhere.

If Natufians did make extensive use of acorns, what does this imply about population levels and resource availability in the Levant 12,000 years ago? The example from California suggests that acorns are most attractive to sedentary and rather large groups (up to 360 people) (Cook & Heizer 1968: 90-91) in densely populated territories with up to 2.3 people per square mile (Cook (1943) 1976: 192-3). These groups experienced at least periodic resource stress, which encouraged their use of a labour-intensive resource when other preferred foods were scarce. This analogy cannot resolve whether Natufian groups used acorns as a major food resource, but a lack of archaeological evidence and the implications raised by this study suggest that they did not.

This analogy suggests that Natufian groups, if indeed they consumed acorns as a major dietary item prior to the invention of agriculture, had achieved far higher densities than attested archaeologically or than proposed by most archaeologists. Carneiro & Hilse (1966) assume that population in the entire Near East 10,000 years ago was between 50,000 and 100,000 people. Charles Reed (1977a: 553) accepted 100,000 people as plausible, but warned that his own conservative estimate of 10,000 people (based on estimated carrying capacities calculated from archaeological data) in the Natufian period in central Palestine would be too high to accord with Carneiro & Hulse. On the other hand, an extrapolation from estimated native populations before the Spaniards arrived indicates that man-managed landscapes in the Central Valley alone supported 83,820 people (Cook 1955), more than twice as many as the estimated 35,000 people that would have filled a region of Palestine as large as the Central Valley at Reed's postulated population density. (The area Cook considered is roughly 36,400 square miles, 3.5 times the 10,429 square-mile zone Reed (1977a: 553) discusses. Reed's Natufian population estimate, corrected for this slightly larger region (10,000 people x 3.5), would be 35,000 people.)

A second important implication from California is that a diet heavily based on acorns reflects a population experiencing resource stress. Basgall (1987: 41) suggests that 'intensive acorn use can be expected to emerge as a consequence of very specific socio-economic conditions, not because of some inherent quality of the resource itself'. Resource stress has long been implicated in the origins of agriculture in the Near East (e.g. Childe 1952: 23, 25; Moore 1985: 232; Byrne 1987; Henry 1989: 24-5; Rosenberg 1990: 410-11; McCorriston & Hole 1991; Bar-Yosef & Belfer-Cohen 1992: 39-40). A suggestion that pre-agricultural Natufian groups were heavily dependent on acorns should also consider them as populations undergoing resource stress, for which archaeological evidence indicates an increase through time (Smith et al. 1984). The model that emphasizes Natufian use of a widely diverse complex of nuts and seeds emphatically rejects resource stress as a compelling factor in the onset of Natufian economies (Henry 1989) but accepts resource stress as a significant factor in the demise of Natufian complex foraging (Henry 1991). That Californian populations appear to have adopted acorns as a pivotal resource only when other resources proved scarce suggests that Natufians, in much lower densities, may have also preferred an acorn-poor diet.

Conclusions

Archaeological absence of acorns cannot constitute proof that acorns held low dietary importance. Archaeologists have systematically recovered acorn cotyledons and shells from Eastern woodland sites (Chapman & Shea 1981: 66-9; Crites 1978: 84-7; Crawford 1982: 207; Asch et al. 1972: 8-11), demonstrating archaeological preservation for acorn and shell fragments presumably processed in the Eastern tradition. Definitive evidence for acorn use in the Natufian would include the recovery of shells and cotyledons from archaeological contexts, and evidence of management of oak stands such as indicated in Corsican and Sardinian prehistory and in California (Lewthwaite 1982:224-5; McCarthy 1993). No such evidence has thus far appeared.

An analogy with California cannot prove whether Natufians depended heavily on acorns. If archaeologists do, however, find evidence of intensive acorn use in the Levant (and I doubt they will in a landscape that must have been as rich as California in native perennial grasslands and abundant resources), this explicit and comprehensive comparison with groups exploiting a similar ecosystem in California will force us to revise current views of Natufian population sizes and densities, resource availability during periods of heavy acorn dependence, and perhaps their options and degree of mobility in the Mediterranean Levant California Indians were dependent on acorns only at certain times 'as a consequence of very specific socioeconomic conditions' (Basgall 1987: 41). These most important aspects of acorn consumption in Near Eastern prehistory have been missed through facile application of ethnographic models.

Finally, through the use of an analogy between Natufians and Mediterranean-adapted hunter-gatherers in California, this study exemplifies a great and nearly untapped potential for using ecological and evolutionary processes recorded in California's recent historical record to examine deadlocked reconstructions in the ancient Near East where archaeological and palaeo-environmental data have unfortunately sometimes proved insufficiently preserved.

Acknowledgements. This paper was written on a Smithsonian Institution Postdoctoral Fellowship. I thank the Department of Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History and especially and Archaeobiology Program for its support. Thanks also go to Sophie Coe, Susan Colledge, Frank Hole, Kevin Johnston, Joyce Marcus, Dan Rogers, Michael Rosenberg, Bruce Smith, Melinda Zeder and two anonymous reviewers for helpful commentary and criticism. Patricia Lambert and Randy Younker kindly made unpublished manuscripts available to me. I am also grateful to the National Anthropological Archives for providing FIGURES 2, 3 & 5 and for permission to publish photographs and to Marcia Bakry for assistance with FIGURE 1.

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