PARENT SESSION
Oral Session #50: Traditional Ecological Knowledge.
Presiding: J. Ford
Wednesday, August 7. 8:00 AM to 11:30 AM. Greenlee Meeting Room, TCC.
Historical ecology of mima mound - vernal pool complexes.
Storm, Linda*,1,2, 1 University of Washington, Seattle, WA2 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Seattle, WA
ABSTRACT- A preliminary review of the literature on mima mounds and mounded-vernal pool complexes in North America suggests that Native peoples used and adapted to these ecologically rich environments. Such adaptation appears to have led to management and maintenance of important root foods (geophytes) and other ethnobotanically significant plant species through intentional broadcast burning and other horticultural practices. Cultivation of wild plant foods, such as Camassia and Perideridia spp., may also have been facilitated by the natural 'irrigation' functions of the hydrogeomorphology of these diverse landscape mosaics, providing beneficial form and functions to humans who harvested, managed and maintained the plant resources of these ecosystems. Syntheses of ecological, ethnohistorical, ethnographic and archaeological literature of several prairie mound and mima mound-like topographies that have ephemerally ponded inter-mound areas, suggest that human use of these systems emerged between 5000 and 3000 years ago. Mima mounds and vernal pools have generally been studied as separate ecological phenomena and the human ecology of these systems has been blatantly overlooked. By studying these systems in the context of their historical ecology, ethnobotany, hydrogeomorphology and human history, greater insights may be gained to better inform their future conservation and restoration. This work attempts to take us a step further in understanding these ecologically complex landscapes and plant communities with an eye to the importance of human use interactions as part of their historical ecology.
KEY WORDS: mima mounds, vernal pools, historical ecology, camassia