Seeded Grasses

We are all very familiar and dependant upon cultivated grasses such as barley, corn, rice, and wheat. What we may not realize is that seeds from natural stands of wild grass have provided a source of carbohydrates to human populations for many thousands of years. In the Plateaus and Canyonlands region, many wild grasses, all members of the Poaceae family, were used as a source of food by the hunters and gatherers who lived there. Little direct evidence of the use of grass seed is preserved at most open sites across the region apart from a few charred seeds. The dry caves of the Lower Pecos Canyonlands, however, have yielded good evidence of grass use and it can be safely assumed that seeded grasses were used at least as heavily in the many areas of the Edwards Plateau. The carbohydrates (and other nutrients) contained in grass seeds become edible only after lots of tedious labor. The tiny seeds must be harvested in bulk, winnowed, separated from their tough seed covers, and ground into meal, before they were ready for the prehistoric table. Thus seeded grasses were a seasonal, supplemental food resource and not a seasonal mainstay. Grass stems were likely used for many purposes including bedding and thatching the roofs or walls of structures.

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Grass seed is actually a caryopsis, a dry fruit in which a single seed is encased and fused to the outer hard fruit covering. Grass seeds often form dense clusters on flowering stalks, making them more easily harvestable. Those species which produce relatively large numbers of seeds on flower stalks include some that have been identified from archeological deposits in Hinds Cave—dropseed (Sporobolus cryptandrus), Texas cupgrass (Eriochola sericea), common reed (Phragmites australis), sandbur (Cenchrus incertus), and plains bristlegrass (Setaria leucopila).

Native Accounts: The ethnographic documentation of the use of grass seed is rather limited, primarily due to the fact that Native Americans quit eating grass seed and many other small seeds soon after domesticated Old World crops such as wheat were introduced into the region. There are, however, references to the use of common reed, cupseed, and dropseed. Indian groups all over North America utilized common reed, primarily to fashion tools or pipes, or as wall or roofing material for houses. Some groups utilized the seeds and the sugar that could be pounded out of the stalks. The northern Paiute extracted the sap from the stalks, crystallized it, and used it as a source of sugar. The Klamath of Oregon would grind the seeds into meal and use the meal in the preparation of other foods.

A species of cupgrass that is very closely related to Texas cupgrass was utilized by the Cocopa of the lower Colorado River region in Arizona and California. The seeds were parched, ground, and mixed with water for a gruel or mush.

Sand dropseed was widely used throughout the Southwest by the Mescalero and Chiricahua Apache (Castetter and Opler 1936), by the Hopi (Colton 1974), and by the Navajo (Vestal 1952). In each case, the seeds were ground into flour and utilized to make a flat bread.

Nutrition: We have no direct records of the nutritional content of the aforementioned grasses, however, there is a record of proximal analysis of Indian ricegrass (Oryzopsis hymenoides). It contains 346 kcal per 100 g dry-weight, 9 g of protein, and less than 2 g of fat (Winkler 1982). In other words, grass seed is low in protein, low in fat, and has a little more than half the carbohydrates that a comparable dry weight of a root or agave stem contains. As a result, wild grasses are typically not considered rich food sources, but they did make a seasonal contribution to the diet of many Indian groups.

Archeological Occurrence: Although grass seed is seldom recovered from archeological sites on the Edwards Plateau, this is clearly due to poor conditions of preservation –only charred seeds would survive, and these are very fragile and difficult to recover. They are well preserved in the upper layers of the dry rockshelters of the Lower Pecos Canyonlands, but can only be recovered and studied by the use very fine screening or flotation techniques. Thus far, this approach has only been applied to a few deposits at Hind Cave. There, it has been shown that grass seeds were very common in the discarded refuse, indicating they were used regularly for food. Both Texas cupgrass and sand dropseed were among the most commonly occurring seeds in the deposits of Area A and Area F at Hinds Cave (Dering 1999). Additionally, plains bristlegrass, common reed, and sandbur have been noted in these contexts. Williams-Dean (1978) found Cenchrus (sandbur) fruit coats, dropseed seeds, and Paniceae (includes Setaria or Panicum) seeds in coprolites from Hinds Cave. All of these grasses have the potential to be milled into flour using a mano and metate.

References:

Castetter, Edward F. and Willis H. Bell
1951 Yuman Indian Agriculture. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Castetter, Edward F. and M. E. Opler
1936 Ethnobiological Studies in the American Southwest III: The Ethnobiology of the Chiricahua and Mescalero Apache. University of New Mexico Bulletin 4(5):1-63. Albuquerque.

Colton, Harold S.
1974 Hopi History And Ethnobotany. In Hopi Indians, edited by D. A. Horr, pp. 152-169. Garland Press. New York.

Dering, J. Phillip
1999 Earth Oven Plant Processing in Archaic Period Economies: An Example from a Semi-Arid Savannah in South-Central North America. American Antiquity 64(4): 659-674.

Fowler, Catherine S.
1989 Willards Z. Park's Ethnographic Notes on the Northern Paiute of Western Nevada 1933-1940. University of Utah Press. Salt Lake City.

Vestal, Paul A.
1952 The Ethnobotany of the Ramah Navaho. Papers of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology 40(4):1-94.

Williams-Dean, Glenna
1978 Ethnobotany and Cultural Ecology of Prehistoric Man in Southwest Texas. Anthropology Research Laboratory. Texas A&M University. College Station.

Winkler, B. A.
1982 Wild Plant Foods of the Desert Gathereres of West Texas, New Mexico, and Northern Mexico: Some Nutritional Values. Unpublished M.A. Thesis, the University of Texas at Austin.

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photo of grasses
Shrubby grassland near the Devils River in Val Verde County with bluegrass, beardgrass, sideoats grama, and some introduced ryegrass. Shrubs include mesquite, condalia, lantana, and guayacan. Photo by Phil Dering.
photo of bristlegrass
This mature seed head of plains bristlegrass was recovered from the upper deposits at Hinds Cave. This specimen was obviously not harvested for food (the seeds remain intact). It may have been brought in as part of a bundle of dried grass for use as bedding material. Photo by Phil Dering.
photo of bristlegrass
Clusters of seeds of plains bristlegrass (Setaria leucopila). This species thrives on the sandy and sandy loam soils of the Edwards Plateau and the Rio Grande Plains. It grows to a height of 3 to 4’ and begins blooming in the spring and matures in the summer. In wet years, several “crops” of plains bristlegrass may mature. Photo by Phil Dering.