ABSTRACT
Like many regions which were traditionally supported by a hunter-gatherer economy, the palaeoethnobotany of the Interior Plateau of western North America has been largely ignored (Lepofsky in press; Lepofsky and Peacock in press). This is despite the fact that one of the richest ethnobotanical records for North America has been collected from this region (Palmer 1975; Turner et al. 1990; Turner 1992; Parish et al. 1996). Although second to fishing and hunting in terms of caloric intake (cf. Ames and Marshall 1980), plants provided the people of the Plateau with a range of foods, medicines, and materials for technological purposes. By consistently neglecting paleoethnobotanical research, archaeologists have missed an important source of information about prehistoric life in this region.
