ECONOMIC RETURN RATES OF WILD PLANTS IN SOUTHERN MENDOZA:

LLANO CARINA & UGAN ANDREW

San Carlos de Bariloche - Río Negro

Congreso; Vth International Congress of Ethnobotany; 2009

ICEB

We conducted collecting and processing experiments for eight plant species endemic to southern Mendoza province in order to assess their utility as human food resources.  Plants were collected and processed by simple techniques believed to approximate those of traditional hunting and gathering societies.  Experimental collection and processing events were timed and total caloric yield weighed against post-encounter handling time to determine each resource’s relative rank.  The results of these experiments indicate a wide range of return rates, from 810 to 3600 Kcals/hr.  These data and the lessons learned while generating them can be incorporated used to generate testable hypotheses regarding variation in hunter-gatherer subsistence patterns through time and across space.