ENHS Nature Trails February 2003 Article 1

This month's speaker: Marge Helzer

Seeds of Discovery

We use seeds figuratively as the catalysts for creativity, as the begetters of wisdom, and as the initiators of destruction, but literally seeds foment the beginnings of life. These powerful little morsels, sometimes crispy or chewy, or perhaps savory or fruity, or decaying and empty, provide an endless variety of clues and suggestions defining our human history. Helping to unlock some of these clues is Marge Helzer, an anthropologist with a specialty in archaeobotany. She shares below her own seeds of discovery that have led to her very interesting pursuits in archaeology.

YOUNG AND RESTLESS
Although I grew up in the suburbs of New Jersey, our neighborhood was surrounded on three sides by an undeveloped parcel of woods. I spent many hours walking and exploring in what to me was a great wilderness. Inspired by National Geographic magazines, I spent much of my youth yearning to see the Galapagos Islands. As a teenager I was the youngest member of our local Audubon chapter, attending monthly meetings and Saturday hikes to learn as much as I could about birds and butterflies.

At home my mother and I shared an interest in feeding and watching birds in the backyard, while my father instilled in me the value of education. However, my older brother Tom, an environmental attorney, had the greatest influence on the direction I took early in my education. From my point of view he was always engaged in exciting adventures, such as writing the bottle bill for the state of Pennsylvania and rebounding with a mandatory recycling bill when the bottle bill failed, serving on the Chesapeake Bay Commission in efforts to restore the natural landscape, and fighting for water rights for the Amish. Tom was often out in the field with wildlife biologists, peering into peregrine falcon nests or observing bears from a blind. I earned my first degree in forestry at Penn State University because I wanted to learn about nature and be closer to my brother.

Upon completion of a degree in forestry, I worked for the Clearwater National Forest in Idaho. Spending a summer doing regeneration surveys in vast clearcuts awakened me to some of the realities of forest practices in the west. While I began to question a career in forestry, I knew I needed to see more of the West Coast.

I found Eugene and the University of Oregon on my second trip out West. Soon I was back in school, this time studying anthropology. I found the discipline to be equally as inspiring as those early walks in the woods near my home.

ART DEFINES DIRECTION
Shortly after I arrived in Eugene I got a job working for a sculptor. He was working on a sighting pedestal that chronicled the geologic history of Oregon over the past 200 million years. My job was to help him correctly represent fossil plants on the sculpture. This experience enhanced my appreciation for botany and exposed me to the concept of the ancient past. This appreciation for botany and the recognition of its role in discovering the ancient past are important because these themes carried with me into my graduate studies in paleoethnobotany years later. This work experience is also important because the sculptor later became my husband.

ROMANCE ASIDE
I earned my degrees in anthropology at the University of Oregon under the guidance of Dr. C. Melvin Aikens. I received my specialized training in archaeobotany from Dr. Linda Scott Cummings of PaleoResearch Institute in Golden, Colorado. I met Linda, a paleoethnobotanist, at a conference and followed her around for three days until she finally agreed to let me visit her laboratory. She has been my mentor and good friend ever since.

AND YOUR TALK NEXT FRIDAY EVENING?
I will be talking about my research on an archaeological site in the Fort Rock Basin in south central Oregon. I have been looking for patterns of human activity within a 6000 year old house. The occupants of this house left clues as to how they used space. By analyzing tiny seeds and fragments of charcoal from the house floor, I am able to reconstruct a basic floor plan and identify where these people ate, slept, and manufactured tools. I am also able to gain information about the foods these people relied on in an environmental setting that is much different from today.

Marge currently is employed by the University of Oregon Museum of Anthropology where she is engaged in archaeological research, paleoethnobotany and teaching. She teaches as well at Oregon State University in Corvallis where she plants the seeds of curiosity and understanding for the young and the restless to chew

EARLY MAN'S DABBLING IN GENE MODIFICATION: A handful of wild almonds can be lethal if selected from the tree offering bitter almonds. The chemical producing the bitter flavor is unlocked through digestion and breaks down into cyanide in the human digestive system. The sweet almond we have today is thought to be a product of prehistoric man's inadvertent dabbling in gene modification, even when still a hunter gather, according to Jared Diamond in his book, Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. In prehistory there were a very small percentage of almond trees, "mutants, if you will," that did not have the gene responsible for the cyanogen. Humans would likely only have raided trees where the sweet almonds grew, and dropped a few during activities or travel which later sprouted without the bitter gene. Their act of gathering thus probably caused more mutant trees to grow than might otherwise have been the case. Animal life would have most likely consumed all of the nuts on the trees if not picked by humans. What was a deficiency in the sweet almond tree's natural defense, then, actually became an asset as humans began to use these sweet almonds in their diet, always spilling some along the way to generate more of the desirable mutants. "Such unconscious acts probably tended to create a kind of natural selection in which mutant plants that humans found most useful tended to have their seeds better distributed due to human consumption (not human planting). So humans were modifying plants from very early times."

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