Potential food sources for foragers in Malaysian rainforest; Sago, yams and lots of little things

Abstract

It may be that enough starchy food simply does not exist in most rain forests to supply even small human groups on a reliable, long-term basis.In that case, prehistoric hunter-gatherers could not have lived in the deep forest but must have been oriented toward its edges, where they could collect food from several different habitats.The archaeological evidence is too fragmentary at present to prove this notion, but the fact that the Hoabinhnians so consistently combined terrestrial sources with aquatic foods supports it.(Hutterer 1988:69.)No wonder then, if agriculture be neglected in a country, where the labour of five men, in felling sago trees, beating the flour, and instantly baking the bread, will maintain a hundred.(Thomas Forrest, quoted in Ellen 1988.119.)Simple uni-directional causal processes seldom occur in human environmental relations.(Ellen 1982:20, cf. also 180-181.) 1 Except where indicated, information on Semai comes from research I conducted in 1961-63 on a Ford Foundation grant, and in 1975 on sabbatical; on Btsisi', from my research in 1976 and from talking with Barbara Nowak.Extensive documentation of the technology and ethnoscience of these two peoples is available in the American Museum of Natural History (Semai), the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology (Btsisi'), and the Botany Department, Universiti Malaya (both peoples).

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