Puget Sound Traditional Food and Diabetes
Collaborative research between tribal members, health
care workers and archaeologists
Research
The research portion of this project is aimed at getting
long term information about what people in Puget Sound
were eating before major changes in economy, access to land and resources and
the ecology of Puget Sound were changed by
Euro-American settlement. While most people think of salmon when they think of
Northwest Native American food, Native American people know that there are many
more foods that were and still are eaten. The archaeological record suggests
that in the more distant past, even more different foods were eaten than today.
Many of these are wild foods that are difficult to obtain or locally extinct in
the now urbanized Puget Sound region.
Currently, Dr. Robert Kopperl
and Kristine Bovy are researching archaeological site records in Washington State to develop a baseline list of food
items found in archaeological sites, a sense of biases in the currently
available data, and a chronological and spatial distribution of food resources
found in the region. Click here to see our
data (site location information has been removed).
Contact Dr. Peter
Lape for more information and updates.