Through a “Green” Lens: A Paleoethnobotanical Survey of the Cedar Valley

The Cedar Valley is an area in northeast Iowa that includes Black Hawk, Bremer, Buchanan, Butler, Chickasaw, Grundy and Tama counties. Over the last 10,000 years, the Cedar Valley has changed tremendously, not only by population but also the landscape. These changes present a challenge for anthropologists and archaeologists to reconstruct a picture of what life may have looked like when prehistoric native tribes settled into the Cedar Valley. Over the years, prairie grasses, wetlands, and other natural features of the Iowa landscape have been altered to accommodate industrial farming. To identify medicinal species and subsistence use of plants available to prehistoric native tribes in the Cedar Valley, ethnographies, maps, plant surveys, botanical lists and archaeological reports were utilized. The information collected was organized into a database and the results analyzed. This database will serve as a tool for future research in fields of archaeology and botany.