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Base Camp




Food

Desert dwellers around the world have always been a resourceful group, and have learned to gather a wider variety of foods than their neighbors in the wetter regions.

The agriculture the Cahuilla developed complimented the native food resources they learned to hunt and gather.

There have been 174* plants identified that have been used by the Cahuilla for food or medicinal purposes. Women gathered seeds, honey and corkscrew mesquite beans, pinion, acorns, cactus buds, chia, agave, yucca, wild cherries and wild plums, and (the Agua Caliente) harvested the seeds of the palm trees in desert groves near or adjacent to springs throughout the deserts of Southern California. * This plant identification project took place in 1972 as the joint work of an ethnographer, Lowell Bean, and Katherine Saubel, a Cahuilla woman.

The men traditionally hunted with bows and arrows, traps, throwing sticks and clubs. Their prey was desert bighorn sheep, (as can be seen in many petroglyphs,) deer, antelope, rabbit, and other small mammals.