Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology

During a recent inventory of anthropological archival material at the University of California, Berkeley, a list of plants collected in Tehama County, California, in or before 1914 by T. T. Waterman (1914-1918) was encountered. This, taken in conjunction with a field check list by C. H. Merriam (1979), consisting in part of native names of plant species collected in Shasta County to the north of Tehama, from Yana Indian residents, may form the basis of at least a partial summary of plant usages by the Yana which has heretofore been lacking. Several other published but scattered sources, especially that of Sapir and Spier (1943) may serve to round out the picture of possibly all that can ever be known, ethnobotanically, for the Yana region.