zone of the Delta. The wife of my informant, who comes 
from a different region than her husband, said she also dis- 
tinctly remembered having seen people collect and eat 
temiche starch. Those who still know about it are in their 
fifties and older. The younger people in the village had never 
seen or even heard about it. 
One need not invoke prophetic insight to predict the dis- 
appearance, in the near future, of palm-starch production 
from all of South America. The majority of southern tribes 
referred to in the introduction have already either given it 
up or are so reduced in number that the practice of starch 
recovery will soon come to an end, Among the Warao, even 
Mauritia extraction is declining rapidly and will soon be- 
come a rarity. Yet, in South America, as elsewhere, recovery 
of starch from different genera of palms represents the sur- 
vival of a once more common tradition that reaches back 
into the remote, prehistoric past. It survived the Neo-Indian 
revolution of subsistence agriculture only among a small 
number of marginal tribes, but it is giving way increasingly to 
agricultural staples even among them. In any event, for the 
Warao this form of traditional aboriculture provided a mea- 
sure of economic stability not unlike that achieved by other 
indigenous societies through agriculture. The entire man- 
palm relationship as it developed among these people over 
many centuries can be fully understood only in the context of 
Manicaria, Mauritia, and Euterpe ethnobotany. Realizing 
this and going a little beyond the scope and evidence of the 
present paper, may I suggest in concluding that economic 
stability is not the only benefit that the Indians have derived 
from gathering around these regal plants. As their ethnobo- 
tanical lore reveals, the palms have nurtured among the 
Warao an exquisite partnership between man and nature — 
a symbiosis that, in addition to a viable socio-economic blue- 
print, generated an ideological matrix that gave meaning to 
the world and purpose to life. Surely, achievements of this 
sort must rank among the finest that mankind has made 
anywhere. 
[ 330 ] 
