by discussing the significance of Native American farming systems for their productivity and efficiency and for the relevance they hold for Americans today.
Eastern North America
Domestication of plants in eastern North America was well underway by 3000 BCE, but the process began thousands of years earlier. People first populated this region during the late Pleistocene, at least 13,000 years ago, and their interactions with edible plants and animals set the stage for future developments. Nuts—especially acorns, hickories, and walnuts——were harvested as soon as post-Pleistocene climatic conditions stabilized, and the burning of understory vegetation served both to enhance mast production and improve hunters’ abilities to procure deer using atlatls (Wagner 2003).
Eastern Agriculture before the Widespread Adoption of Maize
Bottle gourds (Lagenaria siceraria) were used as implements very early, a curious fact because this species is native to Africa and apparently floated across the Atlantic Ocean multiple times, being spread by people in Florida and elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere as early as 8000 BCE (Kistler et al. 2014). By 2500 BCE, bottle gourds were cultivated in Missouri at the Phillips Spring site, along with a native squash (Cucurbita pepo ssp. ovifera), the seeds of which were larger than wild-sized, indicating that the process of domestication was underway (King 1985; Smith, Cowan, and Hoffman 1992). This squash——the eastern North American wild pepo gourd—was widely distributed and propagated during the mid-Holocene (6000–3000 BCE). Charred Cucurbita fragments from sites in Maine, Pennsylvania, and Illinois are within the rind thickness range of wild populations, but these sites are located north of the species’ expected natural growing range. The rind fragments and associated artifacts indicate that fisher-foragers used the small, gourd-like fruits from these easily grown plants, probably for multiple purposes including fishnet floats, containers, rattles, and food (Fritz 1999).
Sumpweed (Iva annua var. macrocarpa, also known as marshelder) (Figure 1.2A) and sunflower (Helianthus annuus var. macrocarpus) (Figure 1.2F) were apparently domesticated in similar riverine and upland savanna settings. Botanists consider the sunflower to have been a western North American species that spread eastward as a camp-follower or took advantage of bison trails and wallows, increasing its range and visibility to people. Archaeological kernels (true seeds) and achenes (fruits with hard outer shells enclosing the kernels) too large to represent wild populations were excavated from the Hayes site on the Duck River in central Tennessee, dating to 2800 BCE (Crites 1993; Smith 2014). This dovetails with genomic studies that situate domestication in the US Midwest (Harter et al. 2004). Domesticated sunflowers were increasingly widespread across eastern North America and the Plains after 1000 BCE, grown by later pre-contact farmers from North Dakota to the Atlantic coast, contributing nutritious, oil-rich seeds used alone or mixed with other foodstuffs in many dishes and for cosmetic purposes such as hair oil (Heiser 1976; Yarnell 1978).
Figure 1.2 Archaeobotanical specimens representing members of the Eastern Agricultural Complex: A. Sumpweed (Iva annua var. macrocarpa), also called marshelder. Photo of desiccated achenes from Alum Cave, Arkansas, by Kay Clahassey, with the permission of the University of Michigan Museum of Anthropological Archaeology. B. Little barley (Hordeum pusillum). Scanning electron micrograph of charred seed from Toltec Mounds, Arkansas, by the author (Gayle Fritz). C. Chenopod (Chenopodium berlandieri ssp. jonesianum). Scanning electron micrograph of desiccated fruit (seed covered by pericarp) from Edens Bluff, Arkansas, by the author (Gayle Fritz). D. Maygrass (Phalaris caroliniana). Photo of desiccated seed head bundle from Gibson Shelter, Arkansas, by Jane Kellett, with the permission of the Arkansas Archeological Survey. E. Erect knotweed (Polygonum erectum). Scanning electron micrograph of charred fruit from Johanings Site, Illinois, by the author (Gayle Fritz). F. Sunflower (Helianthus annuus var. macrocarpus). Photo of desiccated achenes from Brown Bluff, Arkansas, by the author (Gayle Fritz).
Sumpweed is a close relative of sunflower, but it lacks attractive flowers. Nevertheless, selection for larger seeds and fruits resulted in achenes with volumes several times larger than those found in wild populations. The earliest known domesticated archaeological sumpweed specimens come from sites in west-central Illinois and date to at least 2500 BCE (Asch and Asch 1985; Wagner and Carrington 2014).The oily seeds of sumpweed constitute “an exceptionally nutritious package, comparable to sunflower” (Wagner and Carrington 2014). We have no direct evidence for how they were prepared prior to consumption, but their presence in 87 percent of 100 human paleofecal specimens from Salts Cave, Kentucky analyzed by Yarnell (1969 ) demonstrates that sumpweed fruits were readily consumed during the first millennium BCE. The ubiquity of sumpweed in dry Ozark rockshelter caches dating to as late as 1400 CE points to persistence of this crop until shortly before European contact (Fritz 1994a), and scattered domesticate-sized specimens are reported from protohistoric and historic sites from the Plains to North Carolina (Wagner and Carrington 2014). Why it disappeared, whereas sunflower survived, is one of the unanswered questions in eastern North American archaeology.
Early garden plots might have been located at the margins of base camps along alluvial terraces or in nearby upland zones, with clearings maintained by burning along with girdling and removing unwanted trees. Open patches of disturbed soil enriched by organic midden waste would have become beds in which selection pressures favored seeds that germinated and grew quickly, either because they were larger or because dormancy mechanisms were reduced by virtue of thinner seed coats. Domestication of chenopod (Chenopodium berlandieri ssp. jonesianum) (Figures 1.2C and 1.3) and knotweed (Polygonum erectum ssp. watsoniae) (Figure 1.2E), two more members of the Eastern Agricultural Complex, is seen as having progressed in these anthropogenic settings under the watchful gaze of gatherers—almost certainly women—who brought edible wild and weedy seeds home to cook and sometimes to plant where they were most likely to thrive (Watson and Kennedy 1991).
Figure 1.3 Two-thousand-year-old cache of domesticated chenopod (Chenopodium berlandieri ssp. jonesianum) seeds stored in a bottle gourd (Lagenaria siceraria), found at White Bluff rockshelter site in the Arkansas Ozarks. University Museum of Arkansas, Photo negative # 320115. With the permission of the University Museum of Arkansas.
The Riverton site in southeastern Illinois yielded the earliest (to date) flotation-recovered assemblages with a suite of Eastern Agricultural Complex crops: thin-coated chenopod; cultigen-sized sunflower and sumpweed; bottle gourd rind; and Cucurbita rind fragments (Smith and Yarnell 2009). The occupation at Riverton dates to 1800–1700 BCE. Most of the Riverton chenopod seeds and fruits (seeds covered by a papery pericarp) are pale, preserved without charring by having been deposited in prepared clay house floors that made the plant remains appear mineralized. This early manifestation of low-level food production shows that native crops were integrated into a broader subsistence regime dominated by walnuts, hickory nuts, hazelnuts, acorns, and of course, game animals and fish (Smith and Yarnell 2009).
Erect knotweed entered the Eastern Agricultural Complex by 1000 BCE, with pits in dry rockshelters in eastern Kentucky used to store this relative of Old World buckwheat, along with other Eastern Agricultural Complex crops (Mueller 2017). Paleofecal assemblages from Salts Cave, Kentucky, provide direct evidence for consumption of knotweed by cavers between 800 and 300 BCE, although the earliest specimens showing effects of domestication date only to c. 1 BCE (Mueller 2017). In the case of knotweed, selection was in favor of larger seeds with a high proportion of smooth and thin pericarps, a process that continued throughout the first millennium CE and into the second.
Maygrass
