Ancient versus modern distribution of cultivated plants (original) (raw)
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Agricultural Innovation and Dispersal in Eastern North America
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Environmental Science, 2019
The possibility that native peoples in eastern North America had cultivated plants prior to the introduction of maize was first raised in 1924. Scant evidence was available to support this speculation, however, until the “flotation revolution” of the 1960s and 1970s. As archaeologists involved in large-scale projects began implementing flotation, paleoethnobotanists soon had hundreds of samples and thousands of seeds that demonstrated that indigenous peoples grew a suite of crops, including cucurbit squashes and gourds, sunflower, sumpweed, and chenopod, which displayed signs of domestication. The application of accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) dating to cucurbit rinds and seeds in the 1980s placed the domestication of these four crops in the Late Archaic period 5000–3800 BP. The presence of wild cucurbits during earlier Archaic periods lent weight to the argument that native peoples in eastern North America domesticated these plants independently of early cultivators in Mesoamerica. Analyses of DNA from chenopods and cucurbits in the 2010s definitively demonstrated that these crops developed from local lineages. With evidence in hand that refuted notions of the diffusion of plant domestication from Mesoamerica, models developed in the 1980s for the transition from foraging to farming in the Eastern Woodlands emphasized the coevolutionary relationship between people and these crop plants. As Archaic-period groups began to occupy river valleys more intensively, in part due to changing climatic patterns during the mid-Holocene that created more stable river systems, their activities created disturbed areas in which these weedy plants thrive. With these useful plants available as more productive stands in closer proximity to base camps, people increasingly used the plants, which in turn responded to people’s selection. Critics noted that these models left little room for intentionality or innovation on the part of early farmers. Models derived from human behavioral ecology explore the circumstances in which foragers choose to start using these small-seeded plants in greater quantities. In contrast to the resource-rich valley settings of the coevolutionary models, human behavioral ecology models posit that foragers would only use these plants, which provide relatively few calories per time spent obtaining them, when existing resources could no longer support growing populations. In these scenarios, Late Archaic peoples cultivated these crops as insurance against shortages in nut supplies. Despite their apparent differences, current iterations of both models recognize humans as agents who actively change their environments, with intentional and unintentional results. Both also are concerned with understanding the social and ecological contexts within which people began cultivating and eventually domesticating plants. The “when” and “where” questions of domestication in eastern North America are relatively well established, although researchers continue to fill significant gaps in geographic data. These primarily include regions where large-scale contract archaeology projects have not been conducted. Researchers are also actively debating the “how” and “why” of domestication, but the cultural ramifications of the transition from foraging to farming have yet to be meaningfully incorporated into the archaeological understanding of the region. The significance of these native crops to the economies of Late Archaic and subsequent Early and Middle Woodland peoples is poorly understood and often woefully underestimated by researchers. The socioeconomic roles of these native crops to past peoples, as well as the possibilities for farmers and cooks to incorporate them into their practices in the early 21st century, are exciting areas for new research.
Crop Domestication in Prehistoric Eastern North America
Encyclopedia of Plant and Crop Science, 2004
At European Contact, eastern North American Indian agriculture featured the New World cosmopolitan “three sisters:” maize, beans, and squash. Maize and beans had diffused from the tropics as domesticates, as did some squashes. The dominance of this triad in temperate eastern North America was recent. Maize became an important crop only about 1000 years ago, and beans entered the region at 850 b.p. But before maize became preeminent—as early as 3500 b.p.—there was an “Eastern Agricultural Complex” (EAC), which consisted of several indigenous crops. EAC was largely an indigeneous development; its origins can be traced back at least 7300 years.
American crop plants in Asia prior to European contact
Year Book 1988, Proceedings …, 1989
American crop plants may have been present in Asia prior to Columbus's discovery of the New World. If they were, they would serve as indicators of contact between the New and Old World before the "European Age of Discovery." Since cultivated crop plants cannot be invented twice, if they are present on a continent not the home of the wild progenitors and if there is no possible manner of non-human seed dispersal, then they must have been carried by humans. If the crop germ plasm was transferred, it implies much cultural and technological information was probably also transferred. We need to know how the process of cultural advancement occurred. As one of the techniques to test the hypothesis, we conducted a search of the published records of the Asian region . We have reviewed the English translations of the literature of early India and have been assisted by graduate students in reading the medicinal and religious materials in their original languages (Arabic, Farsi and Chinese) for any inclusion of information on crop plants.
Initial formation of an indigenous crop complex in eastern North America at 3800 BP
PNAS, 2009
Although geneticists and archaeologists continue to make progress world-wide in documenting the time and place of the initial domestication of a growing number of plants and animals, far less is known regarding the critically important context of coalescence of various species into distinctive sets or complexes of domesticates in each of the world's 10 or more independent centers of agricultural origin. In this article, the initial emergence of a crop complex is described for one of the best-documented of these independent centers, eastern North America (ENA). Before 4000 B.P. there is no indication of a crop complex in ENA, only isolated evidence for single indigenous domesticate species. By 3800 B.P., however, at least 5 domesticated seed-bearing plants formed a coherent complex in the river valley corridors of ENA.
Revista de Antropología del Museo de Entre Ríos, 2015
The St. Lawrence River valley was home to the northernmost case of plant cultivation in Northeastern North America prior to the arrival of the first Europeans. Recent analyses of phytoliths recovered from ancient pottery vessels in this area were dated to the third century BC, possibly representing the oldest evidence for maize cultivation in this area. These and other similar data from Ontario and New York State, along with ethnohistorical descriptions from the 15th and 16th centuries, allow for a better understanding of the origins of plant cultivation on the edge of North America’s temperate zone.