Eastern Agricultural Complex
By about 1800 BCE the Native Americans of the woodlands were cultivating several species of food plants, thus beginning a transition from a hunter-gatherer economy to agriculture.
[1] The first four plants known to have been domesticated at the Riverton Site in Illinois in 1800 BCE were goosefoot (Chenopodium berlandieri), sunflower (Helianthus annuus var.
Linton suggested that the Eastern Woodland tribes integrated maize cultivation from Mayans and Aztecs in Mexico into their own pre-existing agricultural subsistence practices.
Ethnobotanists Volney H. Jones and Melvin R. Gilmore built upon Ralph Linton's understanding of Eastern Woodland agriculture with their work in cave and bluff dwellings in Kentucky and the Ozark Mountains in Arkansas.
[4] Until the 1970s and 1980s most archaeologists believed that agriculture by Eastern Woodland peoples had been imported from Mexico, along with the trinity of subtropical crops: maize (corn), beans, and squash.
[1][5][6] The earliest cultivated plant in North America is the bottle gourd, remains of which have been excavated at Little Salt Spring, Florida dating to 8000 BCE.
The seeds of erect knotweed and goosefoot are starches, as are maygrass and little barley,[19] both of which are grasses that yield grains that may be ground to make flour.
In the 1970s, archaeologists noticed differences between seeds found in the remains of pre-Columbus era Native American hearths and houses and those growing in the wild.
[5] The region of this early agriculture is in the middle Mississippi valley, from Memphis north to St. Louis and extending about 300 miles east and west of the river, mostly in Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, and Tennessee.
The oldest archaeological site known in the United States in which Native Americans were growing, rather than gathering, food is Phillips Spring in Missouri.
Remains of plants that were used, but may or may not have been domesticated at Riverton, include bottle gourd (Lagenaria siceraria), squash (C. pepo), wild barley (Hordeum pusillum) and marsh elder (Iva annua).
Another name for marshelder is sumpweed; chenopods are derisively called pigweed, although one South American species with a more attractive name, quinoa, is a health food store favorite.
However, Bruce D. Smith and other scholars have pointed out that three of the domesticates (chenopods, I. annua, and C. pepo) were plants that thrived in disturbed soils in river valleys.
[27] Native Americans learned early that the seeds of these three species were edible and easily harvested in quantity because they grew in dense stands.
[29] By about 500 BCE, seeds produced by six domesticated plants were an important part of the diet of Native Americans in the middle Mississippi River valley of the Eastern Woodlands region.
[32] Maize was first grown by Eastern Woodlands Cultures by around 200 BCE, and highly productive localized varieties became widely used around 900 CE.
[33] The spread was so slow because the seeds and knowledge of techniques for tending them had to cross inhospitable deserts and mountains, and more productive varieties of maize had to be developed to compete with local indigenous crops and to suit the cooler climates and shorter growing seasons of the northern regions.
