Prehistoric agriculture on the Great Plains
Minor crops such as sunflowers, goosefoot, tobacco,[1] gourds, and plums, little barley (Hordeum pusillum) and marsh elder (Iva annua) were also grown.
The southernmost area of agriculture was in northern Texas among the Caddoan peoples The faming Indians traded their surplus production to non-agricultural nomads.
Psoralea esculenta) and chokecherry (Prunus virginiana) for food was a practice of Indian societies on the Great Plains since their earliest habitation 13,000 or more years ago.
[5] The Antelope Creek Phase of Plains villagers, dated from AD 1200 to 1450 in the Texas panhandle was influenced by the Southwestern Pueblo people of the Rio Grande valley in New Mexico.
The Missouri River Valley in present-day North Dakota was probably the northern limit of large-scale pre-historic maize cultivation on the Great Plains.
Archaeologists have found evidence of prehistoric maize cultivation on the Great Plains north of the border of the United States and Canada.
The inhabitants at Lockport carefully chose farming sites near water with sandy soils where the frost free period was slightly longer than average for the region.
Some of them, such as the Sioux and Cheyenne, gave up agriculture to become nomadic; other such as the Dhegiha (the Osage, Kaw, Omaha, and Ponca) and the Chiwere (Otoe, Iowa, and Missouria) continued to farm while also hunting buffalo for a major part of their livelihood.
Archaeologists have found evidence of agriculture practiced by Apache people (the Dismal River culture) living on the Great Plains in western Kansas and Nebraska in the 17th century.
[13] The high productivity of maize enabled Indian farmers to produce large crops with simple tools on a small per capita amount of cultivated land—although farming on the drought-prone Great Plains was always a risky endeavor.
[19] The Wichita, and possibly other southern peoples, planted or tended thickets of low-growing Chickasaw Plum trees separating and bordering their maize fields.
[21] Archaeologists have computed the subsistence of people in the Medicine Creek valley in Nebraska near the western limit of cultivation in pre-historic times.
The dependence on agriculture and hunting for subsistence varied due to climatic conditions as the Great Plains had periods of greater and lesser precipitation.
The maize included flour, flint, and sweet corn plus one ancient variety raised only for inclusion in the "sacred bundles" common among Plains Indians.
Maize, beans, and pumpkins were dried, packed into rawhide bags, and stored in bell-shaped underground storage pits.
The Pawnee followed the harvest with a month of celebrations and in early December departed their villages again for a winter hunt, their stored agricultural products hidden beneath in underground pits.
This yearly cycle of life was common among the Plains farmers, especially after the acquisition of the horse in the late 17th and 18th century gave them the mobility to undertake lengthy hunts far from their permanent villages.
In fall 1737, the French explorer La Vérendrye found a group of Assiniboine planning to undertake their annual two-month-long, thousand-kilometer round trip south to the Mandan villages to trade bison meat for agricultural goods.
