Gayle J. Fritz

Multiple pathways to farming in precontact eastern North America

Hunter-gatherers in eastern North America utilized gourds at least 7000 years ago, operating at the early end of a sequence that ended with maize-based agriculture across most of the area. Various subregions differed from each other in timing and degree of participation in premaize crop production. A Midwestern record of native seed plant domestication preceding the adoption of maize is documented, and the significance of this phenomenon is now recognized. Recent archaeobotanical information highlights the amount of geographic variability, limiting the utility of earlier broad-scale interpretations. This paper includes a comparison of sequences in selected subregions: the Midwest/Midsouth, the Southeast, the Lower Mississippi Valley, the Trans-Mississippi South, and the Northeast.

The residues of feasting and public ritual at Early Cahokia

Archaeological remains excavated from the stratified layers of a pre-Columbian borrow pit in the middle of the Cahokia site inform our understanding of how ritual events were related to the social and political foundations of that enormous center. Ordinary and extraordinary refuse, ranging from foods and cooking pots to craft-production debris and sumptuary goods, are associated with a series of large-scale, single-event dumping episodes related to activities that occurred in the principal plaza. Taken as a set, the layers of ceramic, lithic, zooarchaeological, archaeobotanical, osteological, paleoentomological, and sedimentological materials reveal that the construction of Cahokias Mississippian order was an active, participatory process.

Earliest direct evidence for broomcorn millet and wheat in the central Eurasian steppe region

Before 3000 BC, societies of western Asia were cultivating wheat and societies of China were cultivating broomcorn millet; these are early nodes of the worlds agriculture. The authors are searching for early cereals in the vast lands that separate the two, and report a breakthrough at Begash in south-east Kazakhstan. Here, high precision recovery and dating have revealed the presence of both wheat and millet in the later third millennium BC. Moreover the context, a cremation burial, raises the suggestion that these grains might signal a ritual rather than a subsistence commodity.

The diffusion of maize to the southwestern United States and its impact

Our understanding of the initial period of agriculture in the southwestern United States has been transformed by recent discoveries that establish the presence of maize there by 2100 cal. B.C. (calibrated calendrical years before the Christian era) and document the processes by which it was integrated into local foraging economies. Here we review archaeological, paleoecological, linguistic, and genetic data to evaluate the hypothesis that Proto-Uto-Aztecan (PUA) farmers migrating from a homeland in Mesoamerica introduced maize agriculture to the region. We conclude that this hypothesis is untenable and that the available data indicate instead a Great Basin homeland for the PUA, the breakup of this speech community into northern and southern divisions ≈6900 cal. B.C. and the dispersal of maize agriculture from Mesoamerica to the US Southwest via group-to-group diffusion across a Southern Uto-Aztecan linguistic continuum.

Ecotopes and Herd Foraging Practices In the Steppe/Mountain Ecotone of Central Asia During the Bronze and Iron Ages

Abstract Eurasian mobile pastoralists living in semiarid environments focus on specific locations on the landscape where pasture resources and water are available. Ecotones –or intermediary zones between the mountain and steppe environments– create mosaic landscapes composed of forage-rich patches and other discrete enclaves of useful biota for pastoralist communities. Ecotopes (ecological patches) provide vital resources for the herding systems used in Central Asia today as well as in the past. We document and discuss wild seed composition of archaeobotanical samples from the Bronze and Iron Age site of Begash in southeastern Kazakhstan noting that much of the archaeobotanical assemblage represents carbonized animal dung, which is currently and historically used as fuel in this region by mobile pastoralists. The seeds offer a window into prehistoric herding patterns and provide a nuanced view of prehistoric land use, social interaction, and community formation across discrete ecological nodes in the Bronze and Iron Ages.

Gender and the early cultivation of gourds in Eastern North America

Discovery and AMS dating of mid-Holocene Cucurbita pepo fragments from central Maine and north-central Pennsylvania necessitate the reevaluation of the status of the earliest gourds in noncoastal areas of the Eastern Woodlands and the role of women in their cultivation. Gourds may have been spread initially in conjunction with improvements in fishing techniques, with small gourds used primarily as net floats. In this scenario, people passed temperate, Eastern (ovifera-type) gourds northward from the coastal plains of the Southeast into river valleys of the Midwest and Northeast as fishing became more significant in Archaic subsistence systems. The growing of gourds was fully compatible with a fisher-gatherer-hunter lifeway, and it did not necessarily trigger a transition to farming. Women may have grown gourds, but the possible role of women in fishing activities is more ambiguous than is their role in gathering and eventually domesticating the food plants of the Eastern North American agricultural complex.

Identification of Cultigen Amaranth and Chenopod from Rock-Shelter Sites in Northwest Arkansas

The cultigen Amaranthus hypochondriacus has been recognized in four samples of desiccated plant remains from Holman Shelter in Madison County, Arkansas. That site, excavated in 1932, yielded the domesticated Chenopodium berlandieri ssp. nuttalliae described by Hugh Wilson (1981). Cultigen chenopod has been found in one other Madison County rockshelter. Samples containing the two species are described in detail and placed in general cultural context by combining information from excavation notes with regional archaeological data. Mesoamerican origins would exclude both cultigens from the Eastern Agricultural Complex. Current evidence favors a late prehistoric introduction into the eastern United States, but determination of spatial and temporal ranges will depend upon future recovery and analysis.

PrecolumbianCucurbita argyrosperma ssp.argyrosperma (Cucurbitaceae) in the Eastern Woodlands of North America

Peduncles ofCucurbita argyrosperma ssp.argyrosperma are present in collections of desiccated archaeological plant remains from at least seven prehistoric Ozark rockshelter sites. A radiocarbon date (Accelerator Mass Spectrometer method) on a fragment of one of these fruiting stems has a two-sigma calendric date range of A.D. 1280-1490. One C.argyrosperma ssp.argyrosperma peduncle excavated from the Cahokia site in Illinois was among contents of a sub-mound pit deposited during the 11th century A.D. Therefore, cushaw-like squashes were present in eastern North America before European contact, contrary to the long-held belief thatCucurbita pepo was the only prehistoric squash species in the region. Landraces of eastern North American cushaws were isolated from their Southwestern and Mexican argyrosperma progenitors for a longer period of time than previously believed.RésuméPedúnculos de frutos deCucurbita argyrosperma ssp. argyrosperma se encuentran presentes en colecciones arqueológicas de residuos de plantas secas de por lo menos siete refugios rocosos prehistóricos de Ozark. La fecha de radiocarbono (por el método de Aceleración con Espectómetro de Masa), aplicado a fragmentos de un pedúnculo, da un rango de a.d. 1280–1490 después de calibration dendrocronológica. Similarmente, un pedúnculo defruto deC. argyrosperma ssp.argyrosperma, encontrado en excavaciones realizadas debajo de un montículo del sitio de Cahokia en Illinois, tiene unafecha estimada de a.d. 1000–1050. Estos resultados suguieren que esta subespecie de calabaza estuvo presence en el Este de Norte América antes del contacto con Europa, y contradice la creencia de queCucurbita pepo fue la única especie de calabaza prehistórica que estuvo presente en esta región. Ademas, las variedades de calabaza “cushaw” cultivada en el Este de Norte América fueron separadas de su progenitorC. argyrosperma del Suroeste y México por un período de tiempo mucho más largo de lo que previamente suponíamos.

Agricultural origins from the ground up: Archaeological approaches to plant domestication

The timing, geographical locations, causes, and consequences of crop domestication have long been major concerns of archaeologists, and agricultural origins and dispersals are currently more relevant than ever to scientists seeking solutions to elusive problems involving food insecurity and global health disparities. Perennial research issues that archaeologists continue to tackle include (1) thinking outside centers of origin that were based on limited and insufficient past knowledge; (2) distinguishing between single and multiple domestications of specific crops; (3) measuring the pace of domestication; and (4) decoupling domestication from agricultural economies. Paleoethnobotanists have expanded their toolkits to include analysis of ancient and modern DNA and have added increasingly sophisticated techniques in the field and the laboratory to derive precise chronological sequences to assess morphological changes in ancient and often fragmentary archaeobotanical remains and to correctly interpret taphonomy and context. Multiple lines of archaeological evidence are ideally brought together, and whenever possible, these are integrated with information from complementary sources. We discuss current perspectives and anthropological approaches to research that have as their goals the fuller and broader understanding of ancient farming societies, the plants that were domesticated, the landscapes that were created, and the culinary legacies that were passed on.

Reply to Hill and Brown: Maize and Uto-Aztecan cultural history

The hypothesis that Proto-Uto-Aztecan (PUA) speakers cultivated maize in or near Mesoamerica rests primarily on Jane H. Hills argument (1) that a maize-related vocabulary can be reconstructed for PUA, based on cognates in Northern Uto-Aztecan (NUA) and Southern Uto-Aztecan (SUA) languages. In our essay (2), we noted that Hill fails to demonstrate the existence of this PUA vocabulary, because the NUA words she identifies as cognates of maize-related words in SUA languages lack the expected phonological forms or the expected meanings. The same characterization applies to the additional evidence from three California NUA languages that she cites in her reply.