Prospects and Challenges toward Globalization for Crops in the Eastern Agricultural Complex of North America

Summary

Two crops domesticated in North America north of Mexico before European colonization have achieved global economic success: (1) sunflower (Helianthus annuus var. macrocarpus); and (2) eastern squash (Cucurbita pepo ssp. ovifera var. ovifera). Other members of the Eastern Agricultural Complex became extinct as domesticates before European contact or shortly thereafter, forfeiting potential to figure in the Columbian Exchange. Both sunflower and the domesticated eastern chenopod (Chenopodium berlandieri ssp. jonesianum) might have spread via long-distance exchange to Mesoamerica and the U.S. Southwest, but the molecular and archaeobotanical evidence is equivocal and controversial. Scholarly resistance may stem from overly strict adherence to centric models in which "advances"—agricultural and otherwise—diffuse from major civilizations to less politically complex regions. A key factor in all discussions of the demise of native eastern North American crops other than sunflower and squash is the intensification of maize agriculture at approximately A.D. 1000. Maize, of course, went on to become a huge success beyond the Americas after 1492, so its economic dominance in late prehistoric North America is one chapter in the wider and longer-term saga of globalization.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Food Globalisation in Prehistory

Keywords

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