Planting the Empty Spaces: Estimating Field Size from Storage Pits in the Upper Delaware Valley

Summary

Landscapes are formed by diverse human actions and interactions with their surroundings through the performance of various tasks, or what Ingold referred to as the "taskscape." Recently archaeologists have turned their attentions to a previously neglected aspect of the landscape created through quotidian tasks, the agricultural field. These studies, however, tend to focus on preserved built structures still visible in the modern landscape. Direct study of agricultural fields in Eastern North America, however, has largely not been undertaken due to an absence of archaeological signatures marking the location of what were often ephemeral, extensive, and complex elements on the landscape. In the Upper Delaware River Valley, the historic Munsee and their ancestors lived on flood plain terraces where they practiced maize based agriculture. Although lacking direct evidence of fields, these people left behind large pits that based on paleoethnobotanical evidence contained maize and other agricultural crops. Using the excavated storage pits at the Shoemakers Ferry site, I estimate the total storage capacity for the site. This storage capacity will be combined with ethnohistorical data on planting practices for the Middle Atlantic and Northeast region to reconstruct the size and location of the agricultural field landscape associated with Shoemakers Ferry.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 22090