Cultivating Lost Crops: New Insights on the Domestication of Goosefoot (Chenopodium berlandieri) from a Common Garden Experiment

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Advancing the Archaeology of Indigenous Agriculture in North America" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In precolumbian eastern North America, archaeological evidence indicates that Indigenous peoples domesticated a unique crop system called the Eastern Agricultural Complex (EAC) before the arrival of maize (Zea mays) from what is now Mexico. The EAC is thought to have sustained past Indigenous people in eastern North America from around 3900 BP to approximately 600 BP. Their domesticated forms fell out of cultivation prior to European contact, and many important questions remain about the process of domesticating these plants as well as how they preserve in the archaeological record. This presentation focuses on one of these lost crops: goosefoot (Chenopodium berlandieri), an herbaceous annual that produces polymorphic seeds. We report our results from an experimental growth study of the wild modern progenitor of goosefoot. Our findings indicate that goosefoot produces higher percentages (30%–49%) of thin-testa morphs than previously reported (1%–5%), emphasizing this plant’s inherent developmental plasticity. We argue that the seed polymorphism plasticity seen in modern wild progenitors of goosefoot likely occurred in past wild goosefoot populations, complicating previous theories that goosefoot domestication was a linear process of a transition from “wild” or “weedy” thick-testa morphs to “cultigen” thin-testa morphs.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Advancing the Archaeology of Indigenous Agriculture in North America   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37054.0