Keeping Up Productivity: Persistence of "Lost" Crops in the Trans-Mississippi South

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Enduring Relationships: People, Plants, and the Contributions of Karen R. Adams" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Most crops in the Eastern Agricultural Complex were no longer members of Native American farming systems when Europeans first took note. Reasons usually proposed for the fall-off entail advantages of maize over the pre-maize cultigens, with heightened defensibility of close, compact fields being another possible factor. Similar to the variability in timing of initial dependency on maize across subregions of eastern North America, later agricultural trajectories differed from subregion to subregion. At sites in the Trans-Mississippi South, evidence exists for continued production of sumpweed and goosefoot—along with sunflower, eastern squash, and of course maize and beans—well into the final decades of pre-European contact and probably later. I discuss possible causes for the persistence of agrobiodiversity in this particular area, where densely populated Native towns were few and sustained European contact was late. This paper salutes the ongoing productivity of Dr. Karen Adams and her contributions to the study of underappreciated crops, maize, and diverse Indigenous food production systems.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)   •
• Enduring Relationships: People, Plants, and the Contributions of Karen R. Adams

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38459.0