Eurasian Grains, Labor, and the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake

Summary

Historians of the 17th-century Chesapeake have emphasized the importance of tobacco for export and maize for domestic consumption, arguing that wheat became an economically important crop after about 1720. Results from a regional analysis of paleoethnobotanical samples dating from 1630 to 1725 reveal that Eurasian grains began to appear with some consistency in Virginia’s Northern Neck and Maryland after about 1660. Documentary evidence indicates that planters and tenants grew small grains in this subregion during the second half of the 17th century. After 1700, the increased presence of wheat coincides with an increase in beans, bottle gourds and squash, crops likely associated with kitchen gardens, with the former possibly used to improve the fertility of fields. In this paper, we review the evidence and explore this agricultural shift and its implications for social landscapes and British foodways. We call for an archaeologically grounded paleoethnobotanical approach for other British colonial settings.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2025

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Contact(s): Nicole Haddow