Fields where Native Americans farmed a thousand years ago discovered in Michigan

Post by hinkley » Mon, Jun 16, 2025, 2:42 PM UTC

vanattab wrote: post #96

bruce511 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I seem to recall one or two doing this. But i suspect the reason they don't is cause they don't need to. They all have a pot already. The benefits of more pots seems low. Conversely the calorie cost seems high (if only just collecting clay and cutting wood to fire it.) On Alone thd priorities are shelter and food. Clay pots seems like a luxury in terms of utility use and energy cost.

This is the correct answer. Alone is not really a how to live in the woods show, it's a managed starvation show. The contestants are limited to about a 1 sq mile area which may or may not have a good source of clay. They purposely set them out just a few weeks before winter so they do not have a long time to prep. Conserving and replenishing calories is the name of the game.

Post by timeon » Mon, Jun 16, 2025, 2:57 PM UTC

vintermann wrote: post #79

A thousand years ago doesn't seem that long. In Europe it's not so rare to find that the farm that your bus stop is named after, was continuously worked for 3000 years. In the Middle East they probably think that's short too!

Post by maxerickson » Mon, Jun 16, 2025, 4:04 PM UTC

mapt wrote: post #108

maxerickson wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's invasive species that are hugely problematic, converting whole forests from fungal decomposition of leaves to bacterial (changing the soil conditions quite a lot).

I've read this, but I'm not 100% clear on this. I think it's probably entangled with the glaciation / interglacial transition, which happened relatively recently. Earthworms are invasive in Michigan, but so are _trees_ in that timescale. It seems like having a foot thickness of forest duff decomposing slowly is probably not a very ecologically stable situation, and might be a temporary phase as the forests creep nort…

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jun 16, 2025, 4:48 PM UTC

altacc wrote: post #107

Huxley1 wrote: post #87

I always thought large-scale farming like this only happened under big state systems. But it looks like these communities were able to build something pretty big without that kind of centralized power. It’s also kind of amazing that the fields stayed preserved for a thousand years. Makes me wonder if we’re still underestimating how advanced some of these early farming cultures were.

When foreign cultures were discovered by Europeans the default thinking was to assume they were savages without culture, complex society or technology. That has echoed throughout time and still affects our view of history today. The true savages were the Europeans that preferred to subjugate or kill any non-European population they encountered. It is only recently that TV & films from the US stopped portraying the st…

Post by cogman10 » Mon, Jun 16, 2025, 5:17 PM UTC

hinkley wrote: post #111

vanattab wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the correct answer. Alone is not really a how to live in the woods show, it's a managed starvation show. The contestants are limited to about a 1 sq mile area which may or may not have a good source of clay. They purposely set them out just a few weeks before winter so they do not have a long time to prep. Conserving and replenishing calories is the name of the game.

Humanity didn’t really take off until we figured out how to make use of inedible calories though. Making lots of tea and thin soups in the winter should have been a target for many of them. One person did quite well finding wild onions but as I recall got some stomach distress from them. Raw onion doesn’t agree with people when you aren’t eating much else. But those greens would have made soup for days.