I'm surprised that anything remains. If the area is fertile I'd expect it to be farmland now. Clearly it was logged for a while, and perhaps they were expecting to cut it down again at some point.
What is farmed in this country is land compatible with american farming practices not fertile land. E.G. any mountainous farm region in the U.S. will see basically only farming on the valley bottoms. Whereas many civilizations in the past and present developed terrace farms to make use of the entire hilly region not just the convenient bottoms. It isn't really done in the U.S. due to the cost and the availability of vast quantities of flat farmable land well beyond market need.
The unanswered questions are intriguing. I wonder if the crops grew better because they were suited to the climate, but those crops aren’t around anymore? Could they have cultivated varieties of corn over say 1000 years that grew well at that latitude and in the relative cold? Or could there have been warmer micro climates? Maybe not. Even corn specifically developed for my area in British Columbia needs a very warm…
You'd be surprised but the "landraces" e.g. historic geographically constrained cultivars tend to do better than modern cultivars in certain geographical regions. A modern even GMO cultivar might have a couple of beneficial traits introduced over the course of a few decades of work. Whereas a landrace might have been selected for yield in that area for a thousand years or more, maybe 100x or more as many generations under selection. As such there is a huge interest among a subset of biologists today to catalog all of these remaining landrace crops and the genetic diversity they contain before they are lost, either due to changing climate wiping out their native environment or the modern farmer replacing these cultivars with ones you can buy in bulk quantities from your seed supplier and have more of an export market (some landrace crops aren't fit for export shipping due to fragility of the crop unlike more modern cultivars; bananas are a good example where there are 1000 types grown but only 1 single varietal particularly fit for overseas shipping hits the supermarket).
> During their excavations, the scientists also found several artifacts, including charcoal and fragments of broken ceramics. These discoveries suggest that the area’s Indigenous farmers may have dumped their household waste and the remnants of fires onto their fields, using them as compost. Samples taken from the mounds suggest the farmers enriched the dirt with soil from nearby wetlands. Exciting - that sounds a lo…
Until further evidence is found it’s premature to say that there is no doubt that it was widely used in the Americas. I think there is doubt though that could be removed with more evidence.
It’s amazing how smart our ancestors were and creative and observant based on amateur science and gardening skills. The amount of planning and organization this must have taken would require a large coordinated effort.
But a farmer is a professional scientist and a professional gardener. Living 1k years ago did not make them uninformed or unskilled at their profession. It's quite a modern bias to suggest this is amateur.
I wouldn't have imagined broken pottery could serve as compost, how is that made possible? It's clay but it retains some properties even after baking?
Pottery of the time was low-fired and did not generally reach vitrification, and it was not glazed with a silica-based glaze that would seal it. So over time this pottery would absorb water. And especially low-fired bits could totally break down. Source: amateur ceramicist, and I have first-hand experience with cone 6 clay (vitrifies at 1200c) bisc-fired to cone 04 (1060c) and crumbling to bits when left in water too…
I have some reproduction native American pottery from the upper great plains. They're pretty neat as they have round bottoms. Just holding it feels like given enough time it would break down and melt for sure. It feels very porous.
It’s amazing how smart our ancestors were and creative and observant based on amateur science and gardening skills. The amount of planning and organization this must have taken would require a large coordinated effort.
"Stuff grows good in this black muck, but floods here and is hard to work in. Let's bring some of it up closer to the camp."
For anyone else confused about the three sisters and why they weren't mentioned in the article, it's a reference to this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Sisters_(agriculture)
Thank you! That headline really threw me for a loop.