The article seems to assume that the same tribe lived in that place for a thousand years. The pre-Columbian histories I've seen had the tribes moving around, based on comparisons of DNA evidence.
Fields where Native Americans farmed a thousand years ago discovered in Michigan
81–90 of 128 posts
Re: Fields where Native Americans farmed a thousand years ago discovered in Michigan
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why don't contestants on "Alone" do this?
This question is substantially why I stopped watching that show. I think at least a few of them may have trouble locating pure clay where they are dropped but not all of them, every season, for years.
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.
Re: Fields where Native Americans farmed a thousand years ago discovered in Michigan
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
This question is substantially why I stopped watching that show. I think at least a few of them may have trouble locating pure clay where they are dropped but not all of them, every season, for years.
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.
Most of them did a simply terrible job of building a fireplace, from poisoning themselves with the smoke to literally burning their shelter down. Some built a bed up off the ground, which is smart, but never seemed to consider heating up rocks in the fireplace during the day and slipping them under the bed at night.
Anyhow, some mud and clay skills would help make a decent fireplace.
Staying warm is a crucial skill, not a luxury. Some of them got frostbite.
Also, most of them had food storage problems where their meat would get robbed. Some went to great effort to make their meat inaccessible, to no avail. I imagine that would make a storage pot useful.
Re: Fields where Native Americans farmed a thousand years ago discovered in Michigan
#84A 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!
The article quotes a researcher: “Most field systems have been either lost or destroyed due to intensive land use across most of North America, through farming, including pastures and the cutting down of trees for urban development,”
My watching of years of Time Team episodes tells me that Roman mosaic floors keep being found in England, like https://historicengland.org.uk/whats-new/news/rutland-roman-... from about 1,500 years ago. Doing so makes the news.
These floors, and the ruins around them, whilst buried, don't always survive the last century or two of machine plowing, which goes deeper than the medieval animal-based plowing.
Imagine the archeological excitement by your bus stop if a preserved part of the farm from 1,000 years ago were discovered, barely disturbed, giving archeologists a snapshot of what daily life was like at the time.
You know also know the story of Pompeii, and how its ruins have helped understand the Roman era.
This story is likely somewhere in between those two. Unlike your bus stop farm there aren't written records from the 1,000 years ago, nor are there many other sites from which to draw comparable results.
Re: Fields where Native Americans farmed a thousand years ago discovered in Michigan
#85I'd be interested in an alternative world history where the first humans into North America had domesticated and saved the local horses that were kicking around, or the Vikings had left a bunch on their earlier expeditions. Alternatively where the Vikings had managed to give the locals small pox and other European diseases en-masse before leaving.
Not exactly your scenario, but The Years of Rice and Salt, by Kim Stanley Robinson, has Europe almost wiped out by the Black Death.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2723.The_Years_of_Rice_a...
Re: Fields where Native Americans farmed a thousand years ago discovered in Michigan
#86Earlier 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.
Most of them did a simply terrible job of building a fireplace, from poisoning themselves with the smoke to literally burning their shelter down. Some built a bed up off the ground, which is smart, but never seemed to consider heating up rocks in the fireplace during the day and slipping them under the bed at night. Anyhow, some mud and clay skills would help make a decent fireplace. Staying warm is a crucial skill,…
P.S. I've learned to spot the losers early on. They always try to build a monumental log cabin, which drains away their energy and they cannot replace it and tap out. Others spend their time carving toys for their kids instead of looking for food.
To win you need to make a minimal cabin and spend all your time looking for food.
Re: Fields where Native Americans farmed a thousand years ago discovered in Michigan
#87I 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.
Re: Fields where Native Americans farmed a thousand years ago discovered in Michigan
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
Intentional vs incidental?
Does this matter? That is extremely difficult to differentiate via the archaeological record, so most archaeological research simply abandons the distinction. You should essentially never read intention into archaeology unless someone makes an extremely strong case the alternatives might be firmly excluded. As an example for a strong case of intention: if you find twenty skulls with pickaxes in their heads lined up o…
This is the intention the previous poster was countering:
> 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
Re: Fields where Native Americans farmed a thousand years ago discovered in Michigan
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think they were just engaging in time-honored speculation about how different history could’ve been had a few historical accidents changed. For example, the Mayan civilization collapsed about 500 years before the Spanish showed up due to the worst drought in something like 7k years, so people have speculated about what Mesoamerica might have looked like when contact was made of those millions of people hadn’t died.…
The "immune system lottery" is really why the native Americans were doomed. They could have caught up with the technology etc and stood their ground. But when 90% of the population dies at or before first contact, the remaining 10% doesn't have a chance. Pretty sure this would have beaten the Mayas even if they were at the top of their game. It's pretty wild how world history turned on such a random and completely un…
Agreed, but this tradition of speculation had been around for decades before researchers figured out just how severe the plague toll had been. I think part of that was the lack of stone buildings in the eastern United States setting the tone for Americans to think that the native peoples outside of Mesoamerica had been small hunter-gatherer tribes because it took time to establish how large the pre-Colombian populations had been in places like the Mississippian culture or that there are ways to manage the environment other than by plowing fields for grains which weren’t native to the continent.
Re: Fields where Native Americans farmed a thousand years ago discovered in Michigan
#90Does anyone know a 3 sisters equivalent native to Eurasia?
It's not quite the same but growing carp alongside rice in a paddy. The fish eat pests and fertilise the water.