Which native americans farmed

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These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may have an effect on your browsing experience. Necessary Necessary. Native Americans in the Great Plains remained subsistence farmers, if they practiced agriculture at all.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, on many reserves and reservations in the Great Plains, Native American agriculture has nearly ceased. There are important exceptions, of course, such as Montana Reserve in Alberta, which has a successful ranch and feed operation.

But many tribes have leased their reservation lands to white farmers and ranchers, and millions of acres of allotted lands have been sold and passed from Indian control. The problems of government-imposed inheritance laws, which divided land holdings into tracts too small for profitable cultivation, and inadequate capital, credit, and education, as well as insufficient machinery, seeds, fertilizer, irrigation, and managerial experience, remain unresolved.

As a result, most Native Americans in the Great Plains live in rural areas but are not farmers. Baillargeon, Morgan. Hurt, R. Indian Agriculture in America: Prehistory to the Present. Other seeds were carried back to the human camps, for sharing with others or for eating later. Discarded organic material and even human waste would have fertilized the soil around the camp, providing a rich opportunity for some seeds to grow at those locations during the next season.

Over several thousand years, selective collection and seed deposition on middens by sedentary foragers would have had the same impact as selective breeding done by scientists today: genetic modification of the plant community. In patches of disturbed soil at the Archaic Period campsites, the seeds deposited by humans would not have been from "average" plants. Those plants would have had larger-than-average seeds, more-than-the-average-quantity of seeds on each plant, more-than-average percentage of seeds that would ripen at the same time, and more-than-average percentage of seeds that would cling to the plant after ripening.

Humans independently established agriculture in nine separate places, including the Middle East, Ethiopia, and China. In the Western Hemisphere, plants were domesticated in Eastern North America separately from the development of agriculture in Central and in South America. There also may have been some dispersal of males from Mexico and Central America into North America, bringing knowledge of agriculture.

Domestication of three species occurred in the Mississippi Valley. In addition, tobacco was grown as one of the earliest plants. A species native to North America may have been domesticated first, or the South American species Nicotiana rustica and Nicotiana tabacum may have been introduced at the time farming began.

About 4, years ago, Native Americans in the Mississippi River Valley first domesticated a species of squash, Cucurbita pepo ssp. Modern forms of crookneck, acorn and scallop squash developed from Cucurbita pepo ssp.

Pumpkins come from a different form of Cucurbita , introduced later from Mexico. The gourds, the fruits of the squash plants, may have served more as carrying vessels rather than as food. It is even possible that another species, the bottle gourd Lagenaria siceraria was domesticated in Asia and brought to North America across the Bering land bridge. The immigrants also brought domesticated dogs. Humans living in Asia may have domesticated the wolf about the time the Laurentide and Cordilleran ice sheets melted enough to open a migration corridor into what today is Montana.

If Paleo-Indians migrated into North America with domesticated plants and animals, then the first humans to visit what is now Virginia may have been able when they arrived to plant, nurture, and harvest a crop, and had the expertise and tradition of practicing agriculture. The traditional interpretation is that after domesticating the Cucurbita pepo ssp. A relative of Chenopodium berlandieri was domesticated in South America, and is still sold today as quinoa.

These three species of floodplain weeds grew wild in river valleys, where floods regularly exposed bare soil and removed competing vegetation. The end of the Ice Age , years ago created new river and swamp habitats, as the ice sheets melted. Regularly-occupied human camps in the new riparian areas created unplanned experimental plots for genetic modification of plants. At some point, humans became purposeful in their management of the modified plants, by collecting seeds in the fall and replanting them at the start of the next growing season.

Sunflower Helianthus annuus may have a slightly different history. The sunflowers may have been an upland plant species that was originally a native plant west of the Mississippi River, and then introduced to the east via bison or humans. Domestication appears to occurred in the eastern region, where other species were also altered by Native American horticultural practices that selected for plants with preferred characteristics. In addition, wild crops of knotweed Polygonum erectum , maygrass Phalaris caroliniana , and "little barley" Hordeum pusillum were harvested Archeologists and botanists can tell the difference between wild and domesticated plants because the domesticated variety has extra-large seeds, thinner-than-average seed coats, and increased requirements for human assistance in order to spread the seeds.

Corn is not the only latecomer to gardens in Eastern North America. Beans and some variants of squash more similar to modern pumpkins, rather than the already-domesticated variety similar to modern crookneck squash were introduced from Mexico. Beans, corn, and the pumpkin variety of squash arrived in the Eastern United States long after those crops had been domesticated initially in Central and South America, and long after Native Americans in the east had already developed agriculture using native species.

The domesticated turkey also was imported to Virginia from the Southwestern US and Mexico, through an unusual path. Farmers in Turkey obtained birds from Spain, and were very successful in raising the domesticated fowl.

Traders introduced the domesticated fowl to other European nations - who named the bird after the source they knew, Turkey. Agriculture in Eastern North America was the result of initial domestication of wild plants in the eastern half of North America, followed by the diffusion of additional crops from Mexico.

The English colonists saw Algonquians tribes in the Chesapeake Bay planting corns, beans, and squash, but all three were probably imported into Virginia after 1, A.

It is reasonable to assume that the Native Americans in Virginia were exposed to corn, beans, and a different variety of squash AFTER the occupants of the Mississippi River watershed incorporated those new plants into their agricultural practices.

The Appalachian Mountains may have been a barrier to cultural diffusion from the west, just as they slowed European settlement from moving from the Piedmont to the Ohio River valley. Corn cultivation was introduced into Virginia from what today we call the Midwestern United States. Although, after plowing, the humus briefly releases a burst of nitrogen, the depletion of organic matter and increased erosion continue for decades. And thus on balance, Mt. Pleasant says the lack of the plow was an advantage, because planting with hand tools saves soil organic matter.

Overall, Mt. This is sustainable agriculture at its highest level. This type of revelation changes our view of the origin of agriculture, says Eve Emshwiller, an assistant professor of botany at UW-Madison who organized the seminar on native agriculture and who studies oca, a root crop grown in the Andes.

Aside from historical curiosity, why worry about how native Americans grew their crops? One reason is the growing interest in sustainable agriculture, says Emshwiller. As agriculture faces the challenge of feeding more people without further damaging soil and water, older traditions could contribute. Looking at other ways to grow and gather food will broaden our perspective, Emshwiller says.

But if you really understand what they were doing, there is not a sharp line between gathering and farming. There is a huge continuum of ways that people manage resources and get more from them. Post navigation. Lettuce grows in soil containing powdered charcoal. This traditional technology improves soil fertility and yield, and helped the Amazon basin support a large population before Salmonberry was a traditional food along the Northwest Coast, where people also tended and ate red huckleberry, high bush cranberry and crabapple.

Courtesy Nancy Turner. In this permaculture, the harvesters replanted segments of the roots for another crop. Army Corps of Engineers 1. The Pick-Sloan Program, enacted in , built a series of large dams and reservoirs on the Missouri River and its tributaries.