The real extent of the real extent of the Native American agricultural site revealed: NPR

Archaeologists who study a wooded area in northern Michigan say that they have discovered what is probably the largest intact remains of an old Amerindian agricultural site in the eastern half of the United States.

The researchers used a drone equipped with a laser instrument to fly over more than 300 acres, taking advantage of a brief period after the winter snow was based, but before the trees extinguished their leaves.

This allowed the drone to precisely map the subtle characteristics on the surface of the exposed soil, revealing parallel rows of mounds in the ground. This is what remains of the raised gardening beds that have been used to cultivate crops such as corn, beans and squash by the ancestors of the Indian tribe Menominee of Wisconsin, over the centuries before the arrival of European colonizers.

The mounds seemed to continue beyond the area questioned, according to the researchers, showing agriculture on a surprisingly large scale in a place that was not a large center of population.

“We were not even able to locate important settlement sites in this region. There are a few tiny small villages,” said Jesse Casanaprofessor of anthropology at Dartmouth College and one of the authors of a new report In Science. “So, it is really shocking in this case to see this level of investment in an agricultural system which would require really enormous amounts of human work to achieve.”

It is particularly strange given the relatively poor growth conditions than far north, in particular during a colder temperature period known as little ice cream, as well as the presence of wild rice nearby, says Madeleine McLeesterAn anthropologist from Dartmouth who managed the research team.

“Why do they invest so many resources to cultivate corn where it is very, very difficult to cultivate corn?” McLeester wonders. “It’s an interesting puzzle, of course.”

Other experts on old agricultural systems say that the new discovery is magnificent.

“This amazing document shows how underestimated the geographic range, productivity and sustainability of intensive native agriculture across North America,” said Gayle FritzAn anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis.

“The study is exceptional in many ways, one being the long -term collaboration between tribal members of Menominee and non -Aboriginal archaeologists,” she says – the other being the combination of new technologies as well as ancient and old -fashioned explosion. “

The scale was “unexpected”

While some people may consider historic Amerindians such as hunter-gatherers or nomads, “it’s very incorrect”, explains Casana.

“As the settlers arrived, what they met were many fairly sedentary communities throughout North America which practiced various forms of agriculture,” he said.

It is difficult to know how extensive this agriculture was, because evidence is generally not well preserved. European colonists have generally taken over and developed the most fertile land, ultimately efforcing the signs of past indigenous practices with their own plowing and their own development.

The site mapped in this new study is part of Anaem Omot, which means the “dog belly” in the menomine. It is an area along the Menominee river on the border between Michigan and Wisconsin, and has a great cultural and historical meaning for the Menominee tribe.

The region contains funeral mounds and dance rings. He is also known to have agricultural ridges, ranging from 4 to 12 inches high, because previous work in the 1990s had mapped some of them.

“These features are really difficult to see on the ground, even when you walk, and they are difficult to map,” explains McLeester.

This difficulty, as well as the concerns concerning the mining activities proposed in the region, is the reason why the research team – which included the director of the historic preservation of the tribe, David Grignon – I wanted to see if new technologies could reveal more acres covered by agricultural rows on the ground.

McLeester says they thought they were finding more lines, but also expected others to be eroded since the last cartography effort.

“It was really just a test, more than anything else, to see what we could see, which was still there,” she said.

But drones surveys revealed that the field system was ten times greater than what had been seen before.

“The scale, I would say, was unexpected,” she said, noting that they questioned less than half of this historic region and the agricultural ridges seem to continue beyond the area they have studied in detail. “They just had a huge system on the ground.”

Iceberg Pointe

This degree of intensive agriculture in a very north place which is not even much cultivated today is probably only “the tip of the iceberg”, explains Casana.

“One of the interesting things of this study is that it shows us in a way a preserved window of what was probably a much larger agricultural landscape,” he said.

John MarstonAn archaeologist from the University of British Columbia who was not part of the research team, agrees with this evaluation. But if it is the tip of the iceberg, it says: “The rest of the iceberg may have melted.”

The only sites comparable to this discovery can be found in arid regions around Phoenix and Tucson in Arizona, he says, where archaeologists have discovered the traces of large-scale irrigation systems used in ancient Amerindian agriculture.

“This is the only place where I know the characteristics of the landscape of agriculture which are as well preserved on a large scale as what we have here in this example,” he said. “It’s really unusual.”

Susan Koiman From the Southern Illinois University, an expert from the prentacts Aboriginal peoples in eastern North America, says that it was “quite breathtaking” when she learned this discovery.

“There are not many remaining agricultural areas in eastern North America in general, just because of modern plowing and disturbances and soil development,” she said. “And therefore to find intact and old indigenous agricultural fields in any state, at any level, is very rare.”

The size of this particular field system surprised it.

“This requires a lot of work to create these fields, to clean the forest. It is from time to time. From time to time. To clear it, only with stone tools, is a lot of work, a lot of work,” she said, noting that researchers have also done excavation work which show that the old farmers deliberately modify the soil to improve its fertility.

“The quantity of work, how far these fields are extended, is beyond all that I think that people suspected from the north in the east of North America,” she said.

If this same type of drone technology is used to search for other relatively unstructed forest zones, Kooiman says: “We can find more vestiges of agricultural fields that we were waiting for.”

There are historical accounts of European settlers and indigenous groups that describe in -depth agriculture, and researchers know that the city of Cahokia, by Mississippi, used intensive agriculture to support ten to twenty thousand people.

The community of ancestral menomines that has built the agricultural system discovered by this new research, however, seems to have been less populated and hierarchical than a place like Cahokia, showing that large-scale agriculture may have been part of life in very different societies.

“The question is now, what are they doing with everything they grew up?” said Kooiman. “Who consumed exactly all the things they produced in these areas?”