Agriculture in North America on the Eve of Contact: A Reassessment

Despite countless archaeological excavations at prehistoric agricultural sites, understanding of the cultivation practices of native North Americans ca. 1492 remains imperfect, and regional syntheses of agricultural patterning elusive. The problem remains that excavations and surveys focus more on site function than on food production; more on the remains of plants than on cultivation practices; more on socioeconomic hypotheses than on human-environmental or spatial implications. This paper uses extensive ethno-historical accounts of early European explorers that help to identify five different types of agricultural methods in use during the Contact period. I argue that the agroecological landscapes of both the Southwest and Eastern Woodlands were quite complex, in response to mosaic environments, and that labor-intensive agriculture was as common in the East as in the Southwest. Subtleties in irrigation strategies were of equal if not greater importance than the obvious function of simply providing water in arid environments. Pre-European cultivators built terraces in the mountainous Southwest, in part to halt environmental degradation. I question the dominance of shifting cultivation in the Eastern Woodlands. Large, permanently cultivated cleared areas, raised fields, and mounding indicate that intensive practices were common and widespread here. Lastly, I argue that house-lot gardens across the continent may have been critical, rather than merely supplemental, in the overall scheme of indigenous food production. Much work remains to be done before the many residual questions about native agriculture can be resolved.