wiping out everything else if not tended to every year,
I find it very hard to believe that we can find evidence of intensive cultivation after 3,600 years in such a wet area.
Could be true, but I find it hard to believe.
I highly doubt weeds, extensive though they might be, would wipe clean the evidence they've found in the landscape.
> I find it very hard to believe that we can find evidence of intensive cultivation after 3,600 years in such a wet area.
Perhaps I'm missing something. I'm no expert, and have merely skimmed through, but the earliest date I could find in the PDF linked from the fine article was 400 BCE [0], so around 2400 years. That's still a lot, but definitely not 3600 years.
[0] "While there is evidence of maize in the Upper Peninsula as early as 400 BCE (7), intensive cultivation, like we clearly see at Sixty Islands is typically not undertaken until roughly 1000 CE."
https://www.science.org/doi/suppl/10.1126/science.ads1643/su...
The surviving patches are small: 10's of meters on a side. The title language and figures cited make it appear this was a large scale farm operation. Instead, it looks like a collection of household farms scattered around the bottomland.
And while this is the UP of Michigan, it's actually at the southern-most point of the UP, right on the 45th parallel. It's not Florida, but it's also not exactly the Arctic either: the growing season is months shorter, but it does exist, there is ample precipitation, and the soil is often excellent. There are many farms operating at this latitude and further north today, although not much further north.
Have you read about the Eastern Agricultural Complex as one of the prehistoric centers of plant domestication?
anyonecancode•8mo ago
gnabgib•7mo ago
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