[Aztlan] Follow up on early agriculture in Illinois

[Nick Hopkins]

If I'm not mistaken, it was the geographer Carl Sauer who argued that it was not people who were under food stress that domesticated plants, but people with stable food supplies, since they had the luxury of being able to experiment.  Nick Hopkins

> From: michaelruggeri at mac.com
> To: aztlan at lists.famsi.org
> Date: Thu, 9 Apr 2009 10:03:09 -0500
> Subject: [Aztlan] Follow up on early agriculture in Illinois
> 
> Listeros,
> 
> In a follow up story to the complex agricultural complex that sprang  
> up along the Wabash River in Illinois 3,800 years ago, researchers,  
> posting in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,  
> pointed out that the area is rich in wild food sources. So the farmers  
> in this area, known as the Riverton People, may have been farming not  
> out of necessity but as food innovators.
> 
> Five varieties of seed bearing plants including sunflowers, gourds,  
> marsh elder, chenopods (which includes spinach and beets) and possibly  
> squash were grown there. The find changes the paradigm that humans  
> domesticated plants in response to external stress. The Riverton folks  
> already had a rich diet of nuts, deer, fish and shellfish. The crops  
> would have also served as a stable source of food as insurance against  
> shortages of wild food sources.
> 
> National Geographic has the story here;
> http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/04/090408-first-farm.html
> 
> A tiny URL;
> http://tinyurl.com/dhhd4p
> 
> Mike Ruggeri

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