[Aztlan] Earliest North American agriculture in Illinois?

[J. L. Baker]

The claims made by the reporter who wrote the story (about this being the earliest agriculture in North America) are clearly wrong. First, The Balsas River Valley (in Mexico, where maize was domesticated) is in North America. And, even if we want to restrict this to the earliest evidence for agriculture in the U.S., it is still not correct. In the US Southwest (Arizona and New Mexico), a number of sites have provided evidence for maize prior to 4000 years ago, with some data from the Santa Cruz River Valley suggesting that the locals were cultivating indigenous wild plants prior to the introduction of maize in the area. There is a volume in press on the evidence for early agriculture in the southwest, although I can't recall the editors for the volume (one of them might be Jonathan Mabry).

If anyone is interested on reading some of the information on the early agriculture stuff in Arizona, the Center for Desert Archaeology's (www.cdarc.org) Archaeology Southwest Magazine has published several issues in the last ten years that provide some of the information on this issue. They can be purchased as pdf's for the whopping price of $3.00 per issue.



Thanks,

Jeff Baker