From foraging to farming: Domesticating landscapes in the Midsouth three thousand years ago

Abstract

Peoples living in the Eastern Woodlands of North America domesticated a suite of small-seeded crops between five thousand and two thousand years ago, making this region one of roughly ten independent centers of domestication across the globe. In the Southern Appalachian region, foraging peoples began cultivating these native crops around thirty-five hundred years ago (during the Late Archaic period [3000–800 BCE]); by the start of the Early Woodland period (800–200 BCE), they had significantly altered their lifeways and surrounding landscape. This included a change in the physical landscape, as demonstrated by paleoethnobotanical data, with an increase in weedy plants at the expense of bottomland forests. Groups also significantly shifted their lifeways, becoming more sedentary, as evidenced by an increase in storage pits, more substantial structures, and the adoption of ceramic vessels. Storage pits also tend to be smaller, indicating a shift from community-based food procurement and storage to the household level. This may reflect the development of private property and distinctions among households with differential access. Community-based rituals, as evidenced in several caves and rock-shelters in the region, may have been established to strengthen group ties in the face of the broader changing social and physical landscape.