Fields where Native Americans farmed a thousand years ago discovered in Michigan
(smithsonianmag.com)227 points by CoopaTroopa 4 days ago
227 points by CoopaTroopa 4 days ago
I wouldn't have imagined broken pottery could serve as compost, how is that made possible? It's clay but it retains some properties even after baking?
Pottery of the time was low-fired and did not generally reach vitrification, and it was not glazed with a silica-based glaze that would seal it.
So over time this pottery would absorb water. And especially low-fired bits could totally break down.
Source: amateur ceramicist, and I have first-hand experience with cone 6 clay (vitrifies at 1200c) bisc-fired to cone 04 (1060c) and crumbling to bits when left in water too long.
Not to mention terracotta is a very common material for potted houseplants and container gardening. Terracotta is low-fired, non-vitreous and porous to water, giving it nice breathability and water absorption characteristics.
There are also long-necked terracotta bottles (called ollas) you can buy (or DIY) which you bury in the ground. You fill the bottle with water and the terracotta itself acts as a wick, providing a slow release continuous underground water source for plants to access.
If you were in the woods( pick a spot) and had whatever food/medicines you needed could you build pottery from scratch.
Electricity is fine and all, but I imagine the basics of civilization could be replicated by a few good craftsmen(people)
A lot of these observations about the miraculous soil caretaking of the elder Native Americans are in all likelihood just "Look at this garbage dump, so fertile, such agricultural skill!"
Broken half-fired terra cotta is effectively unusable rock. Terra cotta is semi-disposable, so lots of potsherds are produced per person-year before plastics/glasses/metals are introduced. It's the single most common and best-preserved archeological artifact. Broken pottery was used in place of sand to stabilize the clay in new pottery, but other than that it doesn't have many special qualities.
If you try to make a planting bed in any settlement that’s more than say 100 years old on a site that was continuously lived on, you are guaranteed to come across at least some shards of glass, pots, plates, etc. Even if the spot was never explicitly a trash mound. Things break, people usually try to pick them up and put in trash, but (especially in grass) miss pieces. When kids break stuff you often don’t want them picking up sharp objects. Things get stepped on and pressed into soil. Many many reasons to find pottery shards where they seemingly don’t belong.
Clay regulates various elements in the water (too much: they adsorb some, not enough: they release), enhances drainage...
Some species of bacteria needed for the vital nitrogen-cycle thrive inside clay.
That's the reason why clay balls/pebbles/pellets are omnipresent in many types of plant cultivation projects.
I have thought about this and figured it was more mechanical (ie drainage) than chemical (nutrients).
It could just be incidental, some broken pottery unintentionally mixed into fire ash that was intentionally spread on a field.
If you added the pottery fragments to the compost pile they would be “baked” again, albeit in a very different environment, and the finished product would have structural diversity closer to soil. Normally that would be rocks, but if your goal is to grow food clay rocks might be better for many reasons.
You're all overthinking it. They dumped their kitchen waste in the fields, and it happened to contain broken pottery too. It's the same for other archeological sites all over, many are waste dumps that contain interesting objects.
How would you characterize this distinction? It sounds like you're simply describing the same behavior.
Tangentially related: I'm trying to make LiDAR data in Switzerland more accessible, see https://github.com/r-follador/delta-relief
There's some interesting examples in the Readme.
Does LIDAR work underwater?
FWIU in Grand Traverse Bay, Lake Michigan, there's a 9,000 year old stonehenge-like structure 40 feet underwater; that's 4000 thousand years older than Stonehenge and about 6000 years older than the Osireoin and the Pyramids.
/? Michigan underwater stonehenge: https://www.google.com/search?q=michigan+underwater+stonehen...
There's not even a name or a wikipedia page for the site? There are various presumed Clovis sites which are now underwater in TN, as well.
TFA literally says archaeologists discovered the crop(s) using LIDAR and GP links to a project using LIDAR to map lands.
Maybe they should make the paper accessible to the public. Taking public grants to do research but not providing the paper to the public is shameful.
The unanswered questions are intriguing. I wonder if the crops grew better because they were suited to the climate, but those crops aren’t around anymore? Could they have cultivated varieties of corn over say 1000 years that grew well at that latitude and in the relative cold? Or could there have been warmer micro climates?
Maybe not. Even corn specifically developed for my area in British Columbia needs a very warm summer to do well.
I wonder if it’s possible that they used corn less as a food crop and more as a scaffolding crop in the 3 sisters system.
You'd be surprised but the "landraces" e.g. historic geographically constrained cultivars tend to do better than modern cultivars in certain geographical regions. A modern even GMO cultivar might have a couple of beneficial traits introduced over the course of a few decades of work. Whereas a landrace might have been selected for yield in that area for a thousand years or more, maybe 100x or more as many generations under selection. As such there is a huge interest among a subset of biologists today to catalog all of these remaining landrace crops and the genetic diversity they contain before they are lost, either due to changing climate wiping out their native environment or the modern farmer replacing these cultivars with ones you can buy in bulk quantities from your seed supplier and have more of an export market (some landrace crops aren't fit for export shipping due to fragility of the crop unlike more modern cultivars; bananas are a good example where there are 1000 types grown but only 1 single varietal particularly fit for overseas shipping hits the supermarket).
It doesn't take many generations for selective breeding to show improvements in landraces. Even just making sure that volunteers from seeds that were thrown out as food waste were given a chance to fruit and seed starts that process.
One of the more interesting sources of landraces can be found in local seed saving programs, such as ones hosted by local libraries. They are more likely to be viable seeds that is adapting to the local conditions.
Corn is grown in the UP with current varieties currently. It’s not commercially viable because the yields are too low to compete with southern mega yield growers in a highly connected market with efficient transportation systems. There isn’t anything fundamentally hard about growing lower yield corn crops at that location though.
It didn’t necessarily need to be highly productive, just more productive than cultivating local stuff, and even if the corn was not necessarily at its most productive it might have been worth it (and with no real replacement) as part of the companion garden, getting just a few ears of corn would still have been worth more than unproductive wooden stakes.
Or, they had far advanced knowledge of working and remediating soil to grow food. Peat mosses, charcoal, household compost, are all valid soil additives that we now have scientific knowledge to explain how those benefit soil, but they were practicing it in soil that is otherwise unproductive. Given that no one else farmed it in that time it seems that knowledge was lost, but lines up with regenerative agriculture practices we see today.
There are several indicators in the south american jungles of civilisation going through booms and busts. If they would have been significant ahead, they would have colonized europe or china.
> Or could there have been warmer micro climates?
Microclimates? The whole world was warmer. Remember when the Vikings settled Greenland? That was 1000 years ago.
According to graphs I’m seeing, it looks like it was warmer for a period, but then cooler until now. They would have been farming here during a cool period. It’s entirely possible that they established the farm thousands of years ago when it was warm (and warm means about the same temperatures as today), then kept farming throughout the ‘little ice age’ despite crops yielding less. Perhaps that’s what triggered such a huge expansion of the farm land. Or, perhaps there were far more people there than we think. Lots of questions
What graphs are you seeing? This is what the article says:
> Radiocarbon dating suggests the ridges [farming furrows or similar] were initially constructed roughly 1,000 years ago. They were maintained and used for 600 years after that.
Wikipedia says this:
> Erik Thorvaldsson (c. 950 – c. 1003), known as Erik the Red, was a Norse explorer [...]
> Around the year of 982, Erik was exiled from Iceland for three years, during which time he explored Greenland, eventually culminating in his founding of the first successful European settlement on the island. Erik would later die there around 1003 CE
["Erik the Red"]
And this:
> The Little Ice Age (LIA) was a period of regional cooling, particularly pronounced in the North Atlantic region.
> The period has been conventionally defined as extending from the 16th to the 19th centuries
> The NASA Earth Observatory notes three particularly cold intervals. One began about 1650, another about 1770, and the last in 1850
["Little Ice Age"]
And this:
> The Medieval Warm Period (MWP), also known as the Medieval Climate Optimum or the Medieval Climatic Anomaly, was a time of warm climate in the North Atlantic region that lasted from about 950 CE to about 1250 CE.
["Medieval Warm Period"]
The article would appear to suggest that the farm was established near the beginning of the Medieval Warm Period and abandoned near the beginning of the Little Ice Age... which seems incredibly unsurprising.
> They would have been farming here during a cool period.
I see no indication of that.
The article seems to assume that the same tribe lived in that place for a thousand years. The pre-Columbian histories I've seen had the tribes moving around, based on comparisons of DNA evidence.
I always thought large-scale farming like this only happened under big state systems. But it looks like these communities were able to build something pretty big without that kind of centralized power.
It’s also kind of amazing that the fields stayed preserved for a thousand years. Makes me wonder if we’re still underestimating how advanced some of these early farming cultures were.
When foreign cultures were discovered by Europeans the default thinking was to assume they were savages without culture, complex society or technology. That has echoed throughout time and still affects our view of history today. The true savages were the Europeans that preferred to subjugate or kill any non-European population they encountered.
It is only recently that TV & films from the US stopped portraying the stereotypical American Indians as only vaguely more than natural fauna. Until recently US history hardly seems to acknowledge the existence of pre-Colombian towns and cities across the southern states, some with tens of thousands of inhabitants. It didn't fit the European settler narrative that they were taming the wild and when native Americans are mentioned it has been incredibly whitewashed and edited.
A while back it dawned on me that we think the greatest past civilizations were all in Egypt, the Middle East, and Mesopotamia because those areas are deserts or semi-deserts. They built out of stone because they didn't have much wood, and their writings survived because they weren't destroyed by water.
There could have been very sophisticated societies, even large scale civilizations, in the past in places like North America that built mainly out of wood, clay, bone, and other readily available materials, and there'd be nothing left. Any writings would be gone too, since writings don't survive well in wet climates unless they are chiseled into very durable stone or vitrified pottery (and even then they can erode).
Science Mag Podcast covered this as well... with Madeleine McLeester, assistant professor in the department of anthropology at Dartmouth College. I thought interesting that they have yet to find the village that associates with the gardens. https://www.science.org/content/podcast/farming-maize-ice-ag...
A thousand years ago doesn't seem that long. In Europe it's not so rare to find that the farm that your bus stop is named after, was continuously worked for 3000 years.
In the Middle East they probably think that's short too!
In England all the Roman artefacts from 1500 years ago are ruins, while many from only ~500 years later, like the Tower of London are well preserved. Just a few centuries or so of raiding and depredations seperate the two periods of English history.
In some cases Roman architecture was literally dismantled to make something new - the cathedral at St Albans is mostly made from stone taken from Roman buildings.
Things can easily endure that long if well protected, but it’s a long time if they are allowed to fall into ruin (or destroyed).
Put another way: There are about 38 generations in one thousand years. So, yes, it doesn't seem that long!
The article quotes a researcher: “Most field systems have been either lost or destroyed due to intensive land use across most of North America, through farming, including pastures and the cutting down of trees for urban development,”
My watching of years of Time Team episodes tells me that Roman mosaic floors keep being found in England, like https://historicengland.org.uk/whats-new/news/rutland-roman-... from about 1,500 years ago. Doing so makes the news.
These floors, and the ruins around them, whilst buried, don't always survive the last century or two of machine plowing, which goes deeper than the medieval animal-based plowing.
Imagine the archeological excitement by your bus stop if a preserved part of the farm from 1,000 years ago were discovered, barely disturbed, giving archeologists a snapshot of what daily life was like at the time.
You know also know the story of Pompeii, and how its ruins have helped understand the Roman era.
This story is likely somewhere in between those two. Unlike your bus stop farm there aren't written records from the 1,000 years ago, nor are there many other sites from which to draw comparable results.
Related: Check out the book Tending the Earth by Winin Pereira, on Other India Press.
https://www.google.com/search?q=tending+the+earth+winin+pere...
It’s amazing how smart our ancestors were and creative and observant based on amateur science and gardening skills. The amount of planning and organization this must have taken would require a large coordinated effort.
My use of ‘amateur’ was more about how their methods predate formal scientific institutions rather than diminishing their expertise.
What is farmed in this country is land compatible with american farming practices not fertile land. E.G. any mountainous farm region in the U.S. will see basically only farming on the valley bottoms. Whereas many civilizations in the past and present developed terrace farms to make use of the entire hilly region not just the convenient bottoms. It isn't really done in the U.S. due to the cost and the availability of vast quantities of flat farmable land well beyond market need.
The growing season starts in late May. So only the land most amenable to tractors is really actively farmed. It's partly why there's so much forest.
And then much of the logging the UP is selective harvesting rather than clear cutting, so they go in every so often and take out the larger trees.
Note that this combination is a very synergistic combination of crops to grow together, and is millennia old.
"The Three Sisters planting method, commonly known as companion planting, entails growing corn, beans, and squash together in a mutually beneficial arrangement. It originated in North America around 3000 years ago.
...
Each plant brings unique advantages to the others; Corn serves as a trellis, providing a framework for the beans to grow and wrap around. Beans, acting as a natural fertilizer, add nitrogen to the soil, which benefits the growth of the corn and squash. Squash is typically planted between the corn and beans, and its ample leaves serve as a shield, blocking heat, retaining soil moisture and suppressing weed growth."
[0] https://www.nps.gov/tont/learn/nature/the-three-sisters.htm
It's not quite the same but growing carp alongside rice in a paddy. The fish eat pests and fertilise the water.
Asia and Africa have rich historical polyculture traditions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyculture?wprov=sfti1#Histor...
From Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Sisters_(agriculture)
> Geographer Carl O. Sauer described the Three Sisters as "a symbiotic plant complex of North and Central America without an equal elsewhere".There isn't one; closest is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crop_rotation
I'd be interested in an alternative world history where the first humans into North America had domesticated and saved the local horses that were kicking around, or the Vikings had left a bunch on their earlier expeditions. Alternatively where the Vikings had managed to give the locals small pox and other European diseases en-masse before leaving.
Not exactly your scenario, but The Years of Rice and Salt, by Kim Stanley Robinson, has Europe almost wiped out by the Black Death.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2723.The_Years_of_Rice_a...
For anyone else confused about the three sisters and why they weren't mentioned in the article, it's a reference to this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Sisters_(agriculture)
Was the article edited? I don't see a reference to the phrase "three sisters" on it, it just says "corn, beans, and squash." Did the original headline mention it?
No, not in the archived version: https://web.archive.org/web/20250612153046/https://www.smith...
Oh, was this mentioned in the original HN title? Has that been edited?
Yes, it was. https://web.archive.org/web/20250615154352/https://news.ycom...
Original HN title was "1k year old 3 sisters crop farm found in Northern Michigan"
I really wish that when titles were edited there was some history, it would make it much easier to understand these little discussions based on the original title.
My hunch (based on how my grandfather would cultivate) was to provide a mount of fertilizer for added nitrogen along with the added irrigation aspects.
It's surprising ("I'm shocked, shocked, well not that shocked") how this style of farming somehow made it all the way to my ancestral village for cultivating these New World crops.
Gotta love proto-globalization.
One click away is the article title :
"Massive Fields Where Native American Farmers Grew Corn, Beans and Squash 1,000 Years Ago Discovered in Michigan"
> During their excavations, the scientists also found several artifacts, including charcoal and fragments of broken ceramics. These discoveries suggest that the area’s Indigenous farmers may have dumped their household waste and the remnants of fires onto their fields, using them as compost. Samples taken from the mounds suggest the farmers enriched the dirt with soil from nearby wetlands.
Exciting - that sounds a lot like Terra preta: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta
No doubt this practice was used widely across the Americas. The natives were tremendously skilled with plants. This is another step to uncovering some of the knowledge lost. I hope they can find more of these same features.