> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Until further evidence is found it’s premature to say that there is no doubt that it was widely used in the Americas. I think there is doubt though that could be removed with more evidence.
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.
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.
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
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...
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.
But a farmer is a professional scientist and a professional gardener. Living 1k years ago did not make them uninformed or unskilled at their profession. It's quite a modern bias to suggest this is amateur.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
7 replies →
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.
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.
7 replies →
It could just be incidental, some broken pottery unintentionally mixed into fire ash that was intentionally spread on a field.
I have thought about this and figured it was more mechanical (ie drainage) than chemical (nutrients).
1 reply →
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.
Just a wild guess here, but isn't all kinds of stuff usually added to soil to help regulate moisture and pH levels?
1 reply →
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.
3 replies →
They probably couldn't be bothered to sort trash and compost into separate bins.
Until further evidence is found it’s premature to say that there is no doubt that it was widely used in the Americas. I think there is doubt though that could be removed with more evidence.
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.
How is this related at all?
TFA literally says archaeologists discovered the crop(s) using LIDAR and GP links to a project using LIDAR to map lands.
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.
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.
4 replies →
> 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
3 replies →
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...
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...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other_India_Press
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.
But a farmer is a professional scientist and a professional gardener. Living 1k years ago did not make them uninformed or unskilled at their profession. It's quite a modern bias to suggest this is amateur.
My use of ‘amateur’ was more about how their methods predate formal scientific institutions rather than diminishing their expertise.
"Stuff grows good in this black muck, but floods here and is hard to work in. Let's bring some of it up closer to the camp."
I'm surprised that anything remains. If the area is fertile I'd expect it to be farmland now.
Clearly it was logged for a while, and perhaps they were expecting to cut it down again at some point.
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.
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.
Does anyone know a 3 sisters equivalent native to Eurasia?
There isn't one; closest is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crop_rotation
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)
Probably rice cultivation with an understanding of irrigation
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/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.
Thank you! That headline really threw me for a loop.
Thank you. The other thing I really wanted to know was why they were arranged in mounds/quilt? I’m guessing it relates to irrigation
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.
1k year old?
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"
My thoughts too. Using SI prefix for a thousand years is uncommon.
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