Comment by profsummergig
4 days ago
The way weeds grow in my lot in the midwest,
wiping out everything else if not tended to every year,
I find it very hard to believe that we can find evidence of intensive cultivation after 3,600 years in such a wet area.
Could be true, but I find it hard to believe.
From TFA, they're using LIDAR results to determine features suggesting indigenous farming practices. Researchers are doing the same in tropical rainforests around the world, where there's far more vegetation, finding similar evidence of intensive agriculture.
I highly doubt weeds, extensive though they might be, would wipe clean the evidence they've found in the landscape.
> I find it very hard to believe that we can find evidence of intensive cultivation after 3,600 years in such a wet area.
Perhaps I'm missing something. I'm no expert, and have merely skimmed through, but the earliest date I could find in the PDF linked from the fine article was 400 BCE [0], so around 2400 years. That's still a lot, but definitely not 3600 years.
[0] "While there is evidence of maize in the Upper Peninsula as early as 400 BCE (7), intensive cultivation, like we clearly see at Sixty Islands is typically not undertaken until roughly 1000 CE."
https://www.science.org/doi/suppl/10.1126/science.ads1643/su...
"Weeds" are likely to be the main reason the topography was preserved. Without the plant roots fixing the soil in place, these sites would have washed away.
The surviving patches are small: 10's of meters on a side. The title language and figures cited make it appear this was a large scale farm operation. Instead, it looks like a collection of household farms scattered around the bottomland.
And while this is the UP of Michigan, it's actually at the southern-most point of the UP, right on the 45th parallel. It's not Florida, but it's also not exactly the Arctic either: the growing season is months shorter, but it does exist, there is ample precipitation, and the soil is often excellent. There are many farms operating at this latitude and further north today, although not much further north.
it would have been slash and burn agriculture to start, so there is the likelyhood of fiding artifacts assosiated with charcoal and other evidence, as these people were probably hunter/farmer/gatherers a particular tool kit is going to be definitive, hunting ,fishing and birding points, wood and hide tools, plus agricultural tools, picks, shovles, and hoes,and cythe blades that show up in early agriculture elsewhere with layers of identifiable pitholiths still adhering to them......possibly allready found, but missidentified. also living at the 45'th parallel does require substansial winter prep and strurdy housing as it's still frozen solid for months every winter
Are any of the weeds in your lot Chenopodiums like goosefoot?
Have you read about the Eastern Agricultural Complex as one of the prehistoric centers of plant domestication?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Agricultural_Complex
lots of those weeds probably weren't around ca 3600bp (and that's not even discussing the fact that many of those "weeds", so-called, are escaped crops, anyways, so the weediness would've been a feature for these farmers)
The clay does a fantastic job preserving everything.
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