Fields where Native Americans farmed a thousand years ago discovered in Michigan
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
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.
Also learning about this today. Apparently they're bad for ecosystems that had evolved with slowly decaying organic matter (because they eat it all quickly). In particular forests.
At least in my education they have always been framed as a vital component of the ecosystem and a sign of healthy soil. It's interesting to learn that's not true.
Is it bad that redwoods are doing very well in the UK?
Has a drastic change occurred in the forest floors of, say, temperate Georgia?
The earthworms I am talking about were introduced by modern fishermen and have reduced mushroom habitat.
Clay pellets / balls
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.
Electricity is fine and all, but I imagine the basics of civilization could be replicated by a few good craftsmen(people)
You make a hole or find a piece of slate for processing, you mine clay from a stream bed, and then you make your first pot as a tool for moving water, the second pot for making food, and before or after the second pot you make clay bricks to build a kiln to high fire other things more efficiently - less fuel and more multitasking of other tasks.
I think at least a few of them may have trouble locating pure clay where they are dropped but not all of them, every season, for years.
They all have a pot already. The benefits of more pots seems low. Conversely the calorie cost seems high (if only just collecting clay and cutting wood to fire it.)
On Alone thd priorities are shelter and food. Clay pots seems like a luxury in terms of utility use and energy cost.
Anyhow, some mud and clay skills would help make a decent fireplace.
Staying warm is a crucial skill, not a luxury. Some of them got frostbite.
Also, most of them had food storage problems where their meat would get robbed. Some went to great effort to make their meat inaccessible, to no avail. I imagine that would make a storage pot useful.
To win you need to make a minimal cabin and spend all your time looking for food.
One person did quite well finding wild onions but as I recall got some stomach distress from them. Raw onion doesn’t agree with people when you aren’t eating much else. But those greens would have made soup for days.
It's really hard to make a pot if you are trading making that pot with finding food for the day.
That's why when they did the season with couples, they were able to get a lot more done simply because 1 person could spend the day building a shelter while the other person foraged.
The moose guy that won did so because he had a huge calorie surplus from killing the moose. That freed him up to spend pretty much all his time foraging for plants or building shelter.
> Making lots of tea and thin soups in the winter should have been a target for many of them.
Most plants have almost no calories. Soups are useful as a preservation technique but only work if you are constantly adding fairly calorie dense items (like meat) into the mix. If you haven't sourced beans, potatoes, or rice plants then a soup won't really do much to improve your survival.
The benefit of tea or soup is you are boiling the water which prevents a good number of diseases.
Digging in semi-degraded postglacial till filled in with a few conifers (the Great Slave Lake site is largely talus/scree) is not especially productive in terms of clay.
I would love to see them invite Primitive Technology's John Plant on the show. I do understand if North Queensland is more his climate though.
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're reading about the use of pottery in soil, it does not matter what the people intended—at least, not as a primary concern. It is easy to read intention into headlines though.
> 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
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.
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.
There's some interesting examples in the Readme.
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.
Calling it Stonehenge-like is a real stretch.
> The site in Grand Traverse Bay is best described as a long line of stones which is over a mile in length.
> [...] may be a prehistoric drive line for herding caribou
Also speculation that the Sage Wall in Montana is simply a geologic formation.
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.
Microclimates? The whole world was warmer. Remember when the Vikings settled Greenland? That was 1000 years ago.
> 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 NASA Earth Observatory notes three particularly cold intervals. One began about 1650, another about 1770, and the last in 1850
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic_winter#Past_volcanic_...
There is a theory that the Little Ice Age was precipitated by the reforestation of land in America as the natives died off from exposure to European diseases. And of course, there's always the theory that it's just something that happened.
More from that same page:
> Several causes have been proposed: cyclical lows in solar radiation, heightened volcanic activity, changes in the ocean circulation, variations in Earth's orbit and axial tilt (orbital forcing), inherent variability in global climate, and decreases in the human population (such as from the massacres by Genghis Khan, the Black Death and the epidemics emerging in the Americas upon European contact).I don't know what more I can do than saying "Wikipedia says this: _____ ['Little Ice Age']".
They could have caught up with the technology etc and stood their ground. But when 90% of the population dies at or before first contact, the remaining 10% doesn't have a chance.
Pretty sure this would have beaten the Mayas even if they were at the top of their game.
It's pretty wild how world history turned on such a random and completely unknown factor.
There were reasons, but neither side understood them!
From their perspective, it just so happened that 80-90% of the population on one side died within weeks of contact. Often the disease travelled faster than the invaders, so as the went inland they found mostly empty settlements they could just take over.
It's easy to see how both sides could think that the god(s), in their inscrutable ways, had decided to give the land to the Europeans.
This also played out in the opposite direction in Africa. There the Europeans just couldn't survive for long until Malaria treatments became available in the mid 1800s, and so Africa was colonized last. Since Africa is where humanity originated, it has the most diseases and parasites that specialize in feeding on us.
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.
In the Middle East they probably think that's short too!
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.
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).
There's also "Empire of the Summer Moon" about the migrations around the southern US.
Clearly it was logged for a while, and perhaps they were expecting to cut it down again at some point.
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.
https://www.google.com/search?q=tending+the+earth+winin+pere...
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.
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).
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.
Look I completely agree with your whole comment, especially the line above, but it has very little to do with the GP.
Their comment is about "big state systems", which are a totally different thing from culture, complex society, technology, or savagery.
While I appreciate the point you're trying to make that native Americans weren't some kind of savages as they were all too frequently portrayed in the past, the notion that their level of technological or societal development was anywhere near that of Europe, the Middle East or China at the time does not reflect actual history. Relatively speaking, outside the empires of Meso-America most pre-contact American societies were substantially less complex that European societies, and from a purely technological perspective every single American society ever documented was vastly less technologically complex than European, Middle Eastern and East Asian societies. So from that lens its not unreasonable for the Europeans of the time to have perceived the native Americans as less socially and technologically advanced as they were, as that was simply the reality of world at the time.
Also, any historian with any knowledge of actual pre-contact North American societies can tell you they too were subjugating and killing any other populations they encountered just as much as the Europeans did when they arrived on the continent. The notion that native societies lived some kind of eco-friendly, conflict free lifestyle is just as egregious of whitewashing as any former settler narratives.
Let be serious here people are shitty.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2723.The_Years_of_Rice_a...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyculture?wprov=sfti1#Histor...
> Geographer Carl O. Sauer described the Three Sisters as "a symbiotic plant complex of North and Central America without an equal elsewhere"."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 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.
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.
"Massive Fields Where Native American Farmers Grew Corn, Beans and Squash 1,000 Years Ago Discovered in Michigan"