Native American ‘garden agriculture’ in southeastern North America

Abstract

The Native Americans of south-eastern North America are sometimes described as gardeners and sometimes as agriculturalists. Neither label conveys an accurate sense of farming practices that employed polycropping and shifting cultivation to produce substantial surpluses. Ethnohistorical accounts provide tantalizing glimpses of the production and storage of cultivated foods among the native societies of the Southeast. Archaeological investigations in Apalachee Province have yielded further evidence regarding the sizes and distribution of elevated granaries in one native chiefdom. Archaeobotanical data provide information about varied reliance on agricultural products in several polities in Alabama and Mississippi. We weave together these various threads of evidence to survey the cropping strategies (e.g. scale of production, diversity of crops, labor and storage practices) of Mississippian peoples and their historic descendants in the Southeast.

Keywords:

• Maize agriculture
• Native American
• Southeast
• granaries
• Mississippian

Notes

C. Margaret Scarry is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Research Associate in the Research Laboratories of Archaeology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research interests focus on the intersections of agricultural practices, foodways and social relations within the context of the emergence of complex political organizations in southeastern North America.

John F. Scarry is an Adjunct Associate Professor or Anthropology and Research Associate in the Research Laboratories of Archaeology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research interests focus on the construction and marking of social difference and social organization in chiefdoms and the interactions between Native and European during the Colonial period in southeastern North America.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

C Margaret Scarry

C. Margaret Scarry is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Research Associate in the Research Laboratories of Archaeology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research interests focus on the intersections of agricultural practices, foodways and social relations within the context of the emergence of complex political organizations in southeastern North America. John F. Scarry is an Adjunct Associate Professor or Anthropology and Research Associate in the Research Laboratories of Archaeology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research interests focus on the construction and marking of social difference and social organization in chiefdoms and the interactions between Native and European during the Colonial period in southeastern North America.