Feeding Cahokia: Early Agriculture in the North American Heartland

By Gayle J. Fritz

Winner of the 2020 Society for Economic Botany's Mary W. Klinger Book Award

An authoritative and thoroughly accessible overview of farming and food practices at Cahokia
 
Agriculture is rightly emphasized as the center of the economy in most studies of Cahokian society, but the focus is often predominantly on corn. This farming economy is typically framed in terms of ruling elites living in mound centers who demanded tribute and a mass surplus to be hoarded or distributed as they saw fit. Farmers are cast as commoners who grew enough surplus corn to provide for the elites.
 
Feeding Cahokia: Early Agriculture in the North American Heartland presents evidence to demonstrate that the emphasis on corn has created a distorted picture of Cahokia’s agricultural practices. Farming at Cahokia was biologically diverse and, as such, less prone to risk than was maize-dominated agriculture. Gayle J. Fritz shows that the division between the so-called elites and commoners simplifies and misrepresents the statuses of farmers—a workforce consisting of adult women and their daughters who belonged to kin groups crosscutting all levels of the Cahokian social order. Many farmers had considerable influence and decision-making authority, and they were valued for their economic contributions, their skills, and their expertise in all matters relating to soils and crops. Fritz examines the possible roles played by farmers in the processes of producing and preparing food and in maintaining cosmological balance.
 
This highly accessible narrative by an internationally known paleoethnobotanist highlights the biologically diverse agricultural system by focusing on plants, such as erect knotweed, chenopod, and maygrass, which were domesticated in the midcontinent and grown by generations of farmers before Cahokia Mounds grew to be the largest Native American population center north of Mexico. Fritz also looks at traditional farming systems to apply strategies that would be helpful to modern agriculture, including reviving wild and weedy descendants of these lost crops for redomestication. With a wealth of detail on specific sites, traditional foods, artifacts such as famous figurines, and color photos of significant plants, Feeding Cahokia will satisfy both scholars and interested readers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Jan 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9780817392178

Book preview

FEEDING CAHOKIA

ARCHAEOLOGY OF FOOD

SERIES EDITORS

Mary C. Beaudry

Karen Bescherer Metheny

EDITORIAL BOARD

Umberto Albarella

Tamara Bray

Yannis Hamilakis

Christine Hastorf

Frances M. Hayashida

Katheryn Twiss

Amber VanDerwarker

Marike van der Veen

Joanita Vroom

Richard Wilk

Anne Yentsch

FEEDING CAHOKIA

Early Agriculture in the North American Heartland

GAYLE J. FRITZ

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

Tuscaloosa

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

uapress.ua.edu

Copyright © 2019 by the University of Alabama Press

All rights reserved.

Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Alabama Press.

Typeface: Scala and Scala Sans

Cover images: Clockwise from upper left, Huauzontles, a traditional Mexican vegetable (photo by and courtesy of the author); Sponemann figurine (photo by Linda Alexander and courtesy of the Illinois State Archaeological Survey, University of Illinois); wild little barley plants, Cross County, Arkansas (photo by and courtesy of the author); cushaw squash (photo by and courtesy of the author)

Cover design: Michele Myatt Quinn

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Fritz, Gayle, author.

Title: Feeding Cahokia : early agriculture in the North American heartland / Gayle J. Fritz.

Description: Tuscaloosa : The University of Alabama Press, [2019] | Series: Archaeology of food | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018021210| ISBN 9780817320058 (cloth) | ISBN 9780817392178 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Agriculture—Cahokia Mounds State Historic Park (Ill.)—History.

Classification: LCC S444 .F75 2019 | DDC 338.109773/89—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018021210

To Mark E. Esarey for his tireless efforts to improve and preserve Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, and for his patience, love, and deep devotion to family

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Domesticating Gourds and Forests

2. Sunflower and Marshelder: Late Archaic Period Eastern Crops

3. Rise of the Eastern Agricultural Complex: Terminal Late Archaic and Early Woodland Periods

4. Seeds of Exchange: The Middle Woodland Period

5. Good Late Woodland Farmers in the American Bottom

6. Feasting at Early Cahokia

7. Early Mississippian Plant Use

8. Guardians of All Vegetation

9. Crop Production: Estimates of Yields and Dietary Proportions

Plates

10. How to Feed Cahokia: Cultivating Fields and Social Relationships

11. The Farmers Vote with Their Feet

12. What Can We Learn from the Past?

References Cited

Index

Illustrations

PLATES

Plate 1. Cahokia Mounds, central precinct

Plate 2. Modern bottle gourd

Plate 3. Cucurbita pepo gourds growing wild in the Illinois River valley

Plate 4. Ku-nu-che ball

Plate 5. Marshelder (Iva annua) plants

Plate 6. Maygrass growing wild near King’s Bayou Ditch, Arkansas County, Arkansas

Plate 7. Erect knotweed (Polygonum erectum), a modern wild-growing plant

Plate 8. SMAP flotation machine in operation beside the Green River, Kentucky

Plate 9. Little barley plants (Hordeum pusillum)

Plate 10. Mound 51, reconstructed

Plate 11. Squash seeds from sub-Mound 51

Plate 12. Cushaw squash peduncle from sub-Mound 51

Plate 13. Birger figurine from the BBB Motor site

Plate 14. Close-up of head of Birger figurine

Plate 15. Birger figurine, back view

Plate 16. Keller figurine from the BBB Motor site

Plate 17. Keller figurine, rear view

Plate 18. Sponemann figurine from the Sponemann site

Plate 19. Willoughby figurine from the Sponemann site

Plate 20. Westbrook figurine found in Desha County, Arkansas

Plate 21. Westbrook figurine, from rear angle

Plate 22. Huauzontles (Chenopodium nuttalliae), a traditional Mexican vegetable

FIGURES

Figure I.1. Map of the American Bottom showing creeks and lakes as they were recorded at approximately AD 1800

Figure 2.1. Sunflower seed heads from Montgomery Rockshelter #4

Figure 2.2. Iva annua var. macrocarpa achenes from Alum Cave, Arkansas

Figure 2.3. Ragweed (Ambrosia trifida) achenes from Marble Bluff, Arkansas

Figure 3.1. Domesticated chenopod fruit (Chenopodium berlandieri ssp. jonesianum) from Edens Bluff, Arkansas

Figure 3.2. Clump of domesticated chenopod seeds from Marble Bluff, Arkansas

Figure 3.3. Maygrass (Phalaris caroliniana) seed head bundle from Gibson Shelter, Arkansas

Figure 3.4. Archaeological Polygonum erectum achene, tubercled

Figure 3.5. Archaeological Polygonum erectum achene, smooth

Figure 4.1. Twined bag filled with domesticated chenopod seeds from Edens Bluff, Arkansas

Figure 4.2. Gourd (Lagenaria siceraria) full of domesticated chenopod seeds from White Bluff rockshelter, Arkansas

Figure 4.3. Charred tobacco seeds (Nicotiana sp.) from sub-Mound 51, Cahokia

Figure 4.4. Archaeological little barley seed from Toltec Mounds, Arkansas

Figure 5.1. Map of American Bottom with locations of Woodland and Emergent Mississippian sites

Figure 6.1. Corncobs from sub-Mound 51, Zone F

Figure 6.2. Cushaw squash (modern)

Figure 7.1. Map of American Bottom region with mound sites and other key sites

Figure 9.1. Comparison of early and late Cahokian stable carbon isotope values

Figure 10.1. Layout of Hidatsa fields as described by Maxidiwiac to Gilbert Wilson

Figure 10.2. Diagram of a possible early Cahokian small field layout on an alluvial or colluvial fan

Figure 10.3. Diagram of a possible early Cahokian field layout on a floodplain ridge or terrace remnant

Figure 12.1. Leche de alpiste (canary grass powder)

TABLES

Table 1.1. Archaeological time periods of the central Mississippi River valley

Table 3.1. Eastern Agricultural Complex members and other early crops

Table 3.2. Percentages of foods represented in Salts Cave paleofeces, expressed as estimates of fecal bulk

Table 6.1. Plants found in samples from sub-Mound 51

Table 6.2. Percentages of selected plant types from sub-Mound 51 and ICT-II

Table 7.1. American Bottom periods: Late Woodland and Mississippian phases

Table 9.1. Acres needed to grow enough maize to feed Cahokia

Table 9.2. Stable carbon isotope values from Cahokia and other sites in the American Bottom

Acknowledgments

It is impossible for me to include here all the archaeologists whose works have enhanced our knowledge about foodways in the American Bottom, so I thank only those who have contributed directly to this project. In alphabetical order, these include Sandra Dunavan, Kristin Hedman, Sissel Johannessen, Cricket Kelly, John Kelly, Neal Lopinot, Katie Parker, Tim Pauketat, Gina Powell, Katherine Roberts, Mary Simon, and Patty Jo Watson.

Individuals and institutions who assisted me by furnishing photographs and/or by granting permission to publish images include Kay Clahassey (photographer) and Lauren Fuka (collection manager) at the University of Michigan Museum of Anthropological Archaeology; Ann Early and Jane Kellett at the Arkansas Archeological Survey; Mary Suter at the University of Arkansas Museum; Tom Emerson, Kristin Hedman, Mary Hynes, and Linda Alexander at the Illinois State Archaeological Survey; Bill Iseminger at Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site; Ken Keller and Natalie Mueller at Washington University in St. Louis; David Dye at the University of Memphis; and Gary Crawford at the University of Toronto. Several of these people (Gary Crawford, David Dye, Ken Keller, Jane Kellett, and Natalie Mueller) extended their efforts by improving or converting images to meet or exceed publication standards, and for that I am eternally grateful.

Kelly Ervin displayed technical and artistic prowess by creating or relabeling the maps in this volume, often working late into the night after a full day of grueling fieldwork. Many of the scanning electron micrographs were taken under the supervision of Michael Veith, microscopist in the Biology Department at Washington University in St. Louis. Natalie Mueller provided helpful comments on an earlier draft of the text. I thank Dale McElrath for chasing down his earliest use of the term Little Bang. Kristin Hedman was extremely generous in sharing stable isotopic information, published and unpublished, and in explaining complex aspects of biomolecular interpretation.

Funds for color images were generously provided by the Anthropology Department and College of Arts and Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. My sincere thanks go to departmental chair T. R. Kidder and to dean of faculty Barbara Schaal. I wrote much of this book while on sabbatical from teaching at Washington University and was supported throughout by the excellent facilities, amazing colleagues, and incomparable students at this institution. Mark Esarey, to whom I am fortunate beyond belief to be married, provided so much support, wisdom, inspiration, and patience that I gratefully dedicate the book to him.

Introduction

This place, where the maize grows tallest, where the runners are most swift, where the builders reach the sky, and where the noble sun shines most brightly.

—Excerpt from City of the Sun program, aired every half hour at Cahokia Mounds Interpretive Center

Between 700 and 950 years ago, the broad floodplain east of the Mississippi River opposite the location where St. Louis would later be built was studded with nearly 200 human-made mounds and associated settlements where tens of thousands of indigenous people lived and worked. Cahokia was built here: a city laid out according to the cardinal directions and dominated by a flat-topped, truncated earthen pyramid slightly more than 100 feet tall and covering approximately 14 acres at its base. Today this huge mound is called Monks Mound, so named for the French Trappist monks who built a monastery on a nearby mound in the early 1800s and farmed the big mound’s terraces. Inside a large building that stood on the mound’s summit, Native Americans held important meetings and made decisions that probably had impacts on communities up and down the Mississippi and its tributaries.

When Cahokia was in its prime early in the second millennium of the Common Era, a central plaza covering 40 acres at the southern base of Monks Mound provided space for large gatherings of people. Some attendees probably lived nearby, whereas others traveled from their homes that were miles or even hundreds of miles away to take part in activities including calendric rituals and observances of astronomical phenomena, burials of significant individuals, and sports events such as chunkey, a game played by throwing a long wooden stick toward a rolling, concave, disk-shaped stone and trying to make the stick fall near the stone’s stopping point. More plazas lay beyond the central plaza, and a diverse array of residential, communal, and seemingly ceremonial structures spread out in all directions (Plate 1). This pattern changed throughout the many decades of Cahokia’s occupation. During the twelfth century AD, for example, a residential zone west of Monks Mound was converted into an open area within which a circle of carefully spaced large cedar posts was erected. An observation post was set slightly off-center inside the arc, enabling a knowledgeable viewer to chart solar equinoxes, solstices, and probably other significant events. A long causeway ran from Cahokia’s central plaza (called the Grand Plaza) southward to a large, oval-shaped mound (Rattlesnake Mound) at the southern end of the central administrative precinct (Iseminger 2010; Pauketat 2004, 2009). The core area measured 3.9 km (2.4 mi) from east to west and 2.4 km (1.5 mi) from north to south, encompassing up to 120 earthen mounds, and a chain of additional mounds connected the western edge of Cahokia with the East St. Louis Mound group, the second-largest ceremonial center in the American Bottom (Kelly 1999). A massive amount of archaeological work was conducted between 2009 and 2012 in and near the East St. Louis Mound group, preceding construction of the Stan Musial Veterans Memorial Bridge and revealing densely occupied residential neighborhoods in addition to public ritual zones (Brennan 2015; Galloy 2011).

Extending beyond central Cahokia and the nearby heavily settled portion of the East St. Louis Mound group were agricultural fields and settlements of various sizes and purposes that can be called towns, hamlets, farmsteads, administrative nodes, and ritual precincts. The locations of both fields and residential communities were severely limited by the floodplain’s many wetlands: oxbow lakes, marshes, sloughs, swales, and creeks flowing down from the uplands beyond the bluff line to the east (Figure I.1). People living in the Illinois uplands as far away as 1.5 days’ walk, if not farther, were part of the social, spiritual, and economic phenomenon known as Greater Cahokian culture. Other participants in these events and processes—sharing architectural and ceramic styles and presumably being integrated by kinship ties such as clan and lineage membership, possibly along with participation in societies that crosscut kinship—lived west of the Mississippi River in what is now Missouri. This broad area of shared material culture and presumably shared beliefs and values is also referred to as the Greater American Bottom Region, with the American Bottom in a strict geomorphological sense being limited to the low floodplain between the mouth of the Wood River on the north end and the mouth of the Kaskaskia River on the south. The floodplain got its name at a time when land west of the Mississippi River was still culturally French, having been claimed for France in 1673 and then ceded to Spain in 1762. By the early 1800s, Americans were moving into the bottomland east of the river, but French culture held sway in St. Louis even after U.S. government officials assumed control in 1804, following the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 (Ekberg 1998).

GOALS OF THE BOOK

Dozens of books and hundreds if not thousands of articles have been written about ancient Cahokia, and most mention or even devote several pages to the importance of agriculture in the diet and overall economy. The overwhelming emphasis, however, is on corn, which is often called maize in the professional literature to distinguish it from barley and other Old World cereals that British speakers of English refer to as corn. Cahokia’s subsistence economy is usually described as typically Mississippian, with the term Mississippian culture applied by archaeologists to the many mound-building societies living across what is now the southeastern United States between AD 1000 and European contact. This is the first book to describe in detail the entire suite of crops grown by Cahokia’s farmers and to focus on the plants that, unlike corn, were domesticated in the North American midcontinent and grown by generations of farmers who lived here before Cahokia expanded and assumed regional dominance in the early second millennium AD. It took all of these crops, along with corn and the abundant wild plant and animal resources of the American Bottom, to feed the thousands of indigenous people who built the mounds at Cahokia and took advantage of the benefits that such a complex society offered, leaving behind an impressive legacy of artistic, architectural, and technological remains.

A principal goal, then, in this book is to highlight the biologically diverse agricultural system that was unique to the central Mississippi River valley during the early centuries of the second millennium AD and to trace its roots back through time. A second goal is to examine the possible roles played by the farmers themselves both in producing and preparing food and in doing everything they could do to achieve or, if necessary, to restore cosmological balance through community and individual action. Too often these farmers are lumped together along with other presumably low-status members of the society and differentiated from a so-called elite group of leaders, often called rulers or the ruling elite, who demanded tribute of various kinds, including corn, and who supposedly had the authority to reorganize the economic structure to their advantage. In this book I present an alternative scenario in which primary farmers or their close kin occupied all levels of the social hierarchy and made decisions based on expert knowledge of soils, distinct crop varieties, weather, and supernatural beings who could be called on to promote fertility. In the case of Cahokia and other agricultural societies of precontact eastern North America, these farmers were women, a fact widely known and accepted by archaeologists, historians, and geographers but often left unstated in discussions of food production in the American Bottom region.

A third goal is to present evidence—sometimes technical and scientifically complicated—in a way that is comprehensible and, I hope, actually interesting to members of the general public who are motivated to visit Cahokia Mounds or otherwise to learn about methods used to feed an ancient North American city and its surrounding populace. I believe that we can learn lessons from examining traditional farming systems and applying strategies that were successful in the past to modern agriculture. Several of the crops that sustained Cahokia are now extinct as cultigens but are survived by wild-growing ancestors or close relatives that carry the genetic potential of being redomesticated.

ZEACENTRISM: AMERICA’S FIXATION ON CORN

Archaeologist Neal Lopinot, one of the major contributors to our understanding of plant utilization at Cahokia and surrounding American Bottom sites, introduced the term zeacentric bias to describe the exaggerated emphasis on corn, whose scientific name is Zea mays ssp. mays, cast as king among crops during the growth and florescence of that society. Lopinot (1997:54–57) explains the unjustified, narrow focus on corn at the expense of other components in Cahokia’s diversified cuisine as resulting from several pervasive but outdated perspectives. First, archaeologists of the early and middle twentieth century linked Cahokia and other Mississippian societies with Mesoamerican civilizations to a much greater degree than most do today. Corn, beans, and squash formed a triad of staple crops across ancient Mexico and Central America, so it was once assumed they had been introduced together into eastern North America. Eventually, advanced radiocarbon dating techniques, intensified recovery and analysis of archaeological plant remains, and the rise of molecular biology (including the study of plant DNA) demonstrated that corn was both domesticated earlier and traveled northward from Mexico sooner than beans, whereas squashes were independently domesticated in both Mesoamerica and eastern North America. The debate continues about connections between Cahokia and Mesoamerican societies, but independent developmental trajectories in the two regions are universally recognized by modern scholars.

Second, corn was in fact the dominant crop and primary plant food across most of the eastern, southwestern, and riverine Great Plains regions of North America at European contact. This pattern was therefore extended into the past by researchers, and it got fixed in people’s minds before evidence accumulated to show that Cahokian farmers, up until depopulation of the entire region in the fourteenth century, grew a mixture of crops in which corn’s supremacy can and should be challenged. This is especially true of the phases dating to AD 1050–1200, during which maximum population density occurred. The other major food crops were members of what we call the Eastern Agricultural Complex (or Eastern Complex), all of which were domesticated or brought into cultivation in eastern North America before the adoption of corn in this region. I discuss them in some depth throughout this book.

The third factor contributing to zeacentric bias stems from what Lopinot (1997:57) calls a fallacious assumption that maize was simply capable of sustaining higher yields than other crops. We know very little about the varieties of corn grown in eastern North America 700–1,000 years ago, and it is obviously impossible to measure precisely how their yields compared with those of ancient lost crops for which no recorded productivity rates exist. Corn may in fact have been valued for its high potential yields, but other Cahokian crops were also prolific grain producers, and most were more nutritious than corn as well as more tolerant of risky conditions that could result in devastating crop failures. Related to this third questionable assumption is an unsupported notion that corn is more storable than the smaller-seeded crops that were grown in large quantities at Cahokia. Ears of corn can conveniently be braided into long chains using their dried husks and stored in rafters or granaries, but Cahokians possessed the storage capability necessary to keep all their crops safe and unspoiled for several seasons in large ceramic jars and twined fiber bags. Many of the large pits found at sites of all sizes across the American Bottom before and during Cahokia’s period of ascendancy were probably dug for food storage, including those in which charred masses of seeds of various species have been found during archaeological excavation.

This leads to the final historical factor that accounts for widespread zeacentric bias: ongoing improvements in archaeological methods. Before fieldworkers began systematically collecting soil samples to be processed by fine-mesh water flotation, thousands of small seeds belonging to Eastern Agricultural Complex crop species fell through the openings of the standard 1/4-inch and 1/8-inch mesh screens used by archaeologists. Fragments of corn kernels and broken-up cobs also went unnoticed, but large cob segments were easy to spot in features even during troweling by hand, so it seemed as if corn outnumbered all other cultigens. After flotation recovery and archaeobotanical analysis became routine components of archaeological projects in the Midwest and elsewhere, the abundance of small Eastern Complex seeds was recognized, as were morphological characteristics of these seeds that enabled some of them to be classified as domesticated rather than wild.

I add to Lopinot’s list of biased assumptions the difficulty that many modern Americans, including professional archaeologists, have in accepting plants that they have never consumed and that they know only as sidewalk weeds (if they know them at all) rather than palatable foods, much less as the products of careful breeding and crop production. Eastern Complex species are often called weedy crops and relegated to a status beneath that of

Reviews for Feeding Cahokia

[gwendydd · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is an examination of the archaeological evidence for agriculture at Cahokia, a Native American city near modern-day St. Louis that was home to over 10,000 people in the thirteenth century. Fritz describes archaeological evidence in detail, and draws conclusions about what kind of food the people ate and where and how it was grown. She emphasizes that women played an important role in agriculture.If you're not an archaeologist (I am not), this book is full of technical detail that you'll probably want to skim. Fritz's conclusions are very interesting. She particularly emphasizes that corn was probably not the primary crop, as so many people believe, and that women probably played a large role not only in agricultural labor but in decision-making about what to grow where.