Nature + Culture

A few days ago, via Connecticut Public Radio, I learned of recent archaeological research finding evidence of large-scale precolonial Indigenous agriculture in northern Michigan. The research findings, published recently in Science, discuss an ancestral Menominee agricultural site consisting of at least 95 hectares of raised, ridged fields planted mainly in maize, beans and squash maintained, likely for centuries, between about 1000 CE and 1600 CE. The study authors report further evidence, in the form of burial mounds, ritual earthworks and village sites, indicating that the fields were intricately connected to the broader Menominee cultural landscape.

These research findings are important for a variety of reasons. First, the Menominee fields (only partially surveyed to date) may be the largest surviving precolonial Indigenous agricultural site in eastern North America–a crucial find given (a) that pre-contact Indigenous communities were long believed to have maintained settlement sites only for short periods, and (b) that more than 90% of pre-contact Indigenous landscapes have been obliterated from the landscape by settler-era farming and development over the last 400 years. Second, their scale, sophistication and long duration underscore the reality that pre-contact Indigenous cultures modified landscapes in extensive and prolonged ways—via deforestation as well as through extensive earthworks and the movement of soils (e.g., floodplain soils brought to the fields, and evidence of compost used as soil amendments)—to serve agricultural and cultural aims. Third, the cultivation of maize on a large scale near the northern extent of its range invites a reexamination of historical crop practices and precolonial population distributions.

I love these research findings because, in the way that innovative research often does, they deftly upend received notions—in this case, about Indigenous impacts on the land. Far from flitting through the woods, leaving few traces (as “empty continent” claimants still insist) —or, alternately, living in Edenic harmony with nature—Indigenous North Americans were active agents of environmental change and extensive modifiers of landscapes. The archaeological evidence, bolstering Menominee narratives, indicates a long history of sophisticated cultural practices, specialised resource activities, and extensive trade networks.

It is also worth noting that the extensive patchwork of linear mounds also rebuts a ridiculous but often repeated claim that Indigenous structures (& epistemologies) were all curved, in contrast to colonists’ supposedly straight lines. I note this because more intelligent framing of the differences — and similarities — between Indigenous and settler ways of knowing & doing are needed both to add to cultural understanding and to advance projects of reconciliation, not to mention appreciating the complexity of North American landscape history.

I also love these research findings because, for the first time in longer than I can recall, they make me excited about contemporary scholarship. In the last three decades the so-called cultural turn has brought important insights to the social sciences and humanities—but it has also, in recent years, led them to become increasingly pedantic, orthodox, and ossified. Increasingly often, evidence is harnessed to serve a foreordained premise about what (and who) is ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ determined along ideological lines. In this rubric, far too much scholarship has, contradictorily in this supposed age of interdisciplinarity, become doctrinaire.

To me, good scholarship should open up subjects to further investigation, not close off questions. By challenging received notions about how pre-contact Indigenous communities used the land, McLeester et al make room for further exploration of Indigenous land uses, economies and cultural practices. Two areas of follow-up relevant to this particular research program include learning more about the reportedly non- or less-hierarchical nature of ancestral Menominee communities, their trade networks, and village sites (strongly implied, it seems to me, by the use of domestic compost in the fields) the teams have yet to uncover. That the team will likely continue to combine field archaeology methods with oral histories from contemporary Menominee knowledge-keepers makes this a project to keep watching.