[HN Gopher] Fields where Native Americans farmed 1000 years ago ...
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Fields where Native Americans farmed 1000 years ago discovered in
Michigan
Author : CoopaTroopa
Score : 137 points
Date : 2025-06-12 13:13 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.smithsonianmag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.smithsonianmag.com)
| folli wrote:
| Tangentially related: I'm trying to make LiDAR data in
| Switzerland more accessible, see
| https://github.com/r-follador/delta-relief
|
| There's some interesting examples in the Readme.
| 38 wrote:
| How is this related at all?
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| TFA literally says archaeologists discovered the crop(s)
| using LIDAR and GP links to a project using LIDAR to map
| lands.
| firesteelrain wrote:
| It's amazing how smart our ancestors were and creative and
| observant based on amateur science and gardening skills. The
| amount of planning and organization this must have taken would
| require a large coordinated effort.
| cvoss wrote:
| But a farmer is a professional scientist and a professional
| gardener. Living 1k years ago did not make them uninformed or
| unskilled at their profession. It's quite a modern bias to
| suggest this is amateur.
| firesteelrain wrote:
| My use of 'amateur' was more about how their methods predate
| formal scientific institutions rather than diminishing their
| expertise.
| duxup wrote:
| "Stuff grows good in this black muck, but floods here and is
| hard to work in. Let's bring some of it up closer to the camp."
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| The unanswered questions are intriguing. I wonder if the crops
| grew better because they were suited to the climate, but those
| crops aren't around anymore? Could they have cultivated varieties
| of corn over say 1000 years that grew well at that latitude and
| in the relative cold? Or could there have been warmer micro
| climates?
|
| 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.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Or could there have been warmer micro climates?
|
| Microclimates? The whole world was warmer. Remember when the
| Vikings settled Greenland? That was 1000 years ago.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| According to graphs I'm seeing, it looks like it was warmer
| for a period, but then cooler until now. They would have been
| farming here during a cool period. It's entirely possible
| that they established the farm thousands of years ago when it
| was warm (and warm means about the same temperatures as
| today), then kept farming throughout the 'little ice age'
| despite crops yielding less. Perhaps that's what triggered
| such a huge expansion of the farm land. Or, perhaps there
| were far more people there than we think. Lots of questions
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| What graphs are you seeing? This is what the article says:
|
| > 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.
| kasey_junk wrote:
| Corn is grown in the UP with current varieties currently. It's
| not commercially viable because the yields are too low to
| compete with southern mega yield growers in a highly connected
| market with efficient transportation systems. There isn't
| anything fundamentally hard about growing lower yield corn
| crops at that location though.
| mapotofu wrote:
| Or, they had far advanced knowledge of working and remediating
| soil to grow food. Peat mosses, charcoal, household compost,
| are all valid soil additives that we now have scientific
| knowledge to explain how those benefit soil, but they were
| practicing it in soil that is otherwise unproductive. Given
| that no one else farmed it in that time it seems that knowledge
| was lost, but lines up with regenerative agriculture practices
| we see today.
| ashoeafoot wrote:
| There are several indicators in the south american jungles of
| civilisation going through booms and busts. If they would
| have been significant ahead, they would have colonized europe
| or china.
| mapotofu wrote:
| That natives did not colonize Europe or China does not mean
| they were not highly skilled with plants. What kind of
| argument are you making?
| acdha wrote:
| I think they were just engaging in time-honored
| speculation about how different history could've been had
| a few historical accidents changed. For example, the
| Mayan civilization collapsed about 500 years before the
| Spanish showed up due to the worst drought in something
| like 7k years, so people have speculated about what
| Mesoamerica might have looked like when contact was made
| of those millions of people hadn't died. Repeat for
| having draft animals, not losing the immune system
| lottery so badly, etc. Given their martial traditions
| it's very plausible that in slightly different scenarios
| the arriving Conquistadors would've been killed or
| captured and lead to return expeditions.
| ashoeafoot wrote:
| They also had a civilization knowledge base within them ,
| which they could have mined. But there wasn't even a
| united south-north native empire.
| masklinn wrote:
| It didn't necessarily need to be highly productive, just more
| productive than cultivating local stuff, and even if the corn
| was not necessarily at its most productive it might have been
| worth it (and with no real replacement) as part of the
| companion garden, getting just a few ears of corn would still
| have been worth more than unproductive wooden stakes.
| asdff wrote:
| You'd be surprised but the "landraces" e.g. historic
| geographically constrained cultivars tend to do better than
| modern cultivars in certain geographical regions. A modern even
| GMO cultivar might have a couple of beneficial traits
| introduced over the course of a few decades of work. Whereas a
| landrace might have been selected for yield in that area for a
| thousand years or more, maybe 100x or more as many generations
| under selection. As such there is a huge interest among a
| subset of biologists today to catalog all of these remaining
| landrace crops and the genetic diversity they contain before
| they are lost, either due to changing climate wiping out their
| native environment or the modern farmer replacing these
| cultivars with ones you can buy in bulk quantities from your
| seed supplier and have more of an export market (some landrace
| crops aren't fit for export shipping due to fragility of the
| crop unlike more modern cultivars; bananas are a good example
| where there are 1000 types grown but only 1 single varietal
| particularly fit for overseas shipping hits the supermarket).
| hosh wrote:
| It doesn't take many generations for selective breeding to
| show improvements in landraces. Even just making sure that
| volunteers from seeds that were thrown out as food waste were
| given a chance to fruit and seed starts that process.
|
| 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.
| jfengel wrote:
| I'm surprised that anything remains. If the area is fertile I'd
| expect it to be farmland now.
|
| Clearly it was logged for a while, and perhaps they were
| expecting to cut it down again at some point.
| asdff wrote:
| What is farmed in this country is land compatible with american
| farming practices not fertile land. E.G. any mountainous farm
| region in the U.S. will see basically only farming on the
| valley bottoms. Whereas many civilizations in the past and
| present developed terrace farms to make use of the entire hilly
| region not just the convenient bottoms. It isn't really done in
| the U.S. due to the cost and the availability of vast
| quantities of flat farmable land well beyond market need.
| mapotofu wrote:
| > During their excavations, the scientists also found several
| artifacts, including charcoal and fragments of broken ceramics.
| 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. Samples taken from the
| mounds suggest the farmers enriched the dirt with soil from
| nearby wetlands.
|
| 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.
| politelemon wrote:
| I wouldn't have imagined broken pottery could serve as compost,
| how is that made possible? It's clay but it retains some
| properties even after baking?
| p1mrx wrote:
| They probably couldn't be bothered to sort trash and compost
| into separate bins.
| sologoub wrote:
| If you try to make a planting bed in any settlement that's
| more than say 100 years old on a site that was continuously
| lived on, you are guaranteed to come across at least some
| shards of glass, pots, plates, etc. Even if the spot was
| never explicitly a trash mound. Things break, people usually
| try to pick them up and put in trash, but (especially in
| grass) miss pieces. When kids break stuff you often don't
| want them picking up sharp objects. Things get stepped on and
| pressed into soil. Many many reasons to find pottery shards
| where they seemingly don't belong.
| pfdietz wrote:
| I was also going to say, earthworms will slowly bury
| objects (Darwin wrote on this), but that region didn't have
| earthworms at the time.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| TIL that earthworms in the American northeast are largely
| invasive species. That's very surprising to me
| 7thaccount wrote:
| Are they problematic though? There were earthworms there
| before the ice age I think.
| andy99 wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasive_earthworms_of_No
| rth...
|
| 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.
| pfdietz wrote:
| To some extent it's a matter of definition, and whether
| being caused by humanity means it's bad. After all, the
| native earthworms would eventually have migrated north
| and caused similar changes.
|
| Is it bad that redwoods are doing very well in the UK?
| happosai wrote:
| The problem isn't "because it was caused by humans" per
| se. Invasive species because of the speed they migrate.
| Adapting genetically changing environment is the core of
| life in our planet, but it takes thousands of
| generations. Humans spread invasive species much faster
| than the local fauna can adapt.
| sublinear wrote:
| Just a wild guess here, but isn't all kinds of stuff usually
| added to soil to help regulate moisture and pH levels?
| pfdietz wrote:
| Clay also acts to retain positive ions, since the surfaces
| of clay particles have negative charges.
| edmundsauto wrote:
| I have thought about this and figured it was more mechanical
| (ie drainage) than chemical (nutrients).
| fhk wrote:
| Yes very established in Hydro and Aquaponics
|
| Clay pellets / balls
| mapotofu wrote:
| If you added the pottery fragments to the compost pile they
| would be "baked" again, albeit in a very different
| environment, and the finished product would have structural
| diversity closer to soil. Normally that would be rocks, but
| if your goal is to grow food clay rocks might be better for
| many reasons.
| brookst wrote:
| Pottery of the time was low-fired and did not generally reach
| vitrification, and it was not glazed with a silica-based
| glaze that would seal it.
|
| 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.
| politelemon wrote:
| Thanks this was educational for me.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| If you were in the woods( pick a spot) and had whatever
| food/medicines you needed could you build pottery from
| scratch.
|
| Electricity is fine and all, but I imagine the basics of
| civilization could be replicated by a few good
| craftsmen(people)
| hinkley wrote:
| Primitive Technology on YouTube does this repeatedly.
|
| 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.
| hinkley wrote:
| There's a type of low fired clay used in bonsai soil and a
| harder one used in hydroponics. Good for retaining moisture
| and they don't swell and shrink with water.
| duxup wrote:
| I have some reproduction native American pottery from the
| upper great plains. They're pretty neat as they have round
| bottoms. Just holding it feels like given enough time it
| would break down and melt for sure. It feels very porous.
| ruined wrote:
| to add some context, in modern gardening things like
| crushed vermiculite are a common soil amendment. being a
| porous absorbent mineral, it serves the same purpose.
| sfjailbird wrote:
| You're all overthinking it. They dumped their kitchen waste
| in the fields, and it happened to contain broken pottery too.
| It's the same for other archeological sites all over, many
| are waste dumps that contain interesting objects.
| MangoToupe wrote:
| How would you characterize this distinction? It sounds like
| you're simply describing the same behavior.
| mc32 wrote:
| Until further evidence is found it's premature to say that
| there is no doubt that it was widely used in the Americas. I
| think there is doubt though that could be removed with more
| evidence.
| yapyap wrote:
| 1k year old?
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| One click away is the article title :
|
| "Massive Fields Where Native American Farmers Grew Corn, Beans
| and Squash 1,000 Years Ago Discovered in Michigan"
| coin wrote:
| My thoughts too. Using SI prefix for a thousand years is
| uncommon.
| Scarblac wrote:
| Does anyone know a 3 sisters equivalent native to Eurasia?
| swalling wrote:
| Asia and Africa have rich historical polyculture traditions.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyculture?wprov=sfti1#Histor...
| asdff wrote:
| Probably rice cultivation with an understanding of irrigation
| romanhn wrote:
| For anyone else confused about the three sisters and why they
| weren't mentioned in the article, it's a reference to this:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Sisters_(agriculture)
| themadturk wrote:
| Thank you! That headline really threw me for a loop.
| rusk wrote:
| Thank you. The other thing I really wanted to know was why they
| were arranged in mounds/quilt? I'm guessing it relates to
| irrigation
| alephnerd wrote:
| My hunch (based on how my grandfather would cultivate) was to
| provide a mount of fertilizer for added nitrogen along with
| the added irrigation aspects.
|
| 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.
| lambda wrote:
| Was the article edited? I don't see a reference to the phrase
| "three sisters" on it, it just says "corn, beans, and squash."
| Did the original headline mention it?
|
| 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.
| vram22 wrote:
| Related: Check out the book Tending the Earth by Winin Pereira,
| on Other India Press.
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=tending+the+earth+winin+pere...
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other_India_Press
| i4i wrote:
| Science Mag Podcast covered this as well... with Madeleine
| McLeester, assistant professor in the department of anthropology
| at Dartmouth College. I thought interesting that they have yet to
| find the village that associates with the gardens.
| https://www.science.org/content/podcast/farming-maize-ice-ag...
| ji646646 wrote:
| 7723456789
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