Food Production in Native North America: An Archaeological Perspective by Kristen J. Gremillion

Abstract

134 The Michigan Historical Review Kristen J. Gremillion. Food Production in Native North America: An Archaeological Perspective. Washington, DC: The SAA Press (Society for American Archaeology), 2018. Pp. 194. Appendices, Bibliography. Illustrations. Index. Notes. Paper: $31.95. Gremillion’s book, published by the Society for American Archaeology as part of its “Current Perspectives” series, is a wonderful overview of the evidence, origins, and dispersal of plant domestication in the New World as documented through prehistory and early historic records. In Gremillion’s words, her book “provides a highly selective survey of Native North American food production systems from an archaeological perspective [with] four major foci: the domestication and intensification of indigenous seed crops in the East; the introduction and spread of maizebased farming systems that incorporated crops of Mesoamerican origin, including maize; the persistence of diverse low-intensity forms of food production in societies that evade the classic forager-farmer dichotomy; and the impact of introduced crops after AD 1492” (p. ix). The theoretical framework used in Gremillion’s thesis “is both evolutionary and ecology [sic, ecological]; her book does not propose a single dominant causal factor or argue for identical historical pathways to food production; instead, it looks at those pathways as historical enactments of cultural, evolutionary, and ecological processes that affect human societies worldwide” (pp. ix-x). As an overview, Gremillion’s book would make a great “reader” for graduate courses dealing with prehistoric North American gatherer/hunter food-getting strategies to food production requirements for full-scale, threesisters (maize-beans-squash) agriculturalists. Organized into seven chapters (“A Coevolutionary Continuum,” “The Eastern Agricultural Complex,” “Origins and Development of Maize-Based Agriculture in the Southwest,” “The Rise of the Three Sisters: Maize in the Eastern Woodlands,” “Food Production without Farming,” “A World of Difference: Food Production in Postcontact North America,” and “Synthesis”), the book has a very useful appendix that provides a listing of scientific names of plants and animal taxa (domesticated and not), is wonderfully referenced (including a References Cited section that reads like a who’s-who in paleoethnobotanical or archaeobotanical research), and is well indexed. Although generally North American in scope, the book is quite regionalized, and noticeably biased toward geographical areas reflecting where the majority of “early” evidence of plant domestication has been found: e.g., the Ohio/Mississippi/Illinois river valleys and the American Southwest, although some discussion is given to the American Northwest and Northeast. I would have preferred greater discussion about evidence of Book Reviews 135 domesticated plant remains for the Great Lakes region; albeit, there is a brief discussion regarding tobacco and maize agriculture in southern Ontario (p. 73). And although a good portion of the book addresses therise and adoption of maize agriculture north of Mexico, there is no mention of the copious amounts of maize excavated at the Tyra site from Saginaw County in Michigan, or evidence of domesticated cultigens found at more famous, and well-studied, Michigan prehistoric sites like Schultz or Winter, to name just a couple recently receiving significant study (obviously, my bias is toward the archaeology of the Great Lakes area). But as Gremillion points out (p. 4), her book is regionallyoriented and addresses theprocess of domestication in only “some” areas of North America. Despite this minor shortcoming, this book is a must-have, with great potential as a reader for graduate North American archaeology courses, or courses dealing with the rise of plant domestication. Kenneth C. Carstens Missouri State University Lawrence B. A. Hatter. Citizens of Convenience: The Imperial Origins of American Nationhood on the U.S.-Canadian Border. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2017. Pp. 267. Bibliography. Illustrations. Index. Notes. Cloth: $30.49. The Treaty of Paris of 1783, which ended the American Revolution, generously ceded to the United States territory west to the Mississippi River and north to Lake of the Woods. The new border split in two the domain of the Montreal-based fur trade, much to the dismay of its merchants and traders. While the US was given nominal control of this territory, the government was too weak to secure the new border. Canadians—British subjects—continued to trade furs south of the Great Lakes. For the next three and...