The earliest occurrence of a newly described domesticate in Eastern North America: Adena/Hopewell communities and agricultural innovation

Abstract

Archaic and Woodland period communities in eastern North America domesticated a suite of annual seed crops referred to the Eastern Agricultural Complex (EAC), some of which subsequently fell out of cultivation and were lost. Recently, a domesticated sub-species of one of these lost crops, erect knotweed (Polygonum erectum) has been described. This paper reports the earliest example of this domesticated sub-species, which was recovered from a sub-mound context at an Adena/Hopewell site in central Kentucky (Walker-Noe, 15Gd56) dating to c. 1 AD. Contemporary Middle Woodland erect knotweed assemblages from habitation sites in western Illinois are not domesticated. A review of the paleoethnobotanical record suggests that farmers on the western front of the Appalachian Mountains developed several innovative agricultural practices, beginning around 1000 BC, that subsequently were adopted across the core area of EAC cultivation. The ethnography and sociology of 20th and 21st century farmer networks suggests that Adena/Hopewell exchange and community integration at mounds and earthworks may have been instrumental to this process. Additional analyses of botanical assemblages from mounds and earthworks, especially morphometric analyses of crop seeds, are necessary to test this hypothesis. The dynamics of social learning involved in this process may also be implicated in the spread of crop varieties and agricultural techniques in other regions.