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  • From: firekeeper@netscape.net
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] back to our focus /Was mounds
  • Date: Mon, 07 Aug 2006 20:35:12 -0400

When you're right, you're right
 
I got busy answering Arts question, rather than looking to the possible ag uses of these particular mounds.  Native peoples in the Americas, very much like the Nile valley Egyptians, had a familiarity with working with flood plains instead of against them.  Art had been guessing at these as home sites but that is not necessarily what they had been, in fact I don't see that sort of organization, though it may have been and it just looks this way because there are parts missing.  The ID of the points can help with those sort of guesses but it may be worth doing soil samples at the top and bottom of the mounds.  Each sample should show some real variation and some difference in what will grow on and below the mounds.  These may even have been erected to help trap flood sediments.  I know that there is some evidence of this in Bolivia, of using barriers and ditches to retain waters, trap sediments, keep fish for foods and turn a whole area well known today to be inimical to cultivation into an enormous agricultural area.  Art makes a common mistake in seeing the loss of indigenous people as being something that happened naturally.  European diseases let loose on a population with no previous exposure can account for anywhere between 90% and 100% fatalities, something we are hearing about with the Bird Flu scares. This fact allowed many of the 1st Europeans to simply move into empty towns and farm areas and start up life on this continent.  The colonists had no interest in Native farming habits and simply took the advise that they had been given about native foods and converted it to European-style farming as soon and as completely as posible.  Eventually, every bit of Eastern Woodlands communal-style agriculture was lost.  The Pueblo style Waffle garden is making a comeback, because of it's utility in retaining and utilizing small amounts of water in the desert farm.  None the less some efforts are being made to understand the veggies used and now the Slow-Food Movement website has a fairly exciting list of the various veggies that can be grown in their Ark of Taste;
 
And in the Native American Food news;
 
 
I am trying out some of these veggies, myself.  Many Native foods are showing a great deal of benefit in preventing and releiving diabetes. A lot of them are pretty easy to grow, like Oak and Maple or Wild Rice.
 
Yours, Pego
 
 



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