Master Gardener Home PageMy attention was diverted one day by a radio interview of two authors who recently published a book discussing why environmental concerns over land development today are greatly exaggerated. In one portion of the interview, they stated that the American Indians had many times carelessly destroyed large regions by over-farming, etc. To emphasize this point, they assigned to the Paleoindians, (who first occupied North America between 15,000-8,000 B.C.) the responsibility for the extinction of the wooly mammoth and mastodon through over hunting.
As a professional archaeologist, I was surprised to hear this statement, since what is known about the Paleoindian phase of human habitation in North America has been accumulated through over 30 years of professional archaeological research, none of which remotely suggests such a possibility. The generally held viewpoint about Paleoindian lifeways is that this sparse population, in part, hunted the migratory herd animals which were adapted to tundra, steppe and boreal forests existing in a colder climate. Coincident with a climatic warming trend when the glaciers began to melt, the vegetation in North America changed to mixed deciduous/coniferous elements. These animals moved northward until they eventually died out as their habitats vanished. The lack of large Paleoindian sites and the scattered mammoth and mastodon skeletons found confirms that no overhunting took place.
Information abounds, however, about the way Native Americans lived and farmed when the explorers and settlers arrived in this country. Many of these accounts have been substantiated archaeologically since that time. However, the research is becoming more difficult to conduct. Over much of the continent, where fields once contained dozens of native crops, palynologists find a few pollen grains of domesticated plants per gallon of soil. Where once villages of women prepared succotash, archaeologists are lucky to discover more than a handful of corncob fragments and squash seeds. Where farming cultures cared for fields over generations, the soil is now covered with office buildings, subdivisions, and shopping centers.
To recover a sense of what native farming once was, the asphalt, metal, etc., of the past few hundred years must be cleared away. Seven thousand years of plant culture must be unearthed and studied. America before Columbus was not a wasteland nor an untouched wilderness. But what is known is that there is little archaeological evidence that Native Americans were responsible for environmental destruction due to careless farming practices. In every account from the early settlers, the Indians had a great diversity of plants and animals to exploit. Archaeologists almost overwhelmingly agree that Native American farming was influenced by natural disasters and/or social upheaval created by outside forces.
One example of the impact of natural disaster as well as outside forces is embodied in the archaeological data gathered on the Hohokam culture, a prehistoric native American group and the River Pima Indians living along the Salt and Gila rivers of central Arizona. Along the Gila and Salt floodplains, 2,500 years of crop history have been tracked by ethnobotanists and archaeologists. A remarkably complete sequence of crop introductions and extinctions were pulled together by these scholars. They record radical changes in the biotic diversity of a land. Today, the floodplains of the middle Gila and the Salt support few crops and far fewer wild plants and animals than ever before.
Between 300 B.C. and the time of Christ, a small group of native horticulturalists began to utilize a set of technologies previously unknown in the region. Labelled the Hohokam by archaeologists, this prehistoric culture built canals from water diverted from springs, marshes, and rivers which allowed for a greater intensity of crop production than what rainfall or runoff farming might have provided in a desert environment. In addition to corn, they grew beans, cotton, agaves, and little barley in addition to relying on wild foods such as mesquite, cacti, and winter annuals. These farms spread over 14,000 square miles across southern Arizona. Large canal systems served multiple villages as plants like tepary beans, limas, tobaccos, and squashes were introduced from Mexico.
Around A.D. 1,150, a series of droughts appear to have starved the fields fed by river-diversion canals, and people migrated to the more well-watered reaches of the Salt River as new huge canals were constructed. The greater population concentrations clustered in a more geographically limited area may have created subsistence stress. Later, a wet period from A.D. 1354-1358 created a great increase in stream flow which resulted in major damage to the canal intakes from flooding. By the time another devastating flood occurred in 1382, much of the irrigation system on the Salt River had been abandoned. It is postulated by archaeologists that much of the Hohokam culture had been impacted by these forces by the 1350s. Most archaeologists feel that these natural disasters were among the forces that ultimately stressed the Hohokam cultural system and caused their decline.
The River Pima had re-established the farming culture along the rivers where their ancestors lived. When the Spaniards first contacted the River Pima culture in the 1690s, they described this tribe as subsisting on "the innumerable fish that abound in the river", and a diet supplemented with corn and beans.
Although the life of the River Pima changed radically over the last one hundred twenty years, archaeologists agree that the erosional processes that disrupted agricultural landscapes on the Gila River floodplain were set in motion by the Spanish much earlier. The Spanish introduction of European diseases and livestock triggered changes in the intensity of management of the Gila floodplain. Along one stretch of the Gila, the number of River Pima settlements fell from thirty to just three in the first century after Spanish contact, presumably because of the depopulation caused by smallpox and other diseases. Perhaps because of decline in population and in the labor force needed to continue farming, the Pima more readily converted croplands into pastures for newly-arrived livestock.
By the mid 19th century overgrazing by cattle populations in the Gila watershed severely altered the hydrological conditions. In addition to overgrazing, woodcutting and beaver trapping in the Upper Gila began to change gentler streamflows to flashfloods capable of eroding out the floodplain fields of the Pima. In 1867 Jack Swilling, an entrepreneurial alcoholic and morphine addict with vision enough to notice the old Hohokam canals, organized his other Anglo neighbors to divert water out of the Salt River above the Pima villages. Upstream from most of the Pima villages on the Gila, other arrivals to the desert opened up large canals during a drought in the early part of 1870. These Anglos poured onto their fields an excess of irrigation without returning their tailwater to the river for others to use. By 1873 many of the Pima Indians left the Gila River area for good. By 1887, the irrigation canal constructed to take water out of the Gila River utilized the whole flow; no water reached any of the Pima fields downstream.
This impacted many of the types of crops grown by the Pima. By 1901, cotton had all but died out completely; grain amaranth perished between 1870 and 1890; and varieties of common beans, squashes, and a small grain called kof (perhaps a relic goosefoot surviving from prehistoric times) ceased to exist. The Pima lost at least seven crop species that were introduced to the southwest prehistorically by their Hohokam ancestors; seven native varieties of five New World species survive precariously today, in the dooryard gardens and small fields of the River Pima: 60-day corn, white and brown teparies, mottled limas, narrow-seeded bottlegourds, and striped cushaw squash. Foods that had been mentioned in the Pima creation myth were never again grown, prepared, or eaten after 1900.
Like the Pima, many other native American farming groups irrevocably lost control of croplands that had been in their families since long before the arrival of Europeans. In 1910, about 22,000 Indians worked their own farms while another 26,500 served as farm laborers. By 1950, despite considerable growth of Indian populations, the number of Indian farmers had dropped to 14,300, and their farm labor force to 14,100. By 1982, only 4,700 Native Americans were full owners of farms, another 1,700 were part owners and 750 were tenant-operators. In total about 7,000 Native Americans are managing farms at present. Less than 500 of these Indian farms nationwide grow any sizeable mixture of crops, including vegetables, staple grains, and beans for self consumption. Not all of these farms focus on traditional crops native to their region.
Fortunately, tribal governments no longer believe fatalistically that this story must be the Indian legacy. Among many Native American tribes community or tribal projects have emerged to conserve and revive native crops as cottage industries. For example, on both reservations where the Pima live, they have initiated tribally supported farm efforts to increase the supplies of traditional crop plants. The American Indians have recognized the value of the contributions of these crops which are more ancient than the European discovery of this continent. These foods still have the power to support us all and they should be kept alive.
--Hettie Ballweber, MG, 1996
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