Colonial America

by Richard Middleton, Anne Lombard

  In the lower Mississippi Valley and adjacent areas, horticulture first began to emerge after 1500 BCE. Evidence suggests that peoples in these regions may have cultivated edible plants like gourds, sunflowers, goosefoot, and marsh elder, independent of the plant domestication taking place in Mesoamerica around the same time. Eventually the people here acquired the ability to grow maize as well. But just as in the Southwest, the adoption of full-time horticulture was slow; people in the Mississippi Valley region grew plants only to supplement what they could reap from hunting and gathering of wild foods for some time.

  Gradually, beginning around 500 BCE, societies organized around part-time or full-time farming emerged in the Midwest and the Southeast. The people in these societies all developed certain cultural practices in common: all built mounds for burial and other religious purposes; all developed urban settlements; all practiced some form of horticulture; all possessed pottery; and all were familiar with copper for making ornaments and tools. Peoples who were part of the Adena cultural complex, in the Ohio Valley, were still largely hunter-gatherers but practiced some horticulture, notably cultivation of gourds and other squashes. As the Adena peoples shifted to agriculture they became more territorial, building burial mounds to commemorate the dead and filling them with numerous practical and ornamental objects to support the deceased in the afterlife. Then came the Hopewell peoples, whose culture flourished not only in the Ohio Valley but in adjacent areas along the Illinois and Miami rivers, from about 100 BCE to 400 ce. Like the Adena peoples, the people of the Hopewell culture built mounds to honor the dead and for other religious purposes, but their mounds comprised concentric circles and other geometric patterns instead of simple squares. Others were grouped together inside an enclosure to elevate houses or other secular structures, suggesting that the Hopewell people lived in sizable towns. Their burial mounds contained material originating from great distances, such as obsidian from the Rockies, copper from Lake Michigan, and conch shells from Florida, evidence that the Hopewell were engaged in widespread trade and commerce.

  The Mississippian cultures, emerging around 600 ce, initiated the largest and most complex phase of mound-building activity. Mississippian peoples' mounds comprised large platform edifices grouped around a central plaza. The size and complexity of these sites indicate towns and cities of thousands of inhabitants, suggesting that the Mississippian cultures by now depended primarily on agriculture for their subsistence. The greatest of the Mississippian cities was Cahokia, near present-day St. Louis. Cahokia had an enclosed area of several square miles, containing over 100 earthworks. Thirty thousand people may have lived there at the city's height around 1200 ce. Archaeologists working in Cahokia have uncovered copper chisels, awls, and punches (for piercing leather), needles, harpoons, spear points, and knives, showing that the Mississippian people had developed technologies for working in metal. A small percentage of the dead appear to have been buried with copper brooches, bracelets, gorgets, and clasps for decorative purposes, evidence that Mississippians had developed hierarchical societies, in which members of a high-status group possessed considerably more wealth than the majority of the population. Non-elite Mississippians, in contrast, still used arrowheads, scrapers, knives, hoes, and axes made of bone, shell, or stone.

  Figure 1 Cahokia mounds, circa 1150. Painting by William R. Iseminger. Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site.

  The advantage of agriculture for a population is its ability to produce more food per acre than hunting and gathering, so that populations can grow and societies become more complex. The disadvantage of agriculture is that it makes a population dependent on particular patterns of rainfall and sunshine. In the event of climate change, hunting and gathering societies in the ancient world would generally move on and adapt, but fully agricultural societies could be devastated. This seems to be what happened to people of the Hohokam and the Anasazi cultures. Between 1100 and 1350 a shift in rainfall patterns led to food shortages, and the Hohokam and Anasazi people abandoned their settlements and migrated to other parts of the Southwest, reorganizing new communities and becoming integrated with other groups in their new locations. Similarly, a cooling of the climate after about 1300 in the Mississippi Valley made farming less productive and created food shortages. The Mississippian mound builders abandoned their cities and towns and migrated south and east, where they reorganized themselves into smaller communities.

  In addition to forcing communities to split up and move, climate change commonly produced stresses that increased conflict. Forensic evidence from sites across the continent suggests that rates of violent death increased between 1000 and 1500, most likely caused by increased competition for scarce resources. In the large societies of the Southwest and the Mississippi Valley, internal discord apparently contributed to societal collapse. These societies reorganized themselves into much smaller tribes and chiefdoms, whereupon they were often beset by intense rivalries and shifting coalitions. The main legacy of these peoples' shared past was often a set of enduring rivalries between their new communities.

  3 The Eastern Woodlands, 1000–1300

  By 1000 ce the horticultural revolution had spread eastwards, and most Indian peoples in the Eastern Woodlands region, along the Atlantic coast of North America between Florida and southern Canada, began to adopt horticulture for at least part of their diets. A minority of Indian peoples, especially those who lived in cold climates with very short growing seasons such as in northern Canada, spurned farming as a way of life, most likely because they had little incentive to engage in the tedious labor required to grow crops where the land would yield so little and game was still abundant. (Conversely, North American people in temperate regions with rich resources and a low population density, like California, refused to adopt horticulture too, probably because they had no need to give up hunting and gathering.) However, most Eastern Woodlands Indians began farming for at least part of their subsistence, and once they did, particular social and cultural patterns tended to follow.

  Map 1 Eastern Woodlands coastal peoples, circa 1530–1608.

  First, peoples who adopted farming became more sedentary. Instead of living together in small bands whose members moved from one place to another depending on the time of year, Eastern Woodlands peoples began increasingly to live in permanent or semi-permanent villages of 100 or 200 inhabitants near the land they farmed. Farming produced considerably more food than hunting and gathering alone, and populations grew to a substantially greater density than in the past. Estimating the population of the region has been fraught with controversy, as early estimates were based on the observations of Europeans who wanted to convince their sponsors that the land was thinly inhabited. Another problem is that by the time most European observers came to eastern North America, diseases brought by the Spanish may have already caused dramatic depopulation. Current estimates based on the best evidence suggest that before 1492, as many as five million people lived north of the Rio Grande in what would later become the United States. Of these some 30,000 lived in the vicinity of the lower Chesapeake Bay and 150,000 in what would become New England, the two regions which Englishmen would first attempt to colonize.5

  These were linguistically diverse peoples, representing four main linguistic groups by the fifteenth century. Algonquian-speaking peoples occupied the coastal regions from Newfoundland to northern Carolina, though a number also resided around the Great Lakes. Siouan peoples inhabited the coastal areas of the Carolinas. Muskogeans lived in Georgia and the Floridas, and Iroquoian peoples lived almost entirely inland from the St. Lawrence Valley and the area southwards to the piedmont of Virginia and the Carolinas. Within each of these language groups there were distinct dialects and some people spoke multiple languages. Common linguistic roots did not necessarily mean close political or cultural ties. Still, many Indian peoples appear to have been receptive to alliances and cooperation with others with whom they shared linguistic similarities. It was relatively common for part or all of a tribe t
o migrate, particularly if its members had suffered significant population losses, and become integrated into another tribe with a similar language.

  Farming techniques were adapted to the environment of the particular region. Because there were no domesticable animal species in North America, the use of animal-drawn plows was of course impossible. Trees were abundant, so clearing the land was a major problem. Trees could be killed by girdling the bark from the trunk and burning the undergrowth, but this did not remove the stumps. Hence planting was done by digging holes between the stumps and then heaping soil around the plants as they grew. Eventually stumps were removed by scorching the roots, though by then the soil had lost much of its fertility. As a result, every 10 or 20 years the inhabitants typically moved to another site. The restricted ability to practice intensive agriculture to some extent limited the density of the population. Most people lived in villages rather than cities.

  Despite these constraints, the Indians' farming techniques were efficient and highly productive. Women did all of the farming, using wooden hoes tipped with flint or shell to cultivate tobacco, maize, beans, and squash, which were sown together in the same plot. This method allowed the beans and squash to use the maize for support and also helped fertilize the soil, since the beans replaced the nitrogen taken by the maize. During the 1580s, the English observer John White in Roanoke, Virginia, noted that a first sowing of corn was made in April, with further sowings in May and June, so that successive crops could be harvested from midsummer until the fall. His companion Thomas Harriot elaborated, commenting that an acre of corn yielded “at least two hundred London Bushelles,” whereas in England 40 bushels of wheat per acre was considered a good yield. On the other hand, Englishmen William Strachey and Henry Spelman described the fields at Jamestown as small, while White's drawing of the town of Secotan near Roanoke in 1585 shows trees close to the settlement and only small cultivated plots in between. These observations suggest that a village of 20 or 30 dwellings would typically have about 200 to 300 acres under cultivation.6

  Figure 2 The Indian town of Secotan, by John White. Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

  Horticulture provided between 30 and 70 percent of food requirements, depending on the time of the year and location. Peoples like the Timucuas in Florida enjoyed a long growing season and probably secured two-thirds of their subsistence from horticulture. The Abenakis, on the other hand, who lived just south of the St. Lawrence River in Canada, probably secured less than 50 percent of their food by such means. In any case, other food sources besides domesticated plants were still abundant, and people continued to rely on game, fish, and wildfowl to supplement the food supplies produced in the fields. The particular mix depended what was available and whether a settlement was near the coast, by a river, or on high ground inland. Meanwhile the combination of farming, hunting, and fishing largely determined patterns of work and social life.

  Since the women of a village did the majority of the farming, they generally stayed in or near the village for most of the year so they could be close to their fields to cultivate and harvest the crops. During the colder months women had other work to keep them occupied. They built the houses and made baskets, mats, and cooking implements, pounded the corn, processed meat and animal skins, and did all the other things necessary in the village itself. Women also nursed infants and were expected to rear both girls and boys while they were young, although the training of boys usually fell to their uncles (generally considered to be boys' closest adult male kin) as they grew older.

  Meanwhile, the men of a village hunted and fished, meaning they spent much of their time away. The principal hunting seasons were fall and early winter when animals were at their prime weight. Deer constituted the most readily available source of meat; bear, fox, raccoon, and beaver were also caught. Since the habitats for these large animals were often at some distance from the village, most adult men left their villages and traveled during the winter hunt, sometimes for weeks at a time. Most animals were either snared or hunted with bows and arrows. However, over time Indian men had also developed ingenious techniques to make hunting easier and more productive. Deer were often caught with the help of fire, being driven by the flames into an ambush. The large trees were not normally affected by such conflagrations, which typically destroyed only the saplings and other undergrowth. Such fires thus not only cleared the woodlands but encouraged the growth of grasses that attracted the deer to return. Fire also helped rid an area of insects and made travel to and from the hunting grounds easier. In addition, clearing the brushwood around a village made it more difficult for an enemy to approach unseen. The undergrowth was often fired twice a year, which accounted for the “parklike” appearance of many woods to the early Europeans.

  Figure 3 Indian hunter, by John White. From Collectiones peregrinationum in Indiam orientalem et Indiam occidentalen (Francof., 1590). The Bodleian Library, Oxford.

  Before the spring the men generally returned to the village to remain through the summer. For the rest of the year they hunted or fished close to home, sometimes moving to a temporary camp close to the village. One source of meat that could often be found close at hand was wildfowl, abundant during spring and fall when migratory birds such as passenger pigeons, Canada geese, and other species passed by. John Smith, one of the leaders at Jamestown, noted in 1608 as winter approached, the “rivers became so covered with swans, geese, ducks, and cranes, that we daily feasted.”7 Another prolific wildfowl in most regions was turkey, which providentially did not migrate and was available in large numbers. The availability of fish varied from one region to another. Along the coast men fished in shallow waters using dugout tree logs or wood-framed birch bark canoes. On the rivers they could fish either in boats or from the bank, using nets made from vegetable fibers or weirs constructed with poles or rocks, which channeled the fish into a confined area where they were either speared or caught by hand. They also used lines tipped with bone hooks. Fish were abundant. The Chesapeake and Delaware bays offered shad, bass, sturgeon, and eels; the rivers of New England were equally stocked in spring with spawning runs of alewives, salmon, and eels; and the coastal waters proliferated with clams and other shellfish.

  Figure 4 Indians fishing, by John White. From Collectiones peregrinationum in Indiam orientalem et Indiam occidentalen (Francof., 1590). The Bodleian Library, Oxford.

  In general the Indian peoples of eastern North America enjoyed a relatively balanced and healthy diet; Europeans were continually struck by their well-proportioned limbs and physical agility. So prolific were their food sources that the production or accumulation of surpluses for resale was rarely considered. Only corn was stored year-round, though dried fish and meat were kept for a time. In general the Indians knew that they could survive each season until the next part of the food cycle arrived. This philosophy led many Europeans to condemn them for their want of foresight and lack of work ethic. The Indians seemingly ignored the biblical command to have “dominion” over the earth and every living creature in it. But in reality the Indians had developed a different system than the Europeans for supporting their societies, taking advantage of an abundant variety of food sources to feed their populations, in addition to what they could support through farming. Their system allowed their societies to thrive.

  Relationships between men and women were considerably more egalitarian among the Eastern Woodlands peoples than in Europe, where patriarchy was the norm. As farmers, women typically produced at least half of the food, a contribution that probably enhanced their importance within their societies. Most Native American groups were matrilineal and often matrilocal (meaning the couple lived with the wife's kin, and the house belonged to the wife). Thus children took their mother's name and looked to her relatives for protection and support. Women had considerable sexual freedom, at least before marriage. And in most societies, divorce was easily available, merely requiring an agreement by the two parties. A woman who was dissatisfied with her husband could leave h
im and marry a different partner instead. Since the house belonged to her, of course it was the man who left the household once a marriage ended. The absence of patriarchy was also apparent in the Indians' lenient attitude towards children, who were rarely punished and often indulged. Children were teased as a way of getting them to accept society's norms, but were not struck or physically threatened.8

  Figure 5 Indian man and woman preparing a meal, by John White. From Collectiones peregrinationum in Indiam orientalem et Indiam occidentalen (Francof., 1590). The Bodleian Library, Oxford.

  Document 1

  The upbringing of children, Father Gabriel Sagard, 1632, reprinted in James Axtell, ed., The Indian Peoples of Eastern America: A Documentary History of the Sexes (New York, 1995)

  The following is a description by a French Franciscan monk of the parenting styles of Hurons he encountered in present-day Canada. Father Sagard's description reflects his European upbringing, and shows a failure to appreciate that the Huron used other mechanisms, including example, encouragement, public shaming and social ostracism, to teach their children to become self-disciplined. Questions to consider: What kinds of assumptions does Father Sagard make about children? What kinds of assumptions do you think the Huron made about children?