to their crop larder, as is shown by their exuberant adoption of the sweet potato when it arrived. That same lesson is being driven home again in New Guinea today, as those tribes with preferential access to introduced new crops and livestock (or with the cultural willingness to adopt them) expand at the expense of tribes without that access or willingness. Thus, the limits on indigenous food production in New Guinea had nothing to do with New Guinea peoples, and everything with the New Guinea biota and environment. OUR other example of indigenous agriculture apparently constrained by the local flora comes from the eastern United States. Like New Guinea, that area supported independent domestication of local wild plants. However, early developments are much better understood for the eastern United States than for New Guinea: the crops grown by the earliest farmers have been identified, and the dates and crop sequences of local domestication are known. Well before other crops began to arrive from elsewhere, Native Americans settled in eastern U.S. river valleys and developed intensified food production based on local crops. Hence they were in a position to take advantage of the most promising wild plants. Which ones did they actually cultivate, and how did the resulting local crop package compare with the Fertile Crescent's founder package? It turns out that the eastern U.S. founder crops were four plants domesticated in the period 2500-1500 b.c., a full 6,000 years after wheat and barley domestication in the Fertile Crescent. A local species of squash provided small containers, as well as yielding edible seeds. The remaining three founders were grown solely for their edible seeds (sunflower, a daisy relative called sumpweed, and a distant relative of spinach called goose-foot). But four seed crops and a container fall far short of a complete food production package. For 2,000 years those founder crops served only as minor dietary supplements while eastern U.S. Native Americans continued to depend mainly on wild foods, especially wild mammals and waterbirds, fish, shellfish, and nuts. Farming did not supply a major part of their diet until the period 500-200 b.c., after three more seed crops (knotweed, maygrass, and little barley) had been brought into cultivation. A modern nutritionist would have applauded those seven eastern U.S. APPLESOR INDIANS rops. All of them were high in protein — 17-32 percent, compared with cl4 percent for wheat, 9 percent for corn, and even lower for barley and white rice. Two of them, sunflower and sumpweed, were also high in oil (45-47 percent). Sumpweed, in particular, would have been a nutritionist's ultimate dream, being 32 percent protein and 45 percent oil. Why aren't we still eating those dream foods today? Alas, despite their nutritional advantage, most of these eastern U.S. crops suffered from serious disadvantages in other respects. Goosefoot, knotweed, little barley, and maygrass had tiny seeds, with volumes only one-tenth that of wheat and barley seeds. Worse yet, sumpweed is a wind- pollinated relative of ragweed, the notorious hayfever-causing plant. Like ragweed's, sumpweed's pollen can cause hayfever where the plant occurs in abundant stands. If that doesn't kill your enthusiasm for becoming a sumpweed farmer, be aware that it has a strong odor objectionable to some people and that handling it can cause skin irritation. Mexican crops finally began to reach the eastern United States by trade routes after a.d. 1. Corn arrived around a.d. 200, but its role remained very minor for many centuries. Finally, around a.d. 900 a new variety of corn adapted to North America's short summers appeared, and the arrival of beans around a.d. 1 100 completed Mexico's crop trinity of corn, beans, and squash. Eastern U.S. farming became greatly intensified, and densely populated chiefdoms developed along the Mississippi River and its tributaries. In some areas the original local domesticates were retained alongside the far more productive Mexican trinity, but in other areas the trinity replaced them completely. No European ever saw sumpweed growing in Indian gardens, because it had disappeared as a crop by the time that European colonization of the Americas began, in a.d. 1492. Among all those ancient eastern U.S. crop specialties, only two (sunflower and eastern squash) have been able to compete with crops domesticated elsewhere and are still grown today. Our modern acorn squashes and summer squashes are derived from those American squashes domesticated thousands of years ago. Thus, like the case of New Guinea, that of the eastern United States is instructive. A priori, the region might have seemed a likely one to support productive indigenous agriculture. It has rich soils, reliable moderate rain-rail, and a suitable climate that sustains bountiful agriculture today. The lora is a species-rich one that includes productive wild nut trees (oak and I 5 2. • •GUNS,GERMS, AND STEEL hickory). Local Native Americans did develop an agriculture based on local domesticates, did thereby support themselves in villages, and even developed a cultural florescence (the Hopewell culture centered on what is today Ohio) around 200 b.c.-a.d. 400. They were thus in a position for several thousand years to exploit as potential crops the most useful available wild plants, whatever those should be. Nevertheless, the Hopewell florescence sprang up nearly 9,000 years after the rise of village living in the Fertile Crescent. Still, it was not until after a.d. 900 that the assembly of the Mexican crop trinity triggered a larger population boom, the so-called Mississippian florescence, which produced the largest towns and most complex societies achieved by Native Americans north of Mexico. But that boom came much too late to prepare Native Americans of the United States for the impending disaster of European colonization. Food production based on eastern U.S. crops alone had been insufficient to trigger the boom, for reasons that are easy to specify. ; The area's available wild cereals were not nearly as useful as wheat and barley. Native Americans of the eastern United States domesticated no. locally available wild pulse, no fiber crop, no fruit or nut tree. They had* no domesticated animals at all except for dogs, which were probably;: domesticated elsewhere in the Americas. It's also clear that Native Americans of the eastern United States were not overlooking potential major crops among the wild species around' them. Even 20th-century plant breeders, armed with all the power of modern science, have had little success in exploiting North American wild? plants. Yes, we have now domesticated pecans as a nut tree and blueberries; as a fruit, and we have improved some Eurasian fruit crops (apples, plums, grapes, raspberries, blackberries, strawberries) by hybridizing them with North American wild relatives. However, those few successes havt; changed our food habits far less than Mexican corn changed food habits of Native Americans in the eastern United States after a.d. 900. The farmers most knowledgeable about eastern U.S. domesticates, the region's Native Americans themselves, passed judgment on them by .d carding or deemphasizing them when the Mexican trinity arrived. That outcome also demonstrates that Native Americans were not constrained | by cultural conservativism and were quite able to appreciate a good plant when they saw it. Thus, as in New Guinea, the limitations on indigenous:; food production in the eastern United States were not due to Native Amer* j APPLESORindians • 153 . peoples themselves, but instead depended entirely on the American biota and environment. have now considered examples of three contrasting areas, in all of which food production did arise indigenously. The Fertile Crescent lies at one extreme; New Guinea and the eastern United States lie at the opposite extreme. Peoples of the Fertile Crescent domesticated local plants much earlier. They domesticated far more species, domesticated far more productive or valuable species, domesticated a much wider range of types of crops, developed intensified food production and dense human populations more rapidly, and as a result entered the modern world with more advanced technology, more complex political
