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Fields where Native Americans farmed a thousand years ago discovered in Michigan
- folli 1y agoTangentially related: I'm trying to make LiDAR data in Switzerland more accessible, see https://github.com/r-follador/delta-relief https://github.com/r-follador/delta-relief There's some interesting examples in the Readme.
- 38 1y agoHow is this related at all?
- TacticalCoder 1y agoTFA literally says archaeologists discovered the crop(s) using LIDAR and GP links to a project using LIDAR to map lands.
- westurner 1y agoDoes LIDAR work underwater? FWIU in Grand Traverse Bay, Lake Michigan, there's a 9,000 year old stonehenge-like structure 40 feet underwater; that's 4000 thousand years older than Stonehenge and about 6000 years older than the Osireoin and the Pyramids. /? Michigan underwater stonehenge: https://www.google.com/search?q=michigan+underwater+stonehenge+wikipedia https://www.google.com/search?q=michigan+underwater+stonehen... There's not even a name or a wikipedia page for the site? There are various presumed Clovis sites which are now underwater in TN, as well.
- Antipode 1y agoA lot of the pictures used in articles for this are pictures of something else (possible an old ship). Here's what it actually looks like: https://holleyarchaeology.com/index.php/the-truth-about-the-stonehenge-in-lake-michigan/ https://holleyarchaeology.com/index.php/the-truth-about-the-... Calling it Stonehenge-like is a real stretch.
- westurner 1y agoThat's a better source than what I found; > The site in Grand Traverse Bay is best described as a long line of stones which is over a mile in length. > [...] may be a prehistoric drive line for herding caribou Also speculation that the Sage Wall in Montana is simply a geologic formation.
- thfuran 1y agoBathymetric lidar exists, but it's a lot more common for there to be enough particulates in water to mess it up than for air.
- firesteelrain 1y agoIt’s amazing how smart our ancestors were and creative and observant based on amateur science and gardening skills. The amount of planning and organization this must have taken would require a large coordinated effort.
- cvoss 1y agoBut a farmer is a professional scientist and a professional gardener. Living 1k years ago did not make them uninformed or unskilled at their profession. It's quite a modern bias to suggest this is amateur.
- firesteelrain 1y agoMy use of ‘amateur’ was more about how their methods predate formal scientific institutions rather than diminishing their expertise.
- duxup 1y ago"Stuff grows good in this black muck, but floods here and is hard to work in. Let's bring some of it up closer to the camp."
- steve_adams_86 1y agoThe unanswered questions are intriguing. I wonder if the crops grew better because they were suited to the climate, but those crops aren’t around anymore? Could they have cultivated varieties of corn over say 1000 years that grew well at that latitude and in the relative cold? Or could there have been warmer micro climates? Maybe not. Even corn specifically developed for my area in British Columbia needs a very warm summer to do well. I wonder if it’s possible that they used corn less as a food crop and more as a scaffolding crop in the 3 sisters system.
- thaumasiotes 1y ago> Or could there have been warmer micro climates? Microclimates? The whole world was warmer. Remember when the Vikings settled Greenland? That was 1000 years ago.
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- steve_adams_86 1y agoAccording to graphs I’m seeing, it looks like it was warmer for a period, but then cooler until now. They would have been farming here during a cool period. It’s entirely possible that they established the farm thousands of years ago when it was warm (and warm means about the same temperatures as today), then kept farming throughout the ‘little ice age’ despite crops yielding less. Perhaps that’s what triggered such a huge expansion of the farm land. Or, perhaps there were far more people there than we think. Lots of questions
- thaumasiotes 1y agoWhat graphs are you seeing? This is what the article says: > Radiocarbon dating suggests the ridges [farming furrows or similar] were initially constructed roughly 1,000 years ago. They were maintained and used for 600 years after that. Wikipedia says this: > Erik Thorvaldsson (c. 950 – c. 1003), known as Erik the Red, was a Norse explorer [...] > Around the year of 982, Erik was exiled from Iceland for three years, during which time he explored Greenland, eventually culminating in his founding of the first successful European settlement on the island. Erik would later die there around 1003 CE ["Erik the Red"] And this: > The Little Ice Age (LIA) was a period of regional cooling, particularly pronounced in the North Atlantic region. > The period has been conventionally defined as extending from the 16th to the 19th centuries > The NASA Earth Observatory notes three particularly cold intervals. One began about 1650, another about 1770, and the last in 1850 ["Little Ice Age"] And this: > The Medieval Warm Period (MWP), also known as the Medieval Climate Optimum or the Medieval Climatic Anomaly, was a time of warm climate in the North Atlantic region that lasted from about 950 CE to about 1250 CE. ["Medieval Warm Period"] The article would appear to suggest that the farm was established near the beginning of the Medieval Warm Period and abandoned near the beginning of the Little Ice Age... which seems incredibly unsurprising. > They would have been farming here during a cool period. I see no indication of that.
- jfengel 1y agoI'm surprised that anything remains. If the area is fertile I'd expect it to be farmland now. Clearly it was logged for a while, and perhaps they were expecting to cut it down again at some point.
- asdff 1y agoWhat is farmed in this country is land compatible with american farming practices not fertile land. E.G. any mountainous farm region in the U.S. will see basically only farming on the valley bottoms. Whereas many civilizations in the past and present developed terrace farms to make use of the entire hilly region not just the convenient bottoms. It isn't really done in the U.S. due to the cost and the availability of vast quantities of flat farmable land well beyond market need.
- maxerickson 1y agoThe growing season starts in late May. So only the land most amenable to tractors is really actively farmed. It's partly why there's so much forest. And then much of the logging the UP is selective harvesting rather than clear cutting, so they go in every so often and take out the larger trees.
- mapotofu 1y ago> During their excavations, the scientists also found several artifacts, including charcoal and fragments of broken ceramics. These discoveries suggest that the area’s Indigenous farmers may have dumped their household waste and the remnants of fires onto their fields, using them as compost. Samples taken from the mounds suggest the farmers enriched the dirt with soil from nearby wetlands. Exciting - that sounds a lot like Terra preta: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta No doubt this practice was used widely across the Americas. The natives were tremendously skilled with plants. This is another step to uncovering some of the knowledge lost. I hope they can find more of these same features.
- politelemon 1y agoI wouldn't have imagined broken pottery could serve as compost, how is that made possible? It's clay but it retains some properties even after baking?
- p1mrx 1y agoThey probably couldn't be bothered to sort trash and compost into separate bins.
- sologoub 1y agoIf you try to make a planting bed in any settlement that’s more than say 100 years old on a site that was continuously lived on, you are guaranteed to come across at least some shards of glass, pots, plates, etc. Even if the spot was never explicitly a trash mound. Things break, people usually try to pick them up and put in trash, but (especially in grass) miss pieces. When kids break stuff you often don’t want them picking up sharp objects. Things get stepped on and pressed into soil. Many many reasons to find pottery shards where they seemingly don’t belong.
- pfdietz 1y agoI was also going to say, earthworms will slowly bury objects (Darwin wrote on this), but that region didn't have earthworms at the time.
- yapyap 1y ago1k year old?
- jjtheblunt 1y agoOne click away is the article title : "Massive Fields Where Native American Farmers Grew Corn, Beans and Squash 1,000 Years Ago Discovered in Michigan"
- coin 1y agoMy thoughts too. Using SI prefix for a thousand years is uncommon.
- Scarblac 1y agoDoes anyone know a 3 sisters equivalent native to Eurasia?
- swalling 1y agoAsia and Africa have rich historical polyculture traditions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyculture?wprov=sfti1#Historical_and_modern_uses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyculture?wprov=sfti1#Histor...
- throwaway2037 1y agoFrom Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Sisters_(agriculture) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Sisters_(agriculture) > Geographer Carl O. Sauer described the Three Sisters as "a symbiotic plant complex of North and Central America without an equal elsewhere".
- asdff 1y agoProbably rice cultivation with an understanding of irrigation
- petesergeant 1y agoThere isn't one; closest is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crop_rotation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crop_rotation
- walthamstow 1y agoIt's not quite the same but growing carp alongside rice in a paddy. The fish eat pests and fertilise the water.
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- romanhn 1y agoFor anyone else confused about the three sisters and why they weren't mentioned in the article, it's a reference to this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Sisters_(agriculture) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Sisters_(agriculture)
- themadturk 1y agoThank you! That headline really threw me for a loop.
- rusk 1y agoThank you. The other thing I really wanted to know was why they were arranged in mounds/quilt? I’m guessing it relates to irrigation
- alephnerd 1y agoMy hunch (based on how my grandfather would cultivate) was to provide a mount of fertilizer for added nitrogen along with the added irrigation aspects. It's surprising ("I'm shocked, shocked, well not that shocked") how this style of farming somehow made it all the way to my ancestral village for cultivating these New World crops. Gotta love proto-globalization.
- lambda 1y agoWas the article edited? I don't see a reference to the phrase "three sisters" on it, it just says "corn, beans, and squash." Did the original headline mention it? No, not in the archived version: https://web.archive.org/web/20250612153046/https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/massive-field-where-native-american-farmers-grew-corn-beans-and-squash-1000-years-ago-discovered-in-michigan-180986758/ https://web.archive.org/web/20250612153046/https://www.smith... Oh, was this mentioned in the original HN title? Has that been edited? Yes, it was. https://web.archive.org/web/20250615154352/https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44257422#44284035 https://web.archive.org/web/20250615154352/https://news.ycom... Original HN title was "1k year old 3 sisters crop farm found in Northern Michigan" I really wish that when titles were edited there was some history, it would make it much easier to understand these little discussions based on the original title.
- vram22 1y agoRelated: Check out the book Tending the Earth by Winin Pereira, on Other India Press. https://www.google.com/search?q=tending+the+earth+winin+pereira+other+india+press https://www.google.com/search?q=tending+the+earth+winin+pere... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other_India_Press https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other_India_Press
- i4i 1y agoScience Mag Podcast covered this as well... with Madeleine McLeester, assistant professor in the department of anthropology at Dartmouth College. I thought interesting that they have yet to find the village that associates with the gardens. https://www.science.org/content/podcast/farming-maize-ice-age-michigan-predicting-future-climate-cities-and-our-host-takes-quiz https://www.science.org/content/podcast/farming-maize-ice-ag...
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- petesergeant 1y agoI'd be interested in an alternative world history where the first humans into North America had domesticated and saved the local horses that were kicking around, or the Vikings had left a bunch on their earlier expeditions. Alternatively where the Vikings had managed to give the locals small pox and other European diseases en-masse before leaving.
- mmustapic 1y agoNot exactly your scenario, but The Years of Rice and Salt, by Kim Stanley Robinson, has Europe almost wiped out by the Black Death. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2723.The_Years_of_Rice_and_Salt https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2723.The_Years_of_Rice_a...
- vintermann 1y agoA thousand years ago doesn't seem that long. In Europe it's not so rare to find that the farm that your bus stop is named after, was continuously worked for 3000 years. In the Middle East they probably think that's short too!
- eesmith 1y agoThe article quotes a researcher: “Most field systems have been either lost or destroyed due to intensive land use across most of North America, through farming, including pastures and the cutting down of trees for urban development,” My watching of years of Time Team episodes tells me that Roman mosaic floors keep being found in England, like https://historicengland.org.uk/whats-new/news/rutland-roman-villa-mosaic-protected/ https://historicengland.org.uk/whats-new/news/rutland-roman-... from about 1,500 years ago. Doing so makes the news. These floors, and the ruins around them, whilst buried, don't always survive the last century or two of machine plowing, which goes deeper than the medieval animal-based plowing. Imagine the archeological excitement by your bus stop if a preserved part of the farm from 1,000 years ago were discovered, barely disturbed, giving archeologists a snapshot of what daily life was like at the time. You know also know the story of Pompeii, and how its ruins have helped understand the Roman era. This story is likely somewhere in between those two. Unlike your bus stop farm there aren't written records from the 1,000 years ago, nor are there many other sites from which to draw comparable results.
- smartmic 1y agoPut another way: There are about 38 generations in one thousand years. So, yes, it doesn't seem that long! https://howmanygenerations.com/ https://howmanygenerations.com/
- mr_toad 1y agoIn England all the Roman artefacts from 1500 years ago are ruins, while many from only ~500 years later, like the Tower of London are well preserved. Just a few centuries or so of raiding and depredations seperate the two periods of English history. In some cases Roman architecture was literally dismantled to make something new - the cathedral at St Albans is mostly made from stone taken from Roman buildings. Things can easily endure that long if well protected, but it’s a long time if they are allowed to fall into ruin (or destroyed).
- WalterBright 1y agoThe article seems to assume that the same tribe lived in that place for a thousand years. The pre-Columbian histories I've seen had the tribes moving around, based on comparisons of DNA evidence.
- isk517 1y agoDo you have a link to those histories? Everything I've seen is saying the Menominee were a settled people pre-Columbian. https://www.mpm.edu/index.php/content/wirp/ICW-153 https://www.mpm.edu/index.php/content/wirp/ICW-153
- WalterBright 1y agoIt was a TV documentary. I'm sorry I don't recall the title. There's also "Empire of the Summer Moon" about the migrations around the southern US.
- isk517 1y agoAh, found your issue. You are subscribed to the incorrect mainstream view that all native Americans nations were more or less exactly the same. You'd have as much success do this as you would learning about the Roman's by studying the tribal Germanic people.
- Huxley1 1y agoI always thought large-scale farming like this only happened under big state systems. But it looks like these communities were able to build something pretty big without that kind of centralized power. It’s also kind of amazing that the fields stayed preserved for a thousand years. Makes me wonder if we’re still underestimating how advanced some of these early farming cultures were.
- api 1y agoA while back it dawned on me that we think the greatest past civilizations were all in Egypt, the Middle East, and Mesopotamia because those areas are deserts or semi-deserts. They built out of stone because they didn't have much wood, and their writings survived because they weren't destroyed by water. There could have been very sophisticated societies, even large scale civilizations, in the past in places like North America that built mainly out of wood, clay, bone, and other readily available materials, and there'd be nothing left. Any writings would be gone too, since writings don't survive well in wet climates unless they are chiseled into very durable stone or vitrified pottery (and even then they can erode).
- altacc 1y agoWhen foreign cultures were discovered by Europeans the default thinking was to assume they were savages without culture, complex society or technology. That has echoed throughout time and still affects our view of history today. The true savages were the Europeans that preferred to subjugate or kill any non-European population they encountered. It is only recently that TV & films from the US stopped portraying the stereotypical American Indians as only vaguely more than natural fauna. Until recently US history hardly seems to acknowledge the existence of pre-Colombian towns and cities across the southern states, some with tens of thousands of inhabitants. It didn't fit the European settler narrative that they were taming the wild and when native Americans are mentioned it has been incredibly whitewashed and edited.
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- wanderingmind 1y agoMaybe they should make the paper accessible to the public. Taking public grants to do research but not providing the paper to the public is shameful.
- toss1 1y agoNote that this combination is a very synergistic combination of crops to grow together, and is millennia old. "The Three Sisters planting method, commonly known as companion planting, entails growing corn, beans, and squash together in a mutually beneficial arrangement. It originated in North America around 3000 years ago. ... Each plant brings unique advantages to the others; Corn serves as a trellis, providing a framework for the beans to grow and wrap around. Beans, acting as a natural fertilizer, add nitrogen to the soil, which benefits the growth of the corn and squash. Squash is typically planted between the corn and beans, and its ample leaves serve as a shield, blocking heat, retaining soil moisture and suppressing weed growth." [0] https://www.nps.gov/tont/learn/nature/the-three-sisters.htm https://www.nps.gov/tont/learn/nature/the-three-sisters.htm