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Late Archaic across the Borderlands
Why and when human societies shifted from nomadic hunting and gathering to settled agriculture engages the interest of scholars around the world. One of the most fruitful areas in which to study this issue is the North American Southwest, where Late Archaic inhabitants of the Sonoran and Chihuahuan Deserts of Mexico, Arizona, and New Mexico turned to farming while their counterparts in Trans-Pecos and South Texas continued to forage. By investigating the environmental, biological, and cultural factors that led to these differing patterns of development, we can identify some of the necessary conditions for the rise of agriculture and the corresponding evolution of village life. The twelve papers in this volume synthesize previous and ongoing research and offer new theoretical models to provide the most up-to-date picture of life during the Late Archaic (from 3,000 to 1,500 years ago) across the entire North American Borderlands. Some of the papers focus on specific research topics such as stone tool technology and mobility patterns. Others study the development of agriculture across whole regions within the Borderlands. The two concluding papers trace pan-regional patterns in the adoption of farming and also link them to the growth of agriculture in other parts of the world.
eBook
Freedom Farmers
In May 1967, internationally renowned activist Fannie Lou Hamer
purchased forty acres of land in the Mississippi Delta, launching
the Freedom Farms Cooperative (FFC). A community-based rural and
economic development project, FFC would grow to over 600 acres,
offering a means for local sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and
domestic workers to pursue community wellness, self-reliance, and
political resistance. Life on the cooperative farm presented an
alternative to the second wave of northern migration by African
Americans--an opportunity to stay in the South, live off the land,
and create a healthy community based upon building an alternative
food system as a cooperative and collective effort. Freedom
Farmers expands the historical narrative of the black freedom
struggle to embrace the work, roles, and contributions of southern
Black farmers and the organizations they formed. Whereas existing
scholarship generally views agriculture as a site of oppression and
exploitation of black people, this book reveals agriculture as a
site of resistance and provides a historical foundation that adds
meaning and context to current conversations around the resurgence
of food justice/sovereignty movements in urban spaces like Detroit,
Chicago, Milwaukee, New York City, and New Orleans.
eBook
Gardenland : nature, fantasy, and everyday practice
\"Garden writing is not just a place to find advice about roses and rutabagas; it also contains hidden histories of desire, hope, and frustration and tells a story about how Americans have invested grand fantasies in the common soil of everyday life. Gardenland chronicles the development of this genre across key moments in American literature and history, from nineteenth-century industrialization and urbanization to the twentieth-century rise of factory farming and environmental advocacy to contemporary debates about public space and social justice--even to the consideration of the future of humanity's place on earth. Gardenland examines literary fiction, horticultural publications, and environmental writing, including works by Charles Dudley Warner, Henry David Thoreau, Willa Cather, Jamaica Kincaid, John McPhee, and Leslie Marmon Silko. Ultimately, Gardenland asks what the past century and a half of garden writing might tell us about our current social and ecological moment, and it offers surprising insight into our changing views about the natural world, along with realms that may otherwise seem remote from the world of leeks and hollyhocks\" -- Provided by publisher.
Book
The first weed management textbook in the United States (part 2)
This article overviews the earliest weed management book published in the United States. The most problematic weeds of that era are named, along with suggestions for their control.
Journal Article
Beyond the fruited plain : food and agriculture in U.S. literature, 1850-1905
\"Agriculture in the United States has changed dramatically in the last two hundred years. Economic transformation marked by the expansion of the industrial economy and big business has contributed to an increase in industrial food production. Amid this change, policymakers and cultural critics have debated the best way to produce food and wealth for an expanding population with imperialistic tendencies. In a sweeping overview, Beyond the Fruited Plain traces the connections between nineteenth-century literature, agriculture, and U.S. territorial and economic expansion. Bringing together theories of globalization and ecocriticism, Kathryn Cornell Dolan offers new readings on the texts of such literary figures as Herman Melville, Frank Norris, Mark Twain, Henry David Thoreau, and Harriet Beecher Stowe as they examine conflicts of food, labor, class, race, gender, and time--issues still influencing U.S. food politics today. Beyond the Fruited Plain shows how these authors use their literature to imagine agricultural alternatives to national practices and in so doing prefigure twenty-first-century concerns about globalization, resource depletion, food security, and the relation of industrial agriculture to pollution, disease, and climate change. \"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
The seeds are coming home: a rising movement for Indigenous seed rematriation in the United States
Seed rematriation is a rising movement within greater efforts to improve seed and food sovereignty for Native American communities in the United States. As a feminized reframing of repatriation, rematriation seeks to heal Indigenous relationships with food, seeds, and landscapes. Since first contact, Native agricultural practices have been systematically targeted by colonization, resulting in the diminished biodiversity of cultural gardening systems. Of this vast wealth, many varieties exist today solely under the stewardship of non-Native institutions. Seed rematriation is therefore the process and movement by which Native nations reclaim their cultural seed heritages. Once seeds are returned to the hands and soils of their home communities, Indigenous Nations can reestablish healthy, diverse, and sustainable seed and foodways for generations to come. This article explores the history of the term rematriation within Indigenous sovereignty scholarship as well as its evolving interpretations and applications. Considering how the seed rematriation movement has been shaped by several seed keepers in the Midwest reveals the cultural understandings and significances that underpin this work across many aspects of Indigenous lifeways. The resulting discussion from ethnographic material demonstrates why seed reclamation and seed sovereignty movements in the Midwest uphold Native nationhood through both resurgence and refusal. The Indigenous processes of recognizing and reclaiming seeds work beyond recovering agricultural knowledge to also mend severed kin relationships, rejuvenate cultural knowledge, and reestablish authority over Indigenous food systems.
Journal Article
Prehistoric Irrigation in Central Utah: Chronology, Agricultural Economics, and Implications
In 1928, Noel Morss was shown “irrigation ditches” along Pleasant Creek on the Dixie National Forest near Capitol Reef National Park, Utah, by a local guide who contended they were ancient. We relocated the site and mapped the route of an unusual mountain irrigation canal. We conducted excavations and employed OSL and AMS 14C showing historic irrigation, and an earlier event between AD 1460 and 1636. Geomorphic evidence indicates that the canal existed prior to this time, but we cannot date its original construction. The canal is 7.2 km long, originating at 2,450 m asl and terminating at 2,170 m asl. Less than half of the system was hand constructed. We cannot ascribe the prehistoric use-event to an archaeological culture, language, or ethnic group, but the 100+ sites nearby are largely Fremont in cultural affiliation. We also report the results of experimental modeling of the capital and maintenance costs of the system, which holds implications for irrigation north of the Colorado River and farming during the Little Ice Age. The age of the prehistoric canal is consistent with a fragmentary abandonment of farming and continuity between ancient and modern tribes in Utah.
Journal Article