000 YEARS AGO. ALTHOUGH THE TERM “NEOLITHIC” ISNOT USED IN NOR...

2,000 years ago. Although the term “Neolithic” is

not used in North American prehistory, these were the

first steps toward the same major

subsistence changes that took place during the Neolithic (8,000-2,000

B.C.) period elsewhere in the world.

Archaeologists debate the reasons for beginning cultivation in the eastern part of the continent.

Although population and sedentary living were increasing at the time, there is

little evidence that people

lacked

adequate wild food resources; the newly domesticated

foods supplemented a continuing mixed

subsistence of hunting, fishing, and gathering wild plants, increasing predictability of food supplies may

have been a motive. It has been suggested that some early cultivation was for medicinal and ceremonial

plants rather than for food. One archaeologist has pointed out that the early domesticated plants were all

weedy species that do well in open, disturbed habitats, the kind that would form around

human settlements

where people cut down trees, trample the ground, deposit trash, and dig holes. It has been suggested that

sunflower, sumpweed, and other plants almost domesticated themselves that is; they

thrived in human –

disturbed habitats, so humans intensively collected them and began to control their distribution. Women in

the Archaic communities were probably the main experimenters with cultivation, because

ethnoarchaeological evidence tells us that women were the main collectors of plant food and had detailed

knowledge of plants.