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.