Archaeologica.org

An amazing discovery and a well written piece.

Evidence of ancient farming found

By Jeff Nagel | June 20, 2008

A 3,600-year-old native village site uncovered during road work for the new Golden Ears Bridge is being hailed as a globally significant find that suggests aboriginal people here were Canada’s first recorded farmers.

The ancient discovery has electrified archaeologists who say it may help reverse long-held notions of pre-contact natives as hunter-gatherers who didn’t actively garden or otherwise manage the landscape.

It also shines a new spotlight on the accelerating loss of First Nations heritage sites in the Lower Mainland to make way for new highways, bridges and development.

The site was found more than a year ago but has been kept quiet throughout a 10-month excavation that wrapped up this spring.

And it will soon be paved over.

The Abernethy connector is being built through the ancient village to link the Golden Ears Bridge to Maple Ridge and Pitt Meadows.

But rather than oppose the road work, the local Katzie First Nation headed up the dig themselves.

rest of the story here---http://www.bclocalnews.com/news/20615209.html

Sam Salmon wrote:[...] it will soon be paved over.

Joni Mitchell's prophetic words prove a universal truth once again:

"They paved paradise and put up a parking lot"...

http://tinyurl.com/3srjlq

Perhaps some day we will find that agriculture, rather than being some great leap forward, was merely a situational response to the environment. When climatic conditions allowed for it, people practiced it. When they did not, they fell back on other means of eating?

I still think we have to make a distinction between farming and gardening and “helping nature”.
A nomadic H/G may find a patch of berry bushes and encourage growth by removing a few other bushes so the favored ones grow more.
But that is not gardening and certainly not farming.
Gardening can still be done by a basically nomadic people with fast growing plants, like squash, but it is not farming.
Farming is a much longer term activity.
Year around living at a single place with life revolving around fields cultivated and devoted to a single crop from season to season.
All three require some kind of a work / reward concept.
But to far varying degrees.

Single crop? or companion plants? In the right environment a well planned garden needs little help from humans.

I think it is a matter of scale.
Corn and pumpkins do well together in a garden scale.
But farming means larger plots. “Fields”
Tending to the need of 2 or more kinds of plants gets out of hand then.

In the British Feudal period KB villagers cultivated lots of little plots.
So gardeners or farmers?

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 163156.htm

Now, in addition to more traditional macrobotanical and archeological remains, scientists are using new genetic and microbotanical techniques to distinguish domesticated maize from its wild relatives as well as to identify ancient sites of maize agriculture. These new analyses suggest that maize may have been domesticated in Mexico as early as 10,000 years ago.

Digit,
Wasn’t the social structure such that the serfs were not allowed to have large plots?
They had to make do with what they could semi hide from the Lords that controlled the property.
Otherwise they were becoming a threat by becoming common law landowners.
A political problem not a technical one.

No KB, it was designed to see that each villager recieved equal shares of good and poorer quality plots, those within easy distance from the village and those further away for example.
The distribution was normally overseen by the villagers themselves.

Maybe I'm mistaken but I thought large plot farming was a relatively recent development - I mean last few hundred years or so.

That's correct in this country WA. A change in farming practice brought about mainly since WW2 as a response to mechanisation.
Horse drawn machines could not cultivate enough land in a working day to make large areas farming worthwhile. Also machines cannot work on hill slopes.

The Romans developed plantations known as latifundia but, of course, such were only possible due to slavery.

Otherwise, farming is much too labor intensive without machinery to make large farms viable.

Well I guess we into a matter of definitions.
When I said large scale I meant from a single family with hand tools point of view.
Certainly not the multi thousand acre Nebraska wheat farms of today.
Maybe 2 or 3 acres max.
By that definition I would call the English gardeners.
I would also have to throw in an economic factor.
Gardening was for the families consumption.
I think farming has a “for trade” concept behind it.

Dang, that article was tooth-grindingly awful for a lot of reasons.