Millennium-old earthen sites demonstrate Indigenous farming skills

SciTech Daily reports that a team of Dartmouth University researchers have found an intricate system of raised agricultural beds in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula along the Menominee River. The formations cover more than two-thirds of a survey area at Sixty Island archaeological site, signs that early Native communities practiced intensive farming to grow corn, squash, beans and other crops in an area typically deemed cold and with too brief a growing season to sustain large crops.

“The scale of this agricultural system by ancestral Menominee communities is 10 times larger than what was previously estimated,” lead author Madeleine McLeester, an assistant professor of anthropology at Dartmouth, was quoted as saying. “That forces us to reconsider a number of preconceived ideas we have about agriculture not only in the region, but globally.”

The team’s findings are published in Science and build on previous work done at the request of the Menominee Tribe.