Bison, anthropogenic fire, and the origins of agriculture in eastern North America

Abstract

Scholars have argued that plant domestication in eastern North America involved human interactions with floodplain weeds in woodlands that had few other early successional environments. Archeological evidence for plant domestication in this region occurs along the Mississippi river and major tributaries such as the Tennessee, Ohio, Illinois, Missouri, and Arkansas rivers. But this region is also known as the prairie peninsula: a prairie-woodland mosaic that was maintained by anthropogenic fire starting as early as 6000 BP. Contrary to conventional wisdom, recent research has shown that bison were also present in the prairie peninsula throughout the Holocene. Recent reintroductions of bison to tallgrass prairies have allowed ecologists to study the effects of their grazing on this ecosystem for the first time. Like rivers and humans, bison create early successional habitats for annual forbs and grasses, including the progenitors of eastern North American crops, within tallgrass prairies. Our fieldwork has shown that crop progenitors are conspicuous members of plant communities along bison trails and in wallows. We argue that ancient foragers encountered dense, easily harvestable stands of crop progenitors as they moved along bison trails, and that the ecosystems created by bison and anthropogenic fire served as a template for the later agroecosystem of this region. Without denying the importance of human-river interactions highlighted by previous researchers, we suggest that prairies have been ignored as possible loci for domestication, largely because the disturbed, biodiverse tallgrass prairies created by bison have only been recreated in the past three decades after a century of extinction.

Reconsidering domestication from a process archaeology perspective

“…Cooperation in domestication relationships also developed between humans and non-humans. This took place, for example, when humans became seed dispersers in place of large herbivores in numerous small-seeded crop progenitors (Spengler and Mueller 2019;Mueller et al 2020), and when commensal animals were mutually tolerated in anthropogenic environments (Zeder 2012a). Both the wolf (Lahtinen et al 2021) and the wild boar (Price and Hongo 2020) were likely initially attracted to human settlements by human food waste before entering a cooperative relationship, obtaining protection against predators and a secure food source from the human community.…”

“…The question of 'how' this interaction operates becomes the answer to 'why' domestication occurs (Stépanoff and Vigne 2018). Mueller et al have argued that the domestication of certain annual seed crops in eastern North America arose from deep evolutionary relationships between these plants and bison herds (Mueller et al 2020). They envision the early Holocene landscape created by grazing bison as a template for the later agroecosystems created by people: hotspots (Marshall et al 2018) harbouring dense stands of seed-bearing plants in nitrogen-enriched soils exploited and then recreated by people.…”

Exaptation Traits for Megafaunal Mutualisms as a Factor in Plant Domestication

“…The traits of domestication seen in the archaeological record parallel evolutionary processes in the wild; therefore, a better understanding of the archaeological record could come from discussions with evolutionary ecologists. Likewise, many traits in plants that favored farming originally evolved on now extinct landscapes; therefore, the missing variables for understanding early plant domestication may come from restored megafaunal landscapes, such as the bison preserves of the American Midwest, Białowieski National Park in Poland, or Pleistocene Park in Sakha Republic, Russia (e.g., Mueller et al, 2020 ).…”

Quantifying available energy and anthropogenic energy use in the Mississippi River Basin

“…Foraging, hunting, and early agriculture meant that, besides firewood, human labour was the primary energy source. Only low-impact energy diversions occurred via dam building, pyro-agriculture, and animal tracking (Mueller et al, 2020; Nye, 1998: 16). Following European colonisation, anthropogenic impacts appeared to increase an order of magnitude (Knox, 2006).…”