Climate, Ecology and History in North America’s Tallgrass Prairie Borderlands*

Abstract

In the late 1600s, one of the largest population centres in North America — the so‐called Grand Village of the Kaskaskias in the upper Illinois River Valley — suddenly dissolved as various factions among its indigenous inhabitants split apart. While historians have often explained the resulting migrations as a response to the beginnings of colonial history in this region, this article argues that a greater factor may have been climate change. The region of the Illinois Valley was one of the most important ecological transition zones in North America, a biome-scale ecotone between the grasslands of the West and the woodlands of the East. New studies suggest that a major drought in this period had a drastic effect on the special ecological mosaic here, causing interruptions in dynamic ecosystem processes which likely impacted indigenous ways of life. This article provides not only a better understanding for one of the most consequential turning points in late seventeenth-century North American indigenous history, but also a model of the potential benefits of bringing ethnohistory, deep history, climate history and ecology together in a single cross-disciplinary narrative.

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

“…This vast prairie was flanked by the Wabash and Illinois river valleys, where the earliest domesticated sumpweed and goosefoot have been recovered, and where the best evidence for little barley ( Hordeum pusillum ) domestication occurs (Asch and Asch, 1985; Hunter, 1992; Smith and Yarnell, 2009) (Figure 1). In the colonial era, the Illinois people who lived on the Grand Prairie used fire to actively maintain a patchy landscape of forest, prairie, and agricultural land, all of which were necessary for their lifestyle (Morrissey, 2019). Historically, bison hunting was also an important part of this lifestyle, in Illinois and elsewhere in the midcontinent (Morrissey, 2016).…”