Experimental Cultivation of Eastern North America's Lost Crops: Insights into Agricultural Practice and Yield Potential

Abstract

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Is Domestication Speciation? The Implications of a Messy Domestication Model in the Holocene

“…Indeed, in doing so, we can take more into account, notions such as comparator moments between ancient domesticates and modern domesticates, how the evolutionary nature of domestication continues and does not have an end point (see work on Chenopodium sp. by [54,67,68]).…”

Reconsidering domestication from a process archaeology perspective

“…Turning to yield, recent experiments with North American crop progenitors have shown that wild plants are capable of producing similar yields to their domesticated relatives when sufficient labour is invested in cultivation (Mueller, White, and Szilagyi 2019). Since the selective pressures associated with cultivation are the most likely explanation for how domestic annual plants emerged, these results suggest that some increases in yield pre-date domestication.…”

“…Recent experimental work with wild boar has also demonstrated that the entire skeleton of animals, and not just their behaviours, show immediate responses to life in anthropogenic ecosystems (Harbers et al 2020), facilitating the emergence of new morphologies (Neaux et al 2021). Similarly, wild crop progenitors may be especially plastic, capable of responding to cultivation or anthropogenic ecosystems (Ménard et al 2013;Piperno et al 2015Piperno et al , 2019Matesanz and Milla 2018;Mueller, White, and Szilagyi 2019).…”

Archaeobotanical futures in the Indo‐Pacific

“…Archaeobotany can also contribute to recent concerns with making the past relevant to present‐day challenges (Boivin & Crowther, 2021; Reed & Ryan, 2019), whether in terms of adapting to climate change (Burke et al., 2021), resilience (Redman, 2005), sustainability (Fitzpatrick et al., in press), environmental change (Matthews et al., 2012) and so on. Specifically, archaeobotany can directly contribute to debates concerning agrobiodiversity (Gepts et al., 2012), crop improvement (Perrier et al., 2011), indigenous technical/agricultural knowledge (Swiderska & Ryan, 2021), domesticating wild plants in the present (Drake et al., 2021), a re‐engagement with ‘lost crops’ (Chapman, 2022; Mueller et al., 2019), and so on. This list is not exhaustive and these are not abstract concerns; there is widespread and growing interest in how people‐plant interactions in the past can assist communities, particularly at local and regional levels, to move towards sustainable ways of living‐in‐the‐world.…”