Harvesting the Past
Plants and People in Prehistoric Tennessee
6 September - 30 November 1997
Since the arrival of Europeans in the Americas, native American plants have been a focus of intense interest. By the 16th century, plants such as corn and sunflower were being sent to Europe for cultivation.
Today, 60% of the food consumed by humans is derived from four plant groups — wheat and rice from Asia and corn (maize) and potatoes from the Americas.
Contrary to popular thinking, Native Americans, including Native Americans in Tennessee, became skilled landscape managers and food producers more than 2,000 years ago. Details are continually being revealed through the development of new techniques and technologies in a field called paleoethnobotany.
ARCHAEOLOGICAL ARTIFACTS ASSOCIATED WITH
PLANT FOOD PRODUCTION AND PROCESSING
Left to right: mortar and pestle, stone hoe, and "nutting stone"
PALEOETHNOBOTANY
Paleo ("old") + ethno ("people") + botany ("the science of plants") is the study of the interrelations between people and plants in prehistoric times. Just as people of the past left artifacts which have become evidence of their many activities, so too were left remains of their foods, such as charred nuts and seeds.
TWO FLOTATION TANKS IN
OPERATION.
Soil is placed in the drums;
carbonized plant remains float
to the surface and are captured
in fine mesh at the bottom of
the buckets on the left.
In the mid-1960s, intensive, long-term archaeological investigations associated with several Tennessee Valley Authority dam projects provided a laboratory for the development of new methods for the recovery and study of plant remains. Techniques such as water screening (washing soil through small-mesh screens) and flotation (mixing soil with water to allow the less dense plant materials to float) enabled the separation of plant remains from soil. Scanning electron microscopes (SEM) permitted the magnification of tiny plant parts thousands of times, and accelerator mass spectrometry, a specialized form of radiocarbon dating, allowed direct dating of the actual plant remains.
The processing of thousands of metric tons of deposits from archaeological sites in Tennessee over the past 25 years, and the analysis of the plant materials recovered from them, have documented the changes in plant foods and how people got them, briefly outlined below:
- 10,000 years ago - Small groups of people lived by hunting and gathering wild plant foods, moving from place to place as plant availability changed with the seasons. Especially important plant foods included hickory nuts, acorns, and walnuts.
- About 8,000-7,000 years ago - People became more settled in certain river valleys, and began gathering "weedy" plants, such as sumac, pokeweed, wild grape, and a gourd-like squash.
- 4,200 years ago - Sunflowers, Tennessee's first domesticated native plant, appeared.
- 3,000 years ago - People began to garden intensively, then to grow crops in fields. A specific group of seed-bearing plants, including lambsquarters, sunflower, marsh elder, and maygrass were the highly productive and nutritious crops.
SEM (SCANNING ELECTRON MICROSCOPE)
PHOTOGRAPH OF A 2,500-YEAR-OLD
DOMESTICATED LAMBSQUARTERS SEED
Actual size = 1.5 mm.
- By 1,800 years ago - Tennesseans began to grow corn (maize). They were the first people in what is now the southeastern United States to grow this Mexican grain.
- 1,000 years ago - Corn was the primary crop in Tennessee. By this time, people lived in large villages or towns within territories, were highly organized with social classes, and were governed by hereditary rulers. Trade and the arts flourished.
- 900-850 years ago - Native farmers were growing domesticated beans, another crop originally from Mexico.
16TH CENTURY ENGRAVING OF THE
INDIAN TOWN OF SECOTA IN VIRGINIA.
Shows gardens of corn, pumpkins,
sunflowers, and tobacco.
This exhibition chronicles the evolution of native Tennesseans from hunters and gatherers to successful farmers growing a crop of major importance. However, then — as now — these advances have not been free of inherent problems. An examination of human skeletal remains from the later agrarian times reveals a number of health complications, including dental caries (cavities) and signs of anemia due to an overdependence on corn in the diet.
DIET, NUTRITION, AND HEALTH
Today there is great concern and interest about health and fitness at all levels of society. Proper diet and nutrition are major components of a healthy lifestyle.
Much useful information regarding diet, nutrition, and health is in the exhibition, which includes nutrition facts for many of the plant foods in the exhibit, both wild and domesticated. Visitors can compare their diets with those of the past.
Below are just two examples of the kinds of comparisons that can be made. On the left is an unfamiliar but important food in the past — acorn flour, and on the right is a familiar and important food from the past — the sunflower.
 ACORN FLOUR NUTRITION CHART Acorns could be ground into flour and used in a bread. Like many nuts, acorns provided necessary fats, proteins, and other nutrients. |
 SUNFLOWER SEEDS NUTRITION CHART Sunflower seeds are an oily type of seed high in calories, dietary fiber, protein, and certain vitamins and minerals. For prehistoric Tennesseans, sunflower was a highly nutritious crop. |
ONGOING RESEARCH
Intensive ethnobotanical research continues at the McClung Museum with new areas of focus coming to the fore.
ENLARGED PHOTOGRAPH SHOWING
THE INCREASE IN MARSH ELDER
SEED SIZE AS A RESULT OF
INDIAN CULTIVATION.
The seed on the left is 5,000 years old,
the center one is 800 years old,
and the right one is 500 years old.
The ethnobotany lab is involved in research on the extensive maize collections housed in the Museum in an effort to identify the variety and changes in maize in the region through time. This effort is coordinated with colleagues at other institutions in the hopes of identifying the genetic relationships of various corn varieties in order to better evaluate their strengths and weaknesses through analysis of DNA.
PLEASE NOTE: The exhibition logo at the top of this page, and the icons immediately above, illustrate
five important plant foods for the Indians of prehistoric Tennessee: sunflower, marsh elder, hickory nuts,
white oak acorns, and corn.