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3 Corn in the Province of Aminoya Leonard W. Blake (Written in 1974) Leonard Blake’s Comments, 1999 In St. Louis there is an amateur society, the Mound City Archaeological Society, a chapter of the Missouri Archaeological Society, which was organized in the early 1960s. In the 1970s, some of the members used to write short articles about their archaeological interests that were printed in a newsletter, which was circulated among the members and a few others. This paper was written for that purpose and printed in February 1974 in the Newsletter of the Mound City Archaeological Society. It was reprinted in the April 1974 Quarterly Newsletter of the Illinois Association for the Advancement of Archaeology. The IAAA is a group of Illinois amateur archaeologists, organized a few years earlier, which then still had limited membership. We are assured by its secretary that it may be again reprinted here, for publications of the IAAA, purposely, are not copyrighted. I wrote this paper for fun, as a parody of some archaeological articles, and, it must be confessed, as a result of a rather childlike delight in playing with figures. Aftercompletion,itwasrealizedthatsecond-handtestimonyofaromanticwriter, who was not a part of the De Soto expedition, could not be taken seriously. Also, no one knows whether Garcilaso de la Vega is talking about “corn-on-the-cob” or about “shelled” corn, that is, corn kernels removed from the cob. There is archaeological evidence that some protohistoric Indians in northern Arkansas stored their corn on the cob in above-ground structures (Blake and Cutler 1979). Weights per bushel used in this report are those of shelled corn. Calling my paper a “parody” gives an excuse, of sorts, for its production. No one archaeological report is targeted, but it should not be too hard to find one. When the members of the De Soto expedition again saw the Mississippi after their nearly disastrous attempt to reach Mexico overland, according to Garcilaso, they came upon “ . . . two towns, one near the other, and each comprising 200 houses . . . On entering these places the Castilians found a great quantity of corn, and other grains and vegetables as well as such dried fruits as nuts, raisins, prunes, acorns, and some additional ones unknown to Spain . . . Alonso de Carmona declares that on measuring the corn found in both settlements, they discovered that there was by count eighteen thousand bushels of it . . .” (Varner and Varner 1951:531–32). Castetter and Bell (1942:52) indicate that the corn yields of the Pima seldom exceed 10 to 12 bushels per acre. Will and Hyde (1968:142) said that yields of 20 to 25 bushels an acre were considered unusually good, while agriculture was practiced using Indian methods on the Upper Missouri. If a figure of 25 bushels per acre is used, 18,000 bushels represents the production of at least 720 acres, or corn fields totaling more than a square mile. If an estimate of 12 bushels per acre is used, 1,500 acres or nearly 2 and 3 8 square miles of corn fields would be required to produce 18,000 bushels. The latter figure seems more probable, despite the fertility of the alluvial valley of the Mississippi, because Indian cultivators often grew other crops such as squash and beans, mixed with the corn. Will and Hyde (1968:108) figure a family as six persons in their calculations of the number of acres cultivated per family while native agriculture was still in its primitive state on the Upper Missouri. According to their information, the area in cultivation of all crops came to 1 3 to 1 acre per person, or 2 to 6 acres per family. Using six persons per house gives an estimated population of 2,400 persons for the two towns with a total of 400 houses. Seven hundred and twenty acres in cornseemsabitonthelowside,asitamountstolessthan 1 3 ofanacreperperson. One thousand five hundred acres is equivalent to 5 8 of an acre per person, when population is estimated at 2,400. If one calculates five persons per house, the estimatedpopulationis2,000.Withthispopulation,averageacreageperperson is less than 3 8 of an acre, if yields are 25 bushels; or 3 4 of an acre, if yields are 12 bushels. The latter population estimate produces a per capita acreage use closer to Will and Hyde’s data for the more sedentary tribes. Ifthepopulationwas2,400people,18,000bushelswouldprovide7.5bushels, or 410 pounds, of corn for each man, woman and child, as corn weighs about 56 pounds per bushel. When...

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