Plants from the Past: Works Of Leonard W. Blake & Hugh C. Cutler

5. Cultivated Plant Remains from Historic Missouri and Osage Indian Sites

5 Cultivated Plant Remains from Historic Missouri and Osage Indian Sites Leonard W. Blake Washington University (Written in 1986) Leonard Blake’s Comments, 1999 This paper was one of several given by different people in a symposium on the Missouri and Osage tribes, organized by Dr. Carl H. Chapman, given on April 25, 1986, at the Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology at New Orleans. We had been receiving plant remains from excavations at Missouri and Osage sites by the University of Missouri-Columbia for a period of over 20 years. Cultivated plant remains from two Missouri, two Little Osage, and two Big Osage sites are discussed here. They consist of carbonized specimens picked from deposits and those recovered by flotation. Others have reported on the amount of excavation and recovery at the various sites. I have been asked to report separately on three parts of the Utz site, occupied by the Missouri Indians, that is, 23Sa2, 23Sa2B, and 23Sa2C. Recovery of trade items at the last indicates historic, post-contact occupation at that part of the site. Table 5.1 gives comparative figures on the carbonized corn cobs and cob fragments recovered. All but a very small part are of a race called Eastern Eight Row (Cutler and Blake 1976), formerly Northern Flint (Brown and Anderson 1947), which usually has eight, sometimes ten, and rarely twelve rows of kernels. This race of corn reached as far north and east as Ontario, Canada, by about a.d. 800 (Stothers 1976:156). By a.d. 1200 it dominated most of the country east of the Mississippi, and, by a.d. 1500, most of the region east of the Rockies (Cutler and Blake 1976:5). Corn from the sites considered here has been described by Dr. Hugh C. Cutler as follows: “The mean row number is slightly higher [than that of most examples of this race], the grains a bit thinner and the cupule not quite as elevated, differences pointing to varieties of areas farther south” (Cutler n.d.). Table 5.1. Comparison of Corn Cobs from Historic Missouri and Osage Sites and from a Historic Kickapoo Site Median % of Total Cobs Mean Cupule Row Number No. Row Width Cobs No. (mm)* 8 10 12 14 16+ Missouri Gumbo Point (23Sa4) 1712–1794 No measureable cobs or fragments were recovered Utz (23Sa2C) 1650–1712 47 9.2 8.8 51 41 6 2 — (23Sa2) ca. 1460–1712 33 9.2 8.6 51 40 9 — — (23Sa2B) ca. 1460–1712 15 9.2 7.4 60 20 20 — — Little Osage Coal Pit (23Ve4) 1790–1820 459 8.8 9 65 29 5 1 — Plattner (23Sa3) 1714–1794 6 10.3 6.5 33 17 50 — — Big Osage Carrington (23Ve1) 1775–1820 76 8.9 8.3 66 22 11 1 — Brown (23Ve3) ca. 1650–1777 87 9.1 8.7 55 38 6 1 — Corn cobs from another site for comparison Kickapoo Rhoads (11Lo8) 1760–1820 262 8.4 8.3 85 12 3 — — All corn cobs are carbonized. * Cupule width, the distance across the entire pocket in which a pair of grains and their spikelets is borne, is a measure of the size of the cob. (Cutler and Blake 1976:4). Remains from Historic Missouri and Osage Indian Sites 47 Table 5.1 illustrates a typical example of more northern Eastern Eight Row from the Rhoads Kickapoo site of a.d. 1760–1820 in Illinois. Several of the small twelve- and fourteen-rowed cobs from Utz and from most of the Osage sites appear to be of a race of popcorn called North American Pop (Cutler and Blake 1976), an early race grown by some of the Plains Indians (Will and Hyde 1968:305, 307), which has persisted into the present. At the relatively late Coal Pit site several very large twelve- and fourteen-rowed cobs maybetheresultofslightmixingofthelarge,many-rowedSouthernDentcorns being grown by white farmers in the South in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Brown and Anderson 1948; Anderson and Brown 1952), but it was not sufficient to alter the overall composition of the corn. It will be noted that the mean row number of corn from the later Osage sites of Coal Pit and Carrington, which date into the nineteenth century, is slightly lower and the proportion of eight-rowed corn greater than that of corn from Utz and Brown, which were abandoned in 1712 and 1772...