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2 Confounding Stereotypes Building an Earthlodge for Fun and Edi¤cation Michael Scullin It was 1975 and our second season at a Cambria phase site on the Minnesota River about 15 miles (24 km) upstream from Mankato and what was then Mankato State University. The site had been brought to our attention by its owner Dave Price and was thus known as the Price site (21BE36). The people of the Cambria phase were horticulturalists who raised a combination of corn, squash, and sun®owers, hunted bison, deer, and beaver, and¤shed in the Minnesota River. Thus we (“we” being the core group of the excavating crew, consisting of three students and me) were excavating an area with well-constructed bell-shaped storage pits on the site a couple of miles (about 3 km) upstream on the Minnesota River from the principal occupation —the Cambria site (21BE2). Radiocarbon dates from charcoal recovered during the 1974 season gave us a date for Price of about a.d. 1100. We were ¤nding bison scapula hoes, bison scapula squash knives, deer mandible corn scrapers, and carbonized kernels of corn. Ceramics were distinctive and well manufactured. The storage pits tended to be 100–120 cm deep and about as wide at the base. Corn was obviously an important component of the residents’ diet. A large, well-developed sun®ower seed and some squash seeds ¤lled out the garden fare (although the residents may also have been growing Chenopodium berlandieri). No beans had yet made it to the trash of Price. The people of the Price site had been fully involved with the horticulture of the times. They were producing corn in considerable quantity and storing it in large pits for winter and spring consumption. The corn was eight rowed and essentially identical to modern varieties of Northern Flint. Much to our frustration, which has never been resolved, we could ¤nd no evidence for the type of dwelling in which the people had lived. Certainly it was not earthlodges, and it was not the familiar rectangular lodges found in many parts of the Northern Plains. We still do not know despite further work, and at that time dwellings were very much on our minds. The summer of 1975 was very hot and dry, and the soil in the pits baked to the consistency of a parking lot. We drank lots of water and did lots of complaining, but in our travels and travails we couldn’t help but notice the ever-increasing presence of what we knew to be Farmfest ’76 planners and movers and shakers. The following year, 1976, of course, was the Bicentennial , and Farmfest ’76 was to be the of¤cial national celebration to end all celebrations for and of American farms and American farmers. AN IDEA IS BORN After the ninth or tenth or eleventh storage pit a conversation turned to the topic of Farmfest, the site of which was a mere 10 miles south. What, we collectively wondered, would they be doing to celebrate the contributions of American Indians to American agriculture—to global agriculture for that matter? Here we were excavating the homesteads of some horticulturalists from the early twelfth century—how was their story going to be told? Would it be told at all? What about the nearly two hundred plants domesticated by American Indians in North, Central, and South America? How did this ¤t in with the Bicentennial? We knew from our experiences with visitors to the site and from conversations with friends, neighbors, and colleagues that knowledge of southern Minnesota prehistory was slight to say the least. In general, we could conclude that even in academia any sort of information about American Indians and modern agriculture was con¤ned pretty much to Squanto and the Pilgrims . What most people knew, if anything, was that Indians buried ¤sh in hills of corn (they didn’t). Thus it was that we drove to the site of Farmfest ’76 and knocked on the door of the trailer that was serving as headquarters. The movers and shakers were polite. They had some notion of a display built around a nineteenthcentury farmstead. They had no idea that Indians had anything whatsoever to do with agriculture. The notion that the paying public might ¤nd a display depicting American Indian contributions to agriculture interesting seemed doubtful—competing as it would be with hundreds of acres of crop demonstrations , acres of farm equipment old and new, and hundreds of agricultural promotions of herbicides, insecticides, fungicides...

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