People, Plants, and Landscapes: Studies in Paleoethnobotany

9. Changing Strategies of Indian Field Location in the Early Historic Southeast

CHAPTER 9 Changing Strategies of Indian Field Location in the Early Historic Southeast GREGORY A. WASELKOV During the historic period, from the mid-sixteenth century to the early nineteenth century, Indian societies of southeastern North America adjusted to changing epidemiological, demographic, political, technological , and social circumstances that developed in the course of European conquest and colonization. Native American adaptive responses to this invasion involved alterations in traditional agricultural practices, including the strategies employed in selecting field locations. Direct evidence of Indian fields has only occasionally been retrievable from the archaeological record (Fowler 1969, 1992; Kelly 1938; Riley 1987), although recent conceptual breakthroughs in settlement interpretation promise better results in the future (Killion 1992). On the other hand, historical documents, both written descriptions and cartographic depictions, can provide considerable insight on preferred agricultural soils. This data source has not been exploited in a systematic way by southeastern ethnohistorians, but it could serve as a useful corrective to the most naive of cultural resource models that rely exclusively on site-soil correlations. Because native agricultural goals and methods varied greatly across the Southeast, both among societies and through time, it is not yet possible , unfortunately, to account for all strategies of Indian field location according to any single, unified explanatory model. The western Muskogean Choctaws and Chickasaws seem to have followed a sequence of farming strategies that was out of synchrony with that of their congeners to the east. Historical analysis of Choctaw agricultural practices suggests that their late prehistoric preference for bottomland 179 180 Gregory A. Waselkov soils in major river valleys gave way, in the early historic period, to a decided partiality for upland loamy soils, only to revert in the nineteenth century to the bottomlands (White 1983:14,24-25, 132-37).1 The Chickasaws may have undergone a similar transition (Johnson et al. 1989;Waselkov 1989:332-34) (figure 9. I). Archaeologists arejust beginning to consider the question of changing Choctaw and Chickasaw settlement systems, and we should be learning much more in the near future about their strategies of field location. The focus of this discussion will be restricted to another part ofthe Southeast, from the southern Appalachian Cherokee country, through the Creek (or Muskogee) territory of modern-day Alabama, Georgia, and Florida, to the north-central Gulf coast. There, a different sequence of shifting field location strategies evidently occurred during the historic era. Throughout this portion of the Southeast, the seventeenthcentury and eighteenth-century native inhabitants of the region seem to have continued the traditional agricultural practices of their Mississippian predecessors, employing a labor-intensive, mixed-habitat strategy that combined large, communal field cultivation in floodplain bottomlands with household gardening on terrace soils in or adjacent to villages (Hudson 1976:291;Ward 1965:44;Woods 1987). Since bottomlands are subject to periodic flooding, which is accompanied by silt deposition that maintains soil fertility indefinitely, fields located there were continuously cultivated for centuries. When the French arrived on the north-central Gulf coast in 1699 to establish the colony of Louisiana, they found several small tribes (including Mobilians, Tomehs, and Pensacolas) living in villages situated in and around the Mobile-Tensaw delta, which at 180,000 acres is the third-largest swamp in the Southeast. Most of these groups, and other small refugee tribes that soon joined them, typically located their villages on high bluffs overlooking the delta and placed their fields in the bottomlands, which were inundated every spring (figures 9.2 and 9.3). At first, the French and Indian settlements coexisted as complementary segments of a single colonial system, with Indians providing most of the food for the French in exchange for manufactured goods imported from Europe and other European colonies in the Americas (Rowland and Sanders 1932:152; Zitomersky 1992:163-64). Later, French (and eventually British, Spanish, and American) settlers displaced the Indians by establishing plantations of their own. They accomplished this principally by appropriating bluff-top village sites for their farms and towns, PLAN Pu.t "At let u,.Faluch.", lhA/'.ky•• M Q.d'''''';''$ 11.. ('1.\t it\'l\ L"lIltUli't';f 7I.....y"..... _ JlA1l'*'t "fl"."....t~, 'Fl"."5"i$, Figure 9. I. Alexandre de Batz's copy of an Alabama Indian map of the Chickasaw villages, 1737. Chickasaw agricultural fields are the shaded rectangles ("Plan et scituation des villages Tchikatchas, par Alexandre De Batz." Plume et encre, aquarelle sur papier, 7 septembre 1737. Archives...