800-Year-Old Seeds Have Grown Into A History-Altering Plant Summary

The emergence of agriculture was a major stepping stone in human history. During this birth of agriculture, also known as the Neolithic revolution, humans began inhabiting permanent settlements, grow their own crops, and domesticate both plants and animals for food (Weisdorf, 2005). Considering humans have been hunter-gatherers for the majority of their approximately 7 million years of existence, the emergence of agriculture in the Old World only occurring 10,000-5,000 years ago, marks a significant transformation in food sustenance techniques (Weisdorf, 2005). However, this turning point in history is associated with both positive and negative implications. There is much controversy over whether or not the introduction of

In the Columbian Exchange, ecology became destiny. Powerful environmental forces, understood by no one alive at the time and by very few people even today, determined who would thrive and who would die. And that may be the most shocking truth revealed to those who take the time to understand the Columbian Exchange: we, as humans, cannot always control our own destinies. The most important historical actors in this story are not Christopher Columbus or Moctezuma or Hernán Cortés. They are the smallpox virus, the pig, the potato, and the kernel of

The Enlightened Archaeologist – an article authored by Jeffrey Hantman and Gary Dunham chronicles Thomas Jefferson’s investigation of the Indian burial mound located on the South Fork of the Rivanna River in the 18th century. The site excavated by Jefferson, however, is no longer visible, most likely due to dissipation by inevitable natural occurrences (I.E. excessive rainfall, flooding rivers, etc.) or human activity such as farming. The “Father of American Archaeology” correctly predicts the latter in his book, Notes on the State of Virginia, in which he states, mounds “…put under cultivation are much reduced in their height, and spread in width, by the plough, and will probably disappear in time” (1787). Fortunately for Archaeologists of the late 20th century (1988) an Indian burial mound identical to that of the one Jefferson described in his book was uncovered just 14 miles from the South Fork of the Rivanna River.

Storytelling continues to be an integral part of Native American culture, providing us with an understanding of what was important to the Native Americans. Through their stories, Native Americans expressed an understanding of the environment, and the relationship that existed between themselves and their environment. These stories also provide us with a look at Native American legends, history, and a collection of knowledge critical to their survival. Native American stories are deeply rooted in their relationship with Mother Earth. Their many years connected with land, life, water and sky has created many stories explaining these important bonds with Mother Earth. From ancient times the Native Americans have looked to their

     Since the beginning of the human race mankind has depended on the natural resources in their environment for survival. They utilized the available flora to nourish their body, heal their wounds, comfort their ailments and to create products to ease their daily lives. Many of the same plants utilized thousands of years ago by the indigenous people have been integrated into modern day medicines. The scientific interest and knowledge of plants for nourishment, healing, and practical uses is called ethnobotany.

Many people are under a false impression that early Native Americans are the original environmentalists. This is an impression that many people share. The Abenaki tribes that resided in Maine from 3700 BP were not by our traditional definition, environmentalists. In fact they were far from ecologically sound. This paper is meant not to criticize the Native Americans of the age, but to clarify their roles in the environment. To better understand this subject some background is needed.

The fascination with Native Americans has been a constant with outsiders since explorers first “discovered” the New World. The biggest surge in this fascination came in the mid-19th century when the Indian Wars were starting to come to an end and the belief that Native Americans were disappearing, walking into the sunset never to be seen again. This led to an increase in the collecting of anything Native American, from artifacts to stories to portraits. The inevitable outcome of this was that Native Americans, who were never considered very highly to begin with, where now moved into a category of scientific interest to be study. This scientific interest in Native Americans is what many museums and other institutions based their collections and exhibits on and is one of the issues that many Native Americans have with how both their people and their culture were, and to some extent still are, represented in these places.

According to National Geographic, 40% of the Earth today is farmland—soil being manipulated to feed the 7.6 billion human beings on this world. We have taken over this world like ants swarming to a piece of rotting fruit, without much thought to the organisms that have been on Earth long before us. Our lives may be easier in that we do not have to forge for our food or water anymore, but with the stress of today’s world, was the tradeoff worth the natural land? Willa Cather’s novel, O Pioneers! brings attention to the way we choose to use the land, whether it is in our best interests, the land’s, or both. The characters in O Pioneers! demonstrate how in order to maintain a successful relationship with the land we live on, it is necessary to be able to both adapt to the land and mold it to fit our physical, emotional, and spiritual needs.

Ebenezer Baldwin Andrews did excavations in Ash Cave in the Hocking Valley, in 1876. He found skeletal remains in the cave along with millions of preserved seeds that were thousands of years old. The Chenopod seeds that were stored in the cave had thinner seed coats, this was a sign of domestication. A thinner seed coat means quicker germination for domesticated seeds versus wild seeds. Wild seeds with thicker seed coats prevents the seeds from germinating quick and keeps them protected from animals or throughout harsh seasons so they have a better chance of prospering as plants/crops later on. The Indians in this area selected for these seeds to germinate quicker so the crop would grow more rapidly and the food supply would increase to support

So the lives of at least the survivins hunterFatheresaren't nastyand brutish,even though farmers have pushed them into some of the world's worst real estate.But modern hunter-gatherersocietiesthat have rubbed shoulders with farming societies for thousands of vears don't tell us about conditions befor€ the agricultural revolution. The progressivist riers is reallv making a claim about the distant past: that the lives of primitive people improved when they snitched from gathering to farming. Archaeologists can date that sv!'itchby distinguishing remains of wild plants and animals from thoseof domesticatedonesin prehistoricgarbage dumps. Horr' can one deduce the health of the orehistoric garbagemakers.and therebydirectly test the progressi\ist vierv? That question has become answerable onlv in recentvears,in part through the newly emerging techniquesof paleopathology, study of signs of the dirase in the remainsof ancientpeoples. In some lucky situations,the palmpathologist has almost as much material to study as a pathologist todav For example, archaeologistsin the Chilean deserts found well preserved mummies whose medical conditionsat time of death could be determinedby autopsv. And feces of long-dead Indians who lived in dry cavesin Nevada remain sufficientlywell preserved to be examinedfor hookworm and other parasites. Usually the only human remainsivailable for study are skeletons, they permit a surprising numbut ber of

In modern America, we often take for granted the natural world that surrounds us and the American culture which is built upon it. For many of us, we give little thought to the food sources that sustain and natural habitats that surround us because when viewed for what they are, most people assume that they have “simply existed” since the country was founded. However, the documentary ‘America Before Columbus’ provided this writer an extremely interesting record of how the America we know came to exist. In the documentary, one of the most interesting discussions centered on the fact that it was not merely the arrival of conquistadors and colonists that irrevocably changed the landscape of the Americas, but that it was also the coined term known as the “Columbian Exchange” that afforded these travelers the ability to proliferate so successfully. The basic definition of the Columbian exchange is one that defines the importation of European flora and fauna. It could also loosely represent other imports, both intended and unintended, such as tools, implements, and even disease. Armed with this definition, it takes little imagination to envision how differently the Americas might have developed had any significant amount of the native European flora, fauna, or other unintended import not been conveyed to the Americas through the Columbian Exchange. Beyond the arrival of explorers, settlers, and colonists to the New World, the breadth of what the Columbian Exchange represented to

The Natives of California distinguish plants and animals into diverse locations of botany and zoology . They learn to cultivate throughout the views of animals and by creating a food chain that benefited the tribe. Many native tribes observed the environmental system that either made other species survive and extinct. The natives were considered to be curious about the environment they lived that prepared them want to learn, observe, and practice rituals. The natives were uninformed that religious ritual such as coordinating the sun and moon movement was practical rituals of much groundwork for collecting food and building supplies. Like many other American native groups they established and discover valuable properties of plants. Using kernels, plant roots, tree barks and herbal leaves as curative purposes. As the native embarked a lot of nature resources there were many that are ineffective and some are used in today’s modern medicine.

The setting of this book is in the Chesapeake Bay region, which includes the states of Virginia, Delaware, and Maryland. This area is important to anthropologists, people who study human beings and their ancestors, because the first English settlement was built by the colonists more than four hundred years ago in this region. Many graves were discovered in James Fort in Jamestown, Virginia because in the early 1600’s

An Inescapable Past in Edith Wharton’s “Pomegranate Seed” 1. In Edith Wharton’s famous ghost story, “Pomegranate Seed”, the readers are brought back to New York circa 1930, where Charlotte Ashby, the protagonist, is happily wedded to the widower Kenneth Ashby. However, that happiness is short lived, due to the lack of honesty on the part of her spouse as a result of how he fails to leave the past behind.

“ Know your farmer, know your food” goes the slogan by organic farmers to promote the consumption of locally grown food through organic frelated to survival and subsistence for many people worldwide. Based on these seven UNESCO criteria, organic farmers’ knowledge would qualify as indigenous knowledge (Sumner, 2006). In resonance with the understanding of organic knowledge as indigenous knowledge, a Canadian documentary video, titled “the great laws of nature: indigenous organic agriculture” reflects and confirms the concept of indigenous knowledge as organic farmer’s knowledge. The documentary explicates how some indigenous peoples believe that the “concept of organic” was designed by the creator following the fact that nature lives in harmony with itself without gossips or worries, living side by side with each other without fighting over that piece of land in which they are found. (Williams Ermine, Saskatchewan Elder). Through the act of studying nature, indigenous peoples identified four kinds of plant beings; flowers, grasses, trees and vegetables. They have demonstrated that to each of the plant beings, the creator gave the spirit of life, growth, healing and beauty and each is placed where it will be most beneficial. The believe that everything has life and spirit by the indigenous peoples initiated their concept that plant were put on the earth to look after all living things and everything in the universal has a purpose in its natural state. Thus, man needs to