Press

ALBANY, NY - As you sit down to eat that holiday feast, did you ever wonder where that food came from? Before the grocery store. Before the modern day farm. Before takeout.

New York State Museum archaeologist Dr. John Hart knows.

The chairman of the Museum's anthropological survey focuses his research on prehistoric agriculture, and helps people understand how and where Native Americans in the Northeast first started cultivating some of the things that may be sitting on your dining room table.

His studies show that it took longer than previously suspected to establish the maize-beans-squash triad in the Northeast. The three foods are also known as the Three Sisters in Native American lore.

"It shows that the process of developing agriculture in New York State not only was a longer term process, it was a lot more complex than previously believed," Hart said.

"What makes it more complex is that those three crops entered at different times; it was more of a gradual process." Hart now believes that growing corn, beans and squash together, known as "intercropping," in New York was not well established until about A.D. 1300. Previously, scientists had thought Native Americans grew these crops together by about A.D. 1000.

Squash may have been grown about 700 B.C. in New York based on recently obtained dates from Pennsylvania. Gourds may have been grown as early as 3650 B.C. based on dates in Pennsylvania and Maine. Those gourds were being primarily used for their seeds, which were eaten, since the flesh was extremely bitter. Dried gourds may have been used as ceremonial rattles.

"These are the gourds that eventually became the squashes that we eat today," Hart said.

The first evidence of corn in New York was not until sometime between A.D. 800 and A.D. 900. According to Hart's work, beans apparently came into the picture in about A.D. 1300. The beans would grow up the cornstalks and the squash would grow around the corn. The method is illustrated in one of the State Museum's popular permanent exhibits near the Iroquois Longhouse.

Recently, Hart has begun to apply new dating techniques to old collections housed in the State Museum, a program of the State Education Department, and elsewhere.

The Roundtop site in Broome County, N.Y., was excavated in the 1960s by William Ritchie, a world-famous State Museum archaeologist. It was an important site that provided some of the oldest evidence for maize, beans and squash in the Northeast. In a chapter in the State Museum's Bulletin, "Current Northeast Paleoethnobotany," due to come out in the beginning of 1999, Hart details how he reanalyzed Ritchie's specimens using accelerator mass spectrometry dating, a process not available to Ritchie to better understand prehistoric agriculture.

The results indicate that maize, beans and squash do not occur together at Roundtop until several centuries later than previously thought. Hart is now working with Margaret Scarry, a archaeobotanist at the University or North Carolina, to see if the Roundtop results apply to other areas of the Northeast.

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