Kristen Gremillion's Food Production in Native North America documents a paradigm shift in American archaeology. New data and analytical methodologies have challenged theories of economic organization reliant on a hunter-gatherer/farmer dichotomy. Many researchers now interpret Native American economies according to a continuum of practices, which are grouped by Gremillion under the heading of food production, “a broad strategy of intensification that takes a variety of forms” (p. vii). This shift has profound implications for how we understand both Native American history and the diverse modes of production by which people mediate their relationships with each other and the environment. Many of the innovative production systems observed in the archaeological record involve processes of plant domestication, adoption of domesticates, and intensification, defined here as “an increase in yields per unit land beyond that available from unmodified habitats” (p. 2). Gremillion focuses on these processes, neatly synthesizing recent archaeological research to examine the variability of food production in Native American societies through time.
The first case study frames the development of the Eastern Agricultural Complex (EAC) in the Ohio, Missouri, and Mississippi River valleys of the midcontinent as the coevolution of plant biology and human behavior. Archaeobotanical data indicate that by 3000 BC, groups living in diverse ecological settings were growing varieties of goosefoot, marsh elder, sunflower, and other plants bearing morphological markers of domestication. Intensive cultivation became widespread in some areas of the midcontinent after 1000 BC, but the EAC remained a minor supplement to hunting and gathering in other areas of the Eastern Woodlands.
The next chapters track the adoption of maize by people in the U.S. Southwest and Eastern Woodlands. Groups in the Southwest acquired maize from Mesoamerica by 2000 BC. Maize first arrived in the Eastern Woodlands in small quantities through unknown processes of exchange by 300 BC. Societies with and without preexisting cultivation traditions adopted maize gradually and differentially in both regions, possibly facilitating population growth in some cases. Native farmers developed varieties of maize suited to new environments, and they incorporated them into diverse cropping systems over the course of ensuing millennia.
Gremillion then describes practices of nonagricultural intensification documented in the Pacific Northwest and Great Basin. Diverse cultures used controlled burns, coppicing, estuarine modifications, large-scale irrigation, and other practices to encourage particular species, maintaining high-yield systems without triggering recognizable morphological differentiation in plants or animals. This chapter lacks the chronological resolution of the others, reflecting limits of available data and the need for frameworks that explain change through time in nonagricultural systems.
Drawing from early European accounts and ethnohistories in addition to the archaeological record of the contact period, the final case study summarizes the incorporation (or rejection) of Old World domesticates across the continent before mass land theft and displacement. Native farming and nonfarming communities adopted European crops and animals strategically according to variables of culture, environment, and colonial encounter. Some Old World imports similar to endemic species spread rapidly along Native exchange routes, preceding Europeans inland.
Gremillion concludes by comparing the processes described above, highlighting variability, adaptation, and risk assessment. In so doing, she contends that evolutionary ecology offers a viable framework for understanding change in Native North America through time. This attribute sets Gremillion's synthesis apart from comparable projects influenced by historical ecology, a program of research in which anthropogenic effects on natural systems are considered primarily the result of contingent social histories. Reflecting the paradigm shift mentioned above, however, interpretations based in evolutionary ecology and historical ecology both reject the hunter-gatherer/farmer dichotomy in favor of a continuum of practices.
Describing this new consensus from the perspective of evolutionary ecology opens the continuum model to particular critiques. What is the obverse of food production? Gremillion refers to its initial forms, positing that societies of nonfood producers preceded processes of intensification. Reexamining archaeological and ethnographic studies of hunter-gatherer societies, can we identify any that rely on practices not encompassed by the broad category of intensification? If not, are we left with an empty set, and consequently, a theory with limited explanatory power? Furthermore, and drawing from ethnographic work and Indigenous knowledge holders, are the social assumptions of evolutionary ecology—especially the emphasis on individual behavior—compatible with non-Western ontologies, or in fact applicable to any contexts outside of capitalism and modernity?
In facilitating such questions, Gremillion's synthesis is a generous resource for students and early career researchers seeking to identify meaningful points of engagement in the archaeology of food production, as well as for nonspecialists interested in the current state of research and knowledge on these topics in North American archaeology.
