> During their excavations, the scientists also found several artifacts, including charcoal and fragments of broken ceramics. These discoveries suggest that the area’s Indigenous farmers may have dumped their household waste and the remnants of fires onto their fields, using them as compost. Samples taken from the mounds suggest the farmers enriched the dirt with soil from nearby wetlands.
No doubt this practice was used widely across the Americas. The natives were tremendously skilled with plants. This is another step to uncovering some of the knowledge lost. I hope they can find more of these same features.
Until further evidence is found it’s premature to say that there is no doubt that it was widely used in the Americas. I think there is doubt though that could be removed with more evidence.
FWIU in Grand Traverse Bay, Lake Michigan, there's a 9,000 year old stonehenge-like structure 40 feet underwater; that's 4000 thousand years older than Stonehenge and about 6000 years older than the Osireoin and the Pyramids.
The unanswered questions are intriguing. I wonder if the crops grew better because they were suited to the climate, but those crops aren’t around anymore? Could they have cultivated varieties of corn over say 1000 years that grew well at that latitude and in the relative cold? Or could there have been warmer micro climates?
Maybe not. Even corn specifically developed for my area in British Columbia needs a very warm summer to do well.
I wonder if it’s possible that they used corn less as a food crop and more as a scaffolding crop in the 3 sisters system.
You'd be surprised but the "landraces" e.g. historic geographically constrained cultivars tend to do better than modern cultivars in certain geographical regions. A modern even GMO cultivar might have a couple of beneficial traits introduced over the course of a few decades of work. Whereas a landrace might have been selected for yield in that area for a thousand years or more, maybe 100x or more as many generations under selection. As such there is a huge interest among a subset of biologists today to catalog all of these remaining landrace crops and the genetic diversity they contain before they are lost, either due to changing climate wiping out their native environment or the modern farmer replacing these cultivars with ones you can buy in bulk quantities from your seed supplier and have more of an export market (some landrace crops aren't fit for export shipping due to fragility of the crop unlike more modern cultivars; bananas are a good example where there are 1000 types grown but only 1 single varietal particularly fit for overseas shipping hits the supermarket).
Corn is grown in the UP with current varieties currently. It’s not commercially viable because the yields are too low to compete with southern mega yield growers in a highly connected market with efficient transportation systems. There isn’t anything fundamentally hard about growing lower yield corn crops at that location though.
It didn’t necessarily need to be highly productive, just more productive than cultivating local stuff, and even if the corn was not necessarily at its most productive it might have been worth it (and with no real replacement) as part of the companion garden, getting just a few ears of corn would still have been worth more than unproductive wooden stakes.
Or, they had far advanced knowledge of working and remediating soil to grow food. Peat mosses, charcoal, household compost, are all valid soil additives that we now have scientific knowledge to explain how those benefit soil, but they were practicing it in soil that is otherwise unproductive. Given that no one else farmed it in that time it seems that knowledge was lost, but lines up with regenerative agriculture practices we see today.
A thousand years ago doesn't seem that long. In Europe it's not so rare to find that the farm that your bus stop is named after, was continuously worked for 3000 years.
In the Middle East they probably think that's short too!
In England all the Roman artefacts from 1500 years ago are ruins, while many from only ~500 years later, like the Tower of London are well preserved. Just a few centuries or so of raiding and depredations seperate the two periods of English history.
In some cases Roman architecture was literally dismantled to make something new - the cathedral at St Albans is mostly made from stone taken from Roman buildings.
Things can easily endure that long if well protected, but it’s a long time if they are allowed to fall into ruin (or destroyed).
The article quotes a researcher: “Most field systems have been either lost or destroyed due to intensive land use across most of North America, through farming, including pastures and the cutting down of trees for urban development,”
These floors, and the ruins around them, whilst buried, don't always survive the last century or two of machine plowing, which goes deeper than the medieval animal-based plowing.
Imagine the archeological excitement by your bus stop if a preserved part of the farm from 1,000 years ago were discovered, barely disturbed, giving archeologists a snapshot of what daily life was like at the time.
You know also know the story of Pompeii, and how its ruins have helped understand the Roman era.
This story is likely somewhere in between those two. Unlike your bus stop farm there aren't written records from the 1,000 years ago, nor are there many other sites from which to draw comparable results.
Science Mag Podcast covered this as well... with Madeleine McLeester, assistant professor in the department of anthropology at Dartmouth College.
I thought interesting that they have yet to find the village that associates with the gardens.
https://www.science.org/content/podcast/farming-maize-ice-ag...
It’s amazing how smart our ancestors were and creative and observant based on amateur science and gardening skills. The amount of planning and organization this must have taken would require a large coordinated effort.
But a farmer is a professional scientist and a professional gardener. Living 1k years ago did not make them uninformed or unskilled at their profession. It's quite a modern bias to suggest this is amateur.
The article seems to assume that the same tribe lived in that place for a thousand years. The pre-Columbian histories I've seen had the tribes moving around, based on comparisons of DNA evidence.
I always thought large-scale farming like this only happened under big state systems. But it looks like these communities were able to build something pretty big without that kind of centralized power.
It’s also kind of amazing that the fields stayed preserved for a thousand years. Makes me wonder if we’re still underestimating how advanced some of these early farming cultures were.
A while back it dawned on me that we think the greatest past civilizations were all in Egypt, the Middle East, and Mesopotamia because those areas are deserts or semi-deserts. They built out of stone because they didn't have much wood, and their writings survived because they weren't destroyed by water.
There could have been very sophisticated societies, even large scale civilizations, in the past in places like North America that built mainly out of wood, clay, bone, and other readily available materials, and there'd be nothing left. Any writings would be gone too, since writings don't survive well in wet climates unless they are chiseled into very durable stone or vitrified pottery (and even then they can erode).
When foreign cultures were discovered by Europeans the default thinking was to assume they were savages without culture, complex society or technology. That has echoed throughout time and still affects our view of history today. The true savages were the Europeans that preferred to subjugate or kill any non-European population they encountered.
It is only recently that TV & films from the US stopped portraying the stereotypical American Indians as only vaguely more than natural fauna. Until recently US history hardly seems to acknowledge the existence of pre-Colombian towns and cities across the southern states, some with tens of thousands of inhabitants. It didn't fit the European settler narrative that they were taming the wild and when native Americans are mentioned it has been incredibly whitewashed and edited.
I'd be interested in an alternative world history where the first humans into North America had domesticated and saved the local horses that were kicking around, or the Vikings had left a bunch on their earlier expeditions. Alternatively where the Vikings had managed to give the locals small pox and other European diseases en-masse before leaving.
Note that this combination is a very synergistic combination of crops to grow together, and is millennia old.
"The Three Sisters planting method, commonly known as companion planting, entails growing corn, beans, and squash together in a mutually beneficial arrangement. It originated in North America around 3000 years ago.
...
Each plant brings unique advantages to the others; Corn serves as a trellis, providing a framework for the beans to grow and wrap around. Beans, acting as a natural fertilizer, add nitrogen to the soil, which benefits the growth of the corn and squash. Squash is typically planted between the corn and beans, and its ample leaves serve as a shield, blocking heat, retaining soil moisture and suppressing weed growth."
Was the article edited? I don't see a reference to the phrase "three sisters" on it, it just says "corn, beans, and squash." Did the original headline mention it?
Original HN title was "1k year old 3 sisters crop farm found in Northern Michigan"
I really wish that when titles were edited there was some history, it would make it much easier to understand these little discussions based on the original title.
[+] [-] mapotofu|9 months ago|reply
Exciting - that sounds a lot like Terra preta: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta
No doubt this practice was used widely across the Americas. The natives were tremendously skilled with plants. This is another step to uncovering some of the knowledge lost. I hope they can find more of these same features.
[+] [-] politelemon|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] mc32|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] folli|9 months ago|reply
There's some interesting examples in the Readme.
[+] [-] westurner|9 months ago|reply
FWIU in Grand Traverse Bay, Lake Michigan, there's a 9,000 year old stonehenge-like structure 40 feet underwater; that's 4000 thousand years older than Stonehenge and about 6000 years older than the Osireoin and the Pyramids.
/? Michigan underwater stonehenge: https://www.google.com/search?q=michigan+underwater+stonehen...
There's not even a name or a wikipedia page for the site? There are various presumed Clovis sites which are now underwater in TN, as well.
[+] [-] 38|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] steve_adams_86|9 months ago|reply
Maybe not. Even corn specifically developed for my area in British Columbia needs a very warm summer to do well.
I wonder if it’s possible that they used corn less as a food crop and more as a scaffolding crop in the 3 sisters system.
[+] [-] asdff|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] kasey_junk|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] masklinn|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] mapotofu|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] thaumasiotes|9 months ago|reply
Microclimates? The whole world was warmer. Remember when the Vikings settled Greenland? That was 1000 years ago.
[+] [-] wanderingmind|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] vintermann|9 months ago|reply
In the Middle East they probably think that's short too!
[+] [-] mr_toad|9 months ago|reply
In some cases Roman architecture was literally dismantled to make something new - the cathedral at St Albans is mostly made from stone taken from Roman buildings.
Things can easily endure that long if well protected, but it’s a long time if they are allowed to fall into ruin (or destroyed).
[+] [-] eesmith|9 months ago|reply
My watching of years of Time Team episodes tells me that Roman mosaic floors keep being found in England, like https://historicengland.org.uk/whats-new/news/rutland-roman-... from about 1,500 years ago. Doing so makes the news.
These floors, and the ruins around them, whilst buried, don't always survive the last century or two of machine plowing, which goes deeper than the medieval animal-based plowing.
Imagine the archeological excitement by your bus stop if a preserved part of the farm from 1,000 years ago were discovered, barely disturbed, giving archeologists a snapshot of what daily life was like at the time.
You know also know the story of Pompeii, and how its ruins have helped understand the Roman era.
This story is likely somewhere in between those two. Unlike your bus stop farm there aren't written records from the 1,000 years ago, nor are there many other sites from which to draw comparable results.
[+] [-] smartmic|9 months ago|reply
https://howmanygenerations.com/
[+] [-] unknown|9 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] timeon|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] i4i|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] firesteelrain|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] cvoss|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] duxup|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] WalterBright|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] jfengel|9 months ago|reply
Clearly it was logged for a while, and perhaps they were expecting to cut it down again at some point.
[+] [-] vram22|9 months ago|reply
https://www.google.com/search?q=tending+the+earth+winin+pere...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other_India_Press
[+] [-] Huxley1|9 months ago|reply
It’s also kind of amazing that the fields stayed preserved for a thousand years. Makes me wonder if we’re still underestimating how advanced some of these early farming cultures were.
[+] [-] api|9 months ago|reply
There could have been very sophisticated societies, even large scale civilizations, in the past in places like North America that built mainly out of wood, clay, bone, and other readily available materials, and there'd be nothing left. Any writings would be gone too, since writings don't survive well in wet climates unless they are chiseled into very durable stone or vitrified pottery (and even then they can erode).
[+] [-] altacc|9 months ago|reply
It is only recently that TV & films from the US stopped portraying the stereotypical American Indians as only vaguely more than natural fauna. Until recently US history hardly seems to acknowledge the existence of pre-Colombian towns and cities across the southern states, some with tens of thousands of inhabitants. It didn't fit the European settler narrative that they were taming the wild and when native Americans are mentioned it has been incredibly whitewashed and edited.
[+] [-] petesergeant|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] mmustapic|9 months ago|reply
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2723.The_Years_of_Rice_a...
[+] [-] Scarblac|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] toss1|9 months ago|reply
"The Three Sisters planting method, commonly known as companion planting, entails growing corn, beans, and squash together in a mutually beneficial arrangement. It originated in North America around 3000 years ago.
...
Each plant brings unique advantages to the others; Corn serves as a trellis, providing a framework for the beans to grow and wrap around. Beans, acting as a natural fertilizer, add nitrogen to the soil, which benefits the growth of the corn and squash. Squash is typically planted between the corn and beans, and its ample leaves serve as a shield, blocking heat, retaining soil moisture and suppressing weed growth."
[0] https://www.nps.gov/tont/learn/nature/the-three-sisters.htm
[+] [-] romanhn|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] lambda|9 months ago|reply
No, not in the archived version: https://web.archive.org/web/20250612153046/https://www.smith...
Oh, was this mentioned in the original HN title? Has that been edited?
Yes, it was. https://web.archive.org/web/20250615154352/https://news.ycom...
Original HN title was "1k year old 3 sisters crop farm found in Northern Michigan"
I really wish that when titles were edited there was some history, it would make it much easier to understand these little discussions based on the original title.
[+] [-] themadturk|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] rusk|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] yapyap|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] jjtheblunt|9 months ago|reply
"Massive Fields Where Native American Farmers Grew Corn, Beans and Squash 1,000 Years Ago Discovered in Michigan"
[+] [-] coin|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] ji646646|9 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|9 months ago|reply
[deleted]