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Agriculture
Developed agriculture came to North America from the south. Maize, beans, and pumpkin were cultivated in Mexico more than seven thousand years ago. In the South-West these plants spread in the middle of the 2nd millennium BC, and in the South-East, in the Mississippi River basin only in the 6th – 8th centuries. A lot earlier, in the 5th – 4th millenniums BC, in the South-East local low yielders were grown, for example, topinambur which is popular with our gardeners, but which did not play an important part in the development of agriculture. The cultivation of sunflower in the South-West turned out to be of much greater importance.
In the north-east of the United States and in the adjoining regions of Canada the Algonquin and the Iroquois people had developed agriculture several centuries before the Columbus’s arrival. They grew maize, beans and pumpkins. First forests were chopped down, then wood was burnt, and then the site fertilized with ashes was used for planting vegetables. Several years after the soil exhausted and a new site was prepared. Later the Iroquois people adopted fruit trees from Europeans – peaches, apple-trees, pear-trees, etc.
The peoples of the South-East (Natchez, Cherokee, etc.) were skillful farmers. Through Missouri valley, Arkansas and Red-River agricultural skills spread deep into the Plains. In the 15th century during a severe drought many groups of Indians in western and central parts of the continent stopped farming and became hunters and collectors again. In the basin of the Missouri river an exception was made by the Hidatsa, Mandan, Arikara and Pawnee people who in the 18th century grew up to ten kinds of maize on floodplain lands. In the South-West, in New-Mexico and Arizona the culture of farming was preserved by Pueblo Indians: Hopi, Zuni, Keres and Tano.
North-American Indians did not know domestic animals, and the set of crops that they knew was comparatively small, so all agricultural peoples of the continent were largely dependant on the wild nature resources, i.e. on hunting and collecting.
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