Using Maize δ15N values to assess soil fertility in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century ad Iroquoian agricultural fields

John P Hart and Robert S Feranec

PLOS ONE, 2020, vol. 15, issue 4, 1-18

Abstract: Native Americans developed agronomic practices throughout the Western Hemisphere adapted to regional climate, edaphic conditions, and the extent of dependence on agriculture for subsistence. These included the mounding or “corn hill” system in northeastern North America. Iroquoian language speakers of present-day New York, USA, and Ontario and Québec, Canada were among those who used this system. While well-known, there has been little archaeological documentation of the system. As a result, there is scant archaeological evidence on how Iroquoian farmers maintained soil fertility in their often-extensive agricultural fields. Using δ15N values obtained on fifteenth- and sixteenth-century AD maize kernels from archaeological sites in New York and Ontario, adjusted to take into account changes that result from charring as determined through experiments, we demonstrate that Iroquoian farmers were successful at maintaining nitrogen in their agricultural fields. These results add to our archaeological knowledge of Iroquoian agronomic practices. Our results also indicate the potential value of obtaining δ15N values on archaeological maize in the investigation of Native American agronomic practices.

Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0230952 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 30952&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0230952

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0230952

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().