Hurricanes, thunderstorms, summer droughts, or prolonged spring rains could quickly lay waste to a season’s work in the fields. Old fields then had to lie fallow until they recovered some fertility and could be planted again. Preparing new fields was hard work and rather than continually clearing new tracts in a “slash and burn” pattern, Indians probably used each plot as long as possible, even as yields declined.
Some of the larger native cultures probably numbered in the tens of thousands. Farming seems to have allowed native populations to increase in the millennium before European contact. Beans helped replace nitrogen taken from the soil by corn cornstalks provided “poles” for the beans to climb and broad-leaved squash plants helped cut down on weed growth and erosion. By all accounts, the three crops, known in some cultures as “the three sisters,” usually did well under such conditions. Native farmers (primarily women) then planted corn, beans, and squash together in hills beneath the dead and dying trees. They then stripped the bark (a process known as girdling) from larger trees so that they sprouted no leaves and eventually died. To clear farmland, the natives used fire and stone axes to remove smaller brush and timber. The natives also used fire to drive deer and other game into areas where the animals might be easily dispatched.īecause the region’s climate offered a long growing season and generally plentiful rainfall, southern Indians developed a complex system of agriculture based primarily on three crops: corn, beans, and squash. Because they required game animals in quantity, Indians often set light ground fires to create brushy edge habitats and open areas in southern forests that attracted deer and other animals to well-defined hunting grounds. In autumn and winter-especially in the piedmont and uplands-the natives turned more to deer, bear, and other game animals for sustenance. In spring, a season which brought massive runs of shad, alewives, herring, and mullet from the ocean into the rivers, Indians in Florida and elsewhere along the Atlantic coastal plain relied on fish taken with nets, spears, or hooks and lines. Like natives elsewhere in North America, those in the South practiced shifting seasonal subsistence, altering their diets and food gathering techniques to conform to the changing seasons. Exploring the ecological transformation of the colonial South offers an opportunity to examine the ways in which three distinct cultures-Native American, European, and African-influenced and shaped the environment in a fascinating part of North America. Second, like humans everywhere, their presence on the landscape had profound implications for the natural world. First, they lived and worked in a natural environment unlike any other in the American colonies.
Yet all residents of the region shared two important traits. Three Worlds, Three Views: Culture and Environmental Change in the Colonial Southįor nearly three hundred years before the American Revolution, the colonial South was a kaleidoscope of different people and cultures. Nature Transformed is made possible by grants from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations. Three Worlds, Three Views: Culture and Environmental Change in the Colonial South, Nature Transformed, TeacherServe®, National Humanities Center