there was a feast. The people were thus purified, and communal harmony
was restored. Corn was the center.
tEuropeans observed and wrote down much of native agricultural prac-
tices. Some, such as Jacques le Moyne de Morgues and John White, made
sketches and watercolors of farms in Florida, North Carolina, and else-
where. The woodcutter and engraver Theodore de Bry, not himself an ob-
server, copied some of these (notably le Moyne’s work) and famously im-
posed European features upon crop fields. De Bry added plow-point lines,
for instance, to arrow-straight Timucuan corn rows in northeastern Florida.
Contact-era natives were gifted artists, as already observed, yet they seem
not to have executed representational portraits of their culture. Nor did they
have written forms of language until early in the nineteenth century, rather
long after Europeans’ arrival and the disappearance of the Mississippian
tradition. Europeans’ and then Euro-Americans’ recorded observations,
while fascinating and essential, must be employed with caution and, wher-
ever possible, corroborated. This may sometimes be accomplished with
two additional sources: ethnographies compiled during the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries (that is, recorded memory and oral traditions, along
with studies of material cultures) and archaeological evidence.^9
Unsurprisingly, archaeological remains of farming hundreds of years
ago are scarce in the East. (In the arid West and Mexico, some ancient gar-
dens and apparent fields are still visible.) Most crops are annuals, fields
were abandoned, streams changed course and washed away sites, and for-
ests returned, erasing generations of labor and nurture. Certain eastern
gardens, however—not large fields—are an exception. A plausible recon-
struction of late Woodlands and Mississippian domestic life explains why.
All households have waste, such as broken pottery, worn-out fiber, the open
skeletons of shellfish, and the bones and offal of fish and other animals.
These and more were disposed of in pits, called middens (presumably
rather shallow), not far from houses in every village and town. As middens
were filled, lush vegetation appeared, signaling opportunity to establish
kitchen gardens. So women weeded such household plots and tended them
intensively, polycropping corn, squashes, beans, herbs, and medicinals.
The forthcoming bounty, presumably, belonged to the woman who tended
and harvested, for use in her own house and by whomever she chose.
Gardens, whether or not made upon middens, are the prototype for a
long-lived narrative ofallnative farming. Indian agriculture was effectively