the opposite of European. Fields were not permanently established squares
and rectangles with evenly spaced rows. There was no tedious grain mono-
culture—or any monoculture familiar to, say Piedmontese, East Anglians,
or Normans. Indian fields were temporary, shifting, as well as asymmetri-
cal. Middens lost their fertility after a few years, so new ones were adopted.
Or men killed trees by girdling in a portion of forest where tree species indi-
cated rich soil; later they set fire to the dead trees, then reburned the fallen
logs, virtually wading in ashes that were rich in phosphorus and calcium
carbonate. Among big roots and blackened stumps, women made little
hills (not rows) with hoe-blades of stone, rock, or shell. Then with fingers
or planting sticks, they dropped several kernels of seed corn and covered
them. As corn stalks arose, they planted beans, which later climbed the
stalks, around the corn. Squashes and other useful plants joined the bur-
geoning vegetable jumble. Careful weeding and aeration with small tools
was essential, but only for a short time. Squashes leached toxins inimical
to weeds. Soon, too, the cornucopia grew simultaneously upward and out-
ward, shading out competitors. Thereafter birds were farmers’ principal
concern, so little girls were assigned the serious (yet still playlike) task of
acting as living scarecrows. Depending on the latitude of such garden fields
and the vagaries of weather, harvests began as early as June. Often there
were two or three crops of corn alone, each a different type, and harvesting
of various beans and peas, gourds, plants for teas, medicinal herbs, and so
on, probably continued well into November and later.
The genius of the system comports with modern, chemistry-savvy agron-
omy of the sustainable sort. Corn and tobacco (another ubiquitous cultigen
in Native America) are notorious leechers of soil nitrogen. Beans and peas,
however, supply nitrogen, complementing the calcium carbonate in wood
ashes left by firing woods for cropland. Still, following several years of such
farming, natives noticed declining yields and undertook preparation of a
new patch of forest for firing. The abandoned farmland vegetation slowly
succeeded again, through grasses, woody shrubs, conifers, and finally (in
most places) a restored deciduous forest. Here, then, was ‘‘swidden’’ agri-
culture, also called ‘‘shifting’’ and ‘‘slash-and-burn.’’ Peoples without dyna-
mite, chainsaws, and bulldozers around the world, including Europeans,
once upon a time, farmed in some version of the mode; a few still do. And
as late as the nineteenth century (as we shall see later), most Euro- and
Afro-southerners pursued an agronomy of woods-firing, polycropping, and
abandonment, even though many owned land and draft animals and plows.
White and black southerners’ adoption not only of native staples but a large