portion of the Indians’ method surely strengthens this narrative tradition
of Indian garden farming.^10
Yet recently, scholars have brought the tradition under suspicion. Na-
tives indeed gardened. The historical geographer William Doolittle has
cataloged archaeological garden sites in southern Florida, northeastern
Alabama, central Mississippi, and Kentucky (as well as in Cahokia and
other midwestern places, plus in the Northeast and West). Early and later
European newcomers mention gardenlike sites there and elsewhere in the
South, too, butalsolarge—sometimes very large—fields of corn. There
were literally scores of white observers of extensive farming, many of them
well remembered and generally credible—for example, Cabeza de Vaca,
de Soto’s chroniclers, John White, William Bradford, John Winthrop, and
much later, William Bartram. So in addition to southern New England
during the s and s, Europeans saw and recorded big, apparently
communal (as opposed to household) crop fields in eastern Virginia (Pow-
hatan federation), western South Carolina, eastern Tennessee, east-central
Georgia, the Florida panhandle northeast and west, southwestern Mis-
sissippi (apparently Natchez), north-central Louisiana, and eastern Texas.
Twentieth-century archaeologists, meanwhile, convincingly inferred large
fields—some apparently for corn alone, others with corn and beans—not
only at Cahokia but at great and lesser mound sites in Georgia, Alabama,
and elsewhere. Native southerners, in other words, like Europeans, were
both gardenersandfarmers. The distinction is not only important in itself
but comports with other known characteristics of Mississippian culture’s
sizable populations, polities, and hierarchy. Mississippians were so well
organized and specialized that some actually maintained seedbeds for the
early nurturing of tobacco and potatoes, before transplanting to sizable
fields, apparently with no other plant under cultivation.
Doolittle also brings swiddens under considerable suspicion. True slash-
and-burn agriculture includes burning forests, cultivation, and abandon-
ment, plus an ultimate return to the same ground, repeating the process.
Contemporary tropical practitioners of true swidden (such as in Belize and
parts of southeast Asia) provide the model for ethnographers such as Doo-
little, so farmers in temperate regions such as North America almost auto-
matically disqualify themselves—particularly in the behavior of rotation to
formerly slashed and burned farms. Climax forest cover returns to tropical
fields in only twenty years, whereas the succession of grasses, bush, coni-
fers, then mature deciduous trees requires up to years in, say, North
Carolina. Late-Mississippian populations were probably much too dense