diffusion

"coronado(1541) did not quite reach the upper missouri, his farthest north being the kansas river, or the big blue, where he found the quivira ...'in some villages there are as many as two hundred houses: they have corn and beans and melons...' " "...they ( the mandans) first reached the missouri at the mouth of the white river and gradually ascended the missouri to the heart river, where they lived for a long time. here the mandans were joined by two siouan tribes, the hidatsas and the crows...according to their stories they learned all they knew of agriculture form the mandans...the hidatsas claim to have had no knowledge of corn until the first ate it from the trenchers of the mandans..." from "corn among the indians of the upper missouri. george f. will & george e. hyde _________________________________________________________ so if i read this right the mandans migrated up the valley of the mmissouri river taking their agriculture with them in a demic diffusion of the culture which was then culturally diffused to the hidatsas and crows...i am assuming that the mandans were already growing maize when the reached the missouri, which will and hyde date to the mid seventeenth century, a bit over a hundred years after coronado found native peoples growing maize a bit to the south...a combination of diffusions that argue for a plurality of mechanisms in the diffusion of agriculture...it would help to explain the dominance of annual crops as staples ( for me anyway..which probably isn't saying much...but it's my blog )...the beginnings of agriculture is such a contentious business in the anthropological world...from where plants were domesticated to who did it, why, and what plants were the wild ancestors...and i suppose the debate is good, if not the acrimony...and i'm interetsed...mostly because i'd really like to know why anyone would willingly take on that much work ( he said as he spreads gardens all over the place...from the campus to back yards near you )..but the issue that concerns me is the more immediate one of the agricultural system we have today, its health concerns, and its utter reliance on petrochemicals...hinging something so vital on a non-renewable resource is lunacy to me ( so hence the organics and the "perennial" part of the project)...i'll admit upfront that any and everything i'm exploring here is completely derivative...but it still needs to be looked at and i can't help but think the mandans and their fellows could teach us something... the photos have nothing to do with the text but i took them this morning when i went to campus to take the frost cloth off the teosinte ( no it didn't frost but i'll be damned if i'm going to take that chance when the forecast lows are in the thirties...not going to lose the improbable zea diploperennis because i was lazy)...the top one is how the garden looked a bit after seven this morning...lots of winter wheat going on which what the next two photos are of ( and i have to wonder why the backyard wheat hasn't developed any seed heads...it was planted at the same time in soil prepared with the same compost...weird)...the bird tape seems to be doing its job ( still no photos of our bird...she is slippery ) the fourth photo is of a doomed yam already in the shadow of a relentless jerusalem artichoke and the bottom photo is of the improbable teosinte and in it second season it still looks like maize...the family resemblance is plain to see...there's no maize on cmpus yet...or here for that matter...too cold and i am at a loss to know where i would put it in a garden already densely populated..still i want some comparative photos form another season so it will find a home somewhere.