Make some room in the garden, you storied three sisters: the winter squash, climbing beans and the vegetable we know as corn. Grown together, newly examined "lost crops" could have produced enough seed to feed as many indigenous people as traditionally grown maize, according to new research from Washington University in St. Louis.
But there are no written or oral histories to describe them. The domesticated forms of the lost crops are thought to be extinct.
Writing in the Journal of Ethnobiology, Natalie Muellert, assistant professor of archaeology in Arts & Sciences, describes how she painstakingly grew and calculated yield estimates for two annual plants that were cultivated in eastern North America for thousands of years -- and then abandoned.
Archaeologists found the first evidence of the lost crops in rock shelters in Kentucky and Arkansas in the 1930s. Seed caches and dried leaves were their only clues. Over the past 25 years, pioneering research by Gayle Fritz, professor emerita of archaeology at Washington University, helped to establish the fact that a previously unknown crop complex had supported local societies for millennia before maize -- a.k.a. corn -- was adopted as a staple crop.
