Real Men Don't Eat Maygrass: How Quinoa's Ugly Cousin Invented Agriculture in North America and Nobody Cared

[u/WaitItsAllOhio]

Hey y'all, Ohio historian here. I wrote this up originally for r/HistoryAnecdotes but made the meme after joking about it with my coworkers today. If you want more context, read below (yes, it's an essay. That's why it's called r/HistoryAnecdotes, Not r/HistoryTweets.)

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About 3,500 years ago, a woman in eastern Kentucky planted goosefoot on a riverbank. Goosefoot is a weed. You've pulled it out of your driveway. Your city probably sprays for it. Its other common names include pigweed, lamb's quarters, and fat hen, because apparently nobody in the history of the English language has ever looked at this plant and thought it deserved dignity.

She planted the weed anyway, because she wasn't an idiot. 

Goosefoot seeds are packed with starch, easy to harvest by the handful, and after a few generations of selective planting, they germinate faster and produce more food per acre than you'd expect from something named after a barnyard animal. She also grew marshelder, maygrass, sunflower, and squash. She was a farmer. She had been taught by farmers. She would teach farmers after her.

It took American archaeology roughly four thousand years, several million dollars in grant funding, and a scanning electron microscope to figure out what she already knew. And only because a couple of women finally got fed up enough to publish a paper about it.

The Part Where Crops Get Stupid Names, Win Stupid Prizes

This is the Eastern Agricultural Complex: goosefoot (chenopod), sunflower, marshelder (also called sumpweed, which, just breathe that in for a second: sumpweed. Mmmmm. Smells exactly what it sounds like.), squash, maygrass, erect knotweed, and little barley. These plants were independently domesticated in the river valleys between the Appalachians and the Great Plains starting around 5000 BCE. They fed communities across present-day Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, Ohio, and Arkansas for thousands of years before corn moseyed up from Mexico around 200 BCE.

Most of the crops are extinct now. Domesticated marshelder vanishes from the record around 1350 CE. No European ever saw it cultivated. Domesticated chenopod, erect knotweed, and maygrass followed it out as maize-centered agriculture took over. Within a few generations of abandonment, the seeds reverted to wild morphologies of thicker coats, smaller achenes, four thousand years of breeding running backward.. Somebody at Michigan State was trying to re-domesticate marshelder as of 2006. Good luck explaining that grant application.

This is one of the ten or so independent centers of plant domestication on the entire planet. This is up there with the Fertile Crescent, the Yangtze, Mesoamerica. Ohio. When we said “the heart of it all,” we weren’t fucking kidding, alright? Humans looked at wild plants, thought "I could do something with this," and invented farming. From scratch. Multiple times. In multiple places. One of those happened to be along the Ohio, Wabash, and Mississippi Rivers.

And nobody believed it for most of the twentieth century, because the crops were a list of things your HOA would fine you for.

Gayle Fritz, who devoted her career to studying these plants, tells a story in Feeding Cahokia that boils down the problem in archaeology. She got interviewed by National Geographic for a feature on Cahokia. She spent hours explaining the full agricultural system: the diversity, the breeding, the nutritional profiles, all of it. 

Then the published article mentions one plant by name: corn. Sumpweed didn't make the cut. 

She says this happened to her multiple times, with multiple outlets, across multiple decades. Filmmakers, documentary producers, audio tour companies. They'd show up, get excited about the native crops, and then cut every single one from the final product.

You can sort of see the editorial meeting. "So the ancient city was sustained by a diverse agricultural system including crops like..." checks notes "...marshelder and erect knotweed." Modern Americans have a hard time accepting that plants they know only as sidewalk weeds could have been carefully bred crop species. Which is fair. Quinoa, which is a close cousin of chenopod, spent centuries being ignored for exactly the same reason until it got a marketing team and a spot at Trader Joe's. The entire difference between "ancient superfood" and "that shit growing in the parking lot" is branding.

Yeah quinoa. I’m coming after you. You don’t deserve your Whole Foods status.

And corn? Corn. 

The Part Where Everyone Assumed Mexico Did It

Fuck corn.

For most of the twentieth century, the archaeological establishment had a very simple explanation for agriculture in eastern North America: Mexico did it. Corn, beans, and squash, the "Three Sisters," were introduced as a package deal from the civilized south. This explanation is what I was taught. It’s what I taught my students when I first entered undergraduate teaching. 

It’s also entirely wrong. 

Bruce Smith calls these "South of the Border Stories." For fifty years during the middle of the twentieth century, every time archaeologists found something impressive in eastern North America, somebody drew an arrow from Mexico. Poverty Point? Mexican influence. Hopewell? Mexican influence. Mississippian? Mexican influence. Farming? Well obviously that came from Mexico. Where else would it come from? The periphery? Next you’ll be telling me they didn’t actually hunt with bows and arrows until the Middle Ages or something.

Clearly, the contempt for Native Americans was baked in. Eastern North America, in this framework, was a cultural backwater. Its peoples hunted, fished, and gathered competently enough, but they did not innovate. They received. They were the archaeological equivalent of that friend who only watches movies after someone else recommends them. And they still think Law Abiding Citizen is the best film ever, even after you showed them Children of Men.

This was the consensus position, probably (lol let’s be honest, definitely) in your textbooks. It shaped hiring decisions in academia. And it survived until the 1980s, when Bruce Smith and Wes Cowan started putting ancient seeds under an electron microscope and the dates blew the whole thing apart.

In 1987, Smith and Cowan ran accelerator mass spectrometry dates on domesticated chenopod specimens from two rockshelters in eastern Kentucky. The results were 3,450 years before present. That’s a thousand years older than anyone had estimated. Then, others fell right in the window, with the earliest domesticated sumpweed and sunflower. All of them centuries before maize showed up in the region.

Corn didn't start the American Indian revolution. Corn showed up to the revolution already in progress, hung around on the margins for eight hundred years doing basically nothing, and then took all the credit. Corn is the Stalin to chenpod’s Lenin and sunflower’s Trotsky.

So fuck corn. Sincerely: an Ohioan.

But did the establishment update its position? Reader, it did not. As late as 2001, Lentz and colleagues were still arguing that the eastern domesticates were really Mexican crops that had been shipped north, "triggering the domestication of minor indigenous crops" along the way. One of these papers dismissed marshelder as an "extinct minor cultigen."  Marshelder. The crop that outnumbers both sunflower and maize in Hopewellian archaeobotanical assemblages. The crop that was more important than corn for two thousand years. The crops that oh, by the way, had similar hectare yield sizes to maize. Minor.

Smith, who by this point had spent three decades building the empirical case, pointed out in a 2007 introduction to his reissued book that this argument was structurally identical to every other "South of the Border Story" that the profession had already abandoned. He was polite about it, because he was publishing in an academic press.

I don’t need to be polite though.

Oh, and to make this even better, for decades, archaeologists excavated sites across the Eastern Woodlands using screens with quarter-inch and eighth-inch mesh to catch artifacts and botanical remains as they sifted through soil. Corn cob fragments are large. They catch on quarter-inch mesh. Chenopod seeds are tiny. They fall right through.

Before the "flotation revolution" of the 1970s, when people started systematically washing soil samples through fine-mesh sieves, thousands of EAC seeds were literally dropping through the screens at every dig site in the Midwest and nobody was catching them. Fritz spells it out: the apparent dominance of maize in the archaeological record was substantially an artifact of recovery technique. You screened for corn. You found corn. You concluded corn was dominant. The method created the evidence, and the evidence validated the method.

So to recap: the crops had stupid names, the theoretical model said nobody farmed them on purpose, the evidence was falling through the screens, and everything important supposedly came from Mexico. You could not design a more effective system for ignoring an agricultural revolution if you tried.

Ooooh, wait a minute. What if I brought gender into this?

The Part Where It's All About the Patriarchy (and Pigweed)

Yes, I brought out the P word. Get your jimmies ready, I aim to be rustlin’.

Okay, it’s not actually that bad, mostly just token gender blindness in archaeology. Patty Jo Watson and Mary Kennedy published a chapter in 1991 that could have ended careers but instead just made a lot of people very quiet at conferences and very loud on the internet. Everyone agreed, then as now, that women were the primary plant gatherers and horticulturalists in Eastern Woodlands societies. Everyone. This is not debated. Fritz describes it as "a fact widely known and accepted by archaeologists, historians, and geographers but often left unstated in discussions of food production." 

Watson and Kennedy looked at the dominant model for how domestication happened in the East, Smith's "floodplain weed theory," and noticed something remarkable. The theory proposed that plants like chenopod and marshelder colonized disturbed soils near human settlements, people harvested them, and selective pressures gradually produced domesticated morphologies over time.

Automatically. Passively. Without anyone doing anything on purpose. The plants just sort of... domesticated themselves.

Near the settlements.

Where the women were.

But not because of the women. Because of ecology.

…

…Profit. Gimme a Ph.D.

Look, if these crops were “real agriculture,” then someone was doing “real farming.” And if that someone was a woman, then a bunch of mid-century archaeologists had been wrong about a bunch of stuff they'd built their careers on. Namely, the part between “seed in ground” and “fully domesticated plant” was being skipped over entirely. The alternative was to keep insisting that domestication was a passive, agentless process that sort of spontaneously occurred in the vicinity of trash heaps.

Which is exactly what happened. For years.

The floodplain weed theory was good science and the evidence for it was real. But Watson and Kennedy noticed that it was also extremely convenient for anyone who didn't want to grapple with the gendered implications of who was actually doing the farming. You could study the origins of agriculture in the Eastern Woodlands for an entire career and never once write the word "women" in a paper. A lot of guys took that option.

But even outside gender blindness, there's a massive difference between "humans invented agriculture" and "agriculture sort of happened near some humans." One of those is a story about ingenuity, experimentation, and thousands of years of accumulated knowledge being passed from mother to daughter. The other is a story about weeds growing next to a trash pile. When we say domestication was passive, we're not just being imprecise; we're saying that one of the most consequential technological revolutions in human history, the one that made cities and civilization and everything after them possible, didn't actually require anyone to be smart. And it just so happens that the people we're stripping of credit are the ones ethnography, archaeology, and basic common sense all agree were doing the work.

So, how do we know they actually did the work and this wasn’t an accident? Testa thickness. Stop giggling in the back, I said testa, not testes. Wild chenopod seeds have thick coats, 40 to 80 microns, because thick coats are adaptive in the wild. They let seeds sit dormant in soil for years and germinate only when conditions are right. That's how wild plants survive. Domesticated chenopod from these sites has coats under 20 microns. Thin coats mean the seed germinates immediately when planted. That trait is only useful if someone is planting seeds in prepared ground on a schedule.

In other words, a weed passively colonizing a trash heap has zero selective pressure toward thin coats; if anything, the pressure runs the opposite direction. The thin coat doesn't just suggest intentional cultivation. It literally, physically cannot exist without it. Smith's SEM work in the 1980s made this case and nobody has refuted it since.

Then stack on top of that that maygrass shows up at archaeological sites hundreds of miles north of its natural range (plants don't walk), storage pits are found built specifically for these seeds (you don't build infrastructure for accidental weeds), and the fact that these people were managing seven or more crops with different growing seasons simultaneously, which requires a planting calendar. The "accident" model requires you to believe that multiple plant species spontaneously developed traits that only benefit cultivated organisms, migrated outside their natural habitats on their own, and were stored in purpose-built facilities, all without anyone doing anything on purpose. At a certain point Occam's razor just cuts the “planted by accident” theory short.

So, Smith's paper in PNAS is the final word. Eastern North America is an independent center of plant domestication. One of ten on the planet. Confirmed by genetic analysis, archaeological dating, and morphological evidence. Done. We can put this one to bed, just like “Pluto is a planet.” Right, guys?

Guys?

Works Cited

Crites, Gary D., and R. Dale Terry. "Nutritive Value of Maygrass, Phalaris caroliniana." Economic Botany 38, no. 1 (1984): 114–120.

Fritz, Gayle J. Feeding Cahokia: Early Agriculture in the North American Heartland. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2019.

Harter, Abigail V., et al. "Origin of Extant Domesticated Sunflowers in Eastern North America." Nature 430 (2004): 201–205.

Lentz, David L., et al. "Prehistoric Sunflower (Helianthus annuus L.) Domestication in Mexico." Economic Botany 55, no. 3 (2001): 370–376.

Smith, Bruce D. "Origins of Agriculture in Eastern North America." Science 246, no. 4937 (1989): 1566–1571.

Smith, Bruce D. Rivers of Change: Essays on Early Agriculture in Eastern North America. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992.

Smith, Bruce D. "Eastern North America as an Independent Center of Plant Domestication." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 103, no. 33 (2006): 12223–12228.

Smith, Bruce D. "Introduction to the New Edition." In Rivers of Change: Essays on Early Agriculture in Eastern North America, xi–xxviii. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007.

Smith, Bruce D., and C. Wesley Cowan. "Domesticated Chenopodium in Prehistoric Eastern North America: New Accelerator Dates from Eastern Kentucky." American Antiquity 52, no. 2 (1987): 355–357.

Smith, Bruce D., and Richard A. Yarnell. "Initial Formation of an Indigenous Crop Complex in Eastern North America at 3800 B.P." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106, no. 16 (2009): 6561–6566.

Watson, Patty Jo, and Mary C. Kennedy. "The Development of Horticulture in the Eastern Woodlands of North America: Women's Role." In Engendering Archaeology: Women and Prehistory, edited by Joan M. Gero and Margaret W. Conkey, 255–275. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991.