Old World farming typically has two domesticated components:
plants and
animals. The first thing to note in the Americas is the much less
prominent role played by animals. Such domesticated animals as there
were tended to be small, like the turkey in Mesoamerica and the guinea
pig in the Andes. The only domesticated herbivores were the Andean
camelids, the llama and the alpaca, and they did not spread to other
parts of the Americas. Overall, the problem was not lack of grass or,
initially, of herbivores. But just as in Australia, the arrival of
behaviorally modern humans was followed by massive extinctions among
the larger animal species of both continents (the evidence for the role
of humans being much more specific in the American than in the
Australian case). The result was that, by the time farming developed,
few suitable animals remained to domesticate; this left large areas of
the American grasslands to the hunter- gatherers.
In the realm of domesticated plants, one major limitation
relates to
the techniques of cultivation. Whereas the farmers of the Old World
used the plow, those of the New World depended on the digging stick—a
difference obviously related to the lack of oxen in the Americas. This
made New World agriculture a labor- intensive affair—"horticulture," as
it is often called. It also meant that some potentially very fertile
land could not be cultivated with the prevailing technology; again this
land was left to the hunter-gatherers.
The Americas were also less fortunate than the Old
World in the plants
that were available for domestication. The most widespread package was
a combination of maize, beans, and squash that originated in Mexico.
Maize in particular came to be cultivated as far north as Canada and as
far south as Argentina, a remarkable success, given that it had to
diffuse from one climatic zone to another. Other domesticates, like
potatoes in the Andes and manioc in Amazonia, did not spread beyond the
types of environment to which they were initially adapted. The relative
disadvantage of the Americas became clear when the coming of the
Europeans brought Old and New World crops into competition. Several New
World crops, like maize and the potato, were widely adopted in the Old
World; but the colonization of the New World by Old World domesticates
was a much more extensive process.
The relative weakness of New World farming is reflected
in the story of
its emergence. Currently there are two rival chronologies in the field,
a long one and a short one. The long chronology places the beginnings
of plant domestication in the early Holocene, with dates going back to
10,000 B.C. The short chronology prefers dates no earlier than the
fourth millennium B.C., a good five thousand years later. The choice
turns in part on how hard or soft the evidence has to be. Yet for our
purposes there is little need to choose between the two chronologies.
On the short one, domestication started some five thousand years later
in the New World than in the Old; on the long one, it started just as
early in both, but brought about no radical change in New World
societies for the next five thousand years. Whichever is the case, the
upshot was that the Neolithic revolution got under way much later in the
New World. Real villages do not appear in the Americas
before the short
chronology would lead us to expect them.
Within the New World the cases of the two continents
are somewhat
different. In North America the only region in which successful farming
emerged independently was the Mexican highlands with its classic
package of maize, beans, and squash. Maize at least was domesticated in
or by the fourth millennium B.C., though village life appears only in
the second millennium.
From the Mexican highlands this package, and maize
in, particular,
spread northward over considerable distances to two regions of what is
now the United States. One was the southwest, a territory with no
earlier domesticates. Here farming arrived in the second millennium
B.C., but did not become predominant for another couple of millennia.
The other region was the southeast, where maize arrived in the first
millennium A.D.; this region had possessed some marginal local
domesticates since the third millennium B.C., but it was not until some
time after maize had been adopted that farming brought about major
changes in society. In due course maize cultivation diffused widely in
the eastern half of the United States.
Maize also spread to South America; it was cultivated
in Ecuador in the
second millennium B.C. But by this time farming was already well
established in the central Andes. Here the domestication of the main
plants and animals had probably happened in the fourth millennium B.C.
The major crops in the Andean region were a grain called quinoa and the
potato; the major animal was the llama. The impact of farming on
society is clearly visible in the third millennium B.C. In Caral in the
coastal lowlands of Peru; domesticated crops and monumental
architecture date from about 2600 to 2000 B.C.
Domesticated manioc of Amazonia may—or may not—have
as long a history
as Andean crops. The tropical horticulture of the Amazonian lowlands
was most successful when practiced on or near the floodplains of the
major rivers of the region, which in turn provided obvious avenues for
its diffusion. Indeed, farming peoples with canoes seem to have moved
not just down the rivers of northern South America but also through
chains of islands offshore. Thus the linguistic affiliations of the
Taino, who occupied the Greater Antilles at the time the Spanish
arrived, point to an origin deep in the interior of tropical South
America.
