Maize Productivity in the Eastern Woodlands and Great Plains of North America

1999 ◽  
Vol 64 (3) ◽  
pp. 499-516 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sissel Schroeder
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Great Plains ◽  
Nuclear Family ◽  
Eastern Woodlands ◽  
Resource Productivity ◽  
Maize Productivity ◽  
Mean Size ◽  
The Mean

Archaeologists and ethnohistorians have long been interested in quantifying potential maize productivity for late prehistoric and early historic Native Americans of the Eastern Woodlands. Maize yields obtained by Native Americans using traditional farming techniques in the nineteenth century are compared to yields obtained by nineteenth-century Native Americans using plows, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century farmers in Illinois and Missouri. The result is a notion of average resource productivity for maize that is more reasonable and modest than previous estimates. In this study, the mean yield of maize for nineteenth-century Native American groups who did not use plows was 18.9 bu/acre (stdev=4.1) (1,185.4 kg/ha [stdev=254.1]). Yields on the order of 10 bu/acre (627.2 kg/ha) probably are closer to the average prehistoric yields that were available for subsistence purposes. The mean size of gardens cultivated by nineteenth-century Native American families without plows was .59 acre (stdev=.45) (.24 ha [stdev=.18]). These newly compiled data are used to generate a model of nuclear family household economy and minimal and maximal garden sizes given different levels of maize productivity and consumption. Population estimates made on the basis of previous assessments of high rates of resource productivity will need to be reevaluated.

Understanding Variation in Prehistoric Agricultural Productivity: The Importance of Distinguishing among Potential, Available, and Consumptive Yields

2001 ◽  
Vol 66 (3) ◽  
pp. 517-525 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sissel Schroeder
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Agricultural Productivity ◽  
Yield Data ◽  
Maize Productivity ◽  
Productivity Data ◽  
Maize Yields ◽  
Agricultural Yield ◽  
Maize Kernels

Based on a model derived from an analysis of contemporary maize yields in Tennessee, Baden and Beekman claim that Mississippian yields would have ranged between 8 bu/acre (501.7 kg/ha) and 30 bu/acre (1,881.3 kg/ha). Using nineteenth-century observations of Native American farmers, I noted in 1999 that available maize yields ranged between 3.7 and 42.67 bu/acre (232.1 to 2,676.3 kg/ha), with a mean of 18.9 bu/acre (1,185.4 kg/ha) for groups that did not have plows. Consumptive yields would have been lower, probably closer to an average of 10 bu/acre (627.2 kg/ha). In this paper, I clarify the differences between potential yields, available yields to illustrate the advantages of my approach. I discuss some factors that affect maize plants prior to harvest, leading to available yields that may be lower than potential yields, and conditions that reduce the quantity of maize kernels available for consumption after the harvest. Baden and Beekman argue that modern agricultural technology provides a more reasonable baseline analog for modeling ancient maize productivity than nineteenth-century Native American technologies. In contrast, I explore agricultural yield data for Native Americans and Euroamericans from a number of tribes and states for 1850, 1867, and 1878. A comparison of these data shows that, overall, yields obtained by Native American farmers tend to be lower than yields for contemporaneous Euroamerican farmers. My approach using agricultural productivity data from nineteenth-century Native Americans, coupled with a consideration of potential, available, and consumptive yields, provides a plausible foundation for the evaluation of late prehistoric yields.

scholarly journals Tallest in the World: Native Americans of the Great Plains in the Nineteenth Century

2001 ◽  
Vol 91 (1) ◽  
pp. 287-294 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard H Steckel ◽  
Joseph M Prince
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Great Plains ◽  
The World

Kenrick and the Paulists: A Conflict of Structures and Personalities

1969 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-105
Author(s):  
John P. Marschall
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
The United States ◽  
Oxford Movement ◽  
Religious Congregation ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Catholic Church

In spite of the nativism that agitated the United States during the second quarter of the nineteenth century, the Catholic Church experienced a noticeable drift of native American converts from other denominations. Between 1841 and 1857 the increased number of converts included a significant sprinkling of Protestant ministers. The history of this movement, which had its paradigm in the Oxford Movement, will be treated more in detail elsewhere. The purpose of this essay is simply to recount the attempt by several converts to establish a religious congregation of men dedicated to the Catholic apostolate among native Americans.

Wired into Nature

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Schwoch
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
North America ◽  
Communication Networks ◽  
Great Plains ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Electronic Communication ◽  
Spanish American War ◽  
White House ◽  
Atlantic Seaboard

This book is a study of the telegraph in western North America, concentrating on the latter half of the nineteenth century. A number of distinguished books and articles have been written about the telegraph and the nineteenth-century American experience. For the most part, however, this scholarly work is geographically partial. The standard histories of the American telegraph are stories of the East Coast and the Atlantic Seaboard, the growing Midwest, and service to urban areas. This book looks toward the West. The narrative includes landscapes and ecosystems, meteorology, surveillance, and containment and conflict with Native Americans. Major themes include the high ground, the signal flow, the state secret, and the secure command. Opening with discussion of the first attempts to bring the telegraph to the Trans-Mississippi West, the book concludes with the consolidation of the secure command of electronic communication networks in the White House during the Spanish-American War, detailing the transformation of electronic communication networks from continentalism to globalism. The terrain of the narrative incudes the Great Plains, the Southwest, the Pacific Coast, the Rocky Mountains, the border with Mexico, and the subarctic and arctic areas of North America. This book presents an interpretive approach that centers on environmental, climatological, military, and surveillance issues as key factors in the history of electronic communication networks.

Reading the Historical Novel: Reworking the Past and the Relation of Blackfeet History in James Welch's Fools Crow

2009 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-100
Author(s):  
SARAH MARTIN
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
The Political ◽  
Historical Novels ◽  
The Novel ◽  
James Welch ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Impact

The article considers the political impact of the historical novel by examining an example of the genre by Native American novelist James Welch. It discusses how the novel Fools Crow represents nineteenth-century Blackfeet experience, emphasizing how (retelling) the past can act in the present. To do this it engages with psychoanalytic readings of historical novels and the work of Foucault and Benjamin on memory and history. The article concludes by using Bhabha's notion of the “projective past” to understand the political strength of the novel's retelling of the story of a massacre of Native Americans.

Indians Illustrated

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
John M. Coward
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Cultural Values ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Visual Cues ◽  
Political Influence ◽  
Westward Expansion ◽  
History Of

In the second half of the nineteenth century, Americans swarmed to take in a raft of new illustrated journals and papers. Engravings and drawings of “buckskinned braves” and “Indian princesses” proved an immensely popular attraction for consumers of publications like Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper and Harper's Weekly. This book charts a social and cultural history of Native American illustrations—romantic, violent, racist, peaceful, and otherwise—in the heyday of the American pictorial press. These woodblock engravings and ink drawings placed Native Americans into categories that drew from venerable “good” Indian and “bad” Indian stereotypes already threaded through the culture. The book's examples show how the genre cemented white ideas about how Indians should look and behave—ideas that diminished Native Americans' cultural values and political influence. The book's powerful analysis of themes and visual tropes unlock the racial codes and visual cues that whites used to represent, and marginalize, native cultures already engaged in a twilight struggle against inexorable westward expansion.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
Mark Walczynski
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Aboriginal People ◽  
River Channels ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
American Frontier ◽  
History Of ◽  
European Trade ◽  
Frontier Settlers

This chapter provides an overview of the history of Starved Rock in Illinois. The land that today comprises Starved Rock State Park and the adjacent countryside was nearly continuously occupied by Native Americans until the early nineteenth century. Although the Rock itself was not an occupied Native American site per se, like a semi-permanent village, it was a place where, for millennia, Native Americans camped, sojourned, and in a few instances had their earthly remains interred. West and north of Starved Rock, along the ancient river channels that once crisscrossed the Illinois Valley, aboriginal people hunted, fished, and farmed. Oblivious to the movement of Europeans from the Old World to the New, the Indians in the Starved Rock area established a village named Kaskaskia. European trade goods that made the chores of killing, cleaning, and cooking easier reached the Kaskaskia a decade or so before French missionaries and traders made their debut at Starved Rock. By the early nineteenth century, American frontier settlers would arrive and change the entire dynamic of the Starved Rock area. Their attitudes concerning the use of lands and waterways, and their exploitation of natural resources, embodied values that would have seemed utterly foreign to the Indians who proceeded them.

The Oligocene rodent Ischyromys of the Great Plains: replacement mistaken for anagenesis

1993 ◽  
Vol 67 (2) ◽  
pp. 297-308 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy H. Heaton
Keyword(s):  
South Dakota ◽  
Great Plains ◽  
Statistical Investigation ◽  
Closely Related Species ◽  
Geographic Ranges ◽  
Large Samples ◽  
Early Oligocene ◽  
Mean Size ◽  
The Mean ◽  
Entire Distribution

Ischyromys, the most abundant early Oligocene rodent from the Great Plains, has been considered by some workers to represent a single gradually evolving lineage comprising three or more chronospecies. Statistical investigation of large samples suggest instead that two closely related species coexisted, and the shift in mean size that was thought to represent anagenesis actually represents replacement. In Nebraska and eastern Wyoming both I. parvidens (small) and I. typus (large) were rare but of equal abundance in the Chadronian, I. parvidens was more prevalent in the early Orellan, and I. typus was more prevalent in the middle and late Orellan. In northeastern Colorado, northern South Dakota, and North Dakota I. typus is the only species of Ischyromys found in Orellan deposits, thus showing that the two species had differing geographic ranges.The mean size of I. typus does increase up section at all localities, but this change is minor and not deserving of chronospecies recognition. Much of this change occurred in the latest Orellan and earliest Whitneyan as I. typus approached extinction, and it was accomplished mostly by loss of small individuals rather than a shift of the entire distribution. Rate of evolutionary change in Ischyromys is found to be inversely correlated with population size, and no new species arose during the Orellan when Ischyromys was most abundant.

Blood Pressure in Native Americans Switched from Celecoxib to Rofecoxib

2005 ◽  
Vol 39 (5) ◽  
pp. 797-802 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jefferson Fredy ◽  
Daniel A Diggins ◽  
Gregory B Morrill
Keyword(s):  
Blood Pressure ◽  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Index Date ◽  
Medical Center ◽  
Nonsteroidal Antiinflammatory Drugs ◽  
Cardiovascular Safety ◽  
Antiinflammatory Drugs ◽  
The Mean ◽  
Cox 2

BACKGROUND: Nonsteroidal antiinflammatory drugs have been associated with exacerbation of hypertension. Differing effects on blood pressure (BP) have been reported in studies comparing celecoxib and rofecoxib. Concern regarding the cardiovascular safety of the cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2) inhibitor class has intensified since the removal of rofecoxib from the market. OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the effect of a formulary change from celecoxib to rofecoxib on the BP of Native American patients at an Indian Health Service medical center. METHODS: Medical records of patients switched from celecoxib to rofecoxib were retrospectively reviewed. BP during the respective treatments was compared as follows: measurements recorded while taking celecoxib within 6 months before the index date and while taking rofecoxib from 1 week after the index date through 6 months of treatment were averaged. Differences in systolic and diastolic BP before and after the therapy change were evaluated using a paired Student's t-test. Subgroup analysis was performed for patients with preexisting hypertension. RESULTS: During rofecoxib therapy, the mean systolic BP was 2.9 mm Hg higher (p = 0.015) and the mean diastolic BP was 1.5 mm Hg higher (p = 0.042) than during celecoxib therapy. Among hypertensive patients, the respective mean systolic and diastolic BPs were 4.8 mm Hg (p = 0.009) and 2.0 mm Hg (p = 0.063) higher while taking rofecoxib. CONCLUSIONS: Switching patients from celecoxib to rofecoxib resulted in an increase in BP, with a larger difference observed in patients with hypertension. Future studies assessing the cardiovascular safety of currently marketed and investigational COX-2 inhibitors should evaluate the possible contribution of BP effects of these agents to overall risk.

Culture and Agriculture: A Comment on Sissel Schroeder, Maize Productivity in the Eastern Woodlands and Great Plains of North America

2001 ◽  
Vol 66 (3) ◽  
pp. 505-515 ◽  
Author(s):  
William W. Baden ◽  
Christopher S. Beekman
Keyword(s):  
Great Plains ◽  
Maize Yield ◽  
Yield Potential ◽  
Average Yield ◽  
Yield Data ◽  
Eastern Woodlands ◽  
Maize Agriculture ◽  
Maize Productivity ◽  
Agricultural Potential ◽  
Behavioral Constraints

Using selective maize yield data from ethnohistoric and government sources dating between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, Schroeder (1999) argues that Mississippian average yield potential fell within a 9-10 bu/acre range. We evaluate her argument in terms of well-established climatic, environmental, varietal, and behavioral constraints on maize agriculture and conclude that reconstructing prehistoric agricultural potential requires a more precise methodology that incorporates these factors.

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