Bison, anthropogenic fire, and the origins of agriculture in eastern North America

Scholars have argued that plant domestication in eastern North America involved human interactions with floodplain weeds in woodlands that had few other early successional environments. Archeological evidence for plant domestication in this region occurs along the Mississippi river and major tributaries such as the Tennessee, Ohio, Illinois, Missouri, and Arkansas rivers. But this region is also known as the prairie peninsula: a prairie-woodland mosaic that was maintained by anthropogenic fire starting as early as 6000 BP. Contrary to conventional wisdom, recent research has shown that bison were also present in the prairie peninsula throughout the Holocene. Recent reintroductions of bison to tallgrass prairies have allowed ecologists to study the effects of their grazing on this ecosystem for the first time. Like rivers and humans, bison create early successional habitats for annual forbs and grasses, including the progenitors of eastern North American crops, within tallgrass prairies. Our fieldwork has shown that crop progenitors are conspicuous members of plant communities along bison trails and in wallows. We argue that ancient foragers encountered dense, easily harvestable stands of crop progenitors as they moved along bison trails, and that the ecosystems created by bison and anthropogenic fire served as a template for the later agroecosystem of this region. Without denying the importance of human-river interactions highlighted by previous researchers, we suggest that prairies have been ignored as possible loci for domestication, largely because the disturbed, biodiverse tallgrass prairies created by bison have only been recreated in the past three decades after a century of extinction.

Book Review - The Prairie Peninsula, 2017. Gary Meszaros and Guy L. Denny

No abstract available.

Distribution, Habitat, and Zoogeography of the Semifossorial Red-bellied Snake Storeria occipitomaculata (Storer) in Illinois

The examination of 387 preserved red-bellied snakes, Storeria occipitomaculata, from 18 museums and collections, literature records, and unpublished records revealed distributional records throughout much of Illinois, in contrast to earlier studies which found a more limited distribution. Seventy-one records of habitat types from museum records, field notes, and literature indicated that the species occupies woodlands but is not primarily forest adapted. It also inhabits prairie and prairielike habitats in Illinois. The common occurrence of this species in this type of habitat has not heretofore been reported elsewhere in the range of the snake. Our findings do not support an older zoogeographic theory that assumed the snake was nonadapted for prairie and thus excluded from the Prairie Peninsula. We propose that the species was able to occupy the area near the ice rim of the Wisconsin Episode glaciation, and followed the glaciation as it retreated because of the snake’s cold tolerance, ability to inhabit northern prairies and coniferous forests, vivipary which allows thermoregulation by gravid females, and the relatively temperate climate along the glacial rim. Within recent times, it seems likely that the snake was extirpated throughout much of the former prairie by destructive changes associated with agriculture.