ABSTRACT
Twenty-five years ago Joseph Caldwell prepared a summary of Eastern Woodlands prehistory, with emphasis on the origins of food production and subsequent developments, for a volume of comparative cultural-historical studies entitled Courses toward urban life. Primary evidence of plant use in general and of cultigens in particular derives from a variety of sources: pollen; macrobotanical remains in open sites, rockshelters, and caves; and trace-element analyses of human bone. The time–space pattern of cultigen emergence alters significantly after 1000 BC. The centre of gravity with respect to subsistence as a whole had by then shifted from dependence on wild species with supplementary use of the cultigens to dependence on the cultigens with supplementary use of wild foods. The function of plant-food species at the time of their initial cultivation was surely most often as a buffer, an additional resource for those periods when wild foods were scarce or temporarily inaccessible.
