Oct. 8 2017. I’ve been on the road for a week now searching for lost crops. It’s pouring rain into the misty Red River Gorge, and I’m holed up at the lovely Daniel Boone Coffee Shop, so now is a good time to record some reflections so far.

I started my journey in Pittsburgh, where the Monongahela River and the Allegheny River join to form the Ohio River. This was a fitting place to begin, since the Ohio River was one of the great thoroughfares of pre-Columbian North America. I study a group of lost crops that were cultivated for thousands of years in a vast mid-continental region defined by its river valleys: the Ohio, Illinois, Missouri, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Mississippi rivers, among many others. Think of the Ohio as an ancient high road, connecting the heart of the midcontinent to the northeast via the Appalachian Mountains. I left the analogous modern high road, Route 70, in Wheeling, WV, and turned south to follow Route 7 along the upper Ohio River. When I hopped out of my car for the first time, I was looking for three floodplain weeds that were once important crops: native goosefoot (Chenopodium berlandieri), sumpweed (Iva annua), and erect knotweed (Polygonum erectum).

Route 7 along the upper Ohio River.

I spent a fruitless but sun-drench and beautiful afternoon walking the Ohio River valley between Wheeling, West Virginia and Marietta, Ohio. I mostly prospected around small oil wells in the floodplain that looked like something out of another century. The clearings and networks of trails connecting them were ideal places for the weedy species I was looking for, and they were out of the way enough that they weren’t overrun with invasive species. The next morning, I spent a few hours circumnavigating Middle Island, an island in the Ohio River that was one farm land but is now managed as a wildlife refuge. I came up empty handed in all of these likely locations, and in the afternoon decided to abandon the floodplain for now and head up onto the Allegheny Plateau.

Clearing around oil wells are good places to look for lost crops, or get electrocuted by DIY wiring!

If you’re from a coast, you may think of the entire region where I work as fly-over country, an endless expanse of corn fields, but it is actually a very diverse landscape.  The upper Ohio valley cuts southwest through its mountainous eastern margin. Some of the key archaeological evidence for the lost crops came from caves and rockshelters along the western Appalachian front, stretching from Ohio to Tennessee.  From the millions of crop seeds recovered from caves and rockshelters in this upland region, we know that the lost crops were cultivated here beginning in the end of the Late Archaic period, about 3500 years ago.  The three lost crops that I am looking for on this trip are all species of disturbed areas, usually near water, so their presence in mountain caves is somewhat surprising. I think that we can deduce that people made space for them outside of their natural habitat, by clearing forested terraces in mountain valleys and cultivating them there. Given this history, I was curious to see where these species would occur in the uplands without the major assist they once received from ancient farmers.

Ash Cave, Ohio. An enormous cache of ancient crop seeds, including domesticated native goosefoot (similar to quinoa) was recovered here, far from the natural habitat of a floodplain weed.

In Athens, I joined forces with my colleague Paul Patton, a professor at Ohio University. After a brief consultation with the archaeologists and botanists at the Wayne National Forest headquarters, we started prospecting along dirt roads near Monday Creek, a small tributary of the Hocking River. After several hours of not finding lost crops, we had started to get a little careless, strolling along and chatting with our eyes trained on the strips of weeds between the road and the forest. This gave us plenty of time to compare notes. “There’s no sumpweed up here” Paul told me. “But, the USDA map…” I began, but he was one step ahead of me. The Wayne National Forest is his study area, and he’s excavated several Archaic and Woodland sites in those hills. “The occurrence you saw in Athens County was mined from one of my papers – it’s from an archaeological site, not a modern occurrence.”

USDA Map showing sumpweed (Iva annua) occurrences. You can see that Athens County is marked in green, meaning that Iva annua has been collected in that county. Turns out, though, that accession was from archaeological specimens excavated by Paul, not living plants. If you know the major rivers in the region, you might notice that the counties with sumpweed are mainly located along them, not up in the hills and mountains.

For hundreds of years, botanists have been collecting plants, identifying them, and depositing their pressed specimens in curious institutions called herbaria (singular: herbarium). These collections are a priceless record of plant distributions over time, but they are also idiosyncratic. Coverage may be very good within a 50 mile radius of some avid 19th century botanist’s house, but non-existent the next county over. Still, based on the data I’ve personally amassed from herbarium specimens, plus the considerably bigger databases of the USDA and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), there isn’t (and hasn’t been for at least two hundred years) any sumpweed up in the hills where we were looking.

A sumpweed specimen we examined at the Ohio University herbarium from Athens, near the Hocking River. We checked this location, but it is long gone.

After this revelation, I was very surprised when Paul suddenly stopped in his tracks – “Is that?!” Following his shocked gaze, I realized that what it was: a patch of sumpweed plants growing along a parched dirt road running uphill from an old mine – a strange place for a plant that is basically a wetland species. We both stood around not believing our eyes while we texted a picture to our friend Liz, who has been cultivating sumpweed for the past three years. When she texted back “Cute!” rather than “You’re idiots that isn’t sumpweed,” we gleefully started collecting seed, data, and herbarium specimens from our first lost crop find of 2017.

Me recording data on our first sumpweed find

Paul this unlikely location.

This populations is growing literally a stone’s throw from ancient sites where it was an important crop. It’s been hundreds of years since then – hundreds of years during which this site was clear cut, then mined for coal and oil, then reforested. Could this be a remnant of a cultivated population? It would take A LOT more data on where sumpweed does and does not occur to answer that question. Actually that’s part of what brought me down to Boone National Forest, where I’m currently getting rained on. Like the Hocking River and its tributaries, the Red River has provided plenty of evidence for the cultivation of lost crops in the highlands. The lost crops aren’t supposed to be here either, but you never know what you might find when your start looking.

Collecting goosefoot seeds along the Hocking River with Paul.

Post Script, Morning  of Oct. 9

I rallied from my warm dry retreat at the Daniel Boone Coffee Shop and headed down into the Red River Gorge minutes after finishing this post. To get into the gorge, you first have to pass through the spectacular Nada Tunnel, which was created in the early 20^th century to transport lumber out of what was then still an old growth forest. After passing through, the road dives down into the gorge. Route 613, still a pot-holed dirt track in some places but worth the effort,  winds its way down the bottom of the gorge along the Red River, past several caves and rockshelters that are famous (at least, to me) for their contributions to our knowledge of the lost crops.

Nada Tunnel, entrance to Red River Gorge, Kentucky.

As I trudged along one roadside between campsites in the pouring rain, my eyes alighted on a form that I know from my dreams and nightmares – little erect knotweed, the elusive subject of recently completed dissertation – my lost crop. This plant is extremely rare: in four years of searching this is only the sixth population I have ever found. But since I’ve been growing it for going on three years now, I can spot it anywhere, even if it is mowed and bedraggled, like these ones. Back in my car, I checked the location on my big map of Kentucky. I was directly below Courthouse Rockshelter– the very location where excavations had yielded 2,000 year old caches of erect knotweed and other lost crops back in 1998. It was getting dark and didn’t have time to investigate further, but I am headed back up into the hills now!

Erect knotweed growing along the Red River, just below Courthouse Rockshelter.

An a hot August day in 2014, I found myself armpit deep in weeds and grasses on a creek bank in central Arkansas, following my friend Liz Horton as she swept the ground in front of us with a stick to scare off snakes. Kelsey Nordine brought up the rear, mastering her life-long ophidiophobia by dint of dedication to our common goal: to rediscover a lost crop. I remember this day as the spiritual beginning of my lost crops research, a journey of discovery that would transform me into the world expert on one unobtrusive little plant, erect knotweed. While it is easy to overlook this plant today, the archaeological record shows that it was an important seed crop for centuries in many Indigenous communities in eastern North America.

Kelsey and I, not finding lost crops, August 2014. Photo credit: Liz Horton.

That day, I had the help of some formidable companions. Liz is the station archaeologist for Toltec Mounds, a site that was an important ceremonial and political center in the Late Woodland and Mississippian Southeast (from around 650 – 1100 AD). Back then, Liz was getting started building the Plum Bayou Garden at Toltec Mounds, a teaching garden that contains many of the plants used by Woodland communities in Arkansas (if you’re in the area, you really should stop by — it is an extraordinary place). She is also an expert in ancient fiber technology – baskets and clothing – and the plants that were used to create them. The daughter of two master naturalists and a native of the Ozarks region, she was the ideal guide to help me find an elusive and diminutive weed among the almost scary plant fecundity of August in Arkansas. Like me at the time, Kelsey is a graduate student at Washington University in St. Louis specializing in pre-Columbian agriculture. She was working in the Maya world, but her growing interest in the plants and people of eastern North America was evident from her willingness to keep me company on this wild weed chase. We did not find any erect knotweed that day, but later on Kelsey and I did find thousands of seed ticks on our ankles in the seeming luxury of our air conditioned Motel 6 room.

Erect knotweed — if you can spot it! I found this one with the help of Missouri Botanical Garden botanist Alan Brant. I ended up writing a whole dissertation about this plant — read all about it here.

Maybe it seems strange that I remember that day, when I failed to find a lost crop, as the beginning of the journey. But scraping ticks off your legs with a credit card in a motel bathtub and not finding what you’re looking for – then laughing about it in bed with a tall boy of PBR –  is part of the distinctive flavor of my field work. It’s not the only flavor though – there’s also the taste of frozen pickle pops after long hot car rides with the windows down, the indescribable beauty of a native prairie remnant blooming in May, and the excitement of finding whole populations of endangered plants somehow thriving in tucked away corners of the industrial agricultural landscape.

Clockwise from top: Survey for Lost Crops veteran Maggie Spivey-Faulkner, enjoying a roadside Pickle-Ice; Cherokee Prairie echinacea in bloom, an enormous population of maygrass hidden among the cornfields of southeastern Arkansas; Maggie, Liz, and my mentor Gayle Fritz at the Plum Bayou Garden; me the day I found my first stand of erect knotweed.

Now, as I get ready to set out once again with my plant press and my measuring tape, I’ve decided to start writing about these experiences. The Survey for Lost Crops, as I’ve come to call this endeavor, is an esoteric quest to find the remnants of an ancient agricultural system, but along the way it also brings me to parts of the 21^st century rural landscape that are seldom seen. It also brings me into contact with people who are protecting the land, its native flora and fauna, and its deep history in unique and unexpected ways amid what appears from the highway to be a desolation of genetically modified corn and soybeans.

Paul Krautman on his farm talking lost crops with my partner, Don Conner, another Survey stalwart. Paul’s alternative farming methods, especially his limited use of herbicides, make room for native plants like erect knotweed (foreground) to persist in agricultural landscapes.

So what are these lost crops I speak of? Here they are!

From Mueller et al. 2017. a) goosefoot (Chenopodium berlandieri); b) sumpweed/marshelder (Iva annua); c) little barley (Hordeum pusillum); d) erect knotweed (Polygonum erectum); e) maygrass (Phalaris caroliniana)

Don’t feel bad if you don’t recognize them. When you think of Indigenous North American cuisine and agriculture, you probably imagine three crops that are very far from lost: beans, squash, and of course, maize (most people call it corn, but that’s actually an old European term meaning any kind of grain – the name shows how important it became to European colonists, huh?).

The kind of maize agriculture practiced today by this farmer (and good sport) in Illinois would have surprised the ancient farmers who developed this crop. They grew diverse maize landraces in a complex polycrop system with many other plants. Photo credit: Andrew Flachs.

These three crops were indeed the staples in a complex domesticated landscape that supported Indigenous people at the time when their land was invaded by European colonists. Maize, beans, and many common varieties of squash originated in Mexico, where their wild ancestors were first domesticated, and they reached eastern North America through trade. But that doesn’t mean that expert farmers in eastern North America played no role in creating the crops we know today. For the entire history of agriculture up until the early 20^th century, farmers were responsible for selecting and saving their own seed from their own crop, or else trading for seed with neighbors. What archaeologists call the “tropical crops,” those that originated in Mexico, had to be adapted to the temperate climate of eastern North America, a process that likely took centuries of careful observation and experimentation.

I photographed these teosinte (the wild ancestor of maize) and maize sprouts at a workshop on seed saving at Native Seeds Search in Tuscon, AZ. This seed bank houses hundreds of landraces of crop plants, including this sprouting maize variety, that are specially adapted to the Sonoran Desert. The same crop diversity was also characteristic of ancient crops in the East, and many Indigenous communities still maintain their traditional landraces of maize and other crops.

We know from the archaeological record that maize, beans, and Mexican varieties of squash (such as pumpkins) were not widely grown in eastern North American until the last few centuries before the arrival of Europeans – beginning around 900 AD. But agriculture began in this region thousands of years earlier. Which brings me back to the lost crops – if they were lost, how do we know about them? That story begins in the 1960s, when archaeologists began to use a new technique called flotation to recover plant remains from archaeological sites. It’s not rocket science – you take a soil sample from an archaeological context, like a pile of ancient garbage or a storage pit, and you put it in a bucket of water. The organic material floats to the top, you skim it off, dry it out, and look at it under a microscope.

My students processing flotation samples near Avon, NY, in the summer of 2011, and the end results we hope to find: tiny fragments of ancient plants (in this case, erect knotweed sprouts!)

This simple methodological innovation changed everything, though. As thousands of liters of sediment were floated all across eastern North America, it became apparent that several unknown crops had been cultivated for their seed, while at the same time the advent of radiocarbon dating revealed that agriculture dated back a whopping 4,000 years – much longer than anyone had thought before. To answer early skeptics, paleoethnobotanists got creative. They dissected ancient human poops – yes! Poops! – and found that they were full of the seeds of the lost crops. They also found the lost crops stored in baskets and bags or bundled in dry rock shelters. By carefully analyzing the size and shape of the ancient seeds, they were able to demonstrate that some of the lost crops were actually domesticated. This means that they had diverged, in the evolutionary sense, from wild populations and could be recognized as distinct sub-species.

Left: Excavating a pit full of erect knotweed seeds (Photo courtesy of Neal Lopinot); Right top: ancient human poop from Kentucky; Right bottom: ancient bundles of maygrass from Arkansas.

The study of the lost crops is only two academic generations deep. My dissertation adviser, Gayle Fritz of Washington University, was one of the scholars who showed that the lost crops were domesticated. Her adviser, Richard Yarnell, did some of the pioneering studies of the lost crops, including the first analyses of ancient poops. Because we’ve only known about these crops for a few decades, there are a still a lot of unanswered questions. For me and my colleagues, many of these questions can only be answered by interacting with the living plants.

Growing Lost Crops Symposium participants, Athens, GA 2016. Left to right: Me, Gail Wagner, Paul Patton, Liz Horton, Daniel Williams, Gayle Fritz, and Logan Kistler (and some lost crops, of course!)

Here we all are luxuriating in our shared nerdiness at the Growing Lost Crops symposium, the first of its kind, last fall at the Southeastern Archaeological Conference meetings. If you want to read more about this research, check out the paper we recently published on some of the preliminary results of our projects. I am setting out on round three of the Survey for Lost Crops at the end of next week, and I look forward to sharing stories and findings along the way this time.