Maize has sustained the Zuni and other people in the arid American Southwest for many generations. In the traditional Zuni dryland agricultural system, fields are carefully placed on valley-edge landforms to tap into watershed hydrologic and ecosystem processes. In these geomorphic positions, field soils are managed to receive supplemental water and nutrients for crops by retaining storm runoff transported from adjoining uplands. Crop experiments were conducted to examine the effects of runoff on maize (Zea mays) productivity. Productivity of a Zuni maize cultivar and modern hybrid maize was evaluated with five treatment combinations of water and nutrient input sources in two traditional agricultural areas that have been cultivated for at least 1000 years. During the first year of the two-year experiment (1997–1998), one field received inputs from four runoff events, while the other field, with a larger watershed, received no runoff. In year two, the one remaining field (the other field was disrupted) had inputs from one runoff event. Growing season precipitation was above average for both years of the experiment. All treatments, including those receiving only precipitation, produced grain yields ranging from 852 to 3467 kg ha⁻¹ for Zuni maize. Grain and biomass productivity tended to be greater in the irrigation-plus-fertilizer control treatment. Productivity differences among treatments are attributed primarily to differences in water inputs rather than nutrient supply. Although the more densely populated hybrid maize out-yielded Zuni maize on a land area basis, Zuni maize produced greater yields per plant and more biomass than did the hybrid maize.

Soils form the foundation for agriculture and are changed by farming through active management and unintentionally. Soil change from agriculture ranges from wholesale transformation to ephemeral and subtle modification. The archaeological record of early agricultural systems holds information about soil change on centurial to millennial scales, with important implications for long-term soil condition and land use sustainability. Knowledge of early agricultural management can also be inferred from soils, including farming strategies in dynamic, challenging environments. This paper discusses soil change processes and outcomes mainly using studies of ancient and traditional agriculture in arid regions of the Americas. The potential and limitations of soil change research methods in ancient agriculture are also considered. Soil anthropogenic change involves complex and interactive physical, chemical, and biological processes across a wide range of spatial and time scales. Soil change outcomes in early agriculture relating to soil health and productivity vary from improvement to degradation. Soil productivity improvement commonly resulting from management includes soil-landscape physical stabilization for crops, increased topsoil thickness and plant-available water capacity, and improved soil tilth and fertility. Degradation commonly results from unintentional soil-geomorphic-ecosystem changes that cause accelerated erosion, destabilization of soil structure and compaction, and decreases in plant nutrients and soil fertility. Soil change outcomes vary across space and time in response to complex environmental, agricultural, and social factors.

The Solanaceae family of plants provides edible fruit (i.e., tomatoes, husk tomatoes, chili peppers, eggplant), tubers (i.e., potatoes), and plants used for leisure activities (i.e., tobacco) that are useful to humans. Several wild members of this family grow in the U.S. Southwest and some were eaten by the Ancestral Puebloans. We present evidence here that the Ancestral Puebloans in the Four-Corners region of the U.S. Southwest–the states of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah–were actively cultivating the tubers of Solanum jamesii to supplement their diets of domesticated corn (Zea mays), beans (Phaseolus sp.), and squash (Cucurbita sp.). This is supported by modern day Native American groups who have used this plant for food either now or in their recorded past. We also propose that this potato tuber was cultivated or allowed to grow in gardens or fields around some major population centers in Puebloan times and that the stands currently growing in or near some of those archaeological habitation sites are legacy stands directly descended from ancient efforts to manage the tubers for food. The plant's location at the northern limits of its current range offers support for this proposal. This potato tuber would have provided a dependable and excellent source of nutrition for the ancestral Puebloans as well.

Results of original data from crop monitoring on four Hopi maize (Zea mays) fields bear implications regarding the use of agricultural labor, crop yields, and successful agricultural strategies to compensate for drought-induced production deficiencies. Production data from three years of drought and one of moderately moist conditions suggest that the intensity of crop predation and the labor necessitated by crop protection increase with severity of drought. If true, this indicates that increasing the surface area of production (extensification) alone would not compensate for drought-induced deficits in many areas. It also suggests that compensation for crop yield deficiencies might be best achieved by improving conditions for crop production in small areas (intensification) that are easily protected by farmers. In conjunction with geomorphic and hydrologic factors, this phenomenon may have influenced the strategies adopted by prehistoric farmers. Acceptance of these implications will require future hypothesis testing.

The Ocampo Caves of Tamaulipas, Mexico are well-known for archaeological evidence of early domesticated plants and the development of prehistoric food production. Richard S. MacNeish's 1953–1954 investigations in Romero's, Valenzuela's, and Ojo de Agua Caves yielded important insights into local prehistoric societies, the adoption of domesticated plants, and the use of caves as temporary campsites. Our research approaches the broader context of landuse by the occasional occupants of the caves through a geospatial analysis of the agricultural potential of the surrounding landscape. A recent archaeological survey revealed additional cave sites, as well as open-air settlements in the vicinity of the Ocampo Caves. The distribution of open settlements with architecture in a wide range of topographic settings raises the question of how this very rugged landscape might have been cultivated on a sufficient scale to support village populations. To address this issue, we developed a suitability raster using a geographic information system (GIS) weighted overlay analysis isolating areas suitable for farming surrounding the caves. The results of this analysis are briefly compared to tentative site distributions based on previous fieldwork. This agricultural suitability model can be used to generate hypotheses addressing cost-tradeoff decisions influencing prehistoric settlement patterns. From a field-methodological standpoint, the model also has potential as a predictive tool for the detection of early agricultural sites in Ocampo by concentrating future fieldwork efforts on high probability settings.

In agrarian societies, such as the ancestral Pueblo of the Four Corners region of the US Southwest (c. AD 600–1300), the resilience of crops in the face of climate challenges was of paramount concern. Consequently, students of these societies have invested much effort in modeling the response of traditional crops to ancient weather patterns. Less effort has been made to evaluate the quality of those reconstructions with experimental studies. Here, we report on results from the Pueblo Farming Project (PFP), a long-term collaboration between the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center and the Hopi tribe. From 2009 through 2015, PFP researchers and members of the Hopi tribe planted four experimental gardens of Hopi maize (Zea mays) on Crow Canyon's campus in southwestern Colorado using traditional methods. PFP researchers recorded growth progress over the growing season, harvested the corn, measured characteristics of the resulting crop, and derived yield estimates. We present the results of the garden experiments and we compare experimental yields with computational estimates of potential maize yield developed by the Village Ecodynamics Project (VEP). We find that Hopi maize flourishes in this part of the Hopi ancestral land and that PFP experimental yields are highly correlated with VEP yield estimates. We suggest that these PFP data may be used to refine existing maize paleoproductivity estimates, and we propose future directions for farming experiments in the Four Corners.

In spite of the importance of landscape for linguists, ethnobiologists, archaeologists, anthropologists, and humans in general, landscape terminology is an understudied phenomenon. Both methodologically and theoretically, linguistic systems of landscape classification remain a largely uncharted territory. By applying experimental methods from ethnoecology and psychology, I offer an innovative outlook on the study of ecotope terms, particularly those of endangered languages. I explore the meaning of two derivational suffixes that form names of ecotopes in Lokono, a critically endangered Arawakan language of the Guianas. These suffixes are added to plant-denoting nouns to coin two types of plant-based ecotope terms (i.e., names for areas indicated by a particular floral taxon). The results of three experiments involving ecotope vocabulary (free listing, triadic comparison, and pile-sorting) show that the two suffixes correlate with the differences in water saturation of the ecotopes and that the ecotopes are secondarily judged on the density of vegetation. I discuss the Lokono landscape terms, their cultural significance, importance for coordinating subsistence practices, and the spiritual life of the people. The Lokono data serve as a test case for the developed methods and add to the body of knowledge on indigenous landscape classification systems.

Few ethnobiological studies have thus far addressed the effect of diverse social, economic, and political variables that may influence the dynamics of folk plant knowledge. The aim of this work was to better understand the legacy of plant use in the post-Soviet context—particularly in Western Ukraine—by documenting the use of wild plants for food among Boykos living in Transcarpathia and comparing the findings with the results of a previous study conducted among their close neighbors, Bukovinian Hutsuls, living on the other side of the mountains. We documented the use of 35 taxa belonging to 20 families, mostly represented by Rosaceae species. The most popular taxa were Vaccinium sp. and Carum carvi, while the most popular emic food domain was represented by recreational teas, i.e., teas that are not drunk with the aim to obtain a precise therapeutic activity. The main finding, however, was that the difference between the wild food ethnobotany of the Boykos and Hutsuls was far more restricted than the ethnobotanical disparity that was recorded between Bukovinian Hutsuls living on the two sides of the state border (created seven decades ago) between Ukraine and Romania. This outcome may have important implications in ethnobiology, confirming the possible “homogenizing” effect played by the Communist period in the former Soviet Union, possibly due to Soviet agrarian reforms, obligations to work in collective farms (kolkhozes), and the considerable lessening of serendipitous contact with the natural environment.

Edible root resources were widely cultivated and consumed by First Peoples throughout North America from the early to mid-Holocene to historic times. In recent decades, archaeobotanists, ethnobotanists, archaeologists, and traditional knowledge-holders have explored and clarified many aspects of root food ecology, production, and exchange. This paper focuses on camas, considered a cultural keystone species across much of western North America because of its high cultural value and influence in defining the cultural identities and land use of resident communities. While historic camas use by First Peoples has been widely documented throughout the Pacific Northwest, the archaeology of camas is little known at coastal sites. This paper presents evidence for a concentration of camas bulbs (Camassia spp.) found in an earth oven complex within an ancient Sts'ailes (Chehalis) village in the Upper Fraser Valley of southwestern British Columbia, Canada. We contextualize this find by exploring the abundant ethnobotanical and ethnohistoric camas literature in order to create a picture of the production and exchange of camas amongst coastal communities of the Northwest Coast. We analyze direct and indirect sources of archaeological data for coastal camas production, which helps us to evaluate questions raised by the presence of this resource 150 km outside of its historical growing range.