NSF Award
9910438
With National Science Foundation support Dr. John Hart will collect samples of prehistoric common beans (Phaseolus vulgaris) excavated in archaeological sites in Eastern North America and submit them to the University of Arizona AMS radiocarbon laboratory for chronometric dating. Because of small sample size requirements, AMS permits individual beans to be directly dated. This stands in contrast to other methods where larger sample size requirements preclude direct dating of this type. The issue of the spread of agriculture is of great interest to many archaeologists. When Europeans arrived in North America they found that most Native Americans relied on agriculture and that normally maize, beans and squash were cultivated in single fields and together these provided the necessary essential nutrients. While the diffusion of maize and squash are relatively well known, considerable less work has focused on beans. Likely domesticated in Middle America neither the path nor timing of their spread is understood and preliminary data surprisingly suggest their arrival at significantly different times in Eastern North America. Given the complementary role in the diet one would expect that the association between the three domesticates would be relatively old, but such appears not to be the case. Archaeologists have generally assumed that the development of cultural complexity and spread of agriculture occurred together and that the reliable and rich subsistence provided by domesticates played a causal role in this process. However in North America such appears not to be true and agriculture predates the growth of complex society by a significant interval. Thus archaeologists wish to understand when and how domesticates spread and thus approach the subsistence-complexity question on solid chronological ground. The dates obtained by Dr. Hart will provide much needed information. The results will be of interest to, and widely used by, many archaeologists. They will shed important new light on the prehistory of Native American peoples.
