Historical agricultural practices

A primary goal of cultural resource management is to balance the protection of historic properties with the enhancement of these properties for the public benefit. When an undertaking is determined to have an adverse effect on an historic property, it is the responsibility of the lead agency and consulting parties to develop a plan to mitigate (resolve) those adverse effects.  Where historic buildings are impacted, Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) documentation has been the standard mitigation approach.  While HABS is valuable, simply recording a building does little to benefit the local community. The Advisory Council on Historic Preservation (ACHP) encourages creative approaches when mitigating adverse effects to historic properties geared towards emphasizing the public benefit. An example of such an approach is the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) partnership with the Washington Trust for Historic Preservation’s (WTHP) Barn Recycling Program to address the recent decommissioning of two historic barns.  The program salvages building materials from deconstructed structures and redistributes them to local Heritage Barn owners for their own restoration efforts. This presentation will discuss the benefits of the program and outline potential issues for the lead agency to consider in the reclamation process.

Rio Grande Anasazi in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries A .D. mulched hundreds of garden-sized plots with pebbles to increase soil moisture, reduce erosion, extend the growing season, and increase crop yields. This paper reports on the construction and configuration of pebble-mulch gardens in New Mexico, focusing particularly on those in the Galisteo Basin. Surfaces adjacent to these gardens were scraped and pits were excavated to collect gravel, which was placed over garden surfaces in layers 5 to 11 cm thick. Gardens averaged 15 x 23 m in size, although both size and shape were highly variable, and they collectively covered an area of 41,000 m2. Although this unique agricultural strategy has been shown to be effective, construction was limited to sites with natural gravel deposits, pebbled surfaces inhibited the recycling of crop wastes, and such gardens never became as widely used as more traditional field forms.

The mulching of agricultural fields and gardens with stones, pebbles, cinder and similar lithic materials is a variant agricultural strategy that has been used to evade drought and increase crop yield for more than a thousand years in the Old and New Worlds. Lithic mulch agriculture (LMA) is uniquely suited to the constraints of dryland environments, yet its use has remained confined both spatially and temporally. Prehistoric and contemporary LMA cases are synthesized and treated as a taxonomically discrete form of
agriculture. This serves to alert scholars to the possibility of LMA at other historic sites.

Lithic-mulch agriculture is a strategy that employs materials such as volcanic ash and cinder, pebbles, gravel, or stones as a mulch to improve crop growth. The field form has been identified at only a few prehistoric and historic sites. The form is marked by accumulation of lithic materials in solid layers, ridges, terraces, pits, or mounds. These features have been sited in natural gravelly or stony soil on relatively level ground. The mulch has been used only at locales with a growing-season moisture deficit. Mulching increases crop yields on a sustained basis, attenuates declining yields during drought, and extends the growing season on cool semiarid uplands.

Settled agriculture significantly changed life in early societies of the Western Sudan and the Bantu-speaking societies of central and southern Africa led to numerous migrations, population booms, and the establishment of various communities and kingdoms throughout Africa. The people of Africa were no longer comprised of small bands of nomadic hunter-gatherers, but rather established sedentary communities, which allowed for much larger populations and the subsequent development of larger societies and culture.

Soils-based evidence derived from thin section micromorphology is used to explore contrasts in pre-Hispanic and Hispanic arable land management practices associated with raised fields in an inter-Andean valley of Ecuador. Differences in textural pedofeature characteristics suggest that, where they are found in the same locality, camello´n systems were more intensively manured and cultivated than wachu systems. Both, however, were more intensively managed than traditional Hispanic arable fields. The importance of the camello´n in pre-Hispanic agriculture is emphasized by soils-based evidence that highlights the efforts made to clear these fields of volcanic ash after the Quilotoa eruption of ca. A.D. 1280. This research suggests that, in an andosol context, pre-Hispanic and Hispanic arable land management practices leave relict and fossil soil micromorphology features that can be used to interpret land use intensities.

Prehistoric Anasazi Pueblo Indians relied on a diverse set of agricultural strategies, each uniquely suited to specific micro-environments, in their attempts to mitigate subsistence risk. One variant strategy used during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries A.D. was pebble- mulch gardening. The Rio Grande Anasazi of northern New Mexico occasionally mulched some of their garden plots with pebbles in order to increase soil moisture, reduce erosion, moderate soil temperature, and increase crop yields. This labor intensive technique was primarily employed as a drought- evasive measure. And while pebble mulching is an effective agricultural adaptation to the constraints of a dryland environment, construction was limited to sites with natural gravel deposits and it never replaced more traditional food stress- coping mechanisms. In spite of their potential, pebblemulch gardens were used for only a short period of time, never contributed much to the total food yield of pueblos, and remained always a peripheral innovation outside of the Anasazi cultural core.

This study investigates water and land usage in the territory of La Carència, an Ibero-Roman city located near Turís (Valencia, Spain) in Eastern Iberia. The outstanding political importance of La Carència during the Iberian Iron-Age period is attested by its large size, the monumental character of its structures and on-site finds. Multidisciplinary and micro-regional landscape work at its territory documented significant differences between the Iberian and the Roman settlement patterns, which are attributed to the distinct agricultural production and water management systems of each period. While Iberian sites are more related to the agricultural exploitation of flat, dry land for which water sources, such as natural springs, were probably used, Roman sites seem to be associated with more productive soils that take advantage of flooding areas and the drainage of water accumulation zones. Such different agricultural preferences based on large-scale water management are documented for the first time in the Iberian Peninsula and they attest to the great potential of multidisciplinary landscape archaeology to address past land-use practices.

Rio Grande Anasazi in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries A.D. mulched hundreds of garden-sized plots with pebbles to increase soil moisture, reduce erosion, extend the growing season, and increase crop yields. This paper reports on the construction and configuration of pebble-mulch gardens in New Mexico, focusing particularly on those in the Galisteo Basin. Surfaces adjacent to these gardens were scraped and pits were excavated to collect gravel, which was placed over garden surfaces in layers 5 to 11 cm thick. Gardens averaged 15 x 23 m in size, although both size and shape were highly variable, and they collectively covered an area of 41,000 m2 Although this unique agricultural strategy has been shown to be effective, construction was limited to sites with natural gravel deposits, pebbled surfaces inhibited the recycling of crop wastes, and such gardens never became as widely used as more traditional field forms.