[terycarl]

There were farming communities cultivating this country(land) with corn, pumpkins and potatoes, to name a few, long before The founding Fathers ever put pen to paper to frame the Constitution. They were called Indians, or if you will, Native Americans.

not really...the indians were mostly hunter-gatherers..I don't recall them having an agricultural background....did they plow and plant ??? They ate a lot of what grew naturally, hunted the enormous amount of wildlife that were present here. The Europeans, when they came, established farming methods and actually reproduced agricultural products through their own efforts

[muawiyah]

American Indians were the greatest agricultural innovators in world history right up to modern times.

Recent studies attribute the domestication of Japonica Rice to the Aleut people ~ it was developed in Coastal Alaska and taken to Asia in later centuries.

But right off the bat you have two great starch sources ~ potatoes and corn ~ as well as BEANS and SQUASH.

There are thousands of varieties of each ~ and there are numerous other species that were domesticated by Indians thousands of years ago.

The whole planet has but 6 known centers of plant domestication ~ one is the East Central region of North America (centered on Mammoth Cave) and another consists of the highlands of Central America (Mesoamerica) with a wide variety of climate zones arrayed vertically.

[muawiyah]

American Indians were the greatest agricultural innovators in world history right up to modern times.

Recent studies attribute the domestication of Japonica Rice to the Aleut people ~ it was developed in Coastal Alaska and taken to Asia in later centuries.

But right off the bat you have two great starch sources ~ potatoes and corn ~ as well as BEANS and SQUASH.

There are thousands of varieties of each ~ and there are numerous other species that were domesticated by Indians thousands of years ago.

The whole planet has but 6 known centers of plant domestication ~ one is the East Central region of North America (centered on Mammoth Cave) and another consists of the highlands of Central America (Mesoamerica) with a wide variety of climate zones arrayed vertically.

[RedMonqey]

not really...the indians were mostly hunter-gatherers..

terycarl

That is an stereotype.

You mistaken the roving tribes of the Western Plains for all Indians.
There were settled Indian tribes of the East, Central and South American cultures that did hunting as well but would have starved trying to sustain large populations off of "gathering and hunting" sustenance.

One only has to reflect upon Thanksgiving Day history when the local Indian tribe(the Wampanoag) taught the Pilgrims to catch fish and used them to help fertilize the poor soil they tried to use. Dirt mounds were created by hand using a wooden stick to break up the ground. Corn seeds were put into soft earth mounds covering the herring. A Western style plow only made the task simpler and less labor intensive.

The Central American civilizations developed what was essentially a weed with a large seed head into what is known today as "Indian Corn"

Ancient Peruvians did the same to what we know as the potato. They developed several varies to withstand different conditions.

All before Christopher Columbus was a sparkle in his father's eye...