Eastern North America
The remaining agricultural region of the prehistoric Americas comprises the eastern tall grass plains of the US midwest, and the Eastern Woodlands. This is a roughly quadrangular block of territory, divided down the middle by the Mississippi Basin, with its Missouri, Ohio, Arkansas, and Tennessee tributary systems. The northern limits of the region run to the latitude of the Great Lakes. Outside this quadrangle, the Great Plains proper and most of Canada were either too dry or too cold to support prehistoric farming, and farming never reached the west coast of North America in prehistory.
The Eastern Woodlands in particular have suffered much linguistic extinction as a result of European settlement, but there are five language families that are possible candidates for an initial generation through some form of farming dispersal. These are Caddoan, Siouan, and Iroquoian (reputedly sharing distant genetic links according to some linguists), together with Algonquian and Muskogean (likewise, according to some linguists, distantly related) (Figure 1.2). All of these families appear to have expanded within the past 4,000 years, according to glottochronological estimates, with Siouan and Iroquoian being marginally the most diverse.
Because of the high rates of language loss, the precise homelands and expansion histories of these five language families are not easy to reconstruct. But it is still evident that Iroquoian, Siouan, and Algonquian tend to converge geographically within the zone marked in Figure 10.13 as the homeland of post2000 BC interior riverine seed crop cultivation. Admittedly, Iroquoian lies a little to the east of this zone, but this family now has a broken distribution, with Cherokee (Southern Iroquoian) being geographically separated from the main block of Northern Iroquoian languages. Likewise, Siouan proper has become separated by a geographical gap from Catawba in South Carolina. Nevertheless, it is likely that all three did once intersect within the circle in Figure 10.13, and have individually radiated out of it. This, at least, sounds convincing in principle, although it is no doubt impossible at this late date to prove from linguistic resources alone.
Algonquian and Muskogean
Unfortunately, these two language families contain little information that can positively support or negate the applicability of the early farming dispersal hypothesis in eastern North America. According to Mary Haas (1969:62), both could have shared a common ancestor about 5,000 years ago, although this is not agreed upon by all linguists, and even if true it would seem to relate to preagricultural circumstances. Both language families are relatively non-diverse internally, with Algonquian having a divergence history of perhaps 3,500 to 3,000 years, Muskogean much less, perhaps only 2,000 years.
Most linguists who have ventured a homeland for Algonquian focus on the Great Lakes region. Frank Siebert (1967) placed it between Lake Ontario and Lake Huron at about 1200 Be, based on a reconstruction of about 50 ProtoAlgonquian natural history reconstructions. Terms for maize, beans, and squash do not reconstruct to Proto-Algonquian, and Ives Goddard (1979) and Michael Foster (1996:99) have both commented on the rake-like structure of the Algonquian family "tree," with nine or ten subgroups all derived independently from Proto-Algonquian. No linguist, however, seems to have put forward a historical hypothesis to explain the vast spread of the Algonquian languages, ranging ethnographically from the extensive hunter-gatherer populations of central and eastern Canada (Cree, Ojibwa, Montagnais-Naskapi, plus many others), through the hunters of the northern Great Plains (Blackfoot, Cheyenne, Arapaho), to the small-scale farming and foraging populations of the Middle Mississippi and Ohio basins. Wiyot and Yurok, two languages distantly related to Algonquian, also existed on the coast of northern California.
How can we explain the huge spread of Algonquian? Its limited degree of genetic diversity, at least in widespread shared lexicon, means that we cannot claim an eternal existence for it as a sprachbunde since the Paleoindian period. Somehow, and relatively recently, the Algonquian languages have spread from a homeland located somewhere close to the Great Lakes. The spread predated the arrival of maize, beans, and squash, but certainly need not have been totally Archaic and purely huntergatherer. The great problem here is that words for the native seed crops cultivated in the Eastern Woodlands are not recorded in the languages that have survived to the present, and we meet this problem later in connection with Siouan and Iroquoian. So, if the early Algonquians did maintain fields of cultivated goosefoot and sumpweed, we are never likely to find any witnesses in the linguistics.
But all is perhaps not lost. Archaeologist Stuart Fiedel (1987, 1990, 1991) has reconstructed an early Algonquian homeland amongst pottery-using Early or Middle Woodland cultures of the northeast. The options, centered on the period
between 600 and 200 BC, include the Point Peninsula culture of Ontario and the Adena culture of the Ohio valley. Fiedel allows for some cultivation of gourd and squash, but not maize, which is not yet present in the archaeological record. By 200 Be, according to Fiedel's glottochronological dating, Algonquians had reached New England, but many of the Eastern Algonquian languages only spread during the first millennium AD, just prior to the arrival of the Northern Iroquoians (after AD 700).
My own suggestion, offered purely as a working hypothesis, would be that the central and eastern Algonquians (excluding the genetically distant Plains languages and those in northern California) could have undergone some degree of expansion during the late Archaic and Early Woodland periods following the acquisition of indigenous seed crop cultivation in the Mississippi and Ohio valleys. The eventual acquisition of maize agriculture could have stimulated expansion further, perhaps on a much larger geographical scale, but by this time there was growing territorial competition from other groups such as the Iroquoians and Siouans.
The Canadian Algonquian hunters such as the Cree and Ojibwa represent from this perspective another specialization that probably reflected the location of ProtoAlgonquian somewhere close to the northern edge of the zone of agricultural viability. Whether these hunters replaced other populations in Canada I cannot be sure,16 but my inclination is to regard them as akin to the Punan of Borneo, able to spread just as their farmer cousins, but for reasons that could have involved demands from more settled societies for furs and other wild resources.
The essential conclusion, therefore, is that Algonquian expansion may have reflected agricultural dispersal in part, but certainly not in totality. However, when we move to examine Muskogean, the picture (perhaps deceptively) seems to be simpler. Muskogean occupies an area of the southeastern USA east of the lower Mississippi, and is thus more limited in extent than Algonquian. It is not a diverse language family internally, and Proto-Muskogean seems to have existed only about 2,000 years ago according to lexical comparisons. To the west of it existed a number of isolated and now extinct languages such as Natchez, Tunica, Chitimacha, Tonkawa, and Atakapa, suggesting that the spread of Muskogean itself was somewhat constrained to within the modern states of Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. Foster (1996) suggests a
connection for Muskogean languages with the Mississippian culture (AD 10001500) and a possibly aggressive spread southeastward at that time, although some earlier movement following on from the spread of maize cultivation and ridged field construction into the southeastern USA after AD 200 (Riley 1987) can be considered likely. Muskogean seems to be too young for any early connection with the region of indigenous seed crop domestication in the Eastern Woodlands, and it is perhaps significant that its distribution falls mostly outside that region. So, for Muskogean, are we looking at late, maize-related, expansion during the Late Woodland and Mississippian periods? I suspect so.