Archaeological evidence of intensive indigenous farming in MI's Upper Peninsula (opens in new tab)

(science.org)

83 pointsanyonecancode9mo ago15 comments

15 comments

Im not surprised, just a bit north of there the Keeweenaw Peninsula in Michigan has the largest deposit of native copper in the world and would have been fairly prosperous in that era trading copper and copper objects across the midwest and beyond among natives. You can literally dig solid copper nuggets out of the ground there. Just busting up random rocks from the area will show you bright shiny copper bits inside. Any area nearby would itself gain a lot of prosperity from the trade and have decent populations which incentivizes a lot of native farming to feed everyone.

claytonjy9mo ago

Calumet, in the Keweenaw Peninsula (just north of Michigan Tech) was nearly made the capital, instead of Lansing, because of this!

nerdsniper9mo ago

It's incredible knowing this and going there today - it's a very small town with an absolutely anemic economy and extremely old homes that mostly haven't been updated. It really shows how much can change for a town in 100 years.

1 more reply

anyonecancodeOP9mo ago

Also covered in https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/07/science/archaeology-menom...

gnabgib9mo ago

Also:

https://phys.org/news/2025-06-archaeologists-uncover-massive... (2 points, 6 days ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44202410

https://www.npr.org/2025/06/06/nx-s1-5423660/surprise-ancien... (2 points, 6 days ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44202410

https://home.dartmouth.edu/news/2025/06/archaeologists-find-... (5 points, 5 days ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44212470

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/massive-field-wher... (2 points, 3 hours ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44257422

mempko9mo ago

I love research like this. If you are interested in this kind of history, book Dawn of Everything by David Wengrow and David Graebier is an amazing book and imo completely destroys the unscientific narrative of human history they teach us. It's incredibly well researched where 1/4th of the pages are just citations. In other words, probably the most scientific account of human history ever written.

ab5tract9mo ago

Thanks, I will check this out! The amount of archaeological “fact” that rests on religiously (or culturally) constrained research is pretty astonishing.

profsummergig9mo ago

The way weeds grow in my lot in the midwest,

wiping out everything else if not tended to every year,

I find it very hard to believe that we can find evidence of intensive cultivation after 3,600 years in such a wet area.

Could be true, but I find it hard to believe.

npongratz9mo ago

From TFA, they're using LIDAR results to determine features suggesting indigenous farming practices. Researchers are doing the same in tropical rainforests around the world, where there's far more vegetation, finding similar evidence of intensive agriculture.

I highly doubt weeds, extensive though they might be, would wipe clean the evidence they've found in the landscape.

> I find it very hard to believe that we can find evidence of intensive cultivation after 3,600 years in such a wet area.

Perhaps I'm missing something. I'm no expert, and have merely skimmed through, but the earliest date I could find in the PDF linked from the fine article was 400 BCE [0], so around 2400 years. That's still a lot, but definitely not 3600 years.

[0] "While there is evidence of maize in the Upper Peninsula as early as 400 BCE (7), intensive cultivation, like we clearly see at Sixty Islands is typically not undertaken until roughly 1000 CE."

https://www.science.org/doi/suppl/10.1126/science.ads1643/su...

topspin9mo ago

"Weeds" are likely to be the main reason the topography was preserved. Without the plant roots fixing the soil in place, these sites would have washed away.

The surviving patches are small: 10's of meters on a side. The title language and figures cited make it appear this was a large scale farm operation. Instead, it looks like a collection of household farms scattered around the bottomland.

And while this is the UP of Michigan, it's actually at the southern-most point of the UP, right on the 45th parallel. It's not Florida, but it's also not exactly the Arctic either: the growing season is months shorter, but it does exist, there is ample precipitation, and the soil is often excellent. There are many farms operating at this latitude and further north today, although not much further north.

metalman9mo ago

it would have been slash and burn agriculture to start, so there is the likelyhood of fiding artifacts assosiated with charcoal and other evidence, as these people were probably hunter/farmer/gatherers a particular tool kit is going to be definitive, hunting ,fishing and birding points, wood and hide tools, plus agricultural tools, picks, shovles, and hoes,and cythe blades that show up in early agriculture elsewhere with layers of identifiable pitholiths still adhering to them......possibly allready found, but missidentified. also living at the 45'th parallel does require substansial winter prep and strurdy housing as it's still frozen solid for months every winter

SpicyUme9mo ago

Are any of the weeds in your lot Chenopodiums like goosefoot?

Have you read about the Eastern Agricultural Complex as one of the prehistoric centers of plant domestication?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Agricultural_Complex

b00ty4breakfast9mo ago

lots of those weeds probably weren't around ca 3600bp (and that's not even discussing the fact that many of those "weeds", so-called, are escaped crops, anyways, so the weediness would've been a feature for these farmers)

monster_truck9mo ago

The clay does a fantastic job preserving everything.

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