The Eastern Agricultural Complex
Crops domesticated in North America, and later forgotten
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Domestication is when people, over generations, change a plant by sowing the seed of the best specimens, until it can no longer manage without them. Eastern North America is one of fewer than ten places on Earth where agriculture arose independently, and it is routinely left off the list. That the crops were later displaced by maize does not make the domestication less independent — it is documented through seeds growing larger and coats thinner over generations, the same signal used in the Middle East and China.
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Long before maize arrived from the south, people in the Mississippi valley had domesticated their own crops: goosefoot, sunflower, marsh elder and squash. The sunflower is still grown worldwide. The others were abandoned when maize took over, and some are now nearly gone.
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