"Lazarus Cooke" > wrote in message
news:030720072231250006%lazaruscooke@britishlibrar y.invalid...
>
> Thanks for that very informative and interesting answer, cookie.
> Although this stuff is right outside my area, I find it fascinating.
> Over here in Europe, I find it immensely difficult to ascertain what
> people really ate even within living memory.
>
> Spaghetti carabonara?
>
> Cornish pasties?
>
> The project of trying to figure out what native americans ate before
> europeans arrived is very difficult, but no less worth pursuing.
>
The vast differences in the diets of pre-Columbian Native Americans at
various times and places is an amazing study. Here, in Central Texas, at
least in the historically recorded 18th/19th century, sedentary tribes
raised corn, beans and squash/melon/gourds. Thousands of years before, the
almost as sedentary and amazingly artistic dwellers in and on the rim above
Seminole Canyon, just off the Rio Grande between Del Rio and Langtry (of
Judge Roy Bean fame), between creating still beautiful and haunting
"paintings" on the cliff wall, lived (hard and hardly) on what they could
catch and gather seasonally, seed grains from native grasses, small animals,
even insects and edible carrion (with not enough trees for nuts or acorns).
On a meager diet like that, their "droppings" must have been sparse, but
under the canyon's rim were preserved for scholars, for me at least a
particularly unappealing side of archeology. The Karankawa of the Texas
Coast, non-agriculturists on barren barrier islands, lived on shellfish in
season (leaving substantial mounds of oyster shell "in memoriam") and
stranded travelers in the months without an "R" when shellfish are less
dinable. Among the Kroncs, protein's protein.... (which may have accounted
for the speed with which all later occupiers from Spanish to Anglo settlers
"disappeared" the Karankawa rapidly from history's all too brief records.

At least in the Continental US, upon Columbus's first foray to the Bahamas,
the native American population was small, likely fewer than claim to be
"Native Americans today, limited by agricultural, hunting and survival
skills (and by what the current historians overlook from political
correctness, an unfortunate tendency to scuffle, bloodily, with the
neighbors, although in most cases with less self-finality than that which
accompanied conflict with the new and land hungry arrivals). Of course
there were far denser populations in Mexico and parts of Central America and
in the Inca lands, stone age civilizations with sophisticated agriculture
(or simply with access to a bountiful Mother Nature).

TMO