Burned tree stump at edge of newly burned field.
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Burned tree stump at edge of newly burned field. | Family activity was likely intense during the springtime preparation of fields for planting (ECON). Given the importance of domestic foods in their diet, it seems likely that most household members (able-bodied adults and perhaps even children) helped remove scrubby plants that invaded the fields since the last year's harvest. If new fields were needed, related households cooperated in the girdling and burning of forests and old fields. A family's able-bodied adults and adolescents probably took on the more laborious tasks of tilling and piling earth to promote growth of the dietary staples of corn and squash, and native cultigents like goosefoot and sunflower. Younger children could have helped plant the seeds. Like farmers today who lack mechanical work-saving devices and rely mainly on their own labor, Mississippian mothers working the fields, either left their infants with elderly or sub-adult women, or took them to the fields. |