Viewing page 8 of 25

00:15:24
00:17:25
00:15:24
Playback Speed: 100%

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

Transcription: [00:15:24]

{SPEAKER name="Helen Rountree"}
There are other things in the freshwater marsh that can be used, although the English don't mention them, they may not have been quite as important. They include, if I can get my list straight again, they include cattail, the root of which is edible and the young shoots in the spring are edible.
[00:15:38]

They include Golden club, which grows in both marshes and swamps when they are freshwater, and there's one other that is going straight out of my head, there are four altogether. But tuckahoe's the main one. So we have to take a good hard look at marshes, what marshes are available.
[00:15:53]

As for proving archaeologically that they got used, that's going to be a little hard, because root crops do not preserve particularly well. But we can look at least and try to estimate population and that might get at it a little bit.
[00:16:05]

Alright. That's swamps and freshwater marsh. Oh and keep in mind swamps, because a fair number of late villages were on swamps. That's things that the whites didn't want, but the Indians knew how to use.
[00:16:16]

Alright. The next area that people were putting to use, only in a moderately intensive way, was the oak flats, as they're called, that surround swamps. It is not the world's best area in which to try and do any farming, as people have found out frequently, but because the predominant trees are oak trees, there are about eight different oak trees that grow there, there are going to be lots of acorns, and a fair number of critters that people can hunt, and also people can gather the acorns.
[00:16:45]

I believe they've also got pig-nut hickories growing in these things too, so that's some nuts people can eat directly. So the oak flats, or the 'lower oak zone' around a swamp, is moderately useful, and Indian folks would find use that in foraging, strictly for foraging. And at most you might find a temporary camp.
[00:17:05]

One last area, for medium intensive use, and then I'll tell you what I'd expect to find in a camp. Medium intensive use you also find pine barrens. Now, the true pine barrens tend to grow south of Virginia, but you can make a case for calling some of these recolonizing pine forests after clearing or cutting over, you can call those pine [[barrens]]
[00:17:26]