Late last October, I walked to the Clinton Presidential Center to meet with a group of ladies from New York City. They had just taken a tour, and my duty was to show up for lunch and answer questions about Arkansas history and culture.
The oldest of the group asked the best questions, often with a conditional second question (and if so, then ...?). It turned out she had been a junior high algebra teacher. When lunch came and she saw my sweet potato and kale hash, she asked, "Is that an Indigenous dish?"
I think she wanted to know if it was a local specialty. My guess is that a bowl of sweet potato, kale, and whole grains was first offered circa 1975 at the Moosewood Restaurant in Ithaca, N.Y. It's one of those hippie foods that became a ubiquitous yuppie food, and ought to be more ubiquitous, because you can eat it every day and it won't diminish your health--unlike the food we elevate as "authentic Arkansas": pork, fried stuff, pie. (Not to mention beverages: soda fountain drinks, bourbon.)
But while kale and sweet potatoes are grown in Arkansas, neither is "Indigenous" in the sense of being native to our region. Kale is a European import; sweet potatoes are native to the American tropics and made their way north.
And while the Indigenous peoples of Arkansas cultivated native plants for a long time, the state's Indian residents had adopted "foreign" cultigens centuries before European contact in 1541. Arkansas archaeologist George Sabo says in "Arkansas: A Concise History" that the famous trio of corn, beans, and squash were cultivated in many parts of Arkansas by 1250 in sufficient volume to support large populations.
The Arkansas Archeological Survey (AAS) maintains the Native American Teaching Garden at the Winthrop Rockefeller Institute on Petit Jean Mountain. It maintains similar gardens at Plum Bayou Mounds Archeological State Park and Parkin Archeological State Park.
Because the prehistory of Arkansas began about 30,000 years ago, and because the chronological divisions that archaeologists use are by necessity complicated, it is helpful to have a simple, concrete subject as an introduction to prehistoric chronology. The AAS three-way division of the Teaching Garden on Petit Jean offers just that, using the most memorable subject: food. Specifically, food from plants.
The first section, the native plants walkway, contains wild plants that people in Arkansas gathered for food beginning no later than 8500 BC. The foods include fruits, nuts, and greens. Hickory and black walnut trees supply nuts, and oaks supply acorns. The fruits are blackberries and dewberries, maypops, persimmons, pawpaw, elderberry, and ground cherry. The maypop plant blooms in May, and its fruits pop when stepped on. Ground cherries are similar to tomatillos.
Seeds from fruits and shells from nuts can last for millenia and accumulate around encampments and settlements, but leafy greens tend to deteriorate, so it's harder for archaeologists to determine what greens people ate.
The AAS identifies the greens of the gathering period as fiddlehead ferns, purselane, amaranth, and goosefoot. "Fiddlehead fern" is a tricky term; according to the AAS, it means any fern in "a growth stage ... when they are first coming up and in the process of unfurling" but it can also refer to the Ostrich Fern.
The second section of the Teaching Garden is dedicated to native plants that people in Arkansas were cultivating for food "around a few thousand years ago," according to the AAS website. It's called the Eastern Agricultural Complex garden, and the crops highlighted correspond to the late Archaic and early Woodland periods of prehistoric Arkansas.
I find it easiest to think of this section of the garden as the part that represents centuries and centuries of rudimentary agriculture, when crops included sumpweed, goosefoot, maygrass, little barley, sunflower, and erect knotweed. They all can be processed (dried, ground up, pressed) to yield starch and/or oil, and any group of people that starts producing starch and oil in great measure is about to settle down.
Archaeologists call from AD 900 to 1541 in Arkansas the Mississippi period, and its hallmarks, to quote Sabo again, are "population growth, the advent of large-scale agriculture, and the emergence of large communities with powerful leaders and priests." The third section of the Teaching Garden is the Mississippian Garden, where AAS staff grow the non-native crops that native Arkansans grew during the last few centuries before contact: corn, beans, and squash.
So here's a broad, necessarily imprecise, but easy (I hope) approach to the prehistory of Arkansas: Think of it in terms of the human relationship to edible plants.
Tens of millenia of gathering; a few millenia of rudimentary agriculture, cultivating native plants on purpose; and then a few centuries of intensive cultivation of plants imported from elsewhere in the Americas, allowing remarkable population growth and the development of civilization. And then Hernando de Soto comes along.