This is a new feature of the MAS Newsletter is to provide a guide to books or long articles that might be of interest to MAS members. Booknotes will not include professional-style book reviews with an obligatory critical examination of the ideas, but rather they will offer descriptions of materials that the readership may wish to explore.

     The first Booknote is on Current Northeast Paleoethnobotany edited by John P. Hart and published by the New York State Museum, 1999. The book is available for $29.95 through the New York State Museum, Publication sales, Albany, New York 12230 (Phone: 518/449-1404).

     Paleoethnobotony is the study of human use of plants. This book explores the emerging field of paleoethnobotany in the Northeast. It contains eleven articles, plus an introduction and summary chapter, derived from a 1996 conference held at the New York State Museum. The majority of the data in the book are derived from identification of charred plant remains(charcoal) from archaeological sites, and the geographic coverage extends from New York and Pennsylvania northeast to Maine.

     The articles in the book address several primary topics: the date of introduction and intensity of use of Meso-American domesticates (i.e., corn and beans); the domestication and intensity of use of native North American crops including sunflowerand chenopodium (goosefoot); archaeological evidence for Native American use of wild plants for food, medicinal,other uses; and enviornmental reconstruction, particularly of local site enviornments through identification of wood charcoal.

     One of the surprising developments of roughly the last two decades in North American archaeology is the discovery that the mid-south (e.g., Tennessee, Ohio River Valley, Middle Mississippi Valley) was an independent center for the domestication of native North American seed plants. In addition to sunflower and goosefoot other species that were domesticated include sumpweed, may grass, knotweed and little basley. This domestication began roughly 3,000 years ago and pre-dated the introduction of corn and bean agriculture by 1,000 to 2,000 years, depending on the location. One of the questions addressed in this volume is how far north and east the use of these native North American domestic plants spread, and it seems that Pennsylvania, New York, and perhaps southern New England were involved, but not Maine.

     Then with the introduction of corn and beans, it seems that most of the native North American domestic plants became less important. Apparently, corn and bean agriculture, was the first major introduction of domestic plant crops into northern New England and that may have been as late as 800 to 600 years ago. There is also exciting new development of identification of domestic squash or gourd during the Archaic period. We are probably all familiar with Nancy Asch Sidell's identification of a circa 5700 B.P. gourd from the Sharrow Site in Milo, Maine and that find is now backed up by identification of the gourd circa 5400 B.P. at a site in Pennsylvania. Thus, it looks like intensification of use and subsequent domestication of plants in the Northeast was a long process, beginning much earlier in the archaeological record than we had previously imagined. All this has to be factored into what was predominantly a hunter/gatherer existence through the Archaic and much of the Woodland period, for it seems that intensive use of corn and bean agriculture where populations were primarily dependent on it, did not occur until very late in prehistory in the Fort Ancient culture in Ohio, Monongahela in Pennsylvania, and the proto-Iroquios, however defined, in New York and southern Ontario. It is till an open question how intensive was corn and bean agriculture in southern and southwestern Maine during late prehistory.

     Some of the chapter titles are as follows: Changing Evidence for Prehistoric Plant Use In Pennsylvania, Sunflower in the Seneca Iroquois Region of Western New York, New Data on the Chronology of Maize Horticulture in Eastern New York and Southern new england, Chenopodium in Connecticut Prehistory: Wild, Weedy, Cultivated, or Domesticated?, and Changing Strtegies in the Pre- and Port Contact Subsistence Systems in southern New England, Archaeological and Ethnohistorical Evidence. There are other articles reviewing prehistoric plant use on Block Island, mobile farmers in southern New England,a nd specific site reports.

     Two articles specifically focus on Maine. Paleogeographic Changes in Wetlands in Upland Enviornments in the Milford Drainage Basin of Central Maine in Relation to Holocene Human Settlement History, by Heather Almquist-Jacobson and david Sanger, is a paleogeographic reconstruction of enviornmental change just north of Bangor over much of the Holocene. This article is primarily based on cores from bogs, pollen identifications, and to a much lesser degree, charcoal identifications from specific sites. As such, it really does not address the same topics as do the rest of the articles in the book, although it provides a context for the local hunter/gatherer use of the enviornment.

     The premier article in the whole book, both from the Maine point of view and from the path-breaking quality of research and strength data summary, is Prehistoric Plant Use in Maine: Paleoindian to Contact Period by Nancy Asch-Sidell. Nancy's arrival in Maine roughly a decade ago, and her willingness to dive right in to identifying Maine charcoal, has produced unbelievable dividends in knowledge for Maine prehistory. For those of you who don't know, her work in the lower Illinois River Valley and specifally at the Koster Site (with other collaborators beginning around 1970) was important in the development of the whole field of paleoenthnobotany in North America. So we are privileged to have a worldclass expert living and working in Maine. Nancy's paper reviews the Paleoindian charcoal from the Hedden Site and its enviornmental implications, Archaic enviornmental reconstruction from wood charcoal at seven sites, the gourd identification at the Sharrow Site, and the use of wild plants for food and medicine and domestic corn and beans during the Ceramic period. In addition, she points out that certain techniques of field laboratory recovery are more useful than others for recovering charcoal and charred seeds.

     In sum, the book is a good value for anyone seriously interested in Maine archaeology and the Northeast in general. Several years ago I proposed a loaning library program to the Maine Archaeological Society board; but it would take a great deal of effort on the part of one volunteer to run such a program, and no member of the MAS has stepped forward to do it. This book would make a great acquisition and start for such a program.