By the Late Archaic Period (5,000-3,000 years ago) natives began supplementing their diet with cultivated plant foods like
sumpweed (marsh elder), squash and sunflower.
They love bison, cooked with
sumpweed. The hunters retort that even the big deer is not rutting when it should.
Risk was estimated by evaluating consumption of Uroleucon aphids by lady beetles in no-choice laboratory tests, and by determining incidence of non-native lady beetles within naturally occurring patches of goldenrod and giant sumpweed (Cyclachaena xanthifolia (Nutt.) Fresen.) used by U.
ambrosiae (Thomas) on giant sumpweed (Cyclachaena xanthifolia [Nutt.] Fresen.) (Olsen, 1971; Moran, 1984; Hesler and Petersen, 2008; Hesler et al., 2009).
Thirteen of the species occurred in more than half of the sites and Iva texensis (
sumpweed) was present at each site.
There also seems to be some relationship between giant ragweed, common sunflower and seacoast
sumpweed. So step one is to keep away all possible plants that would attract the sharpshooters.
In feasting deposits at Cahokia in southern Illinois, for example, Pauketat and his colleagues found evidence of corn, bottle gourd, squash, sunflower,
sumpweed, chenopod, maygrass, erect knotweed, four varieties of nuts, grape, and many fruits (persimmon, strawberry, plum, bramble, elderberry, nightshade, blackhaw, mulberry, sunflower), along with greens and small grains amaranth, purslane, panicoid grasses, carpetweed, and spurges).
He describes
sumpweed, with 32 percent protein, as "a nutritionist's ultimate dream." He explains that the flower did not make it to the rank of corn, potatoes, and rye because it causes hay-fever, smells bad, and can cause skin irritation.
The Mexican or Southwestern pumpkin-beans-corn triad displaced crops native to the region--small grains (little barley, knotweed, and chenopod, a kind of pigweed), cucurbits (squash and bottle gourd), oily seeds (
sumpweed and sunflower), and other plants now widespread as weeds--that had been domesticated more than a thousand years before.
In a similar vein, Dee Anne Wymer summarizes paleoethnobotanical evidence from ten Woodland sites in the study area that span a temporal range of 2,000 years, documenting the shift from Early Woodland garden production of Eastern Agricultural Complex plants (maygrass, goosefoot, erect knotweed, little barley,
sumpweed, and sunflower) to Late Woodland maize-based field agriculture.
Dominant forbs included Mexican hat (Ratibida columnaris), western ragweed (Ambrosia psilostachya),
sumpweed (Iva annua), loosestrife (Lythrium californicum), and clay violet (Ruellia nudiflora).