Pre-Columbian Agriculture in California?

8Deer

I've always been interested in timelines like Lands of Red and Gold and Mississippi Rice, which involve alternate agriculture and such. Since California is such an agricultural area now, it seems plausible that agriculture could have taken root there. In fact, I'm surprised that maize and other crops didn't reach California from Mexico in OTL.

So, could maize, beans, squash etc have been cultivated in California? If so, how developped would the area be? Maybe as much as the Pueblo area?

Hmm, for some reason I'm imagining the Colorado river as a Nile analogue...If agriculture is more likely to develop where there is a lack of natural resources, this seems like a good place...If Californian agriculture does originate here, how far could it spread?

Sorry for all the questions, but this idea has really piqued my interest and I have a really pathetic understanding of agriculture and how it develops.
 

NKVD

Agriculture wasn't really needed in many parts of California. However, it could be useful in the more arid or otherwise resource-poor areas.
 

tallwingedgoat

I think the reason agriculture never reached California is due to the geographic isolation of the area from Mexico due to the deserts.

Other than that California would make excellent farming country, the Williamette Valley in Oregon was also exceptionally well suited.
 

Malta

The Pacific Northwest and Northern California seems to be noted as a very abundant area in terms of readily avaliable natural resources such as food. It is a common description that if a Native of the pre-European involvement period of the area starved he could only do it if he was trying hard to. Threrefore there seems to be the opinion that they didn't need intensive agricultre to live such as in areas like the Nile and Mesopotamia. So a Colorado analogue is possible on the Colorado river.
 

8Deer

there was a form of agriculture in California. The books "The Long Summer", which includes an extensive study of the California coastal tribes, discusses at length how the locals extensively harvested acorns, which after processing, are used to make flour, gruel and cakes.
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I've heard of this, yeah. I think the Indians of the eastern woodlands area did something similar as well.

I'll have to check out that book.

Hmm, it seems I have a lot to learn about the history of agriculture. It makes sense that in areas where there abundant natural resources (like the coast of BC), agriculture just isn't worth the effort. But in some places, this doesn't seem to have been the case: Yucatan, the Amazon, even the Mississippi River seem to have abundant natural resources, and yet agriculture was adopted there.
 

mosodake

It's possible, but not likely on a large scale and would take time to develop. The Mesoamerican crops grown in the southwest and Mexico need warm weather and lots of water to grow. The problem with developing agriculture in California is that most of the state gets rainfall only in the winter. Until irrigation systems can be built, agriculture would have to be restricted to the few rivers that stay wet all year long. There was so much in the way of available game and edible wild plants that it was simply not necessary for the natives to expend huge amounts of energy in digging canals.
 

pa_dutch

Actually, many of the West Coast tribes did pick up tobacco cultivation prior to contact with Europeans, so the potential for food agriculture is there.
 

tormsen

mosodake said:
It's possible, but not likely on a large scale and would take time to develop. The Mesoamerican crops grown in the southwest and Mexico need warm weather and lots of water to grow. The problem with developing agriculture in California is that most of the state gets rainfall only in the winter. Until irrigation systems can be built, agriculture would have to be restricted to the few rivers that stay wet all year long. There was so much in the way of available game and edible wild plants that it was simply not necessary for the natives to expend huge amounts of energy in digging canals.
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While the bumper wild resources was a factor in northern California, was that necessarily true in southern California? If agriculturalists establish even a small foothold, then they will outcompete the hunter-gatherers in the long run as they did everywhere else.

I was going to do this with a timeline I had developed earlier, involving a longer Little Ice Age. One of the effects was less desertification in the American Southwest, which in the timeline was going to allow for larger Pueblo cultures with the effect of having agriculture spread to California.
 

wolf_brother

Banned
I'm not entirely sure about the Pacific Coast, but everything east of the Rockies extensively farmed the 'Three Sisters' of maize, squash and beans, and forests were traditionally a well maintained system used throughout the continent. The 'Eden' of North America was only created following the mass die-off following exposure to Eurasian diseases, creating a population explosion across multiple species nominally managed by the native societies.

With that being said, I'm fairly sure the Pacific coasters would also have had their own forms of agriculture, fish-farms, forestry, etc.
 

mosodake

tormsen said:
While the bumper wild resources was a factor in northern California, was that necessarily true in southern California? If agriculturalists establish even a small foothold, then they will outcompete the hunter-gatherers in the long run as they did everywhere else.

I was going to do this with a timeline I had developed earlier, involving a longer Little Ice Age. One of the effects was less desertification in the American Southwest, which in the timeline was going to allow for larger Pueblo cultures with the effect of having agriculture spread to California.
Click to expand...

Most of the species the tribes relied on in northern California are present in southern California as well. Although rainfall increases for the most part as you go north, the main plant communities are very similar in composition. Establishing agriculture in southern California means relying on very fickle sources of water. The availability of water in the summer is almost exclusively dependent on the amount of snow in the mountains. Low snowfall or warm winters means little summer water. The LA river changed course dozens of times in the years before it was confined in concrete channels, and it would often either flood or dry up completely. Without first controlling the rivers and finding a way to store large amounts of water for the dry season, the tribes in southern California would not be able to have a consistently agriculture based lifestyle. Agriculture would be more likely along the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers, especially in the delta region.
 
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