NEW WORLD PREHISTORY — WILLEY 563 



A fourth tradition of incipient cultivation for the New World 

 derives from the cultivation of local plants in the Mississippi Valley 

 by as early as 1000 B.C. These plants include the sunflower {IJelian- 

 thtis), the goosefoot (C henopodium) , and the pumpkin {Cucurhita 

 pepo) [42]. This domestication may have been in response to stimuli 

 from Middle America, or it may have been an entirely independent 

 development. This Eastern Woodland incipient-cultivation tradition 

 was undoubtedly but a minor part of the food-collecting economy for 

 a long time. Just how important it ever became, or how important 

 that early diffusion of maize was to eastern United States cultures of 

 the 1st millennium B.C., are crucial problems in the understanding of 

 the area. I shall return to them later. 



APPEARANCE OF POTTERY 



Before taking up the rise of village farming in Nuclear America 

 and its subsequent spread to other parts of the hemisphere, let us re- 

 view the first appearances of pottery in the New World. Obviously, 

 the line indicating the presence of pottery on the charts is not 

 comparable to the lines indicating type of subsistence or settlement 

 (figs. 1-3). American archeologists no longer consider potteiy to be 

 the inevitable concomitant of agricultural village life, as was the 

 fashion some years ago. Still, ceramics, because of their veiy ubiq- 

 uity and durability, are an important datum in many prehistoric 

 sequences. Their presence, while not a necessary functional correlate 

 of farming, at least implies a certain degree of cultural development 

 and sedentary living. 



At the present writing there seem to be two pottery traditions for 

 native America. Curiously, the ages of these two pottery traditions — 

 in the broadest sense of that term — may be about the same, 2500 B.C. 



One of these pottery traditions, which we shall call the Nuclear 

 American, is believed to be indigenous, but we can be no more specific 

 about its geographic point of origin than to state that this is some- 

 where in the central latitudes of the New World. Actually, the 

 earliest radiocarbon dates on the Nuclear American pottery tradi- 

 tion come from coastal Ecuador, in the Valdivia phase (pi. 2), and 

 are from about 2500 to 2400 B.C. [43]. There are also early dates 

 on pottery generally similar to that of Valdivia from Panama (about 

 2100 B.C.) [44, 45]. Thus, these earliest ceramic datings for Nuclear 

 America are not from Middle America or Peru but from the Inter- 

 mediate area, and this may be significant in following up origins, 

 although the record is still too incomplete to say for sure. Both the 

 Ecuadorean and the Panamanian early potteries are found in coastal 

 shell-mound sites, and in connection with cultures about whose means 



