In spring, a season which brought massive runs of shad, alewives, herring, and mullet from the ocean into the rivers, Indians in Florida and elsewhere along the Atlantic coastal plain relied on fish taken with nets, spears, or hooks and lines. In autumn and winter—especially in the piedmont and uplands—the natives turned more to deer, bear, and other game animals for sustenance. Because they required game animals in quantity, Indians often set light ground fires to create brushy edge habitats and open areas in southern forests that attracted deer and other animals to well-defined hunting grounds. The natives also used fire to drive deer and other game into areas where the animals might be easily dispatched. Because the region’s climate offered a long growing season and generally plentiful rainfall, southern Indians developed a complex system of agriculture based primarily on three crops: corn, beans, and squash. To clear farmland, the natives used fire and stone axes to remove smaller brush and timber. They then stripped the bark (a process known as girdling) from larger trees so that they sprouted no leaves and eventually died. Native farmers (primarily women) then planted corn, beans, and squash together in hills beneath the dead and dying trees. By all accounts, the three crops, known in some cultures as “the three sisters,” usually did well under such conditions. Beans helped replace nitrogen taken from the soil by corn; cornstalks provided “poles” for the beans to climb; and broad-leaved squash plants helped cut down on weed growth and erosion. Farming seems to have allowed native populations to increase in the millennium before European contact. Some of the larger native cultures probably numbered in the tens of…
