On November 2, 2022, the name of Toltec Mounds Archeological State Park was officially changed to Plum Bayou Mounds Archeological State Park and the ARAS research station was renamed the Plum Bayou Research Station. Learn more...
Liz Horton
Arkansas Archeological Survey, Plum Bayou Mounds Research Station
July 2015
When visitors to Plum Bayou Mounds Archeological Park are asked, “what did the Indians of Arkansas eat,” they will, almost to a person, reply “corn, beans, and squash.” While this triad of tropical crops, often referred to as the “Three Sisters,” does reflect the food staples used by the late prehistoric agricultural peoples of the Southeast, these plants were only the latest additions to an already existing sophisticated system of land management and horticulture that stretched back thousands of years. Long before the introduction of tropical crops such as maize (corn), the Indians of Arkansas were planting and tending multiple locally domesticated crop plants. Known as the Eastern North American Crop Complex, these ancient domesticated and cultivated crops included sumpweed, maygrass, little barley, sunflower, goosefoot, erect knotweed, a specific kind of squash (Cucurbita pepo var. ovifera), and bottle gourds. In addition, the Late Woodland Indians of the Central Arkansas River Valley we know as the “Plum Bayou Culture” were intensively utilizing a still unidentified cereal grain, known only as “Type X” grass.
