Archaeologists debate the reasons for beginning cultivation in the eastern part of the
continent. Although population and sedentary living were increasing at the time, there is
little evidence that people lacked adequate wild food resources; the newly domesticated
foods supplemented a continuing mixed subsistence of hunting, fishing, and gathering
(20) wild plants, Increasing predictability of food supplies may have been a motive. It has been
suggested that some early cultivation was for medicinal and ceremonial plants rather than
for food. One archaeologist has pointed out that the early domesticated plants were all
weedy species that do well in open, disturbed habitats, the kind that would form around
human settlements where people cut down trees, trample the ground, deposit trash, and
(25) dig holes. It has been suggested that sunflower, sumpweed, and other plants almost
domesticated themselves, that is , they thrived in human –disturbed habitats, so humans
intensively collected them and began to control their distribution. Women in the Archaic
communities were probably the main experimenters with cultivation, because
ethno archaeological evidence tells us that women were the main collectors of plant food
and had detailed knowledge of plants.