1000 BCE–300 CE: (Agricultural Frontier Expansion in the Americas — The Addition of Mesoamerican Crops into the Eastern Agricultural Complex of the East-Cent…

1000 BCE–300 CE: (Agricultural Frontier Expansion in the Americas — The Addition of Mesoamerican Crops into the Eastern Agricultural Complex of the East-Central and Southern United States by the Later First Millennium BCE Greatly Enhancing Farming Productivity, Ancestral Iroquois-Cherokee Speakers Expanding from Tennessee and North Carolina to Southern Ontario, Early Caddoan and Siouan Speakers Spreading This Economy Northward Through the Great Plains to Modern-Day North Dakota, Similar Histories Possibly Underlying the Wide Spread of Arawakan and Tupi-Guarani Language Groups in South America and the Caribbean): The expansion of agricultural frontiers in this age was not limited to the Eastern Hemisphere. By the later first millennium BCE, the addition of a new suite of crops from Mexico into the Eastern Agricultural Complex of today’s east-central and southern United States had begun to greatly enhance the productivity of farming across those areas. With this enriched agricultural productivity, the ancestral Iroquois-Cherokee speakers expanded across lands extending from present-day Tennessee and North Carolina to southern Ontario in Canada, while early speakers of Caddoan and Siouan languages spread this economy northward through the Great Plains region of North America as far as modern-day North Dakota. In South America and the Caribbean, similar histories may lie behind the very wide spread of the Arawakan and Tupi-Guarani language groups during this age. The pattern is the same on every continent: agricultural enrichment through crop exchange drives population growth, population growth drives territorial expansion, territorial expansion drives the spread of language families across vast new territories. The Iroquois-Cherokee expansion through eastern North America is the American version of the Bantu expansion — a language family carried across a subcontinent by the demographic engine of enhanced food production. And the crops that made it possible were not native to the region. They came from Mesoamerica — maize, beans, new varieties of squash — through the same process of agricultural exchange between independent centers of invention that Ehret has been documenting as a global phenomenon throughout this chapter.