Natalie Mueller
Assistant Professor of Archaeology
Would you say you’re more of a historian or an ecologist?
“I love that you picked those two words because the way that I define myself is a historical ecologist. I’m absolutely a combination of those two things. I think that ecology has traditionally been lacking temporal depth. What historical ecology brings to the picture is this understanding that people have been shaping and impacting and reacting to ecosystems for thousands of years.”
How does your research this summer reflect that?
“Indigenous people in eastern North America grew a lot of different native plants before they started growing the things that most of us probably associate with native American agriculture, like maize and pumpkins and beans. Those plants were all domesticated in Mexico. They reached this area through trade probably around 900 AD. That probably sounds like a long time ago to you and most people, but in archeological time it’s not. For thousands of years before that, the people in this region were growing native plants.
We still have some squashes that were domesticated here, like acorn squashes, and sunflowers that we still grow. But then there were a bunch of other species that were lost. Indigenous people stopped cultivating them probably about 500 years ago and they never made it into written records or oral histories that described how they were grown or cooked. But we know that they were important crops from the archeological record.
So I’ve been collecting them, trying to understand what kind of ecosystem they live in and then experimentally cultivating them. The goal of the long-term project I am currently doing is to see if we can re-domesticate them.”
Between COVID-19 and increasing racial tensions, this summer has heightened cultural instability around the globe. Do these events affect your perspective of your research or science in general?
“Living through this time period will push my research in different directions or cause me to think about things differently than I otherwise would have right now. It pushes you to try to think about how you can make your research and the things that you’re intellectually interested in relevant to making the world a better place.”