Carol I. Mason
Americans know intuitively that maple sugar and maple syrup are among the things that spread from Indians to the rest of world culture after the discovery of the Americas by Europeans. In almost all books dealing with Indians for young readers, children learn that maple sugar was made before European contact (Gridley 1973; Franklin 1979; Poatgieter 1981); television cooks feature recipes made with this acknowledged Indian food (Smith 1987); and students of the maple products industry unhesitatingly ascribe the discovery of maple sugar to Indians (Nearing and Nearing 1970). Indians themselves claim to have discovered the process and taught it to Europeans (Keesing 1971). Indian priority in making maple sugar is so well-established a belief that even textbooks in North American ethnography routinely list maple sugaring as an aboriginal practice and include it in their general discussions of Indian life without particular comment (see, for example, Garbarino 1976). The Indian origin of maple sugaring is one of those things that everyone knows. How we know it and why we think it are questions hardly anyone ever asks: maple sugar and maple syrup are together a sweet small something that came from the Indians, in what way or how is quite beside the point.
Maple sugaring is such a minute part of the incredibly long and nutritionally potent list of New World contributions to the whole world’s diet that it slips easily through the cracks of scholarly concern. It does not have either the modern economic importance or the obvious nutritional virtues of other pre-Columbian Indian foodstuffs. No one would range it next to corn or potatoes, beans or tomatoes and argue that it is in the same dietary league with these staples: sugar in any form is without redeeming value except insofar as it can provide calories where ordinary caloric intake is low or provide flavor to otherwise unpalatable foods. It is an active threat to health when it is responsible for dental caries and progressive tooth loss. Perhaps its relative unimportance has partially masked the search for the truth about its origins: does it really matter to know whether maple sugaring is truly indigenous to North America?
There are at least two reasons why puzzling over the origins of maple sugaring is not merely an exercise in historical trivia. One of these has to do with the place of American Indians in national life. Indians have not escaped being part of others’ myths, whether on a large scale, as the bloodthirsty attackers of television wagon trains, or on more intimate ones as fathers of Thanksgiving, children of Mother Earth, or the original conservationists. These stories are part of a pattern, one seldom subject to scrutiny, and they ride along as the stuff of national self-image, influencing Indian self-conceptions as well as those of non-Indians and becoming new truths with spurious ancient roots. Philosophers have suggested that the unexamined life is not worth living, but the effects of the unexamined life for a single individual cannot be as great as the consequences for nations of unexamined national myths in action. Treatment of ethnic, racial, or religious groups may hinge upon the working out of myths, ancient or new-grown, and they need to be recognized, scrutinized, and “examined.”
A second reason for concern with the small problem of maple sugar origins has to do with one of the major approaches of anthropology, the comparative method and what it can reveal about the workings of cultural evolution on a global scale. One of the most useful supports for the comparative method is accurate knowledge of the “Second Earth,” the American continents so long separated from both Europe and Asia (Harris 1985). This American world, isolated for thousands of years from contact with the rest of world cultures, developed along its own lines and made its own way toward complex community life, towards agriculture and urban settlements, towards civilization. Using the data from these independent routes to complexity and comparing them to what happened elsewhere is a major tool for understanding possible causes for cultural development and relating outcomes to material and environmental factors affecting change (see, for example, Adams 1966 and Haas 1982). If what scholars are seeing in the New World and using in their testing of parallel phenomena is not the working out of indigenous patterns but the result of European contact after the 15th century, then their comparative efforts are seriously compromised. Western culture spread so fast and was so influential that the existence of “untouched” societies, a pristine Second Earth, becomes suspect and the reconstruction of pre-European lifeways a much more daunting task (Wolf 1982). The problem of the origins of maple sugaring is a nicely bounded test case: was this practice, so widely “known” as an indigenous one, truly of American origin? Or might it have been introduced by Europeans? Being able to answer this question has a bearing on the anthropologists’ grasp of the “Second Earth” and whether its realities are as they have been presented.
The pursuit of an answer to the “maple sugar question” is both a question of epistemology—how do we know what we know—and intellectual history, or how we have come to know what we know. In general, the first attempts to answer these questions depended heavily upon historical sources, the eye-witness accounts of European observers. The use of mutually supportive eye-witness testimony has to be the single most important body of corroborative evidence, but the eyewitness accounts do not speak for themselves. H.W. Henshaw (1890), the earliest anthropologist to consider the matter, cited Joutel’s Journal of 1688, Lafitau’s observations of 1724, Bossu’s comments of 1756, Keating’s description of 1825, Smith’s statements of 1850 as well as comments by Lewis H. Morgan, Alexander Henry, John Tanner, and others. All of these mentioned maple sugaring as an Indian custom, and most considered Indian origins to be unquestioned. Henshaw was conscious that none of them was very early, but he thought that their near unanimity in supporting the Indian origins of maple sugaring and the fact that the comments themselves stretched over a very long time span were enough to “render reference to earlier authorities unnecessary” (Henshaw 1890:343). Another anthropologist, A.F. Chamberlain (1891), added the 1684 “Dr. Robinson to Mr. Ray” letter, so far the earliest mention of the maple sugar production process in English, a letter in which Indians are described as having been making sugar “for time out of mind” (381). In addition to historic accounts, both Henshaw and Chamberlain considered philological evidence very important in demonstrating the Indian origins of maple sugaring, a research route that needs to be pursued further, using more modern linguistic methods.
However, the strength of the Henshaw-Chamberlain approach to solving the maple sugaring question founders on two rocks. One of these is the sources they cite: none of them is early enough. The seventeenth century is much too late to trust eye-witness accounts; Indians already had nearly 200 years of contact with Europeans under their belts by the time Dr. Robinson wrote his famous letter to Mr. Ray in 1684. The other problem with the Henshaw-Chamberlain effort is more subtle and fits into how Indians were viewed by ordinary non-Indian Americans. When these two papers were published at the end of the nineteenth century, Indian life was not as well known to the general public, and the more romantic portrayal of Indians as “Noble Savages” was less widely accepted than interpretations of them as “blood-thirsty savages.” Henshaw, in particular, took pains in his paper to point out the debts owned by “civilized” man to Indians and to establish in terms of dollars and cents just what value Indian discoveries have for modern civilization. In the context of the time, his paper was another attempt to redress a perceived imbalance and support more favorable press for Indians; he had a “hidden agenda” that favored Indians as having originated maple sugaring as part of their extended contributions to civilization, and evidence was not an important consideration.
In the late nineteenth century, then, Indians were allowed by scholars to be as enthusiastic users of maple sugar in prehistory as they wished, presumably reveling in its sweet taste, devouring it in great quantities (see Alexander Henry’s account as analyzed in Quimby 1966), and undoubtedly laying up a legacy of dental problems for their old age. By the twentieth century, though, the scholarly community, looking at the same kind of data as Henshaw and Chamberlain, came to just the opposite conclusion. Evidently the felt need to defend Indians and celebrate their very real contributions to world culture was less pressing, and maple sugar was snatched from their prehistoric lips. The work done at this time was specifically directed at the earliest of the historic sources, and an exhaustive examination of the extant literature concluded that there is no evidence at all to support pre-European maple sugaring. Keesing, in his classic study of Menomini ethnohistory (1971), and Flannery, in her review of the early literature on Algonquin culture on the east coast (1939), both independently arrived at the same place in the same year: their replowing of the ethnohistorical field yielded an entirely different crop from some of the same seeds, and maple sugaring was seen as a post-European contact phenomenon. Any reexamination of the sources is very likely to come up with the same conclusions.1
Stepping outside the circle of the historic sources is one of the directions research into the origins of maple sugaring had to take, and one of the first attempts came about somewhat later than the work by Keesing and Flannery. This was the “argument from equipment.” This point of view insisted that Indians could not have processed maple sugar without the metal kettles, metal spoons, and other paraphernalia brought by Europeans (Waugh 1916; Yarnell 1964). Indeed, the argument from equipment has this in its support: with the exception of birch-bark sap collectors, the “things” employed in the many descriptions of Indian maple sugaring are all European in origin. The familiar lithographs of Indians in the woods at sugaring time show them with their metal boiling kettles set directly over open fires, their steel axes at work shopping wood, and—most curious of all—their European-style wooden carrying yokes across their shoulders (see, for example, Schoolcraft 1851-1857 and Hoffman 1896). It is hard to find a body of “traditional” or even old maple sugaring equipment.
The argument from equipment, however, is seriously flawed. For one thing, it is based upon a model of maple sugar manufacture that would not have been present in prehistory: the eighteenth or nineteenth century commercial sugarbush camp. In these communal camps, Indians produced sugar in quantity for their own use and for sale, treating it as a commodity with a value over and above a single group’s subsistence needs. The extent to which maple sugaring was a commercial operation among Indians at this time must not be underestimated: they produced it in quantities that are difficult to imagine, particularly as a single heap. For example, Hoffman cites a Leech Lake Chippewa group of 1500 persons whose maple sugar production in one year was recorded as 90 tons (1896:288). Given such a commercial redefinition of a possible aboriginal practice, it would not be surprising if the tools common among non-Indian producers, maximizing their own production as best they could, had come to be adopted by Indians in pursuit of the same goals. The argument from equipment is weakened by the simple insistence that Indians, like anyone else, were perfectly able to learn to use new tools, new techniques, new motor habits. They might simply have given up the less efficient, older tools and means of manufacture once they became sugar producers and entrepreneurs in the sugar trade themselves.
In the end, the argument from equipment is a spurious one, of interest only to eighteenth or nineteenth century sugar making. Whatever equipment was being used then was certainly European in origin and can hardly be useful to a discussion of possible prehistoric sugar making among Indians. Many simple techniques for concentrating at least small quantities of sap into syrup were within the reach of anyone who had a container of birchbark or, perhaps, of pottery. Syrup and eventually sugar production involves boiling, the standard means of concentrating liquids—whether syrups or soups—and it can be achieved in birchbark containers set over hot coals or less efficiently in clay pots heated with rocks; it is even possible to concentrate sap through the slow process of freezing and then removing the layers of ice as they form (see Holman and Egan 1985 for replication experiments).2 If the goal is to make only a little syrup or a little sugar, then these methods may work well enough, although in the case of freezing, the authentic “maple” flavor does not seem to develop (see Henning 1965).
Combining a favorable reading of the argument from equipment with an exhaustive examination of the ethnohistorical sources, scholars were persuaded that the issue of maple sugaring in prehistory was settled and that maple sugaring could be removed from the list of “things that we got from the Indians.” They reckoned, however, without the ingenuity and audacity of archaeologists hot on the trail of trying to understand the patterns of Indian subsistence in prehistory and not overly careful of what ethnohistorical toes they treaded upon in the process. Archaeologists had begun with a careful reading of previous work (see Quimby 1966; Fitting and Cleland 1969) and a properly agnostic attitude toward maple sugaring in prehistory. But with time their own pressing problems, especially those of trying to figure out how people actually lived in the western Great Lakes in Late Woodland times, began to convert some of them into true believers, ethnohistorical sources or not. In an impressive leap of faith, they pushed back into prehistory the pattern of commercial sugar production and began to “find” prehistoric maple sugaring stations in areas where historic people had been known to have produced maple sugar. The mere presence of historic maple sugaring seems to have been the principle stimulus for assuming that maple sugaring was practiced there in prehistory (see Pendergast 1974; Lovis 1978; Kingsley and Garland 1980; Holman 1984). Maple sugaring—in spite of the conclusions of ethnohistorians of the mid-twentieth century—suddenly appeared in the archaeological literature as simply another pattern of economic life in prehistory (Spence and Fox 1986).
The efforts of archaeologists to resuscitate Indian use of maple sugar in prehistory provoked still another assessment of the ethnohistorical sources (Mason 1985, 1986). The same literature that led to the original rejection of prehistoric historic maple sugaring in North America reconfirmed what Flannery, Keesing, and Henning had all insisted: the earliest historic accounts are not ambiguous at all; they do not—under any circumstances—refer to maple sugaring among American Indians at a date early enough to constitute historical proof. There is not a single eye-witness account in the critical stretch of time between Champlain in the first years of the seventeenth century and the earliest clear mention of maple sugaring late in that century (Schuette and Ihde 1946:95), a powerful silence that speaks volumes (Mason 1987). Almost anything could have happened in those years when “the people without history” confronted European culture for the first time (Wolf 1982).
A different approach picked up by archaeologists to support the presence of maple sugaring in prehistory is the “argument from availability.” In its simplest form it rests on a conviction that if a resource were there, surely people living in nature would have taken advantage of it. Henshaw (1890:342) considered the “great familiarity of the Indians with the natural edible products of America” to be a strong support to their having discovered it. After all, maple trees produced sap in prehistory as they do today; people living in close proximity to the trees and being “familiar” with them, would very likely have quickly learned to take advantage of this potentially important source of calories. Maple products have other virtues that might have attracted “natural man” to them: they are also a source of calcium, although whether people can drink enough syrup or eat enough sugar to make them an effective aid in protecting women from calcium depletion during infant feeding or osteoporosis after menopause is not yet clear (Holman and Egan 1985:69-70). On the basis of known patterns of life of hunters and gatherers, whose knowledge of and experience in a particular environment supports a model of use of whatever is there, the argument from availability seems reasonable. Yet, like necessity’s being the mother of invention, it has its problems.
One of these is the fiction that maple sugar is a quintessentially American product, something that cannot be produced elsewhere. This would account for North American aboriginal people’s having picked up on the presence of maple trees and to have produced sugar as a regular part of a hunter/gatherer diet while people elsewhere did not. The truth is, though, that many trees in many places produce a sweet sap and some have as potentially useful a sugar-producing role as the sugar maples of the New World, but nowhere did hunters and gatherers tap them to produce sugar. Even European trees will produce sugar and sweet syrup, but although the potential is there, a sugar industry from trees never arose in Europe. European hunters and gatherers and, later, farmers were presumably as knowledgeable as American Indians about the possibilities inherent in their own backyards, but they did not make sugar by tapping trees. Curiously enough, the record for the manufacture of sugar and syrup from trees is about as old in northern Europe as it is in the New World. There are records going back into the seventeenth century of northern Europeans’ making their own sugar from the sap of trees (Henning 1965:13-14). It has even been proposed that Swedish immigrants introduced the process into the Americas (Henning 1965:20), but the coincidence of sugaring’s arising in two places at the same time has an easier explanation than enterprising Swedes or world-wandering American Indians. It has more to do with new patterns of consumption, low cost of production, difficulties in transportation and the vagaries of trade. Commercial production in Europe of sugar from the tree sap occurred as late as the nineteenth century (Deerr 1950), but it faltered and failed owing to the undoubted fact that by then other sources of sugar were far cheaper.
The archaeological leap into the maple sugar problem highlights a difficulty with so much of ethnohistoric research: it is bounded by a single kind of evidence, the documentary one. Whatever the virtues of such work, breaking out of its circle and obtaining independent confirmation from a different kind of evidence should be a major line of attack. Once archaeologists made the assumption that maple sugaring was prehistoric, they were faced with the practical problem of how to distinguish maple sugaring camps in the ground. Their efforts in this direction constitute the first real steps to identify the possible archaeological remains of sugar camps independent of historic documents. Loftus (1977) suggested on the basis of excavation of a known historic site that one characteristic of prehistoric sites might be low levels of food refuse bcause people ate sugar and dried meat at the camps and left no animal or fish bones behind. Other possible traits might be the presence of extensive hearth areas resulting from long term boiling; small, impermanent storage buildings; and whatever fragments of maple sugaring equipment as might have survived. The excavators of the prehistoric DeBoer site in Michigan followed this lead, speculating that a maple sugaring camp might also have an unbalanced sex ratio, since women did most of this work, plus a large number of potsherds relative to other kinds of equipment, indicating sap collection and not as much hunting or fishing (Kingsley and Garland 1980). Holman (1984) accepted these in-the-ground indicators, but after trying to stone boil sap in a clay pot, she abandoned the use of large numbers of potsherds as a possible sign that maple sugaring might have been done on the premises (Holman and Egan 1985). Using clay pots was simply too inefficient to be an effective means of production.
All of the archaeological efforts to “find” prehistoric maple sugaring sites are limited by the same problems that beset the ethnohistoric sources: how can independent testing procedures verify or not verify the conclusions drawn from the documents? In the form of archaeological evidence, at least two further tests can be attempted. Sugar residues leave a telltale chemical trace behind them; since the only sugar that could have been in the hands of Indians before Columbus would have been maple sugar, any identifiable sugar residue would support prehistoric sugar use (Holman: personal communication). A second possible line of investigation is to judge the beginning of maple sugaring by assessing the dental health of Indian populations, both historic and prehistoric (Kelley, Barrett, and Saunders 1987). In the maple sugaring country, this would mean examining the teeth of hunters and gatherers rather than farmers in order to avoid confusion when dealing with a diet rich in corn and hence in carbohydrates not derived from maple sugar. Dental caries rates across the historic boundary would be especially significant (Holman and Mason n.d.) since they could be expected to go up when people began to use sugar in quantity.
The promise of archaeological verification for problems of this kind is too often still but a promise, and the ethnohistorical conclusions continue to stand as a powerful corrective for precipitate flights of fancy. But there is one other tool that can be brought to bear on the whole issue, a tool that should be part of the standard equipment of ethno-historians: how does the phenomenon under discussion fit into the general course of world history? It is commonplace to consider the fur trade, for example, in the context of supply and demand for beaver hair in the European hat business or the political activities of Indians in terms of the competition of France and Britain in the New World. But what of maple sugar? Does its development in the seventeenth century, its expansion into a commercial activity in the eighteenth and nineteenth occur in a vacuum? Or can it be understood and in a way “revealed” through its ties with what was going on elsewhere? It turns out that maple sugaring and the maple sugar industry make enormous good sense when considered within a broader historical framework: it may not even be necessary to belabor the historic sources further or struggle to dig up archaeological techniques for identifying maple sugaring sites. The road to understanding may reach beyond the borders of North America and even beyond the Second Earth into the Old World itself.
In the seventeenth century, maple sugaring was not alone as a high calorie, low nutrient addition to the human diet. It was a small part of the rapid spread of sugar into the human—and especially, the European—diet, fueled by the natural attraction sweetness has for human beings and the development of sugar production as a money-making activity on a large scale (see Mintz 1985; Wolf 1982; Deerr 1949 and 1950). Sweet foodstuffs in general, sugar in particular, have been around for a long time; human populations probably enjoyed honey in the Paleolithic, and the process for making sugar from cane was neither difficult nor abstruse. However, sweetness was a tiny portion of the human diet, a thing to be used sparingly as a condiment, taken as medicine, employed as a preservative, or enjoyed as a treat or on special occasions; it was not food in the ordinary, everyday sense of a repeated, regular source of nutrition. The American Indian pattern of supra-con-sumption, of eating pounds and pounds of it is peculiar; what it resembles most of all is the similar reaction Europeans had when they themselves were first introduced to sugar on a grand scale (see Mintz 1985).
The basic, archaic technique for making sugar from the liquids taken from plants—before the invention of refining—was “boiling down the juice to a solid mass, allowing the magma of crystals and molasses to drain and recrystallizing the product” (Deerr 1950:449). This simple process was recorded as early as A.D. 375, but it did not initiate a worldwide sugar industry: the technology was simple but hardly amenable to production on a large scale at that time. Furthermore, a market had not been created for sugar in quantity, the European social system was not structured for mass consumption habits, and a slave-based labor force in cane-producing areas was unavailable. It was not yet worth anyone’s while to mass produce it, and even by A.D. 1000, sugar was a rarity (Mintz 1985).
Things changed by the fifteenth century as markets developed and sugar in quantity reached more and more people. The island of Madiera became one of the important sugar centers (Deerr 1949), by 1456 producing tons and tons for the European market. By 1480, the Canaries had a local sugar industry and became an important source for sugar experts who could be moved from there to wherever sugar production was possible. With the discovery of the New World, sugar production was on the minds of the discoverers very early; Columbus himself brought sugar experts from the Canaries to the New World, clearly with an eye to expanding what was already seen as a potentially lucrative industry (Mintz 1985). By the early sixteenth century, Hispaniola was exporting sugar to Europe, and as slaves became the pre-eminent labor force “in sugar,” production spread rapidly. By 1548 sugar was being produced on a large scale commercial basis: by 1576, local figures mention between 675 and 950 tons from Brazil alone (Deerr 1949:100-01).
What this meant for Europeans was a vastly expanded role for sugar in their diet. Beginning with the privileged classes, sugar consumption spread throughout the social order, perhaps replacing more nutritious foods and serving as an easy source for empty calories (Mintz 1985:177). No one needs to persuade people to like sugar; its attraction may begin before birth, and it is hard to do without once taste has been habituated to it. For those who sell sugar, it is an ideal substance: people do not like to do without; the sugar itself is eaten and consumers always have to buy more; and its shelf life is excellent. And unlike other very attractive, addictive substances, it does not interfere with the working life of working people. By the time Europeans began to immigrate to the Americas, they were avid sugar consumers, and they saw it as a proper part of an ordinary human diet.
The Europeans who came to North America liked sugar perhaps more than others—they were mainly English, and the marketing of sugar in that country reached unimaginable proportions in a very short time (Mintz 1985). The same English consumers who managed to put away 10,000 tons in 1730 were eating 150,000 tons only 70 years later (Henning 1965:12). When New England was settled, a source for sugar was one of the necessities of life, not something that people were wiling to do without. Where it was to come from, of course, was a difficult matter, considering the intricacies of international trade, the problems in taxation, the cost of transportation, and a myriad of other little vexations. Sugar transshipped from the Caribbean or from Brazil was very expensive to begin with; the additional costs of overland travel brought the price sufficiently high as to force complaints from colonists unwilling or unable to foot the bill. Relief from the high cost of cane sugar came about through a series of steps that, taken together, leave a trail of evidence from the sugar works in Brazil to the doorsteps of thrifty New Englanders.
The first calamity for European sugar users was the destruction of the very lucrative Portuguese sugar trade in Brazil by the Dutch (Deerr 1949:104-7). The ruin of the Brazilian trade was accomplished by 1635, well over 100 years after the effective start of commercial sugar production there. Those who knew the sugar business and wanted to continue supplying the growing market in Europe shifted operations to the West Indies, the “sugar islands,” where many different national groups attempted to make their fortunes on the sweet tooth of Europe by exploiting the horrors of the African slave trade (Sheridan 1974). By the end of the first half of the seventeenth century, Martinique, Barbados and other islands had successful sugar industries, all of them jumping into the vacuum left by the ruin of the industry in Brazil (see Deerr 1949; Mintz 1985).
The ruin of the trade from Brazil and the great demand for sugar in Europe left New Englanders to satisfy their own sweet tooth either by paying the exorbitant price of imported sugar or developing a substitute themselves. At this point the nature of capitalism came to their rescue. The sugar trade was so profitable and was so nicely enriching both planters and the mother countries that the larger sugar producers, often with the help of home governments, were able to squeeze out the smaller shareholders and establish monopolies with more relaxed competition. The smaller shareholders were “forced” out (Deerr 1949:160), and there were no alternative ways for them to live on the islands. They had to emigrate, carrying in their heads everything they knew about sugar manufacture. Around 1200 of these failed small shareholders are documented as being resident in New England between 1643 and 1647 (Deerr 1949:160). These people had the expertise for sugar production, and they knew that sugar could be made from the juices of plants; some of the earliest comments about sugar in the New World come from natural historians inquiring about and experimenting with saps that might, like cane, be induced to give a sweet substance when heated and reduced (Schuette and Schuette 1939). And it is from New England in 1664 that the very first known reference to maple sugar comes, a comment by Robert Boyle citing the governor of “Masathusets” as his authority for a practice carried out in that “great and populous” colony, but Boyle never once mentioned Indians (Schuette and Ihde 1946:95).
The history of maple sugaring in the New England area is predominantly one of non-Indian producers. Their great demand for a source for sweetness, the influx of an enormous number of technically expert producers, and the high price of imported sugar were a potent combination for the development of maple sugaring as an industry. Prior to this time, the only recorded use for the maple tree was for its wood or for its untreated sap, a refreshing drink to some, a cure for stomach disorders for others (Schuette and Schuette 1939; Schuette and Ihde 1946). After this time, it becomes the standard source for sugar in the region, made not by Indians selling their native products but by thrifty farmers unwilling to do without sugar and even more unwilling to pay the high prices for imported cane sugar. The extent of the maple sugar industry in colonial New England was sufficiently great that, by the eighteenth century, sugar was being produced as a matter of course by every farmer, to the tune of between 600 and 1500 pounds per year each, more than enough for family use (Schuette and Ihde 1946:106, 112-13, 187) with surplus production sufficient to provision places as populous as the city of Boston. Maple sugar production quickly became a major part of the New England economy.
The presence of maple sugaring on the periphery of the development of sugar as a commodity with a world market is too much of a coincidence to suppose them to be unrelated events. Bringing the one into the orbit of the other and appreciating the circumstances of profit-making, cost-benefit, and the other appurtenances of a market economy certainly reinforces a picture of their mutual dependence. Maple sugaring is what happened when a demand for sugar existed in an area where cane could not grow, and people turned expertise and ingenuity toward the nearest equivalent vegetable source (Mason n.d.). Indians, when they were first described as maple sugar makers, were part of this entrepreneurial complex: small capitalists producing for themselves, at least partly responding to the demands of consumers, whose decisions to use or not use maple sugar were in turn based on sugar supplies elsewhere in the world.
Why maple sugaring should ever have been identified as a pre-Columbian Indian practice is a mystery. Scholarly examination of historic sources has over and over again demonstrated an absence of acceptable documentation for aboriginal maple sugaring during the critical early years of contact. It is not that available sources are equivocal or confusing; there simply are none. Archaeology has yet to provide confirmation of the practice from any sites in the area where maple sugaring might have been assumed to have been actively pursued. In addition, the curious spectacle of prehistoric Indian foragers and farmers making intensive use of what is an almost useless food files in the face of data pointing to the generally well-balanced and nutritious diet of aboriginal hunter-gatherers and horticulturists, no matter what their environment happens to be. American Indians in the Northeast would stand as a conspicuous exception to this pattern if they were in fact consuming sugar in prehistory.
There is no good reason to attribute sugar making to Indians other than the irrelevant fact that they lived with maple trees for a long time and were “likely” to have observed sap running. In European eyes, given the possibilities, Indians had to have been perceptive enough to have figured out that desirable, omnipresent, addictive, and entirely unnecessary sugar could be made from maple sap. Only in European eyes could sugar have been acknowledged as a virtue; perhaps attributing sugar to human beings living “in nature” made its consumption seem natural also. The Indian as aboriginal sugar maker is a projection of the state of dietary affairs in seventeenth-century England, a clearly ethnocentric interpretation of what constitutes an appropriate human diet.
1See Henning 1965, Mason, 1985, 1986; but see also Pendergast 1982 and Holman 1986 and Mason’s rejoinder 1987.
2Replication experiments involve trying to duplicate the technology used by prehistoric people and to understand what was involved in production; artifacts and patterns in the ground can then be interpreted in the light of what has been learned.
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