During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, over 450 precolumbian and historic Indigenous agricultural fields were documented across the state of Wisconsin. Today, the vast majority of these features are generally assumed to have been destroyed. Focusing on the Wisconsin River basin, which has the highest concentration of known archaeological field systems in the Midwest, this study explores the potential of using historical aerial photographs to identify and interpret archaeological agricultural features. Relying on state site records, an archive of high-resolution 1930s aerial images, and modern lidar data, we carefully examine the region surrounding 59 sites where fields had previously been documented. At a quarter of the sites we investigated, we successfully identified both known and unrecorded archaeological features—including agricultural fields, effigy mounds, earthworks, and house basins—most of which have been destroyed by recent land use practices. Our analysis sheds light on the complexity and richness of the archaeological landscape, with vast agricultural spaces situated beyond traditional site boundaries, and suggests that precolumbian and historic Indigenous agricultural fields may have been much larger and more widespread than conventionally understood.

Resource depression and garden hunting are major topics of archaeological interest, with important implications for understanding cultural and environmental change. Garden hunting is difficult to study using traditional zooarchaeological approaches, but isotopic analyses of animals may provide a marker for where and when people exploited nondomesticated animals that fed on agricultural resources. To realize the full potential of isotopic approaches for reconstructing garden hunting practices—and the impacts of agriculture on past nondomesticated animal populations more broadly—a wider range of species, encompassing many “ecological perspectives,” is needed. We use bone-collagen isotopic compositions of animals (n = 643, 23 taxa, 39 sites) associated with the Late Woodland (~AD 900−1650) in what is now southern Ontario to test hypotheses about the extent to which animals used maize, an isotopically distinctive plant central to subsistence practices of Iroquoian-speaking peoples across the region. Results show that although some taxa—particularly those that may have been hard to control—had substantial access to maize, most did not, regardless of the animal resource requirements of local populations. Our findings suggest that this isotopic approach to detecting garden hunting will be more successful when applied to smaller-scale societies.