In general, the kinds of research questions and relevant data to be discussed here focus on the possible interaction of aboriginal subsistence traits like scheduling and patch use with European activities, especially trade. Because of the lack of sufficient paleoethnobotanical data from prehistoric sites in the Piedmont, assessment of change from prehistoric to historic times is somewhat speculative. However, two probable aspects of the influence of the European cultural presence on aboriginal subsistence patterns can be discussed on the basis of present evidence. These are (1) more or less indirect influences on subsistence activity patterning conditioned by native involvement in European trade networks, and (2) more direct effects of European contact on plant use in the form of introduced Old World species and their incorporation into aboriginal subsistence systems.
If the Fredricks site population, or part of it, was active in the deerskin trade with Europeans, it is reasonable to assume that other subsistence activities would have been adjusted in some way to accomodate this new strategy. Unfortunately, sufficient evidence from prehistoric sites in the area is not available with which to directly compare the Fredricks site paleoethnobotanical evidence. However, a picture of the seasonal round of subsistence activities at Fredricks can be drawn using ethnohistoric and archaeological evidence.
Observations on the scheduling of activities by European travelers are not available for the immediate vicinity of Fredricks site but do exist for nearby parts of the Piedmont and Coastal Plain as well as coastal and piedmont Virginia. Such accounts indicate that movement of groups in the fall to hunting grounds was a common pattern in post-contact times. Strachey (Major 1849:75-76) reports movement of coastal Algonquin groups into the interior to hunt deer during which times women and children accompanied the men. Similarly, Lawson (Lefler 1967:215), probably speaking of coastal North Carolina, describes the movement of groups at leaf-fall to hunt specifically for hides to trade. The precise timing of transport of hides can only be guessed at without further research into contemporary sources. Aboriginal groups like that occupying Fredricks lived in a frontier region that had not yet been settled by the English. Trade contacts probably took place in the aboriginal villages, with English traders and adventurers transporting hides back to the North Carolina coast or to Virginia for transport overseas (Robinson 1979). However, Adair (Williams 1930:436), writing late in the eighteenth century and generalizing about Southeastern groups, reports that in early May Indian traders set off for English settlements. Presumably the exchange of goods would be put off until spring, when enough hides had been collected and travel was easier.
What evidence is there for such a winter/spring hunting pattern at Fredricks? Assessment of seasonality of activities using paleoethnobotanical remains is complicated by the fact that most temperate flowering plants fruit in the fall rather than in the winter or early spring. The absence or rarity of spring-ripening seeds may merely indicate scarcity of these species rather than a lack of human activity at the site during these times of year. Thus, at the Fredricks site, it is not surprising that nearly all the food plants represented by seeds were collected in late summer and early fall. Exceptions such as strawberry (which flowers and fruits between March and June), bedstraw (which produces fruit anywhere between April and August), and bramble (which fruits in May and July) indicate that there could have been human activity that resulted in deposition of these remains as early as March. However, ripening patterns generally extend over several months, which makes it impossible to determine the timing of human deposition activities with any precision. The only conclusion to be drawn is that, although all or part of the Fredricks site population may have been elsewhere during winter and spring, there is no strong paleoethnobotanical evidence that they were.
Thus, seed data provide no evidence either for or against the hypothesis that the Fredricks site people hunted for marketable hides during the winter. There is so far no evidence for increased harvesting of deer in the faunal record. Based on a comparison of the nearby protohistoric Wall site (occupied c. A.D. 1550) with Fredricks, quantities of deer bones (based on MNI as well as raw counts) are not significantly greater at the later site (Holm 1987). Abundant and diverse trade goods at Fredricks (Carnes 1987), as well as ethnohistoric mentions of the Occaneechi as trade specialists in their island home in southern Virginia before their move to the village on the Eno (Dickens et al. 1986) and the location of Fredricks near a major trading path (Simpkins 1984), indicate that the Fredricks site people were quite active in exchange with the English. A plausible explanation for the lack of evidence of increased deer hunting based upon faunal evidence is that the Fredricks site traders acted as middlemen acquiring hides from other aboriginal groups (Holm 1987), a pattern which was common elsewhere in the interior Southeast (Waselkov 1986). A similar degree of trade specialization occurred among groups such as the Huron in the Northeast (Hunt 1967).
The paleoethnobotanical evidence is inconclusive on this point. It is possible that the Fredricks site people acquired their plant foods through trade, reserving most of their time and energy for deerskin trade rather than gardening and collecting. However, the diversity of plant foods found at the site indicates that all or most plant foods were grown or collected locally. Lawson's contemporary account of nearby groups (Lefler 1967) also supports this interpretation. It is more likely that trade activity would have modified scheduling of such activities as acorn and hickory collection, which would have taken place in mid- to late fall. On the other hand, a sexual division of labor that allowed women to harvest nuts and crops, gather fruits, and maintain gardens would have allowed men to specialize in trade without disruption of most traditional plant exploitation activities.
Considerable shifts in scheduling of seasonal activities might not have been needed to allow the Fredricks site people to devote time and energy to trade with Europeans, if scheduling conflicts between trade and traditional subsistence activities did not occur. Maize remained a staple crop based on comparisons of plant remains assemblages from Fredricks and from the Wall site (Gremillion 1987). The difference between relative quantities of acorn and hickory is greater at Fredricks than at Wall, but quantities of nut remains indicate that acorn was probably about as important as hickory at both sites. Thus, changes in seasonal subsistence activity patterning, if in fact it occurred among the Fredricks site population and similar groups as a result of contact, apparently did not alter diet composition a great deal. It would have at least been possible to incorporate trade activities into an existing seasonal round without rescheduling or abandoning activities such as planting and harvesting of maize and other fall crops and collecting nuts and fruits.
Similarly, responses to spatial variation in the form of environmental and vegetational patchiness could have continued in much the same way as in pre-contact times. Managed patches such as gardens and fields were important sources of plant foods, as well as unmanaged or mininally managed woodlands and forest edges containing fruit and nut trees and herbaceous fruit-producing taxa. At the time of the Fredricks site occupation, the Piedmont was not yet settled by Europeans. Thus, modification of the local vegetational mosaic had probably not increased much beyond the effects that aboriginal settlement had already had, unless fire drives for deer became more frequent and/or more intense.
Although it seems probable that trade relationships with Europeans required modifications of pre-contact subsistence scheduling, there is as yet no archaeological evidence to support this conclusion for the Fredricks site. There is likewise no indication that different kinds of vegetational patches were exploited; gardens and/or fields, woods, and woods edges all seem to have been sources of plant foods for the Fredricks site population. Despite their trade relationships with Europeans, the Fredricks site people used a variety of plant foods from different types of vegetational patches.
Most of the plants used were ones with a long history of association with human populations in the Eastern Woodlands. Some, like oak, hickory, and most of the fleshy fruits, are native to Eastern North America. The most important cultigen, maize, was a Mesoamerican import as were beans and presumably pepo squash. However, only two Old World species were found at the site. Both peach and watermelon were presumably easy to grow and productive in in the Southeast. Presumably the effort involved in managing these introductions was minimal, and probably did not require abandonment of other subsistence activities. There is no evidence at Fredricks of Old World cereal crops; either the English made no attempt to introduce them, or the local groups did not adopt them, preferring to plant maize. Watermelon and peach, both somewhat weedy, could have been adopted as cultigens with little or no effort on the part of the English, who seem to have made little effort to "improve" Indian agriculture through introduction of European crops, unlike the Spanish elsewhere in the Southeast (H. Smith 1956). Direct effects of European contact on the Fredricks site in the form of introduced plant species were minimal.
Our knowledge of the ethnobotany of the Fredricks site and the subsistence patterns of the people who lived there has increased greatly. We know of only two European introductions that found their way into the aboriginal subsistence system, and that these probably required little effort to exploit and did not displace other indigenous fleshy fruits. It also has been established that maize was as important at Fredricks as might be expected from contemporary European accounts and data from other sites in the Southeast, whereas indigenous starchy and oily grains were apparently not used. Harvesting of acorn and hickory, collecting of fruits, and management of gardens where annual crops (and perhaps tree crops as well) were grown, combined to provide a nutritionally diverse plant food resource base that depended on a variety of activities. Although data from pre-contact sites such as Wall have been used to generate hypotheses about possible differences between earlier and later sites, e.g., the behavioral correlates of the differences in relative quantities of acorn and hickory between the two sites, more prehistoric data are needed before questions about change can be properly addressed. Until then, however, collection and interpretation of plant remains from the Fredricks site has been invaluable for reconstructing the subsistence patterns of this Historic period village and suggesting directions for future research.