Salamence

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/5171302

With its cold climate, short growing season, and dense forests, Michigan's Upper Peninsula is known as a challenging place for farming. But a new Dartmouth-led study provides evidence of intensive farming by ancestral Native Americans at the Sixty Islands archaeological site along the Menominee River, making it the most complete ancient agricultural site in the eastern half of the United States.

The site features a raised ridge field system that dates to around the 10th century to 1600, and much of it is still intact today.

The raised fields are comprised of clustered ridged garden beds that range from 4 to 12 inches in height and were used to grow corn, beans, squash, and other plants by ancestors of the Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin.

The findings are published in Science.

"The scale of this agricultural system by ancestral Menominee communities is 10 times larger than what was previously estimated," says lead author Madeleine McLeester, an assistant professor of anthropology at Dartmouth. "That forces us to reconsider a number of preconceived ideas we have about agriculture not only in the region, but globally."

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cross-posted from: https://rss.ponder.cat/post/199000

From BBC News via this RSS feed

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May 22, 2025, was the last day of life as they knew it for the Bedouin community of Maghayer al-Deir, which until recently used to reside east of Ramallah, in the central occupied West Bank. The 24 Palestinian families who made up the community were forced to gather their belongings and leave their home in the eastern slopes of Ramallah overlooking the Jordan Valley. After three days of intense harassment and attacks on the community, Israeli settlers now have complete control over the little valley.

Since October 7, 2023, Israeli settlers have intensified their attacks on Palestinian rural communities in the West Bank, harassing, attacking, and completely displacing thousands of Palestinians. With each new displaced community, Israeli settlers gain control of more strategic areas for the expansion of established settlements or the establishment of new settler outposts.

According to Hasan Mleihat, spokesperson for the al-Baidar organization for the defense of Bedouin rights in Palestine, Israeli settlers have displaced 62 out of the 212 Bedouin communities in the West Bank since October 2023. These include 12,000 out of the roughly 400,000 West Bank Palestinian Bedouins.

“It is a wholesale ethnic cleansing campaign of exclusively Bedouin communities, which has been happening far away from the media’s attention,” Mleihat told Mondoweiss.

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publicado de forma cruzada desde: https://hexbear.net/post/5127921

The Israeli government’s decision last Thursday to create 22 new settlements in the West Bank was reported as regular news in most mainstream media. Although it received official condemnations from the UK, Finland, and some Arab states, the decision passed with absolutely no practical consequence for Israel, despite European threats to impose sanctions.

On the other hand, within Israeli politics, the decision was regarded as far from ordinary and received with widespread fanfare. The Israeli Defense Ministry called the decision “historic,” while the Defense Minister, Israel Katz, said that the decision “reinforces Israel’s control over Judea and Samaria,” Israel’s term for the occupied West Bank.” Israel’s hardline Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich, celebrated the move as “a great day for the settlement movement and an important day for the State of Israel.”

The geographical distribution of this planned network of settlements, some of it already in existence, will ensure Israel’s grip on the West Bank is all-encompassing. The sprawling web includes four settlements in the Ramallah area in the central West Bank, four in Jenin in the north, four more in Hebron in the south, two in Nablus in the center-north, one in Salfit in the northeast, three in Jericho in the southern Jordan Valley, three more across the Jordan Valley itself, and one in East Jerusalem.

In short, it is annexation in all but name.

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