I don't know about the northern Indians, but beeing settled/neolithic does not equate being sedentary ("SOYA"). When an agriculturalist people spreads into an area that cannot support a 100% agri-lifestyle (or a paleo-people possibly takes up farming in that same place) they must supplement it with herding or hunting/collecting (or farming might be taken up as a supplement to...). Supposedly pastoralism presupposes agriculture, because it was agriculture that made man settle, and without settlement no large-scale domestication can be initiated (you have to start the process somewhere - and the big herds driven across the Great Plains of the Old world are animals of a DOMESTICATED kind! That the people driving them have not been settled for a few thousand years now takes nothing away from that). As for farming in a Northern climate: that the vikings gave up Geenland is not so surprising. What is surprising is that they held out for 500 yrs with an essentially agriculturalist lifestyle
 (Although I give you that their main "crop" was sheep). To make a short story long...
Did the Indians perhaps just consume the 3% maple sap as it was? And sea-salt takes way more than just a log. It takes intensive sun (you can't make sea-salt "the all-natural way" in northern Europe for example), or a fire-proof container to boil in.
Erik F.

Tom Bridgeland <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Does anyone know how the northern Indians made maple sugar before the European invasion? They were not farmers, at the latitude, and I don't think they had clay pottery either. All sea salt requires is evaporation, a hollowed out log would do.

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