This is Science Friday. I'm Iroflato. When we think of Native American agriculture, we think of corn.

You know, the stuff Europeans couldn't get enough of once they got here. But before that crop became popular,

indigenous people were farming things like erect knotweed, goose foot, little barley. So what happened to these domesticated plants?

And why don't they have a place on our Thanksgiving tables?

Here to tell us about these lost crops, as well as other short subjects in science, is Annalie Newitz.

Tech Culture Editor at Aris Technica.

Annali, welcome back to Science Friday.

Hey, thanks for having me back.

Oh, you're welcome.

So what are these, what are they?

Where do they go?

Things we've never heard of like goosefoot, little barley.

Give us the story on it.

That's right.

So about 1,000 to 2,000 years ago, indigenous people in the Americas had a very different set of meals

than they would have had much later in that we have today.

And there's a archaeobotanist, which is somebody who studies ancient plants, named Natalie

Mueller at Cornell University, who's been studying these lost crops.

And she focuses specifically on erect knotweed, which if you're a gardener, you've probably

heard of Asian knotweed, which is an invasive plant.

This is not that.

This is a local indigenous plant.

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