# Subsistence and slave food fields  
In the early plantation period, Amerindians and Africans came into frequent contact with each other. They were bound together in plantation fields as enslaved labourers or lived in clandestine communities beyond white hegemony. They were skilled agriculturalists, and the products of their food heritage improved their overall prospects for survival. As native populations declined, enslaved Africans and their descendants inherited a second botanical legacy that encompassed foods from New and Old World tropical regions. As replacement populations for Amerindians, they hybridized both tropical food systems in the fields where they cultivated food staples.  
In the fields allotted to them for food production, enslaved Africans forged a new subsistence system that included crops from the world's principal