Re: Primitives affect on the environment

[Guest guest]

I may have posted this earlier. If so, my

impressin is that it didn't 'take.' The following

article by C. Mann is drawn from an

emerging paradigm in new world Anthropology. The

basic tenet is that indigenous cultures not only

greatly affected the enrionment, they did so in

very positive ways. Please read and enjoy. If you

are not familiar with this article, I promise

you'll never think about 'primitive' people the

same way again. Thanks -Allan

The Atlantic Monthly | March 2002 | C. Mann's " 1491 "

Before it became the New World, the Western

Hemisphere was vastly more populous and

sophisticated than has been thought-an altogether

more salubrious place to live at the time than,

say, Europe. New evidence of both the extent of

the population and its agricultural advancement

leads to a remarkable conjecture: the Amazon rain

forest may be largely a human artifact

by C. Mann

The plane took off in weather that was

surprisingly cool for north-central Bolivia and

flew east, toward the Brazilian border. In a few

minutes the roads and houses disappeared, and the

only evidence of human settlement was the cattle

scattered over the savannah like jimmies on ice

cream. Then they, too, disappeared. By that time

the archaeologists had their cameras out and were

clicking away in delight.

Below us was the Beni, a Bolivian province about

the size of Illinois and Indiana put together,

and nearly as flat. For almost half the year rain

and snowmelt from the mountains to the south and

west cover the land with an irregular, slowly

moving skin of water that eventually ends up in

the province's northern rivers, which are

sub-subtributaries of the Amazon. The rest of the

year the water dries up and the bright-green

vastness turns into something that resembles a

desert. This peculiar, remote, watery plain was

what had drawn the researchers' attention, and

not just because it was one of the few places on

earth inhabited by people who might never have

seen Westerners with cameras.

From Atlantic Unbound:

Interviews: " The Pristine Myth "

(March 7, 2002)

C. Mann talks about the thriving and

sophisticated Indian landscape of the

pre-Columbus Americas

kson and Balée, the

archaeologists, sat up front. kson is based

at the University of Pennsylvania; he works in

concert with a Bolivian archaeologist, whose seat

in the plane I usurped that day. Balée is at

Tulane University, in New Orleans. He is actually

an anthropologist, but as native peoples have

vanished, the distinction between anthropologists

and archaeologists has blurred. The two men

differ in build, temperament, and scholarly

proclivity, but they pressed their faces to the

windows with identical enthusiasm.

Dappled across the grasslands below was an

archipelago of forest islands, many of them

startlingly round and hundreds of acres across.

Each island rose ten or thirty or sixty feet

above the floodplain, allowing trees to grow that

would otherwise never survive the water. The

forests were linked by raised berms, as straight

as a rifle shot and up to three miles long. It is

kson's belief that this entire

landscape-30,000 square miles of forest mounds

surrounded by raised fields and linked by

causeways-was constructed by a complex, populous

society more than 2,000 years ago. Balée, newer

to the Beni, leaned toward this view but was not

yet ready to commit himself.

kson and Balée belong to a cohort of

scholars that has radically challenged

conventional notions of what the Western

Hemisphere was like before Columbus. When I went

to high school, in the 1970s, I was taught that

Indians came to the Americas across the Bering

Strait about 12,000 years ago, that they lived

for the most part in small, isolated groups, and

that they had so little impact on their

environment that even after millennia of

habitation it remained mostly wilderness. My son

picked up the same ideas at his schools. One way

to summarize the views of people like kson

and Balée would be to say that in their opinion

this picture of Indian life is wrong in almost

every aspect. Indians were here far longer than

previously thought, these researchers believe,

and in much greater numbers. And they were so

successful at imposing their will on the

landscape that in 1492 Columbus set foot in a

hemisphere thoroughly dominated by humankind.

Given the charged relations between white

societies and native peoples, inquiry into Indian

culture and history is inevitably contentious.

But the recent scholarship is especially

controversial. To begin with, some

researchers-many but not all from an older

generation-deride the new theories as fantasies

arising from an almost willful misinterpretation

of data and a perverse kind of political

correctness. " I have seen no evidence that large

numbers of people ever lived in the Beni, " says

Betty J. Meggers, of the sonian Institution.

" Claiming otherwise is just wishful thinking. "

Similar criticisms apply to many of the new

scholarly claims about Indians, according to Dean

R. Snow, an anthropologist at Pennsylvania State

University. The problem is that " you can make the

meager evidence from the ethnohistorical record

tell you anything you want, " he says. " It's

really easy to kid yourself. "

More important are the implications of the new

theories for today's ecological battles. Much of

the environmental movement is animated,

consciously or not, by what Denevan, a

geographer at the University of Wisconsin, calls,

polemically, " the pristine myth " -the belief that

the Americas in 1491 were an almost unmarked,

even Edenic land, " untrammeled by man, " in the

words of the Wilderness Act of 1964, one of the

nation's first and most important environmental

laws. As the University of Wisconsin historian

Cronon has written, restoring this

long-ago, putatively natural state is, in the

view of environmentalists, a task that society is

morally bound to undertake. Yet if the new view

is correct and the work of humankind was

pervasive, where does that leave efforts to

restore nature?

The Beni is a case in point. In addition to

building up the Beni mounds for houses and

gardens, kson says, the Indians trapped fish

in the seasonally flooded grassland. Indeed, he

says, they fashioned dense zigzagging networks of

earthen fish weirs between the causeways. To keep

the habitat clear of unwanted trees and

undergrowth, they regularly set huge areas on

fire. Over the centuries the burning created an

intricate ecosystem of fire-adapted plant species

dependent on native pyrophilia. The current

inhabitants of the Beni still burn, although now

it is to maintain the savannah for cattle. When

we flew over the area, the dry season had just

begun, but mile-long lines of flame were already

on the march. In the charred areas behind the

fires were the blackened spikes of trees-many of

them, one assumes, of the varieties that

activists fight to save in other parts of

Amazonia.

After we landed, I asked Balée, Should we let

people keep burning the Beni? Or should we let

the trees invade and create a verdant tropical

forest in the grasslands, even if one had not

existed here for millennia?

Balée laughed. " You're trying to trap me, aren't you? " he said.

Like a Club Between the Eyes

According to family lore, my great-grandmother's

great-grandmother's great-grandfather was the

first white person hanged in America. His name

was Billington. He came on the Mayflower,

which anchored off the coast of Massachusetts on

November 9, 1620. Billington was not a Puritan;

within six months of arrival he also became the

first white person in America to be tried for

complaining about the police. " He is a knave, "

Bradford, the colony's governor, wrote of

Billington, " and so will live and die. " What one

historian called Billington's " troublesome

career " ended in 1630, when he was hanged for

murder. My family has always said that he was

framed-but we would say that, wouldn't we?

A few years ago it occurred to me that my

ancestor and everyone else in the colony had

voluntarily enlisted in a venture that brought

them to New England without food or shelter six

weeks before winter. Half the 102 people on the

Mayflower made it through to spring, which to me

was amazing. How, I wondered, did they survive?

In his history of Plymouth Colony, Bradford

provided the answer: by robbing Indian houses and

graves. The Mayflower first hove to at Cape Cod.

An armed company staggered out. Eventually it

found a recently deserted Indian settlement. The

newcomers-hungry, cold, sick-dug up graves and

ransacked houses, looking for underground stashes

of corn. " And sure it was God's good providence

that we found this corn, " Bradford wrote, " for

else we know not how we should have done. " (He

felt uneasy about the thievery, though.) When the

colonists came to Plymouth, a month later, they

set up shop in another deserted Indian village.

All through the coastal forest the Indians had

" died on heapes, as they lay in their houses, "

the English trader Morton noted. " And the

bones and skulls upon the severall places of

their habitations made such a spectacle " that to

Morton the Massachusetts woods seemed to be " a

new found Golgotha " -the hill of executions in

Roman Jerusalem.

To the Pilgrims' astonishment, one of the

corpses they exhumed on Cape Cod had blond hair.

A French ship had been wrecked there several

years earlier. The Patuxet Indians imprisoned a

few survivors. One of them supposedly learned

enough of the local language to inform his

captors that God would destroy them for their

misdeeds. The Patuxet scoffed at the threat. But

the Europeans carried a disease, and they

bequeathed it to their jailers. The epidemic

(probably of viral hepatitis, according to a

study by Arthur E. Spiess, an archaeologist at

the Maine Historic Preservation Commission, and

Bruce D. Spiess, the director of clinical

research at the Medical College of Virginia) took

years to exhaust itself and may have killed 90

percent of the people in coastal New England. It

made a huge difference to American history. " The

good hand of God favored our beginnings, "

Bradford mused, by " sweeping away great

multitudes of the natives ... that he might make

room for us. "

By the time my ancestor set sail on the

Mayflower, Europeans had been visiting New

England for more than a hundred years. English,

French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese mariners

regularly plied the coastline, trading what they

could, occasionally kidnapping the inhabitants

for slaves. New England, the Europeans saw, was

thickly settled and well defended. In 1605 and

1606 de Champlain visited Cape Cod, hoping

to establish a French base. He abandoned the

idea. Too many people already lived there. A year

later Sir Ferdinando Gorges-British despite his

name-tried to establish an English community in

southern Maine. It had more founders than

Plymouth and seems to have been better organized.

Confronted by numerous well-armed local Indians,

the settlers abandoned the project within months.

The Indians at Plymouth would surely have been an

equal obstacle to my ancestor and his ramshackle

expedition had disease not intervened.

Faced with such stories, historians have long

wondered how many people lived in the Americas at

the time of contact. " Debated since Columbus

attempted a partial census on Hispaniola in

1496, " Denevan has written, this " remains

one of the great inquiries of history. " (In 1976

Denevan assembled and edited an entire book on

the subject, The Native Population of the

Americas in 1492.) The first scholarly estimate

of the indigenous population was made in 1910 by

Mooney, a distinguished ethnographer at the

sonian Institution. Combing through old

documents, he concluded that in 1491 North

America had 1.15 million inhabitants. Mooney's

glittering reputation ensured that most

subsequent researchers accepted his figure

uncritically.

That changed in 1966, when Henry F. Dobyns

published " Estimating Aboriginal American

Population: An Appraisal of Techniques With a New

Hemispheric Estimate, " in the journal Current

Anthropology. Despite the carefully neutral

title, his argument was thunderous, its impact

long-lasting. In the view of , the

author of The Earth Shall Weep (1998), a history

of indigenous Americans, Dobyns's colleagues " are

still struggling to get out of the crater that

paper left in anthropology. " Not only

anthropologists were affected. Dobyns's estimate

proved to be one of the opening rounds in today's

culture wars.

Dobyns began his exploration of pre-Columbian

Indian demography in the early 1950s, when he was

a graduate student. At the invitation of a

friend, he spent a few months in northern Mexico,

which is full of Spanish-era missions. There he

poked through the crumbling leather-bound ledgers

in which Jesuits recorded local births and

deaths. Right away he noticed how many more

deaths there were. The Spaniards arrived, and

then Indians died-in huge numbers, at incredible

rates. It hit him, Dobyns told me recently, " like

a club right between the eyes. "

It took Dobyns eleven years to obtain his Ph.D.

Along the way he joined a rural-development

project in Peru, which until colonial times was

the seat of the Incan empire. Remembering what he

had seen at the northern fringe of the Spanish

conquest, Dobyns decided to compare it with

figures for the south. He burrowed into the

papers of the Lima cathedral and read apologetic

Spanish histories. The Indians in Peru, Dobyns

concluded, had faced plagues from the day the

conquistadors showed up-in fact, before then:

smallpox arrived around 1525, seven years ahead

of the Spanish. Brought to Mexico apparently by a

single sick Spaniard, it swept south and

eliminated more than half the population of the

Incan empire. Smallpox claimed the Incan dictator

Huayna Capac and much of his family, setting off

a calamitous war of succession. So complete was

the chaos that Francisco Pizarro was able to

seize an empire the size of Spain and Italy

combined with a force of 168 men.

Smallpox was only the first epidemic. Typhus

(probably) in 1546, influenza and smallpox

together in 1558, smallpox again in 1589,

diphtheria in 1614, measles in 1618-all ravaged

the remains of Incan culture. Dobyns was the

first social scientist to piece together this

awful picture, and he naturally rushed his

findings into print. Hardly anyone paid

attention. But Dobyns was already working on a

second, related question: If all those people

died, how many had been living there to begin

with? Before Columbus, Dobyns calculated, the

Western Hemisphere held ninety to 112 million

people. Another way of saying this is that in

1491 more people lived in the Americas than in

Europe.

His argument was simple but horrific. It is well

known that Native Americans had no experience

with many European diseases and were therefore

immunologically unprepared- " virgin soil, " in the

metaphor of epidemiologists. What Dobyns realized

was that such diseases could have swept from the

coastlines initially visited by Europeans to

inland areas controlled by Indians who had never

seen a white person. The first whites to explore

many parts of the Americas may therefore have

encountered places that were already depopulated.

Indeed, Dobyns argued, they must have done so.

Peru was one example, the Pacific Northwest

another. In 1792 the British navigator

Vancouver led the first European expedition to

survey Puget Sound. He found a vast charnel

house: human remains " promiscuously scattered

about the beach, in great numbers. " Smallpox,

Vancouver's crew discovered, had preceded them.

Its few survivors, second lieutenant Puget

noted, were " most terribly pitted ... indeed many

have lost their Eyes. " In Pox Americana, (2001),

Fenn, a historian at Washington

University, contends that the disaster on the

northwest coast was but a small part of a

continental pandemic that erupted near Boston in

1774 and cut down Indians from Mexico to Alaska.

Because smallpox was not endemic in the

Americas, colonials, too, had not acquired any

immunity. The virus, an equal-opportunity killer,

swept through the Continental Army and stopped

the drive into Quebec. The American Revolution

would be lost, Washington and other rebel leaders

feared, if the contagion did to the colonists

what it had done to the Indians. " The small Pox!

The small Pox! " wrote to his wife,

Abigail. " What shall We do with it? " In

retrospect, Fenn says, " One of

Washington's most brilliant moves was to

inoculate the army against smallpox during the

Valley Forge winter of '78. " Without inoculation

smallpox could easily have given the United

States back to the British.

So many epidemics occurred in the Americas,

Dobyns argued, that the old data used by Mooney

and his successors represented population nadirs.

From the few cases in which before-and-after

totals are known with relative certainty, Dobyns

estimated that in the first 130 years of contact

about 95 percent of the people in the Americas

died-the worst demographic calamity in recorded

history.

Dobyns's ideas were quickly attacked as

politically motivated, a push from the

hate-America crowd to inflate the toll of

imperialism. The attacks continue to this day.

" No question about it, some people want those

higher numbers, " says Shepard Krech III, a Brown

University anthropologist who is the author of

The Ecological Indian (1999). These people, he

says, were thrilled when Dobyns revisited the

subject in a book, Their Numbers Become Thinned

(1983)-and revised his own estimates upward.

Perhaps Dobyns's most vehement critic is

Henige, a bibliographer of Africana at the

University of Wisconsin, whose Numbers From

Nowhere (1998) is a landmark in the literature of

demographic fulmination. " Suspect in 1966, it is

no less suspect nowadays, " Henige wrote of

Dobyns's work. " If anything, it is worse. "

When Henige wrote Numbers From Nowhere, the

fight about pre-Columbian populations had already

consumed forests' worth of trees; his

bibliography is ninety pages long. And the

dispute shows no sign of abating. More and more

people have jumped in. This is partly because the

subject is inherently fascinating. But more

likely the increased interest in the debate is

due to the growing realization of the high

political and ecological stakes.

Inventing by the Millions

In May 30, 1539, Hernando de Soto landed his

private army near Tampa Bay, in Florida. Soto, as

he was called, was a novel figure: half warrior,

half venture capitalist. He had grown very rich

very young by becoming a market leader in the

nascent trade for Indian slaves. The profits had

helped to fund Pizarro's seizure of the Incan

empire, which had made Soto wealthier still.

Looking quite literally for new worlds to

conquer, he persuaded the Spanish Crown to let

him loose in North America. He spent one fortune

to make another. He came to Florida with 200

horses, 600 soldiers, and 300 pigs.

From today's perspective, it is difficult to

imagine the ethical system that would justify

Soto's actions. For four years his force, looking

for gold, wandered through what is now Florida,

Georgia, North and South Carolina, Tennessee,

Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Texas,

wrecking almost everything it touched. The

inhabitants often fought back vigorously, but

they had never before encountered an army with

horses and guns. Soto died of fever with his

expedition in ruins; along the way his men had

managed to rape, torture, enslave, and kill

countless Indians. But the worst thing the

Spaniards did, some researchers say, was entirely

without malice-bring the pigs.

According to Hudson, an anthropologist

at the University of Georgia who spent fifteen

years reconstructing the path of the expedition,

Soto crossed the Mississippi a few miles

downstream from the present site of Memphis. It

was a nervous passage: the Spaniards were watched

by several thousand Indian warriors. Utterly

without fear, Soto brushed past the Indian force

into what is now eastern Arkansas, through

thickly settled land- " very well peopled with

large towns, " one of his men later recalled, " two

or three of which were to be seen from one town. "

Eventually the Spaniards approached a cluster of

small cities, each protected by earthen walls,

sizeable moats, and deadeye archers. In his usual

fashion, Soto brazenly marched in, stole food,

and marched out.

After Soto left, no Europeans visited this part

of the Mississippi Valley for more than a

century. Early in 1682 whites appeared again,

this time Frenchmen in canoes. One of them was

Réné- Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle. The

French passed through the area where Soto had

found cities cheek by jowl. It was deserted-La

Salle didn't see an Indian village for 200 miles.

About fifty settlements existed in this strip of

the Mississippi when Soto showed up, according to

Anne Ramenofsky, an anthropologist at the

University of New Mexico. By La Salle's time the

number had shrunk to perhaps ten, some probably

inhabited by recent immigrants. Soto " had a

privileged glimpse " of an Indian world, Hudson

says. " The window opened and slammed shut. When

the French came in and the record opened up

again, it was a transformed reality. A

civilization crumbled. The question is, how did

this happen? "

The question is even more complex than it may

seem. Disaster of this magnitude suggests

epidemic disease. In the view of Ramenofsky and

Galloway, an anthropologist at the

University of Texas, the source of the contagion

was very likely not Soto's army but its

ambulatory meat locker: his 300 pigs. Soto's

force itself was too small to be an effective

biological weapon. Sicknesses like measles and

smallpox would have burned through his 600

soldiers long before they reached the

Mississippi. But the same would not have held

true for the pigs, which multiplied rapidly and

were able to transmit their diseases to wildlife

in the surrounding forest. When human beings and

domesticated animals live close together, they

trade microbes with abandon. Over time mutation

spawns new diseases: avian influenza becomes

human influenza, bovine rinderpest becomes

measles. Unlike Europeans, Indians did not live

in close quarters with animals-they domesticated

only the dog, the llama, the alpaca, the guinea

pig, and, here and there, the turkey and the

Muscovy duck. In some ways this is not

surprising: the New World had fewer animal

candidates for taming than the Old. Moreover, few

Indians carry the gene that permits adults to

digest lactose, a form of sugar abundant in milk.

Non-milk-drinkers, one imagines, would be less

likely to work at domesticating milk-giving

animals. But this is guesswork. The fact is that

what scientists call zoonotic disease was little

known in the Americas. Swine alone can

disseminate anthrax, brucellosis, leptospirosis,

taeniasis, trichinosis, and tuberculosis. Pigs

breed exuberantly and can transmit diseases to

deer and turkeys. Only a few of Soto's pigs would

have had to wander off to infect the forest.

Indeed, the calamity wrought by Soto apparently

extended across the whole Southeast. The Coosa

city-states, in western Georgia, and the

Caddoan-speaking civilization, centered on the

Texas-Arkansas border, disintegrated soon after

Soto appeared. The Caddo had had a taste for

monumental architecture: public plazas,

ceremonial platforms, mausoleums. After Soto's

army left, notes K. Perttula, an

archaeological consultant in Austin, Texas, the

Caddo stopped building community centers and

began digging community cemeteries. Between

Soto's and La Salle's visits, Perttula believes,

the Caddoan population fell from about 200,000 to

about 8,500-a drop of nearly 96 percent. In the

eighteenth century the tally shrank further, to

1,400. An equivalent loss today in the population

of New York City would reduce it to 56,000-not

enough to fill Yankee Stadium. " That's one reason

whites think of Indians as nomadic hunters, " says

Thornton, an anthropologist at the

University of California at Los Angeles.

" Everything else-all the heavily populated

urbanized societies-was wiped out. "

Could a few pigs truly wreak this much

destruction? Such apocalyptic scenarios invite

skepticism. As a rule, viruses, microbes, and

parasites are rarely lethal on so wide a scale-a

pest that wipes out its host species does not

have a bright evolutionary future. In its worst

outbreak, from 1347 to 1351, the European Black

Death claimed only a third of its victims. (The

rest survived, though they were often disfigured

or crippled by its effects.) The Indians in

Soto's path, if Dobyns, Ramenofsky, and Perttula

are correct, endured losses that were

incomprehensibly greater.

One reason is that Indians were fresh territory

for many plagues, not just one. Smallpox,

typhoid, bubonic plague, influenza, mumps,

measles, whooping cough-all rained down on the

Americas in the century after Columbus. (Cholera,

malaria, and scarlet fever came later.) Having

little experience with epidemic diseases, Indians

had no knowledge of how to combat them. In

contrast, Europeans were well versed in the

brutal logic of quarantine. They boarded up

houses in which plague appeared and fled to the

countryside. In Indian New England, Neal

Salisbury, a historian at College, wrote in

Manitou and Providence (1982), family and friends

gathered with the shaman at the sufferer's

bedside to wait out the illness-a practice that

" could only have served to spread the disease

more rapidly. "

Indigenous biochemistry may also have played a

role. The immune system constantly scans the body

for molecules that it can recognize as

foreign-molecules belonging to an invading virus,

for instance. No one's immune system can identify

all foreign presences. Roughly speaking, an

individual's set of defensive tools is known as

his MHC type. Because many bacteria and viruses

mutate easily, they usually attack in the form of

several slightly different strains. Pathogens win

when MHC types miss some of the strains and the

immune system is not stimulated to act. Most

human groups contain many MHC types; a strain

that slips by one person's defenses will be

nailed by the defenses of the next. But,

according to Francis L. Black, an epidemiologist

at Yale University, Indians are characterized by

unusually homogenous MHC types. One out of three

South American Indians have similar MHC types;

among Africans the corresponding figure is one in

200. The cause is a matter for Darwinian

speculation, the effects less so.

In 1966 Dobyns's insistence on the role of

disease was a shock to his colleagues. Today the

impact of European pathogens on the New World is

almost undisputed. Nonetheless, the fight over

Indian numbers continues with undiminished

fervor. Estimates of the population of North

America in 1491 disagree by an order of

magnitude-from 18 million, Dobyns's revised

figure, to 1.8 million, calculated by H.

Ubelaker, an anthropologist at the sonian.

To some " high counters, " as Henige calls

them, the low counters' refusal to relinquish the

vision of an empty continent is irrational or

worse. " Non-Indian 'experts' always want to

minimize the size of aboriginal populations, "

says Lenore Stiffarm, a Native American-education

specialist at the University of Saskatchewan. The

smaller the numbers of Indians, she believes, the

easier it is to regard the continent as having

been up for grabs. " It's perfectly acceptable to

move into unoccupied land, " Stiffarm says. " And

land with only a few 'savages' is the next best

thing. "

" Most of the arguments for the very large

numbers have been theoretical, " Ubelaker says in

defense of low counters. " When you try to marry

the theoretical arguments to the data that are

available on individual groups in different

regions, it's hard to find support for those

numbers. " Archaeologists, he says, keep searching

for the settlements in which those millions of

people supposedly lived, with little success. " As

more and more excavation is done, one would

expect to see more evidence for dense populations

than has thus far emerged. " Dean Snow, the

Pennsylvania State anthropologist, examined

Colonial-era Mohawk Iroquois sites and found " no

support for the notion that ubiquitous pandemics

swept the region. " In his view, asserting that

the continent was filled with people who left no

trace is like looking at an empty bank account

and claiming that it must once have held millions

of dollars.

The low counters are also troubled by the

Dobynsian procedure for recovering original

population numbers: applying an assumed death

rate, usually 95 percent, to the observed

population nadir. Ubelaker believes that the

lowest point for Indians in North America was

around 1900, when their numbers fell to about

half a million. Assuming a 95 percent death rate,

the pre-contact population would have been 10

million. Go up one percent, to a 96 percent death

rate, and the figure jumps to 12.5

million-arithmetically creating more than two

million people from a tiny increase in mortality

rates. At 98 percent the number bounds to 25

million. Minute changes in baseline assumptions

produce wildly different results.

" It's an absolutely unanswerable question on

which tens of thousands of words have been spent

to no purpose, " Henige says. In 1976 he sat in on

a seminar by Denevan, the Wisconsin

geographer. An " epiphanic moment " occurred when

he read shortly afterward that scholars had

" uncovered " the existence of eight million people

in Hispaniola. Can you just invent millions of

people? he wondered. " We can make of the

historical record that there was depopulation and

movement of people from internecine warfare and

diseases, " he says. " But as for how much, who

knows? When we start putting numbers to something

like that-applying large figures like ninety-five

percent-we're saying things we shouldn't say. The

number implies a level of knowledge that's

impossible. "

Nonetheless, one must try-or so Denevan

believes. In his estimation the high counters

(though not the highest counters) seem to be

winning the argument, at least for now. No

definitive data exist, he says, but the majority

of the extant evidentiary scraps support their

side. Even Henige is no low counter. When I asked

him what he thought the population of the

Americas was before Columbus, he insisted that

any answer would be speculation and made me

promise not to print what he was going to say

next. Then he named a figure that forty years ago

would have caused a commotion.

To Fenn, the smallpox historian, the

squabble over numbers obscures a central fact.

Whether one million or 10 million or 100 million

died, she believes, the pall of sorrow that

engulfed the hemisphere was immeasurable.

Languages, prayers, hopes, habits, and

dreams-entire ways of life hissed away like

steam. The Spanish and the Portuguese lacked the

germ theory of disease and could not explain what

was happening (let alone stop it). Nor can we

explain it; the ruin was too long ago and too

all-encompassing. In the long run, Fenn says, the

consequential finding is not that many people

died but that many people once lived. The

Americas were filled with a stunningly diverse

assortment of peoples who had knocked about the

continents for millennia. " You have to wonder, "

Fenn says. " What were all those people up to in

all that time? "

Buffalo Farm

In 1810 Henry Brackenridge came to Cahokia, in

what is now southwest Illinois, just across the

Mississippi from St. Louis. Born close to the

frontier, Brackenridge was a budding adventure

writer; his Views of Louisiana, published three

years later, was a kind of nineteenth-century

Into Thin Air, with terrific adventure but

without tragedy. Brackenridge had an eye for

archaeology, and he had heard that Cahokia was

worth a visit. When he got there, trudging along

the desolate Cahokia River, he was " struck with a

degree of astonishment. " Rising from the muddy

bottomland was a " stupendous pile of earth, "

vaster than the Great Pyramid at Giza. Around it

were more than a hundred smaller mounds, covering

an area of five square miles. At the time, the

area was almost uninhabited. One can only imagine

what passed through Brackenridge's mind as he

walked alone to the ruins of the biggest Indian

city north of the Rio Grande.

To Brackenridge, it seemed clear that Cahokia

and the many other ruins in the Midwest had been

constructed by Indians. It was not so clear to

everyone else. Nineteenth-century writers

attributed them to, among others, the Vikings,

the Chinese, the " Hindoos, " the ancient Greeks,

the ancient Egyptians, lost tribes of Israelites,

and even straying bands of Welsh. (This last

claim was surprisingly widespread; when and

surveyed the Missouri, Jefferson told them

to keep an eye out for errant bands of

Welsh-speaking white Indians.) The historian

Bancroft, dean of his profession, was a

dissenter: the earthworks, he wrote in 1840, were

purely natural formations.

Bancroft changed his mind about Cahokia, but not

about Indians. To the end of his days he regarded

them as " feeble barbarians, destitute of commerce

and of political connection. " His

characterization lasted, largely unchanged, for

more than a century. Eliot Morison, the

winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, closed his

monumental European Discovery of America (1974)

with the observation that Native Americans

expected only " short and brutish lives, void of

hope for any future. " As late as 1987 American

History: A Survey, a standard high school

textbook by three well-known historians,

described the Americas before Columbus as " empty

of mankind and its works. " The story of Europeans

in the New World, the book explained, " is the

story of the creation of a civilization where

none existed. "

Alfred Crosby, a historian at the University of

Texas, came to other conclusions. Crosby's The

Columbian Exchange: Biological Consequences of

1492 caused almost as much of a stir when it was

published, in 1972, as Henry Dobyns's calculation

of Indian numbers six years earlier, though in

different circles. Crosby was a standard

names-and-battles historian who became frustrated

by the random contingency of political events.

" Some trivial thing happens and you have this guy

winning the presidency instead of that guy, " he

says. He decided to go deeper. After he finished

his manuscript, it sat on his shelf-he couldn't

find a publisher willing to be associated with

his new ideas. It took him three years to

persuade a small editorial house to put it out.

The Columbian Exchange has been in print ever

since; a companion, Ecological Imperialism: The

Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900,

appeared in 1986.

Human history, in Crosby's interpretation, is

marked by two world-altering centers of

invention: the Middle East and central Mexico,

where Indian groups independently created nearly

all of the Neolithic innovations, writing

included. The Neolithic Revolution began in the

Middle East about 10,000 years ago. In the next

few millennia humankind invented the wheel, the

metal tool, and agriculture. The Sumerians

eventually put these inventions together, added

writing, and became the world's first

civilization. Afterward Sumeria's heirs in Europe

and Asia frantically copied one another's

happiest discoveries; innovations ricocheted from

one corner of Eurasia to another, stimulating

technological progress. Native Americans, who had

crossed to Alaska before Sumeria, missed out on

the bounty. " They had to do everything on their

own, " Crosby says. Remarkably, they succeeded.

When Columbus appeared in the Caribbean, the

descendants of the world's two Neolithic

civilizations collided, with overwhelming

consequences for both. American Neolithic

development occurred later than that of the

Middle East, possibly because the Indians needed

more time to build up the requisite population

density. Without beasts of burden they could not

capitalize on the wheel (for individual workers

on uneven terrain skids are nearly as effective

as carts for hauling), and they never developed

steel. But in agriculture they handily

outstripped the children of Sumeria. Every tomato

in Italy, every potato in Ireland, and every hot

pepper in Thailand came from this hemisphere.

Worldwide, more than half the crops grown today

were initially developed in the Americas.

Maize, as corn is called in the rest of the

world, was a triumph with global implications.

Indians developed an extraordinary number of

maize varieties for different growing conditions,

which meant that the crop could and did spread

throughout the planet. Central and Southern

Europeans became particularly dependent on it;

maize was the staple of Serbia, Romania, and

Moldavia by the nineteenth century. Indian crops

dramatically reduced hunger, Crosby says, which

led to an Old World population boom.

Along with peanuts and manioc, maize came to

Africa and transformed agriculture there, too.

" The probability is that the population of Africa

was greatly increased because of maize and other

American Indian crops, " Crosby says. " Those extra

people helped make the slave trade possible. "

Maize conquered Africa at the time when

introduced diseases were leveling Indian

societies. The Spanish, the Portuguese, and the

British were alarmed by the death rate among

Indians, because they wanted to exploit them as

workers. Faced with a labor shortage, the

Europeans turned their eyes to Africa. The

continent's quarrelsome societies helped slave

traders to siphon off millions of people. The

maize-fed population boom, Crosby believes, let

the awful trade continue without pumping the well

dry.

Back home in the Americas, Indian agriculture

long sustained some of the world's largest

cities. The Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán dazzled

Hernán Cortés in 1519; it was bigger than Paris,

Europe's greatest metropolis. The Spaniards

gawped like hayseeds at the wide streets,

ornately carved buildings, and markets bright

with goods from hundreds of miles away. They had

never before seen a city with botanical gardens,

for the excellent reason that none existed in

Europe. The same novelty attended the force of a

thousand men that kept the crowded streets

immaculate. (Streets that weren't ankle-deep in

sewage! The conquistadors had never heard of such

a thing.) Central America was not the only locus

of prosperity. Thousands of miles north,

, of Pocahontas fame, visited Massachusetts

in 1614, before it was emptied by disease, and

declared that the land was " so planted with

Gardens and Corne fields, and so well inhabited

with a goodly, strong and well proportioned

people ... [that] I would rather live here than

any where. "

was promoting colonization, and so had

reason to exaggerate. But he also knew the

hunger, sickness, and oppression of European

life. France- " by any standards a privileged

country, " according to its great historian,

Fernand Braudel-experienced seven nationwide

famines in the fifteenth century and thirteen in

the sixteenth. Disease was hunger's constant

companion. During epidemics in London the dead

were heaped onto carts " like common dung " (the

simile is Defoe's) and trundled through

the streets. The infant death rate in London

orphanages, according to one contemporary source,

was 88 percent. Governments were harsh, the rule

of law arbitrary. The gibbets poking up in the

background of so many old paintings were, Braudel

observed, " merely a realistic detail. "

The Earth Shall Weep, 's history of

Indian America, puts the comparison bluntly: " the

western hemisphere was larger, richer, and more

populous than Europe. " Much of it was freer, too.

Europeans, accustomed to the serfdom that thrived

from Naples to the Baltic Sea, were puzzled and

alarmed by the democratic spirit and respect for

human rights in many Indian societies, especially

those in North America. In theory, the sachems of

New England Indian groups were absolute monarchs.

In practice, the colonial leader

wrote, " they will not conclude of ought ... unto

which the people are averse. "

Pre-1492 America wasn't a disease-free paradise,

Dobyns says, although in his " exuberance as a

writer, " he told me recently, he once made that

claim. Indians had ailments of their own, notably

parasites, tuberculosis, and anemia. The daily

grind was wearing; life-spans in America were

only as long as or a little longer than those in

Europe, if the evidence of indigenous graveyards

is to be believed. Nor was it a political

utopia-the Inca, for instance, invented

refinements to totalitarian rule that would have

intrigued Stalin. Inveterate practitioners of

what the historian Francis Jennings described as

" state terrorism practiced horrifically on a huge

scale, " the Inca ruled so cruelly that one can

speculate that their surviving subjects might

actually have been better off under Spanish rule.

I asked seven anthropologists, archaeologists,

and historians if they would rather have been a

typical Indian or a typical European in 1491.

None was delighted by the question, because it

required judging the past by the standards of

today-a fallacy disparaged as " presentism " by

social scientists. But every one chose to be an

Indian. Some early colonists gave the same

answer. Horrifying the leaders of town and

Plymouth, scores of English ran off to live with

the Indians. My ancestor shared their desire,

which is what led to the trumped-up murder

charges against him-or that's what my grandfather

told me, anyway.

As for the Indians, evidence suggests that they

often viewed Europeans with disdain. The Hurons,

a chagrined missionary reported, thought the

French possessed " little intelligence in

comparison to themselves. " Europeans, Indians

said, were physically weak, sexually

untrustworthy, atrociously ugly, and just plain

dirty. (Spaniards, who seldom if ever bathed,

were amazed by the Aztec desire for personal

cleanliness.) A Jesuit reported that the

" Savages " were disgusted by handkerchiefs: " They

say, we place what is unclean in a fine white

piece of linen, and put it away in our pockets as

something very precious, while they throw it upon

the ground. " The Micmac scoffed at the notion of

French superiority. If Christian civilization was

so wonderful, why were its inhabitants leaving?

Like people everywhere, Indians survived by

cleverly exploiting their environment. Europeans

tended to manage land by breaking it into

fragments for farmers and herders. Indians often

worked on such a grand scale that the scope of

their ambition can be hard to grasp. They created

small plots, as Europeans did (about 1.5 million

acres of terraces still exist in the Peruvian

Andes), but they also reshaped entire landscapes

to suit their purposes. A principal tool was

fire, used to keep down underbrush and create the

open, grassy conditions favorable for game.

Rather than domesticating animals for meat,

Indians retooled whole ecosystems to grow bumper

crops of elk, deer, and bison. The first white

settlers in Ohio found forests as open as English

parks-they could drive carriages through the

woods. Along the Hudson River the annual fall

burning lit up the banks for miles on end; so

flashy was the show that the Dutch in New

Amsterdam boated upriver to goggle at the blaze

like children at fireworks. In North America,

Indian torches had their biggest impact on the

Midwestern prairie, much or most of which was

created and maintained by fire. Millennia of

exuberant burning shaped the plains into vast

buffalo farms. When Indian societies

disintegrated, forest invaded savannah in

Wisconsin, Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska, and the

Texas Hill Country. Is it possible that the

Indians changed the Americas more than the

invading Europeans did? " The answer is probably

yes for most regions for the next 250 years or

so " after Columbus, Denevan wrote, " and

for some regions right up to the present time. "

When scholars first began increasing their

estimates of the ecological impact of Indian

civilization, they met with considerable

resistance from anthropologists and

archaeologists. Over time the consensus in the

human sciences changed. Under Denevan's

direction, Oxford University Press has just

issued the third volume of a huge catalogue of

the " cultivated landscapes " of the Americas. This

sort of phrase still provokes vehement

objection-but the main dissenters are now

ecologists and environmentalists. The

disagreement is encapsulated by Amazonia, which

has become the emblem of vanishing wilderness-an

admonitory image of untouched Nature. Yet

recently a growing number of researchers have

come to believe that Indian societies had an

enormous environmental impact on the jungle.

Indeed, some anthropologists have called the

Amazon forest itself a cultural artifact-that is,

an artificial object.

Green Prisons

Northern visitors' first reaction to the storied

Amazon rain forest is often disappointment.

Ecotourist brochures evoke the immensity of

Amazonia but rarely dwell on its extreme

flatness. In the river's first 2,900 miles the

vertical drop is only 500 feet. The river oozes

like a huge runnel of dirty metal through a

landscape utterly devoid of the romantic crags,

arroyos, and heights that signify wildness and

natural spectacle to most North Americans. Even

the animals are invisible, although sometimes one

can hear the bellow of monkey choruses. To the

untutored eye-mine, for instance-the forest seems

to stretch out in a monstrous green tangle as

flat and incomprehensible as a printed circuit

board.

The area east of the lower-Amazon town of

Santarém is an exception. A series of sandstone

ridges several hundred feet high reach down from

the north, halting almost at the water's edge.

Their tops stand drunkenly above the jungle like

old tombstones. Many of the caves in the buttes

are splattered with ancient

petroglyphs-renditions of hands, stars, frogs,

and human figures, all reminiscent of Miró, in

overlapping red and yellow and brown. In recent

years one of these caves, La Caverna da Pedra

Pintada (Painted Rock Cave), has drawn attention

in archaeological circles.

Wide and shallow and well lit, Painted Rock Cave

is less thronged with bats than some of the other

caves. The arched entrance is twenty feet high

and lined with rock paintings. Out front is a

sunny natural patio suitable for picnicking,

edged by a few big rocks. People lived in this

cave more than 11,000 years ago. They had no

agriculture yet, and instead ate fish and fruit

and built fires. During a recent visit I ate a

sandwich atop a particularly inviting rock and

looked over the forest below. The first

Amazonians, I thought, must have done more or

less the same thing.

In college I took an introductory anthropology

class in which I read Amazonia: Man and Culture

in a Counterfeit Paradise (1971), perhaps the

most influential book ever written about the

Amazon, and one that deeply impressed me at the

time. Written by Betty J. Meggers, the

sonian archaeologist, Amazonia says that

the apparent lushness of the rain forest is a

sham. The soils are poor and can't hold

nutrients-the jungle flora exists only because it

snatches up everything worthwhile before it

leaches away in the rain. Agriculture, which

depends on extracting the wealth of the soil,

therefore faces inherent ecological limitations

in the wet desert of Amazonia.

As a result, Meggers argued, Indian villages

were forced to remain small-any report of " more

than a few hundred " people in permanent

settlements, she told me recently, " makes my

alarm bells go off. " Bigger, more complex

societies would inevitably overtax the forest

soils, laying waste to their own foundations.

Beginning in 1948 Meggers and her late husband,

Clifford , excavated a chiefdom on Marajó,

an island twice the size of New Jersey that sits

like a gigantic stopper in the mouth of the

Amazon. The Marajóara, they concluded, were

failed offshoots of a sophisticated culture in

the Andes. Transplanted to the lush trap of the

Amazon, the culture choked and died.

Green activists saw the implication: development

in tropical forests destroys both the forests and

their developers. Meggers's account had enormous

public impact-Amazonia is one of the wellsprings

of the campaign to save rain forests.

Then C. Roosevelt, the curator of

archaeology at Chicago's Field Museum of Natural

History, re-excavated Marajó. Her complete

report, Moundbuilders of the Amazon (1991), was

like the anti-matter version of Amazonia. Marajó,

she argued, was " one of the outstanding

indigenous cultural achievements of the New

World, " a powerhouse that lasted for more than a

thousand years, had " possibly well over 100,000 "

inhabitants, and covered thousands of square

miles. Rather than damaging the forest, Marajó's

" earth construction " and " large, dense

populations " had improved it: the most luxuriant

and diverse growth was on the mounds formerly

occupied by the Marajóara. " If you listened to

Meggers's theory, these places should have been

ruined, " Roosevelt says.

Meggers scoffed at Roosevelt's " extravagant

claims, " " polemical tone, " and " defamatory

remarks. " Roosevelt, Meggers argued, had

committed the beginner's error of mistaking a

site that had been occupied many times by small,

unstable groups for a single, long-lasting

society. " [Archaeological remains] build up on

areas of half a kilometer or so, " she told me,

" because [shifting Indian groups] don't land

exactly on the same spot. The decorated types of

pottery don't change much over time, so you can

pick up a bunch of chips and say, 'Oh, look, it

was all one big site!' Unless you know what

you're doing, of course. " Centuries after the

conquistadors, " the myth of El Dorado is being

revived by archaeologists, " Meggers wrote last

fall in the journal Latin American Antiquity,

referring to the persistent Spanish delusion that

cities of gold existed in the jungle.

The dispute grew bitter and personal; inevitable

in a contemporary academic context, it has

featured vituperative references to colonialism,

elitism, and employment by the CIA. Meanwhile,

Roosevelt's team investigated Painted Rock Cave.

On the floor of the cave what looked to me like

nothing in particular turned out to be an ancient

midden: a refuse heap. The archaeologists slowly

scraped away sediment, traveling backward in time

with every inch. When the traces of human

occupation vanished, they kept digging. ( " You

always go a meter past sterile, " Roosevelt says.)

A few inches below they struck the charcoal-rich

dirt that signifies human habitation-a culture,

Roosevelt said later, that wasn't supposed to be

there.

For many millennia the cave's inhabitants hunted

and gathered for food. But by about 4,000 years

ago they were growing crops-perhaps as many as

140 of them, according to R. Clement, an

anthropological botanist at the Brazilian

National Institute for Amazonian Research. Unlike

Europeans, who planted mainly annual crops, the

Indians, he says, centered their agriculture on

the Amazon's unbelievably diverse assortment of

trees: fruits, nuts, and palms. " It's

tremendously difficult to clear fields with stone

tools, " Clement says. " If you can plant trees,

you get twenty years of productivity out of your

work instead of two or three. "

Planting their orchards, the first Amazonians

transformed large swaths of the river basin into

something more pleasing to human beings. In a

widely cited article from 1989, Balée,

the Tulane anthropologist, cautiously estimated

that about 12 percent of the nonflooded Amazon

forest was of anthropogenic origin-directly or

indirectly created by human beings. In some

circles this is now seen as a conservative

position. " I basically think it's all

human-created, " Clement told me in Brazil. He

argues that Indians changed the assortment and

density of species throughout the region. So does

kson, the University of Pennsylvania

archaeologist, who told me in Bolivia that the

lowland tropical forests of South America are

among the finest works of art on the planet.

" Some of my colleagues would say that's pretty

radical, " he said, smiling mischievously.

According to Stahl, an anthropologist at

the State University of New York at Binghamton,

" lots " of botanists believe that " what the

eco-imagery would like to picture as a pristine,

untouched Urwelt [primeval world] in fact has

been managed by people for millennia. " The phrase

" built environment, " kson says, " applies to

most, if not all, Neotropical landscapes. "

" Landscape " in this case is meant

exactly-Amazonian Indians literally created the

ground beneath their feet. According to

I. Woods, a soil geographer at Southern Illinois

University, ecologists' claims about terrible

Amazonian land were based on very little data. In

the late 1990s Woods and others began careful

measurements in the lower Amazon. They indeed

found lots of inhospitable terrain. But they also

discovered swaths of terra preta-rich, fertile

" black earth " that anthropologists increasingly

believe was created by human beings.

Terra preta, Woods guesses, covers at least 10

percent of Amazonia, an area the size of France.

It has amazing properties, he says. Tropical rain

doesn't leach nutrients from terra preta fields;

instead the soil, so to speak, fights back. Not

far from Painted Rock Cave is a 300-acre area

with a two-foot layer of terra preta quarried by

locals for potting soil. The bottom third of the

layer is never removed, workers there explain,

because over time it will re-create the original

soil layer in its initial thickness. The reason,

scientists suspect, is that terra preta is

generated by a special suite of microorganisms

that resists depletion. " Apparently, " Woods and

the Wisconsin geographer ph M. McCann argued

in a presentation last summer, " at some threshold

level ... dark earth attains the capacity to

perpetuate-even regenerate itself-thus behaving

more like a living 'super'-organism than an inert

material. "

In as yet unpublished research the

archaeologists Neves, of the University

of São o; Heckenberger, of the

University of Florida; and their colleagues

examined terra preta in the upper Xingu, a huge

southern tributary of the Amazon. Not all Xingu

cultures left behind this living earth, they

discovered. But the ones that did generated it

rapidly-suggesting to Woods that terra preta was

created deliberately. In a process reminiscent of

dropping microorganism-rich starter into plain

dough to create sourdough bread, Amazonian

peoples, he believes, inoculated bad soil with a

transforming bacterial charge. Not every group of

Indians there did this, but quite a few did, and

over an extended period of time.

When Woods told me this, I was so amazed that I

almost dropped the phone. I ceased to be

articulate for a moment and said things like

" wow " and " gosh. " Woods chuckled at my reaction,

probably because he understood what was passing

through my mind. Faced with an ecological

problem, I was thinking, the Indians fixed it.

They were in the process of terraforming the

Amazon when Columbus showed up and ruined

everything.

Scientists should study the microorganisms in

terra preta, Woods told me, to find out how they

work. If that could be learned, maybe some

version of Amazonian dark earth could be used to

improve the vast expanses of bad soil that

cripple agriculture in Africa-a final gift from

the people who brought us tomatoes, corn, and the

immense grasslands of the Great Plains.

" Betty Meggers would just die if she heard me

saying this, " Woods told me. " Deep down her fear

is that this data will be misused. " Indeed,

Meggers's recent Latin American Antiquity article

charged that archaeologists who say the Amazon

can support agriculture are effectively telling

" developers [that they] are entitled to operate

without restraint. " Resuscitating the myth of El

Dorado, in her view, " makes us accomplices in the

accelerating pace of environmental degradation. "

Doubtless there is something to this-although, as

some of her critics responded in the same issue

of the journal, it is difficult to imagine greedy

plutocrats " perusing the pages of Latin American

Antiquity before deciding to rev up the chain

saws. " But the new picture doesn't automatically

legitimize paving the forest. Instead it suggests

that for a long time big chunks of Amazonia were

used nondestructively by clever people who knew

tricks we have yet to learn.

I visited Painted Rock Cave during the river's

annual flood, when it wells up over its banks and

creeps inland for miles. Farmers in the

floodplain build houses and barns on stilts and

watch pink dolphins sport from their doorsteps.

Ecotourists take shortcuts by driving motorboats

through the drowned forest. Guys in dories chase

after them, trying to sell sacks of incredibly

good fruit.

All of this is described as " wilderness " in the

tourist brochures. It's not, if researchers like

Roosevelt are correct. Indeed, they believe that

fewer people may be living there now than in

1491. Yet when my boat glided into the trees, the

forest shut out the sky like the closing of an

umbrella. Within a few hundred yards the human

presence seemed to vanish. I felt alone and

small, but in a way that was curiously like

feeling exalted. If that place was not

wilderness, how should I think of it? Since the

fate of the forest is in our hands, what should

be our goal for its future?

Novel Shores

Hernando de Soto's expedition stomped through

the Southeast for four years and apparently never

saw bison. More than a century later, when French

explorers came down the Mississippi, they saw " a

solitude unrelieved by the faintest trace of

man, " the nineteenth-century historian Francis

Parkman wrote. Instead the French encountered

bison, " grazing in herds on the great prairies

which then bordered the river. "

To Kay, the reason for the buffalo's

sudden emergence is obvious. Kay is a wildlife

ecologist in the political-science department at

Utah State University. In ecological terms, he

says, the Indians were the " keystone species " of

American ecosystems. A keystone species,

according to the Harvard biologist O.

, is a species " that affects the survival

and abundance of many other species. " Keystone

species have a disproportionate impact on their

ecosystems. Removing them, adds, " results

in a relatively significant shift in the

composition of the [ecological] community. "

When disease swept Indians from the land, Kay

says, what happened was exactly that. The

ecological ancien régime collapsed, and strange

new phenomena emerged. In a way this is

unsurprising; for better or worse, humankind is a

keystone species everywhere. Among these

phenomena was a population explosion in the

species that the Indians had kept down by

hunting. After disease killed off the Indians,

Kay believes, buffalo vastly extended their

range. Their numbers more than sextupled. The

same occurred with elk and mule deer. " If the elk

were here in great numbers all this time, the

archaeological sites should be chock-full of elk

bones, " Kay says. " But the archaeologists will

tell you the elk weren't there. " On the evidence

of middens the number of elk jumped about 500

years ago.

Passenger pigeons may be another example. The

epitome of natural American abundance, they flew

in such great masses that the first colonists

were stupefied by the sight. As a boy, the

explorer Henry Brackenridge saw flocks " ten miles

in width, by one hundred and twenty in length. "

For hours the birds darkened the sky from horizon

to horizon. According to Neumann, a

consulting archaeologist in Lilburn, Georgia,

passenger pigeons " were incredibly dumb and

always roosted in vast hordes, so they were very

easy to harvest. " Because they were readily

caught and good to eat, Neumann says,

archaeological digs should find many pigeon bones

in the pre-Columbian strata of Indian middens.

But they aren't there. The mobs of birds in the

history books, he says, were " outbreak

populations-always a symptom of an

extraordinarily disrupted ecological system. "

Throughout eastern North America the open

landscape seen by the first Europeans quickly

filled in with forest. According to

Cronon, of the University of Wisconsin, later

colonists began complaining about how hard it was

to get around. (Eventually, of course, they

stripped New England almost bare of trees.) When

Europeans moved west, they were preceded by two

waves: one of disease, the other of ecological

disturbance. The former crested with fearsome

rapidity; the latter sometimes took more than a

century to quiet down. Far from destroying

pristine wilderness, European settlers bloodily

created it. By 1800 the hemisphere was

chockablock with new wilderness. If " forest

primeval " means a woodland unsullied by the human

presence, Denevan has written, there was

much more of it in the late eighteenth century

than in the early sixteenth.

Cronon's Changes in the Land: Indians,

Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (1983)

belongs on the same shelf as works by Crosby and

Dobyns. But it was not until one of his articles

was excerpted in The New York Times in 1995 that

people outside the social sciences began to

understand the implications of this view of

Indian history. Environmentalists and ecologists

vigorously attacked the anti-wilderness scenario,

which they described as infected by postmodern

philosophy. A small academic brouhaha ensued,

complete with hundreds of footnotes. It

precipitated Reinventing Nature? (1995), one of

the few academic critiques of postmodernist

philosophy written largely by biologists. The

Great New Wilderness Debate (1998), another

lengthy book on the subject, was edited by two

philosophers who earnestly identified themselves

as " Euro-American men [whose] cultural legacy is

patriarchal Western civilization in its current

postcolonial, globally hegemonic form. "

It is easy to tweak academics for opaque,

self-protective language like this. Nonetheless,

their concerns were quite justified. Crediting

Indians with the role of keystone species has

implications for the way the current

Euro-American members of that keystone species

manage the forests, watersheds, and endangered

species of America. Because a third of the United

States is owned by the federal government, the

issue inevitably has political ramifications. In

Amazonia, fabled storehouse of biodiversity, the

stakes are global.

Guided by the pristine myth, mainstream

environmentalists want to preserve as much of the

world's land as possible in a putatively intact

state. But " intact, " if the new research is

correct, means " run by human beings for human

purposes. " Environmentalists dislike this,

because it seems to mean that anything goes. In a

sense they are correct. Native Americans managed

the continent as they saw fit. Modern nations

must do the same. If they want to return as much

of the landscape as possible to its 1491 state,

they will have to find it within themselves to

create the world's largest garden.

Copyright © 2002 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.

The Atlantic Monthly; March 2002; 1491; Volume 289, No. 3; 41-53.

[Guest guest]

Someone mentioned stress and its effects on people now compared to the past

and while I really don't think we modern folks are that much different than

the people who came before us -- stress being somewhat relative -- I DO

think that they had at least two things going for them: 1.) Stress was

something that often had to be acted on (rather than obsesses about!) and so

a person's whole body was involved (blood circulation and muscles as well as

nerves and brain) and 2.) Before the advent of electricity, people just HAD

to get a lot more sleep.

~Robin