Waking Up on Turtle Island: “One of the World’s Largest Rock Gardens" (New England)

Wednesday, March 26, 2025

“One of the World’s Largest Rock Gardens" (New England)

Illustration from "1493"

“The New World was not a wilderness at the time of European contact, but an environment which Indigenous peoples had been altering for thousands of years for their benefit, mostly with fire… Mann discusses the growing evidence that shows Native Americans did indeed transform their lands. Most Native Americans shaped their environment with fire, using slash-and-burn techniques to clear forests and create grasslands for cultivation and to encourage the abundance of game animals. Native Americans domesticated fewer animals and cultivated plant life differently from their European counterparts, but did so quite intensively nonetheless…”

I would have to disagree with Mr. Wikipedia because, as Mann points out in the book if I recall correctly, that it isn’t really “slash-and-burn techniques” being used but more like a particular cultural landscape maintained by “thermal pruning,” a kind of culturally controlled burning, understudied in the Northeast and New England in particular, where assumed post contact “stone fences” colloquially known as “Yankee Stone Walls” may actually be Indigenous made fuel breaks surrounding enclosures connected to other enclosures which were in turn connected by stone bordered roadways as well as stone retaining walls supporting causeways over water features which in turn may also show evidence of being bordered by stone wall-like stacked stone features that divert water and prevent erosion.

Mr. Wikipedia: “Mann argues that in the ecological sense Native Americans were in fact a keystone species, one that "affects the survival and abundance of many other species". By the time Europeans arrived in numbers to supplant the indigenous populations in the Americas, the previous dominant cultures had already been nearly eliminated, mostly by disease. There was extensive disruption of societies and loss of environmental control as a result. Decreased environmental influence and resource competition would have led to population explosions in species such as the American bison and the passenger pigeon. Because fire clearing had ceased, forests would have expanded and become denser. The world discovered by Christopher Columbus began to change immediately after his arrival, such that Columbus "was also one of the last to see it in pure form".

Illustration from "1493"

Mann concludes that we must look to the past to write the future. "Native Americans ran 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 state in 1491, they will have to create the world's largest gardens."

Here in what has come to be known as New England, I suggest that the “state of the landscape in 1491” may qualify as “one of the world’s largest rock gardens…”