THE PRE-EUROPEAN LANDSCAPE OF THE UNITED STATES: PRISTINE OR
HUMANIZED? \ Thomas R. Vale
"All peoples embrace creation myths—stories that tell whence
they came. Commonly considered unique to premodern societies, such narratives
of origins are also told in contemporary nations. More specifically, the United
States—for most of its existence—has envisioned its beginnings as wilderness, a
state of nature, a natural landscape. American society expanded across the
continent, extending its frontiers through a wild and primeval environment.
Over the last couple of decades, however, a contrary creation myth has emerged,
rising like a crescendo until it has become conventional wisdom: the nation's
roots extend back not into wilderness but into a landscape inhabited by the
First Americans, a place both psychologically a home and hearth, and physically
an artifact of human activities (1)...
Agricultural activity marks the landscape (of the SW) not only by cropland but
also, sometimes, by constructed landforms—the canals of the Hohokam serve as an
obvious example. Low rock check dams across ravines that collect sediment and
thus form small surfaces for planting, short rock walls running along the
contour on slopes that similarly create low terraces ("linear
borders" or "contour terraces"), rectangular fields on level
ground that are edged by earth or rock borders ("bordered gardens"),
fields with veneers of gravel mulch—all result in landforms that persist long
after agriculture has ended (Cordell 1997). But, as with agricultural fields
more generally, these forms occupy only tiny parts of the landscape..."
The manner of portraying archaeological sites in the
anthropological literature may contribute to an exaggerated sense of the
spatial scale of Indian agricultural impact. Typically in such studies, the
maps of sites focus on the immediate environment in which artifacts and
modifications are located—a logical and appropriate custom for purposes of
presenting the data (Figure 1.6). This local scale, however, cannot reveal the
landscape context for the impacts, which account for only small areas of the
total environment. (17)…
Vegetation modifications other than formal agriculture may
have been more prevalent in the East, but evidence of such activities is common
in the West. Doolittle (2000) compiles a comprehensive compendium of specific
Indian manipulations of plants throughout North America, and the results are
dizzily rich in both number of instances and diversity of activities.
Documented from firsthand accounts, ethnographies, and archaeological evidence,
Doolittle's detailed listing is organized into categories arrayed along a
continuum between the poles of formal agriculture (in which crop plants require
human action to reproduce) and sim pie (simple?) gathering (in which wild plants yield
products for people but are unaffected by them) (Box 1.2). Most closely resembling
agriculture, the category of cultivation describes human planting of species
that readily and commonly reproduce in the wild. Activities labeled as
encouragement include manipulations of naturally occurring plants (e.g.,
diverting water from streams to wild stands of sedge), whereas, closer to
gathering, those activities classified as protection involve management to
enhance the persistence of particular natural plants (e.g., removing
potentially damaging dead branches from shrubs). Within Doolittle's work,
instances of cultivation, encouragement, and protection span the continent,
although the larger number from the West, compared to the East, may reflect
more the character of the data sources than the degree of proliferation of
pre-European societies. Within the West, more than two-thirds of the documented
examples occur in more densely populated California and the Southwest, again
perhaps a consequence of the history of anthropological and archaeological
study (and preservation of certain types of evidence in dry environments) and
not a result of regional differences in human activities. These instances from
the American West contribute to the question of the degree to which the
pre-European landscape was humanized (18-19)…
The category of cultivation includes such activities as the
spreading of seeds of herbaceous species (e.g., Winter and Hogan 1986), but the
transplanting of woody plants constitutes perhaps the most obvious
illustration. A celebrated example involves the prehistoric Hohokam of central
Arizona, who constructed piles of cobbles (which increased the infiltration of
rainwater and/or runoff and thus enhanced available soil moisture) in which
they planted agave (Agave spp.), prized for their edible fruits. The rockpiles,
modest in size (1.5 meters in diameter and no more than 75 centimeters high)
but numerous (about 42,000 in a study area of 350 square kilometers north of
Tucson), represent a human modification of both the vegetation cover (including
local range extensions of the transplanted agaves) and the landform surface
(Fish, Fish, and Madsen 1985, 1990, 1992; Fish, Fish, Miksicek, and Madsen
1985). Interspersed with pits for roasting the fruits, as well as with low
terraces and check dams for field crops, the rockpiles contributed to impressive
agricultural/cultivation complexes (Figure 1.7). Nonetheless, as with formal
agricultural fields, the percent of the landscape directiy modified by
constructed rockpiles is small—-they collectively cover only 1.4 percent of the
area in the "full-coverage" survey in the northern Tucson Basin—and
the acreage of the complexes mapped at a more general scale leave much
landscape unmodified (Figure 1.7).
(pages 19, illustrated on 20 & continued on 21)
The most likely impact on the landscape—an impact that might
be said to alter the fundamental conditions of vegetation and ecosystems— is
fire. Moreover, long-lived, fire-dependent trees may testify to a former
burning regime centuries after the cessation of conflagrations. These
characteristics, then, render Indian burning—identified by generations of
anthropologically inclined geographers and other scientists as the human
activity that has shaped landscapes for almost as long as people have been
around (Stewart 1956)—to be key to those contemporary champions of the
pre-European North American humanized landscape, probably because of fire's
prehistoric association with people, its apparent ubiquity, and its potential
as a landscape-scale factor. Even so, Indian burning cannot be assumed, a
priori, to determine the character of all environments on the continent. In
fact, in the very region where fires were, and are, most important—the American
West— questions remain as to what factor, fuels or ignitions, determined
preEuropean fire regimes. If the former, Indian burning may not have been an
important modifier of nature; if the latter, Indian burning could have altered
the landscape from what otherwise would have occurred. Since it is both
spatially extensive and temporally persistent, anthropogenic fire is the most
likely candidate for major human modification of nature in pre-European Western
North America, and, as such, it is a key to the pristine-versus-humanized
landscape debate. But was Indian burning critical to the appearance of the
American West before the arrival of Columbus? It is to this question that the
essays in this book are directed (31)..."
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