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.
Clark Erickson
and William Balée, the archaeologists, sat up front. Erickson 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 Erickson'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.
Erickson 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 Erickson 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 Smithsonian 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 William 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 William 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, Erickson 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 John 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," William 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 Thomas 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 Samuel 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," William
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 James Mooney, a distinguished ethnographer at the Smithsonian
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 James Wilson, 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 George 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 Peter Puget noted, were "most terribly pitted ...
indeed many have lost their Eyes." In
Pox Americana,
(2001), Elizabeth Fenn, a historian at George 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!" John Adams wrote to his
wife, Abigail. "What shall We do with it?" In retrospect, Fenn says,
"One of George 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 David 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
On 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 Charles 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-Robert 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
Patricia 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 Timothy 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 Russell 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 Smith 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 Douglas H.
Ubelaker, an anthropologist at the Smithsonian. To some "high counters,"
as David 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 William 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 Elizabeth 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 Lewis and Clark surveyed the Missouri, Jefferson told them to keep
an eye out for errant bands of Welsh-speaking white Indians.) The
historian George 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. Samuel 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, John Smith, 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."
Smith 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 Daniel 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, James Wilson'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 Roger Williams
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 Jamestown 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, William 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 Smithsonian 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 Evans, 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
Anna 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 Charles 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, William 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 Clark Erickson,
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 Peter
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," Erickson 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 William 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 Joseph 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 Eduardo Neves, of
the University of São Paulo; Michael 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 Charles 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 Edward O. Wilson, is a species "that
affects the survival and abundance of many other species." Keystone
species have a disproportionate impact on their ecosystems. Removing
them, Wilson 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 Thomas 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 William
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,
William 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.
