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By Root 1817 0

of American Geographers. Curious, I picked up the journal, sank into an armchair, and began to read an article by William Denevan, a geographer at the University of Wisconsin. The article opened with the question, “What was the New World like at the time of Columbus?” Yes, I thought, what was it like? Who lived here and what could have passed through their minds when European sails first appeared on the horizon? I finished Denevan’s article and went on to others and didn’t stop reading until the librarian flicked the lights to signify closing time.

I didn’t know it then, but Denevan and a host of fellow researchers had spent their careers trying to answer these questions. The picture they have emerged with is quite different from what most Americans and Europeans think, and still little known outside specialist circles.

A year or two after I read Denevan’s article, I attended a panel discussion at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Called something like “New Perspectives on the Amazon,” the session featured William Balée of Tulane University. Balée’s talk was about “anthropogenic” forests—forests created by Indians centuries or millennia in the past—a concept I’d never heard of before. He also mentioned something that Denevan had discussed: many researchers now believe their predecessors underestimated the number of people in the Americas when Columbus arrived. Indians were more numerous than previously thought, Balée said—much more numerous. Gee, someone ought to put all this stuff together, I thought. It would make a fascinating book.

I kept waiting for that book to appear. The wait grew more frustrating when my son entered school and was taught the same things I had been taught, beliefs I knew had long been sharply questioned. Since nobody else appeared to be writing the book, I finally decided to try it myself. Besides, I was curious to learn more. The book you are holding is the result.

Some things this book is not. It is not a systematic, chronological account of the Western Hemisphere’s cultural and social development before 1492. Such a book, its scope vast in space and time, could not be written—by the time the author approached the end, new findings would have been made and the beginning would be outdated. Among those who assured me of this were the very researchers who have spent much of the last few decades wrestling with the staggering diversity of pre-Columbian societies.

Nor is this book a full intellectual history of the recent changes in perspective among the anthropologists, archaeologists, ecologists, geographers, and historians who study the first Americans. That, too, would be impossible, for the ramifications of the new ideas are still rippling outward in too many directions for any writer to contain them in one single work.

Instead, this book explores what I believe to be the three main foci of the new findings: Indian demography (Part I), Indian origins (PartII), and Indian ecology (Part III). Because so many different societies illustrate these points in such different ways, I could not possibly be comprehensive. Instead, I chose my examples from cultures that are among the best documented, or have drawn the most recent attention, or just seemed the most intriguing.

Throughout this book, as the reader already will have noticed, I use the term “Indian” to refer to the first inhabitants of the Americas. No question about it, Indian is a confusing and historically inappropriate name. Probably the most accurate descriptor for the original inhabitants of the Americas is Americans. Actually using it, though, would be risking worse confusion. In this book I try to refer to people by the names they call themselves. The overwhelming majority of the indigenous peoples whom I have met in both North and South America describe themselves as Indians. (For more about nomenclature, see Appendix A, “Loaded Words.”)

In the mid-1980s I traveled to the village of Hazelton, on the upper Skeena River in the middle of British Columbia. Many of its inhabitants belong