1491_ New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus - Charles C. Mann [182]
The pigeon should indeed stand as a rebuke and warning. But if archaeologists are right it should not be thought of as a symbol of wilderness abundance.
Passenger pigeons’ diet centered on mast, the collective name for acorns, beechnuts, hazelnuts, chestnuts, and the like; they also really liked maize. All were important foods to the Indians of eastern North America. Thus passenger pigeons and Native Americans were ecological competitors.
What would be the expected outcome of this rivalry? asked Thomas W. Neumann, a consulting archaeologist in Atlanta. Neumann noted that Indians had also vied for mast and maize with deer, raccoons, squirrels, and turkeys. Unsurprisingly, they hunted all of them with enthusiasm, as documented by the bones found in archaeological sites. Indeed, as Neumann noted, Indians actually sought out pregnant or nursing does, which hunters today are instructed to let go. They hunted wild turkey in spring, just before they laid eggs (if they had waited until the eggs hatched, the poults could have survived, because they will follow any hen). The effect was to remove competition for tree nuts. The pattern was so consistent, Neumann told me, that Indians must have been purposefully reducing the number of deer, raccoons, and turkeys.
Given passenger pigeons’ Brobdingnagian appetites for mast and maize, one would expect that Indians would also have hunted them and wanted to keep down their numbers. Thus their bones should be plentiful at archaeological sites. Instead, Neumann told me, “they almost aren’t there—it looks like people just didn’t eat them.” Pigeons, roosting en masse, were easy to harvest, as the Seneca hunt showed. “If they are so easy to hunt, and you expect people to minimize labor and maximize return, you should have archaeological sites just filled with these things. Well, you don’t.” To Neumann, the conclusion was obvious: passenger pigeons were not as numerous before Columbus. “What happened was that the impact of European contact altered the ecological dynamics in such a way that the passenger pigeon took off.” The avian throngs Audubon saw were “outbreak populations—always a symptom of an extraordinarily disrupted ecological system.”
Intrigued by Neumann’s arguments, William I. Woods, the Cahokia researcher, and Bernd Herrmann, an environmental historian at the University of Göttingen, surveyed six archaeological studies of diets at Cahokia and places nearby. All were not far from the site of the huge pigeon roost that Audubon visited. The studies examined household food trash and found that traces of passenger pigeon were rare. Given that Cahokians consumed “almost every other animal protein source,” Herrmann and Woods wrote, “one must conclude that the passenger pigeon was simply not available for exploitation in significant numbers.”
Some archaeologists have criticized these conclusions on the grounds that passenger pigeon bones would not be likely to be preserved. If so, their absence would reveal nothing about whether Indians ate the species. But all six Cahokia projects found plenty of bird bones, and even some tiny bones from fish; one turned up 9,053 bones from 72 bird species. “They found a few passenger pigeon bones, but only a few,” Woods told me. “Now, these were hungry people who were very interested in acquiring protein. The simplest explanation for the lack of passenger pigeon bones is a lack of passenger pigeons. Prior to 1492, this was a rare species.”
Passenger pigeons were but one example of a larger phenomenon. According to the naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton, North America at the time of Columbus was home to sixty million bison, thirty to forty million pronghorns, ten million elk, ten million mule deer, and as many as two million mountain sheep. Sixty million bison! The imagination shrinks from imagining it. Bison can run for hours at thirty miles per hour and use their massive, horned skulls like battering rams. Mature