1491_ New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus - Charles C. Mann [184]
The same may have held true for many other species. “If elk were here in great numbers all this time, the [archaeological] sites should be chock-full of elk bones,” Charles Kay, a wildlife ecologist at Utah State, told me. “But the archaeologists will tell you the elk weren’t there.” In middens around Yellowstone National Park, he said, they first show up in large numbers about five hundred years ago, the time of the great epidemics. Until European contact the warm coastline of California was heavily populated, according to William S. Preston, a geographer at California State Polytechnic University in San Luis Obispo. After Columbus everything changed. The Indian population collapsed. Clams and mussels exploded in number; they also grew larger. Game overran the land. Sir Francis Drake sailed into San Francisco’s harbor in 1579 and saw a land of plenty. “Infinite was the company of very large and fate Deere,” he announced. How could he have known that just a century before the shoreline had been thickly settled and the deer much more scarce?
HUMANIZED LANDSCAPES, 1491 A.D.
Complex as it is, this map of Indian effects on the environment is incomplete; no single map could possibly do justice to the subject. The most important omission is fire. I have highlighted some areas where fires deliberately set by Indians effectively controlled the landscape, but this practice played an important ecological role throughout the hemisphere as well, except in wettest Amazonia and northeastern North America. Similarly, scattered clearing, burning, and earth movement for drainage occurred in all agricultural areas—the map indicates only where these factors were especially concentrated. (My depiction of fire-dominated regions in the southern Amazonian highlands is highly speculative, unlike the rest of this map. Researchers have not established where such burning occurred—only where it seems likely.)
Not all of these claims have been endorsed enthusiastically. Kay’s work on elk has drawn especially heavy fire. Elk are big and Indians may have butchered them where they fell, meaning that few elk carcasses would appear in middens. Nonetheless, ecologists and archaeologists increasingly agree that the destruction of Native Americans also destroyed the ecosystems they managed. Throughout the eastern forest the open, park-like landscapes observed by the first Europeans quickly filled in. Because they did not burn the land with the same skill and frequency as its previous occupants, the forests grew thicker. Left untended, maize fields filled in with weeds, then bushes and trees. My ancestor Billington’s great-grandchildren may not have realized it, but the impenetrable sweep of dark forest admired by Thoreau was something that Billington never saw. Later, of course, Europeans stripped New England almost bare of trees.
When the newcomers moved west, they were preceded by a wave of disease and then a wave of ecological disturbance. The former crested with fearsome rapidity; the latter sometimes took more than a century to tamp down, and it was followed by many aftershocks. “The virgin forest was not encountered in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,” wrote historian Stephen Pyne, “it was invented in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.” Far from destroying pristine wilderness, that is, Europeans bloodily created it.
By 1800 the hemisphere was thick with artificial wilderness. If “forest primeval” means woodland unsullied by the human presence, Denevan has written, there was much more of