History of Western Landscapes

Plain Facts: Tasmania under Aboriginal Management

Bill Gammage. 2008. Plain Facts: Tasmania under Aboriginal Management. Landscape Research, Vol. 33, No. 2, 241 – 254, April 2008.

Full text [here]

Selected excerpts

Abstract

Almost all researchers now accept that Australia’s Aborigines were managing their country with the broad-scale use of fire when Europeans arrived. In respect to Tasmania, this article goes further, arguing that fire was not merely broad-scale, but applied variably and precisely, to make, then connect, a complex range of useful ecosystems. The article also argues that Aboriginal land management must be seen in cultural as well as ecological terms.

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When Europeans arrived, the Aborigines of Tasmania were managing their land by using fire to arrange its vegetation. They did so to ensure that all species flourished as the Law required, to make resources abundant, convenient and predictable, and to make the land an integrated domain.

Although such acute early observers as Thomas Mitchell and Ludwig Leichhardt knew that Aborigines fired country to attract game,1 not until the 1960s did researchers begin to sense system and purpose in Aboriginal burning. From 1965, Bill Jackson argued that for thousands of years Tasmanians altered vegetation by deliberate and repeated firing.2 In 1968, Duncan Merrilees pointed to faunal changes in Australia which he thought could only have been caused by people.3 In 1968 and 1969, Rhys Jones showed that throughout Australia ‘fire-stick farming’ made a more complex vegetation mosaic than climate alone could dictate.4 In 1975, Sylvia Hallam provided extensive evidence of purposeful firing in southwest Western Australia.5 Debate persists on whether Aborigines intended the results of such widespread, purposeful and effective firing,6 but enough evidence exists to resolve this debate, and to take it further.

The broad impact of Aboriginal burning on Tasmania’s plants is sketched by the answers to two questions. When Europeans arrived:

1) What would the land have looked like without human intervention?

2) What did it look like?

Jackson concluded that deliberate burning best explains why there was much less rainforest in Tasmania when Europeans arrived than on New Zealand’s South Island, a comparable climate but generally without people.7 As its title hints, ‘Plain Facts’ begins by echoing Jackson, arguing that but for Tasmanian fire, plains, heath and open forest would have been much less common than they were when Europeans arrived, and rainforest more common. Tasmanians burnt rainforest to diversify and arrange their resources. …

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The Ozette Prairies of Olympic National Park: Their Former Indigenous Uses and Management

M. Kat Anderson. 2009. The Ozette Prairies of Olympic National Park: Their Former Indigenous Uses and Management. Final Report to Olympic National Park, Port Angeles, Washington Winter 2009.

Full text [here] (3.2 MB)

Selected excerpts:

Introduction

The Ozette Prairies—openings of bog, fen, and grassland in a forest of Sitka spruce, western hemlock, and western redcedar—lie two kilometers east of the Pacific Ocean, well within hearing distance of barking sea lions on the rocky islands offshore. One can walk from these wetlands to the coast on the Cape Alava Trail, which cuts through the openings and the surrounding forest along the route of an old Indian trail (Waterman 1920). Wandering off the trail into the forest, the travel becomes slow and cumbersome; one has to straddle downed logs and bushwhack through shrubbery and young trees.

The wetlands, on the other hand, are easily and comfortably traversed. They are inviting landing sites for ducks and geese, habitat for ground-nesting birds, and are attractive to Roosevelt elk, blacktailed deer, and black bears. Before the coming of white settlers, they were also attractive to the Ozette Indians, who hunted and collected food and useful plants there for perhaps 2,000 years (Blinman 1980; Wessen 1984). The Ozette people would come to the Ozette Prairies from their village at Cape Alava on the Pacific Ocean, seeking young horsetail sprouts to eat in spring, the leaves of a particular sedge to weave into their baskets in summer, and bog cranberries, Indian tea leaves, and fern rhizomes in autumn.

They built shelters in the wetlands and dried and smoked their food there (Bertelson 1948; Gunther 1871-1981). Before 1910, two Swedish immigrants—Peter Roose and Lars Ahlstrom—filed 160 acre claims and moved onto these open areas, built structures, raised sheep and cattle, and planted vegetable gardens (see Figures 1 and 2). When Ahlstrom first moved to the area in 1902, he lived in an Ozette Indian hut and interacted with the Ozette as described by Bertelson (1948): “He got along fine with the Ozettes, and bought salvaged drift-boards and planks from them with which to build. And after he got settled and had acquired four cows, he traded butter and garden truck with the Indians for fish and game.”

Today, butterfly and plant experts view the Ozette Prairies as a wilderness refuge — a place sheltering unique plant and animal life. They are a biological focus area of the National Park Service because they represent excellence in beauty and biological diversity and harbor an array of rare and endangered plant and animal species (http://www1.dnr.wa.gov/nhp/refdesk/lists/plantrnk.html; Pyle 2002). In recognition of their cultural and ecological value, the wetlands have received official protection; their structures are on the National Register of Historic Places and the land is designated as wilderness or potential wilderness (Washington Park Wilderness Act of 1988; Ruth Scott pers. comm. 2007).

But formal designation alone is not enough to save the biotic diversity of these areas, as they are shrinking. Young western hemlock and redcedar trees, along with some Sitka spruce and Pacific yew, are advancing into the open habitats (see Figure 3). In the early 1940s, Alice Kalappa, Makah, complained to anthropologist Elizabeth Colson in an interview that “Now there are lots of trees on the [Ozette] marsh because nobody takes care of it anymore.” In 1981, Stephen Underwood, Ozette Subdistrict Ranger, wrote Olympic National Park visitors to solicit early photographs of the Ahlstrom’s Prairie. He received slides and prints of Ahlstrom’s Prairie from the early 1960s. He wrote the visitors thank you notes saying in one letter that “It’s impressive how much growth has occurred out on the prairie [between the early 1960s and 1981]” (Underwood 1981). Wetlands ecologist Linda Kunze documented tree encroachment on the Ozette Prairies in her unpublished botanical field notes in 1989 (see Appendix 1). Ed Tisch (2002:6) explained the tree encroachment onto Ahlstrom’s Prairie in an article in the Voice of the Wild Olympics magazine:

The highest, best-drained sites favor tree establishment. Most of these elevated areas currently support a hemlock\salal-evergreen huckleberry community type in which bracken, deer ferns, bunchberries, twinflowers, and beaked mosses are common, and the dominant shrubs grow to heights of three to ten feet. These expanding ‘forests’ are slowly repossessing.

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Before Columbus: The Americas of 1491

Charles C. Mann and Rebecca Stefoff. 2009. Before Columbus: The Americas of 1491. Atheneum Books for Young Readers, Simon & Schuster.

Available  [here]

This book should be in every school.

The study of historical human influences on the environment is hampered by stubborn adherence to myths and falsehoods developed in childhood. Schools teach that Native Americans were few, savage, and insignificant wandering nomads who lived in a wilderness before Europeans arrived to tame the Americas.

Charles C. Mann’s 2005 bestseller, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus [here], exploded many of those myths. He essayed the new, developing ideas and evidence regarding pre-Columbian America indicating that the Western Hemisphere was populated by millions of people living in civilizations older and more advanced than those of the invading Europeans.

Now Mann and co-author Rebecca Stefoff have adapted 1491 into a book for school children. Before Columbus: The Americas of 1491 is a gorgeous “coffee table” book filled with vibrant pictures and a text that is exciting and understandable for younger scholars.

Teachers and parents take note. Don’t let your kids grow up to be ignorant of their roots. The landscapes we live in have been cultural landscapes, shaped by humanity, for thousands of years. The heritage of place is your heritage and that of your children.

Part One of Before Columbus: The Americas of 1491 examines the question “How Old was the New World?” Archaeologists keep pushing the date back, but without a doubt human beings were living throughout the Americas 10,000 years ago (8,000 BC). The first cities may have been along the Peruvian coast. The pyramids at Huaricanga are at least 5,500 years old. The residents also built irrigation canals to water cotton fields, from which they made nets to harvest fish. Ancient mariners sailed far out into the Pacific to net anchovies, sardines, and other fish. Their cultural stamp (the distinctive gods carved on gourds) can be seen in rock carvings and temples crafted thousands of years later at Lake Titicaca,  the cradle of Incan civilization.

Part Two asks “Why Did Europe Succeed?” and includes four chapters on “The Great Meeting” (Cortez and the Aztecs at Tenochtitlan), “Long, Long Ago” (the first Americans, the PaleoIndians, and Monte Verde in Chile), “Extinction” (the demise of the megafauna, including mammoths), and “Disease-Free Paradise? (the impact of European disease on the Native Americans).”

Part Three examines “Were the Americas really a Wilderness?” It’s chapters include “Amazonia” with discussion of the fruit and nut orchards found across the Amazon Basin and the anthropogenic soils called terra preta. “Land of Fire” discusses the way in which Indians maintained a living anthropogenic mosaic of prairies, savannas, and open, park-like forests, principally through the use of controlled burning. In “The Created Wilderness” the authors explain how those human-shaped landscapes were abandoned when the Indian populations nearly disappeared following the introduction of Old World diseases.

We cannot plan for the future if we do not understand the past. Forests cannot be cared for, and the desired future conditions cannot be achieved, if we do not have a firm grasp on how our forests developed in the first place.

Mann and Stefoff seek to instruct our youth with the truth, so that as adults they can make informed judgments about environmental stewardship.

Buy this book. Better yet, buy a dozen copies and donate them to your local schools. Raise the consciousness about the distant past so that our coming future is guided by knowledge instead of myth.

Aboriginal Use of Fire: Are There Any “Natural” Plant Communities?

Gerald W. Williams. 2002. Aboriginal Use of Fire: Are There Any “Natural” Plant Communities? IN Wilderness and Political Ecology: Aboriginal Land Management–Myths and Reality, Charles E. Kay and Randy T. Simmons (eds.) University of Utah Press.

Full text [here]

Selected excerpts:

INTRODUCTION

Evidence for the purposeful use of fire by American Indians (also termed Native Americans, Indigenous People, and First Nations/People) in many ecosystems has been easy to document but difficult to substantiate. Commonly, many people, even researchers and ecologists, discount the fact that the American Indians greatly changed the ecosystems for their use and survival. Scientists often attribute old fire scars found in tree rings to “natural” causes, such as lightning rather than anthropogenic causes (Kilgore 1985 and Pyne 1995). However, there is a growing literature that many of the so-called “natural” fires were intentionally set. A knowledge of the Indian use of fire will understand how ecosystem conditions today have been shaped by humans in the past. The implications of restoring fire to ecosystems for management of million of acres of federal lands are profound.
The following accounts of Indian burning of ecosystems focuses on the Pacific Northwest, where some of the best documentation of Indian use of fire exists (see Appendix B). For other parts of North America, see the excellent studies by Henry Lewis (1982, 1985) on the forest areas of Canada, as well as the articles by Emily Russell (1983, 1997) and Gordon Whitney (1994) for the East (especially the northeast) and William McClain and Sherrie Elzinga (1994) for the Midwest region of the United States. Stephen Pyne’s (1982, 1995) books contain information on aboriginal people and their use of fire in North America, as well as other parts of the world.

“NATURAL” LANDSCAPES OF NORTH AMERICA

For over 100 years there was the idea that nature could only be “natural” when left on its own. Massive landscape changes, such as caused by hurricanes or volcanoes, or even small changes like landslides caused by heavy rainfall, would, if left alone, recover to the natural “order” of nature, undisturbed, peaceful, with harmony restored. In this view, nature is wonder, filling the human body and soul with beauty and spirit of the grand works of God. Painters of the mid-1800s “Hudson River School” emphasized, through magnificent, large-scale painting, this notion of the glory and spirit of nature untamed, wild, and beautiful beyond imagination. George Perkins Marsh, in his classic book Man and Nature, originally published in 1864, set the tone for much of the conservation movement of the late 19th century and the environmental movement of the mid- to late-20th century as he wrote about the stability and resiliency of nature:

Nature, left undisturbed, so fashions her territory as to give it almost unchanging permanence of form, outline and proportion, except when shattered by geologic convulsions; and in these comparatively rare cases of derangement, she sets herself at once to repair the superficial damage and to restore, as nearly as practicable, the former aspect of her dominion (Marsh 1864: 29).

There are elements of this simplistic philosophic notion that still live on in society as a whole and especially the minds of the environmental community. The writings of the eminent conservation/environmental scholars in the last century have tended to take these idealistic and romantic, almost transcendental, notions into the realm of gut-wrenching emotion and action to save what is left of the “natural” environment. …

The last few decades, however, have seen significant changes in the ecological basis for defining nature, as well as wilderness “untrammeled by Man” (Botkin 1990). …

Human activities have also influenced and changed ecosystems. Researchers today are tending to believe that the concepts of “nature,” “natural,” and “wilderness” are human constructs and that people have been part of ecosystems since before recorded time. People, in this contemporary notion, are part of ecosystems, have evolved with ecosystems, have used parts and pieces of ecosystems for survival, and have changed portions of ecosystems for their needs:

No forests [shrublands or grasslands] are unaffected; humans have been a part of the ecosystem over the past ten centuries of major climatic change, so that all forests have developed under some kind of human influence, although its intensity has varied greatly over time and space. This influence must be accounted for as an important part of any study of forest structure and dynamics (Russell 1997: 129).

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Where Have All the Fires Gone?

Stephen J. Pyne. 2000. Where Have All the Fires Gone? Fire Management Today, Vol 60, No. 3, Summer 2000

Full text:

IN the United States, few places know as much fire today as they did a century ago. Fires have fled from regions like the Northeast that formerly relied on them for farming and grazing. They have receded from the Great Plains, once near-annual seas of flame, ebbing and flowing with seasonal tides. They burn in the South at only a fraction of their former grandeur. They have faded from the mountains and mesas, valleys and basins of the West. They are even disappearing from yards and hearths. One can view the dimming panorama of fire in the same way that observers at the close of the 19th century viewed the specter of the vanishing American Indian.

Missing Fires, Missing Peoples

And with some cause: Those missing fires and the missing peoples are linked. The fires that once flushed the myriad landscapes of North America and have faded away are not fires that were kindled by nature and suppressed, but rather fires that people once set and no longer do. In some places, lightning has filled the void. But mostly it has not, and even where lightning has reasserted itself, it has introduced a fire regime that can be quite distinct from those shaped by the torch.

Anthropogenic (human-caused) fire comes with a different seasonal signature and frequency than natural fire. Moreover, it is profoundly interactive. It burns in a context of general landscape meddling by humans—hunting, foraging, planting—in ways that shape both the flame and its effects. So reliant are people on their fire monopoly that what makes fire possible generally makes human societies possible. What prevents one retards the other. Places that escaped anthropogenic fire likely escaped fire altogether.

Pre-Columbian Fire Practices

Did American Indians really burn the land? Of course they did. All peoples do, even those committed to industrial combustion, who disguise their fires in machines. The issue is whether and how those fires affected the landscape. Much of the burning was systematic. Pre-Columbian peoples fired along routes of travel, and they burned patches where flame could help them extract some resource — camas, deer, huckleberries, maize. The outcome was a kind of fire foraging, even fire cultivating, such that strips and patches burned as fuel became available. But much burning resulted from malice, play, war, accident, escapes, and sheer fire littering. The land was peppered with human-inspired embers.

The aboriginal lines and fields of fire inscribed a landscape mosaic (see Lewis and Ferguson (1988) for a different terminology). Some tiles were immense, some tiny. Some experienced fire annually, some on the scale of decades. In most years, fires burned to the edge of the corridor or patch and then stopped, melting away before damp understories, snow, or wet-flushed greenery. But in other years, when the land was groaning with excess fuels and parched by droughts, fires kindled by intent or accident roared deep into the landscape. People move and fire propagates; humanity’s fiery reach far exceeds its grasp of the firestick. Remove those flames and the structure of even seldom-visited forests eventually looks very different.

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How far could a squirrel travel in the treetops? A prehistory of the southern forest

Paul B. Hamel, and Edward R. Buckner 1998. How far could a squirrel travel in the treetops? A prehistory of the southern forest. Transactions of the 63rd North American Wildlife and Natural Resources conference; 1998 March 20-25; Orlando, FL. Washington, DC: Wildlife Management Institute: 309-315.

Full text [here]

Selected excerpts:

Introduction

Conservation activities aimed at protecting old-growth forests; at maintaining populations of desired species groups, such as oaks (Quercus sp.), wild turkeys (Meleagris gallopavo), other game species or Neotropical migratory birds; and at increasing populations of endangered species, such as red-cockaded woodpeckers (Picoides borealis), Bachman’s warblers (Vermivora bachmanii), Louisiana black bears (Ursus americanus luteolus) and Tennessee coneflowers (Echinaea tennesseensis), require a target environment. This target, often viewed as the environment at some specified past time, becomes the desired future condition. If the target can be considered a stable ecosystem that is self-perpetuating under control of natural processes, the envisioned environment is a defendable “natural” target for land-use planning. If the target is not easily regarded as “natural,” but must involve cultural intervention for its appearance or persistence, the planning process must derive a target environment by some other method, one more clearly reflective of the values of the planners themselves.

Our purpose in this paper is to suggest time periods as potential candidates for the “original” or “natural”condition of the southern forest and to evaluate the forest conditions at those times in light of knowledge of past geological and cultural conditions.

The “Original” Southern Forest in 1607

A most useful starting point for characterizing the prehistory of the southern forest is the establishment of permanent English colonies in 1607. We begin there. A frequent vision of the forest, shared by authors too numerous to mention (e.g., Alverson et al. 1994) depicts relatively complete coverage of closed-canopy forest from the Atlantic Coast to the Great Plains. In this view, a squirrel, presumably a gray squirrel (Sciurus carolinensis), would have been able to move almost in a straight line from treetop to treetop across the Carolinas and Tennessee to the Mississippi River.

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The History of Fire in the Southern United States

Cynthia Fowler, Evelyn Konopik. 2007. The History of Fire in the Southern United States. Human Ecology Review, Vol. 14, No. 2, 2007

Full text [here]

Selected excerpts:

Abstract

Anthropogenic fires have been a key form of disturbance in southern ecosystems for more than 10,000 years. Archaeological and ethnohistorical information reveal general patterns in fire use during the five major cultural periods in the South; these are Native American prehistory, early European settlement, industrialization, fire suppression, and fire management. Major shifts in cultural traditions are linked to significant transitions in fire regimes. A holistic approach to fire ecology is necessary for illuminating the multiple, complex links between the cultural history of the South and the evolution of southern ecosystems. The web of connections between history, society, politics, economy, and ecology are inherent to the phenomena of fire.

A Holistic View of People and Fire

Written documents that address fire ecology in the South include more than 380 years of publications, ranging from Smith’s 1625 monograph to Kennard’s 2005 essay. This body of literature includes the travelogues of European explorers, research reports on fossil pollen and charcoal records, as well as critical analyses of fire management policies. The wide variety of perspectives that is represented in
this literature reflects the web of connections between history, society, politics, economy, and ecology that are inherent to the phenomena of fire.

A multidisciplinary synthesis of the literature in light of the complexity of fire ecology will lead us to a better understanding of long term interactions between people and fire in specific ecological communities. In this article, we approach the fire ecology literature from two points of view, looking at “fire through people’s eyes” and “people through fire’s eyes” (Vayda 2005). We describe general patterns in fire use during five major cultural periods (Table 1) in four of the South’s physiographic regions: the Coastal Plains, Piedmont, Southern Appalachians, and Ozark-Ouachita Highlands. Using this holistic framework, we consider “both ends of the fire stick” (Vayda 2005) examining elements of fire use by each cultural group that has inhabited the South and its effects on southern ecosystems.

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The Alseya Valley Prairie Complex, ca. 1850: Native Landscapes in Western GLO Surveys

Bob Zybach. 2001. The Alseya Valley Prairie Complex, ca. 1850: Native Landscapes in Western GLO Surveys. IN Changing Landscapes: Proceedings of the 5th and 6th Annual Coquille Cultural Preservation Conferences 2001 and 2002, Don Ivy and R. Scott Byram (eds.), Coquille Indian Tribe, North Bend, Oregon: 161-188.

Full text [here]

Selected excerpts:

Editor’s note: Over the past several years researchers and land managers in numerous fields have begun to recognize what many Native people have been saying for a long time; the ecological landscape in western Oregon reflects the influence of the judicious use of fire and other plant management techniques. Despite this recognition, relatively little research has been done to explore the diversity of techniques Native people used to nurture the region’s ecological mosaic. Bob Zybach applies his broad knowledge of forest ecology and historical records in assessing the extent and variety of traditionally-tended plant communities in and around the Alsea Valley. He shows us that U.S. land survey records hold crucial, but largely untapped data for research on historic Native land use. — R. Scott Byram

TODAY there is a strong interest in rediscovering the nature and extent of historical Indian land use patterns in western Oregon. Knowledge of past environmental conditions and American Indian resource management actions can prove beneficial to developing wildfire control strategies (Boyd 1999c:293; Williams 2000:45-47), preservation of threatened and endangered species (Pendergrass 1996:227), recreation and maintenance of significant cultural landscape patterns (Winkler and Bailey 2002:2-3), and logging and reforestation planning (Wakefield 1988: personal communication).

Researchers and land managers have attempted to distinguish the effects of ecosystem management practices used by Native people historically, from the “natural variability” of ecological landscapes (e.g., Vale 2002). To what extent did historical landscapes reflect peoples’ influence as well as other ecological processes? This knowledge is seen as key to the successful management of natural resources in western Oregon, where Native communities interacted closely with a complex ecosystem that has undergone drastic changes since European-American (“White”) settlement began in the early 1800s. Knowledge of historical environmental conditions is needed as a baseline for this research (Schulte and Mladenoff 2001:5). Such conditions can be estimated or documented for the lands of western Oregon by a number of methods, depending on the time period, scale, and specific location in question (Zybach 1992).

The abrupt transformation of land management practices that occurred in western Oregon in the early and middle 1800s makes this a particularly critical period to understand. Over scarcely more than a generation, diverse Indian societies were largely replaced by a population of White immigrant farm families. The catastrophic loss of Indian lives, knowledge, and land use practices through introduced diseases in the late 1700s and early 1800s, coupled with a corresponding invasion of foreign cultures, plants, animals, people, philosophies, and technologies, resulted in a landscape that was forever altered (Boyd 1999a; Robbins 1997:23-49). General Land Office (GLO) surveys completed throughout western Oregon between 1850 and 1910 provide an exceptional source of information for documenting the transition of environmental conditions from traditional Indian land management practices to introduced European practices. Although these surveys were performed during the early 1850s and after, they can also be used to make reasonable estimates of environmental conditions at the time of contact (used here to mean the first documented contact between Indians and Whites for a given area), or even earlier.

This article considers the Alsea Valley and Alsea River headwaters of the central Oregon Coast Range (see Map 1) and examines information contained in early GLO surveys for that area (see Map 2). …

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Pre-Columbian geometric earthworks in the upper Pur’us: a complex society in western Amazonia

Martti Parssinen, Denise Schaan, and Alceu Ranzi. 2009. Pre-Columbian geometric earthworks in the upper Pur’us: a complex society in western Amazonia. Antiquity 83 (2009): 1084–1095

Full text [here]

Selected excerpts:

Abstract

It’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good. The combination of land cleared of its rainforest for grazing and satellite survey have revealed a sophisticated pre-Columbian monument-building society in the upper Amazon Basin on the east side of the Andes. This hitherto unknown people constructed earthworks of precise geometric plan connected by straight orthogonal roads. Introducing us to this new civilisation, the authors show that the ‘geoglyph culture’ stretches over a region more than 250km across, and exploits both the floodplains and the uplands. They also suggest that we have so far seen no more than a tenth of it.

Introduction

According to mid-twentieth-century neo-evolutionist interpretations of cultural development in the South American lowlands, pre-European Amazonian societies were mainly considered to be primitive egalitarian tribes living in small, impermanent villages in a hostile environment, unable to develop complex socio-political institutions (Steward 1948; Meggers 1954). Although historical accounts mentioned that floodplain river banks and islands were heavily populated by chiefdoms with village leaders and superior lords, some students of Amazonian archaeology and ethnology emphasised important differences between floodplain (varzea) and upland (terra firme) ecosystems. According to Lathrap’s model, for example, the varzea constantly attracted peoples due to its bountiful resources, especially aquatic fauna and good alluvial soils; but, as population pressure over limited land took its toll, they were forced to flee to the hinterland terra firme, where their cultural level decreased (Lathrap 1968, 1970). In her own way, Meggers (1991, 1995) also acknowledged higher levels of cultural complexity for varzea peoples, where some level of social hierarchy and elaborate material culture could develop, thanks to better soils. In her account, terra firme peoples remained demographically smaller and less complex, and were forced to live as hunters, collectors and semi-sedentary slash-and-burn cultivators. …

Roosevelt (1980), for her part, also had an important role in defending the varzea/terra firme dichotomy, emphasising the fact that the alluvial soils of the varzea were critical for supporting the indigenous development of chiefdoms, an idea not backed up by neo-evolutionist determinism, which always gave priority to outside cultural developments. …

As we can see, although scholars had different ideas on how to account for the differences between the two main Amazonian environments, the basic dichotomy between varzea (floodplain) and terra firme (interfluvial hinterland) remained valid for some time. In fact, given the scarcity of archaeological data for hinterland areas, researchers concentrated their efforts in trying to figure out how social complexity arose among floodplain societies (Carneiro 1970, 1987; Roosevelt 1993), accepting, even if not explicitly, that terra firme peoples had remained smaller and simpler.

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Bighorn hunting, resource depression, and rock art in the Coso Range, eastern California: a computer simulation model

Alan P. Garfinkel, David A. Young, Robert M. Yohe II. 2009. Bighorn hunting, resource depression, and rock art in the Coso Range, eastern California: a computer simulation model. Journal of Archaeological Science 37 (2010) 42–51.

Full text [here]

See also: Garfinkel, Alan P. 2007. Paradigm Shifts, Rock Art Studies, and the “Coso Sheep Cult” of Eastern California. North American Archaeologist, Spring 2007. [here]

Selected Excerpts:

Abstract

The extraordinary record of prehistoric rock art depicting tens of thousands of animal images in the Coso Range of eastern California provides an opportunity to study the relationship between aboriginal hunting, forager ecology, bighorn prey population levels, and the production of rock art. We review archaeofaunal evidence that the Coso desert bighorn sheep population was strongly depleted during the Newberry era after 1500 B.C. We discuss the dating of the rock art and show a correlation between bighorn depletion and increased rock art production. These data are consistent with the arrival of Numic foragers ca. A.D. 600 who competed with the Coso Pre-Numics and eventually terminated the Coso rock art tradition. An ecological predator-prey computer simulation of the human populations (Numic and Pre-Numics), the sheep population, and the rock art ‘‘population’’, demonstrates these proposed interconnections and gives a reasonable fit to the observed rock art production rate. …

Introduction

The Coso Range of eastern California has been occupied by humans since the Paleoindian period. The early inhabitants of the area left pecked rock images in very large numbers. Beginning roughly 2000/1500 B.C. and ending about A.D. 1300, aboriginal people left an elaborate record of hunting scenes with bighorn sheep (Ovis canadensis) as their prey. Over time the images become more naturalistic or realistic, larger in size and the image count increases remarkably during its peak period of production and then inexplicably at its peak after about A.D. 1300 the art ceased being produced. There are at least 100,000 individual rock art images represented in the Coso petroglyph record and it is estimated that about half are depictions of bighorn sheep. The Coso Rock Art Complex is one of the largest concentrations of rock drawings in all of North America.

Such a striking array of naturalistic or realistic images is very unusual for the Desert West and this startling record begs explication. Early researchers posited that the tremendous numbers of bighorn representations were indicative of vast herds of bighorn sheep that occupied the area in the distant past. Prehistorians implied that periods of peak sheep hunting correlated with the greatest abundance of bighorn rock art images. Prehistoric animal images were part of a bighorn sheep cult. These images figured in increase rites designed to ensure the return of game animals, human, plant, and animal fecundity, and the health and well-being of the Coso people and their way of life (Garfinkel, 2006; Grant et al., 1968; Hildebrandt and McGuire, 2002; Heizer and Baumhoff,1962).

This paper provides a population estimate for the metapopulation (a group of spatially separated or isolated animals that occupy a fragmented habitat, have limited exchange of individuals, and consist of a number of animal groups that interact in a restricted geographic area) of Coso bighorn and simulates the population dynamic of the local herds in light of human predation. It evaluates the proposition of whether it is possible that bighorn were over-harvested and depleted. Archaeofaunal data are adduced to provide a timeline, trajectory, and independent evaluation of the plausibility for bighorn resource depression. It also posits that the Coso inhabitants were seeing population pressure and conflicting land use issues from the neighboring Numic groups to the north moving into their territory from the Owens Valley. Standard ecological competition and predator-prey models are applied to simulate human and sheep populations. The simulation models sheep hunting across time and also models rock art production.We develop a model of the competing Numic and pre-Numic exploitation and land use strategies and close by providing a partial explanation of why the Coso Range was such an extraordinary focus of rock art expression. …

Fig. 2. Coso Representational rock art, Coso Style sheep, bowmen, and more ancient,
patinated abstract and geometric petroglyph elements.

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Ecological and Cultural Significance of Burning Beargrass Habitat on the Olympic Peninsula, Washington

Daniela Joy Shebitz, Sarah Hay den Reichard and Peter W Dunwiddie. 2009. Ecological and Cultural Significance of Burning Beargrass Habitat on the Olympic Peninsula, Washington. Ecological Restoration Vol, 27. No. 3, 2009.

Full text [here]

Selected Excerpts:

ABSTRACT

To conserve or restore culturally significant plants, one must consider the important role that indigenous land management techniques have played in maintaining habitats of those species. Beargrass (Xerophyllum tenax) is a basketry plant used by Native Americans and is reportedly declining in traditional gathering sites. Many low-elevation beargrass sites on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington were maintained as savannas and wetland prairies through anthropogenic burning prior to European settlement. This study measures short-term (1 and 2 y) effects of reintroducing prescribed burning (both low and high severity) and manual clearing on beargrass growth and reproductive success—flowering, vegetative reproduction, and seedling establishment. High-severity fire led to a significant increase in beargrass seedling establishment and vegetative reproduction over two years but a decline in beargrass cover. Low-severity fire also decreased beargrass cover, but did not significantly affect shoot production or seedling establishment. In areas where vegetation and coarse woody debris were manually cleared, beargrass cover decreased, while shoot production and flowering increased. Neither low-severity fires nor clearing plots affected beargrass seedling establishment. Results indicate that fire is a useful tool for enhancing low-elevation beargrass populations in this region.

Introduction

The persistence of many indigenous traditions is dependent upon the availability of culturally significant resources {Anderson 1996a, 1996b, 2005). Baskets made from local plants, for example, strengthen cultures by preserving traditions, reinforcing communities, and providing income (Shebitz and Kimmerer 2005). Indigenous basketmakers throughout the United States, however, have reported a decline in abundance and quality of basketry plant material at historic gathering sites. The absence of traditional burning over the past century is a potential cause for the decline in abundance of some basketry plant species, including deergrass (Muhlenbergia rigens) (Anderson 1996b), sweetgrass (Anthoxanthum nitem [=Hierochloe odorata]) (Shebitz and Kimmerer 2004), and beargrass (Xerophyllum tenax) (Hunter 1988, Rentz 2003, Shebitz 2005).

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Historic Anthropogenically Maintained Bear Grass Savannas of the Southeastern Olympic Peninsula

David Peter and Daniela Shebitz. 2006. Historic Anthropogenically Maintained Bear Grass Savannas of the Southeastern Olympic Peninsula. Restoration Ecology Vol. 14, No. 4, pp. 605–615

Full text [here]

Selected Excerpts:

Abstract:

This paper documents the existence and character of a little known fire-maintained anthropogenic ecosystem in the southeastern Olympic Peninsula of Washington State, U.S.A. Due to cessation of anthropogenic burning, there is no longer an intact example of this ecosystem. We present evidence from Skokomish oral tradition, historical documents, floral composition, tree-ring analysis, stand structure, and site potential to describe former savanna structure and function. We believe this system was a mosaic of prairies, savannas, and woodlands in a forest matrix maintained through repeated burning to provide culturally important plants and animals. The overstory was dominated by Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii). Bear grass (Xerophyllum tenax) likely was a dominant understory component of the savannas, woodlands, and prairie edges. These lands grew forests in the absence of anthropogenic burning. Wide spacing of older trees or stumps in former stands and rapid invasion by younger trees in the late 1800s and early 1900s suggest a sudden change in stand structure. Shade-intolerant prairie species are still present where openings have been maintained but not in surrounding forests. Bark charcoal, fire scars, tree establishment patterns, and oral traditions point to use of fire to maintain this system. A common successional trajectory for all these lands leads to forested vegetation. These findings suggest that frequent application of prescribed burning would be necessary to restore this ecosystem.

Introduction

Some anthropogenically maintained ecosystems owe their character to cultural burning and are inherently unstable when management practices change. Fire-dependent habitats that were maintained through burning by Native Americans include the prairies and savannas of western Washington State, U.S.A. Although these habitats were common in the region prior to European settlement (Jones 1936; Norton 1979; Leopold and Boyd 1999), their former extent in the southeastern Olympic Peninsula is not well known. …

Prior to European settlement, anthropogenic burning in many areas was regular, constant, and long term, causing cumulative effects reflected in current plant communities and species distributions (Pyne 1982; Anderson 1996, 2005; Boyd 1999). Prairie and savanna flora and fauna were integral components of diets, medicines, baskets, and rituals of local tribes (Norton 1979). The most significant sources of complex carbohydrates in the diets of Olympic Peninsula tribes came from bulbs and rhizomes found in prairies and savannas. Bracken fern (Pteridium aquilinum (L.) Kuhn) and Common camas (Cammasia quamash (Pursh) Greene) were commonly used by the Skokomish and other native peoples in wetter Washington coastal environments (Gunther 1974; Norton 1979; Deur 2000). Berries growing in prairie forest ecotones were important sources of sugars and vitamins. Bear grass, used in Skokomish basketry and burial ceremonies (Gunther 1974; Shebitz 2005), also grew historically on the periphery of prairies (B. Miller, Skokomish Tribe, 2004, personal communication). According to Skokomish oral tradition, fire intervals were determined, in part, to maximize production of Trailing blackberry (Rubus ursinus Cham. and Schlecht) (B. Miller, Skokomish Tribe, 1996, personal communication). Prairies and savannas provided important Blacktail deer (Odocoileus hemionus) and Elk (Cervus canadensis) winter range, and were convenient places to hunt (Kruckeberg 1991; B. Miller, Skokomish Tribe, 2004, personal communication). …

Our objective is to provide evidence for the historic existence and character of an anthropogenically managed savanna ecosystem on the southeastern Olympic Peninsula of Washington as mixed prairie forest areas supporting extensive patches of bear grass. We compare data from two vegetation types identified on 1929 aerial photographs as savanna and matrix forests and describe forest invasion of savannas in the late 1800s. We interpret current vegetation in light of tree-ring analysis, fire history, and native oral traditions to reconstruct former savanna vegetation. We discuss our results in terms of site potential, cultural influence, and fire history. This information is assisting current efforts of the Olympic National Forest (ONF) in restoring savannas to the area. …

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World Trade and Biological Exchanges Before 1492

John L. Sorenson, Carl L. Johannessen. 2009. World Trade and Biological Exchanges Before 1492. iUniverse. ISBN: 978-0-595-52441-9

A book review by Mike Dubrasich

There exists a pernicious myth that American Indians were savages (noble or not) living in roving bands of hunter-gatherers, at one with Nature due to their lack of civilization and technological sophistication.

That myth has been exploded by cutting-edge anthropology, archaeology, and historical landscape geography.

Prior to Columbus’ “discovery” of the “New World”, human beings had lived and thrived in the Americas for 12,000 years or more. They built great cities such as Teotihuacan, which by 700 C.E. had an estimated population of 200,000 and was larger than Paris and London combined four hundred years later!

Pre-Columbian Americans developed writing, mathematics, astronomy, and agriculture. Cropping systems were in use as much as 9,000 years ago [here] and had spread across much of both North and South America by 5,800 years ago [here].

People built incredible earthworks including terraces, raised fields, canals and irrigation systems for agriculture [here]. People modified soils for food cropping across vast territories such as Amazonia [here].

And pre-Columbian people developed food crops such corn (maize), potatoes, tomatoes, peanuts, pumpkins (all edible squashes), sweet potatoes, sunflowers, peppers, pineapples, watermelons, strawberries, and pecans. All edible beans except horse beans and soybeans were developed in the pre-Columbian Americas.

It is widely believed that these food crops, common around the world today, were not known outside the Americas until Columbus and other contemporary explorers brought them to Europe 500 years ago. But if so, how do you explain this?

This wall sculpture from the Hoysala Dynasty Halebid temple at Somnathpur, Karnataka state, India, dates between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. Among the numerous representations of maize ears, the shape of the ear, kernels off set in relation to those in adjacent rows, the presence of part of the husk, and other features ensure that no object other than an ear of maize could be represented. The mudra (sacred gesture) made by the figure’s hand underlines the sacred significance of the context and thus of maize. (Photograph by C. Johannessen.)

In World Trade and Biological Exchanges Before 1492 authors John L. Sorenson and Carl L. Johannessen present strong evidence that pre-Columbian Americans engaged in overseas trade:

People moved into America very early across the Bering Strait. By the fifth millennia B.C.E. tropical sailors brought diseases to America and took plants and animals in both directions.

Long before Columbus, tropical sailors carefully selected crops from New World highlands and shorelines, wet and dry climates, and took them to the Old World where they were grown in appropriate environments. Medicinal and psychedelic plants were traded and maintained in Egypt and Peru during separate 1,400-year periods. This implies that maritime trade was continuous.

In this groundbreaking book, learn about:

* 84 plants that were taken from the Americas to the Old World.
* What plants and animals were brought to the Americas.
* Why world trade was essential for transfer of so many.
* Interconnectedness of civilizations had to result from world trade.
* Dating of 18 species by archaeology with radio carbon shows dispersal.
* And much more!

Plants, diseases, and animals from America were distributed throughout the world, across the oceans before 1492. It is time for scientists, teachers, and students to reconsider their beliefs about the early history of civilization with World Trade and Biological Exchanges Before 1492.

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A 500-year record of fire from a humid coast redwood forest

Steven P. Norman. 2007. A 500-year record of fire from a humid coast redwood forest. A report to Save the Redwoods League.

Full text at Save the Redwoods League [here]

Selected excerpts:

ABSTRACT

California’s coast redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) forests have long been associated with moderately frequent to frequent fire, particularly in the southern and interior portions of the species range. The historical importance of fire in northern coast redwood forests is generally thought to be much less because lightning ignitions are rare, and cool coastal temperatures and summer fog ameliorate the fire hazard. Support for this climate-fire gradient hypothesis has been limited because of insufficient fire history data from the northern coast redwood range. Past efforts to test this hypothesis range-wide are made difficult because of methodological differences among studies and problems with scar preservation in redwood. This research revisits the fire history of an area thought to have experienced fire only a few times per millennium in Del Norte Coast Redwoods State Park. I found that fire frequency was substantially more frequent than previously thought. Between 1700 and 1850, mean fire intervals within 0.25 to 1 ha sample areas varied from 11 to 26 years. Fire intervals did not correspond to a latitudinal, coast-interior or a topographically defined moisture gradient. Instead, patterns of fire frequency better fit a cultural burning gradient inferred from the ethnographic and historical record. Areas close to aboriginal villages and camps burned considerably more often than areas that were probably less utilized. Summer season fires, the ones most likely set by the Native Tolowa for resource needs, were 10 years shorter than the mean fire interval of autumn season fires. In the dryer eastern portion of the study area, frequent fire resulted in unimodal or bimodal pulses of Douglas fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii) establishment suggesting moderate to high fire severity. Near a Tolowa village site, a frequent fire regime before the late 1700s initiated a pulse of Douglas fir establishment that dominated the forest canopy for centuries; long after the village was abandoned, possibly due to epidemic disease. While variability in coastal fog-stratus and drought may also influence fire regimes, these relationships provide a weaker explanation than human ignition history. Variable human and climate influence on old-growth redwood fire regimes suggests that old growth redwood forests are not in equilibrium, but are dynamic due to a long history of variable human influence. Remnant old growth forests are likely to continue to evolve in response to human management. Efforts by managers to restore and sustain these remarkable forests can be enhanced by understanding how complex histories give rise to biodiversity.

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Initial formation of an indigenous crop complex in eastern North America at 3800 B.P.

Bruce D. Smith and Richard A. Yarnell. 2009. Initial formation of an indigenous crop complex in eastern North America at 3800 B.P. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 106 No. 16 pp 6561–6566.

Full text [here]

Selected excerpts [here]

Abstract

Although geneticists and archaeologists continue to make progress world-wide in documenting the time and place of the initial domestication of a growing number of plants and animals, far less is known regarding the critically important context of coalescence of various species into distinctive sets or complexes of domesticates in each of the world’s 10 or more independent centers of agricultural origin. In this article, the initial emergence of a crop complex is described for one of the best-documented of these independent centers, eastern North America (ENA). Before 4000 B.P. there is no indication of a crop complex in ENA, only isolated evidence for single indigenous domesticate species. By 3800 B.P., however, at least 5 domesticated seed-bearing plants formed a coherent complex in the river valley corridors of ENA. Accelerator mass spectrometer radiocarbon dates and reanalysis of archaeobotanical assemblages from a short occupation of the Riverton Site in Illinois documents the contemporary cultivation at 3800 B.P. of domesticated bottle gourd (Lagenaria siceraria), marshelder (Iva annua var. macrocarpa), sunflower (Helianthus annuus var. macrocarpus), and 2 cultivated varieties of chenopod (Chenopodium berlandieri), as well as the possible cultivation of Cucurbita pepo squash and little barley (Hordeum pusillum). Rather than marking either an abrupt developmental break or a necessary response to population-packing or compressed resource catchments, the coalescence of an initial crop complex in ENA appears to reflect an integrated expansion and enhancement of preexisting hunting and gathering economies that took place within a context of stable long-term adaptation to resource-rich river valley settings.

Introduction

Marking a major evolutionary episode in human history, the transition from hunting and gathering to agricultural economies spanned several millennia and occurred independently in 10 or more different world regions, including eastern North America (ENA) (1) (Fig. 1). In each of these independent centers, this long transition began with the initial domestication of a number of indigenous wild progenitor species. These different domesticates eventually were coalesced to form regionally distinctive complexes of domesticates and low-level food production economies. As a result of parallel and often cross-illuminating efforts by geneticists and archaeologists over the past several decades, we are gaining a much clearer idea of where and when domestication of different individual species of plants and animals occurred (3, 4). Much less is currently known, however, about the equally important process that led to numbers of different species being brought together to form coherent distinctive domesticate complexes in different world regions. When did such domesticate complexes initially develop? What was the identity and relative importance of each complex’s different constituent species? What can be said regarding the environmental and cultural context of coalescence of these early domesticate complexes in different world regions, and what can be said about the societies that developed them? Combining extant information with new data, this article addresses these key questions and provides a clear picture of the initial emergence of a crop complex in one of the world’s best-documented independent centers of domestication — the eastern woodlands of North America.

The Temporal and Spatial Context of Initial Plant Domestication in ENA

Based on several morphological changes associated with the adaptive syndrome of domestication that have been documented in seed specimens recovered from 4 Late Archaic period archaeological sites in the Oak-Savannah and Oak-Hickory forest regions of ENA (i.e., seed size increase and reduction in seed-coat thickness), at least 4 indigenous seed-bearing plants were brought under domestication in the region over a span of ~1,200 years from 5000 to 3800 B.P. These plants include squash (Cucurbita pepo ssp. ovifera), sunflower (Helianthus annuus var. macrocarpus), marshelder (Iva annua var. macrocarpa), and chenopod (Chenopodium berlandieri) (1). Maize (Zea mays), the first Mesoamerican domesticate to reach ENA, did not arrive for another 1,500 years, at ~200 B.C. (see SI Text). In addition to these 4 species that exhibit morphological changes because of domestication, 3 other eastern seed plants that lack such changes have also been identified, based on their abundance in seed assemblages before 2000 B.P., as likely crops and as the subjects of deliberate planting and harvesting of stored seed stock. These plants include erect knotweed (Polygonum erectum), little barley (Hordeum pusillum), and maygrass (Phalaris caroliniana). …

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