Mann begins in the grasslands of the province of Beni, Bolivia ("about the size of Illinois and Indiana put together, and nearly as flat"), where one can find
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 [archaeologist Clark] 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. [Anthropologist William] Balée, newer to the Beni, leaned toward this view but was not yet ready to commit himself.Absolutely incredible! And apparently this is by no means an isolated incident in the Americas. A new school of ecologists and archaeologists and anthropologists holds, very controversially of course, that "Indians were here far longer than previously thought, … 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."
Needless to say, this is utterly at odds with the image of the Native American presented to me in school textbooks. There the impression is created that Native Americans (who are conveniently classified into one bucket, while the incoming Europeans are carefully distinguished on the basis of nationality, at the very least) were some sort of noble savages who lived in complete harmony in an eternal present with pristine nature. This was convenient because, on the one hand, it served to show the evil of the white man destroying this beautiful, naïve, gentle, harmonious culture, and on the other, it served as an implicit justification for the fact that the European strive for progress and perfection would lead to the overwhelming of these people who were frozen in time.
This article showed me just how incredibly simplistic and ridiculously wrong my understanding of the native inhabitants of the Americas was. Just like humans anywhere else, they were smart and sophisticated manipulators of their environments; it's just that they did so in ways so radically different from anything the Europeans had seen before that they naturally assumed that what they saw was wilderness. That, and the fact that European-transmitted diseases often travelled far, far faster than the Europeans themselves, so that even in those cases where Europeans did come into contact with Native Americans, they were likely encountering severely attenuated cultures on the verge of collapse.
The article also fascinatingly points out that this new picture of Native Americans undermines one of the cornerstones of (certain branches of) the environmental movement: that there can be "untouched" nature, and that our goal should be to restore our damaged environment to this state. But what this article suggests is that there never was such a state, and that our efforts to do so are quite artificial indeed. Or, to put it differently, and to reinforce the point I made a few days ago, the line between the natural and the artificial is rather artificial!
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