http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/03/1491/2445/
1491 Before it became the New World, the Western Hemisphere was vastly more populous and sophisticated than has been thought—an altogether more salubrious place to live at the time than, say, Europe. New evidence of both the extent of the population and its agricultural advancement leads to a remarkable conjecture: the Amazon rain forest may be largely a human artifact By Charles C. Mann The plane took off in weather that was surprisingly cool for north-central Bolivia and flew east, toward the Brazilian border. In a few minutes the roads and houses disappeared, and the only evidence of human settlement was the cattle scattered over the savannah like jimmies on ice cream. Then they, too, disappeared. By that time the archaeologists had their cameras out and were clicking away in delight. Below us was the Beni, a Bolivian province about the size of Illinois and Indiana put together, and nearly as flat. For almost half the year rain and snowmelt from the mountains to the south and west cover the land with an irregular, slowly moving skin of water that eventually ends up in the province's northern rivers, which are sub-subtributaries of the Amazon. The rest of the year the water dries up and the bright-green vastness turns into something that resembles a desert. This peculiar, remote, watery plain was what had drawn the researchers' attention, and not just because it was one of the few places on earth inhabited by people who might never have seen Westerners with cameras. Clark Erickson and William Balée, the archaeologists, sat up front. Erickson is based at the University of Pennsylvania; he works in concert with a Bolivian archaeologist, whose seat in the plane I usurped that day. Balée is at Tulane University, in New Orleans. He is actually an anthropologist, but as native peoples have vanished, the distinction between anthropologists and archaeologists has blurred. The two men differ in build, temperament, and scholarly proclivity, but they pressed their faces to the windows with identical enthusiasm. Dappled across the grasslands below was 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 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. Balée, newer to the Beni, leaned toward this view but was not yet ready to commit himself. (clip) ---- http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/the-first-farmers-20110930-1l1gv.html The first farmers by Tony Stephens October 1, 2011 - 12:14AM The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia by Bill Gammage (Allen & Unwin, $49.99). THE still common assumption is that Aboriginal Australians in 1788 were simple hunter-gatherers who relied on chance for survival and moulded their lives to the country where they lived. Historian Bill Gammage might have driven the last nail into the coffin of this notion. Rather, Gammage argues, the first Australians worked a complex system of land management, with fire their biggest ally, and drew on the life cycles of plants and the natural flow of water to ensure plentiful wildlife and plant foods throughout the year. They managed, he says, the biggest estate on Earth. The publishers of his new book, The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia, say it rewrites the history of the continent. It's a big claim. But not too big, Gammage says. ''When I look at the subject, I think, that's right. When I think it's my claim, I think people might regard me as a mug lair. But I believe the book will lead to a rethink of what the Aborigines did.'' Henry Reynolds, the historian who has written extensively on the effect of white settlement on indigenous Australians, says in a foreword: ''He [Gammage] establishes without question the scale of Aboriginal land management, the intelligence, skill and inherited knowledge which informed it.'' Gammage draws striking conclusions from more than a decade's research: The Aborigines of 1788 could not have survived recent bushfires that killed dozens of Australians and destroyed houses, flora and fauna. Uncontrolled fire could wipe out Aboriginal food. People had to prevent it or die. They worked hard to make fire work for them. They burnt off in patches, knowing the sensitivities of different plant species and that timing was crucial. Evidence strongly suggests that no devastating fires occurred. The Aborigines farmed as an activity rather than a lifestyle. They grew crops of tubers such as yams, grain such as native millet, macadamia nuts, fruits and berries. People reared dingoes, possums, emus and cassowaries, moved caterpillars to new breeding areas and carried fish stock across country. They knew that kangaroos preferred short grass, native bees preferred desert bloodwood, koalas tall eucalypts and rock wallabies thick growth. The Aborigines set templates to suit land, plants and animals. Explorers such as Eyre, Mitchell and Leichhardt noted how indigenous Australians fired grass to bring on short green pick to attract kangaroos and other animals. To do this they had to make sure the grass was nutritious and to provide shelter so that the kangaroos would not feel vulnerable. There is no such thing as pristine wilderness in Australia. More trees grow in areas now known as national parks than did in 1788. Gammage, adjunct professor in the Australian National University's humanities research centre, is best known for his ground-breaking The Broken Years: Australian Soldiers in the Great War. His main sources for the new book are writing and art depicting land before Europeans changed it, anthropological and ecological accounts of Aboriginal societies, and the study of plant habitats. His huge bibliography include Abel Tasman in 1642, James Cook in 1770 and he credits researchers who sensed purpose in Aboriginal burning, including R.C.Ellis, Sylvia Hallam, Eric Rolls and Tim Flannery. Some critics assume that early colonial artists romanticised their landscapes but Gammage says they were the photographers of their day and sought accuracy. Joseph Lycett's painting, Aborigines Using Fire to Hunt Kangaroos (c.1817), depicts fire burning away from trees to a grassy area, driving kangaroos to the hunters' spears. By shaping the land carefully for grazing animals, the Aborigines paved the way for pastoral occupation. ''The more carefully they made the land, the more likely settlers were to take it,'' he writes. ''The Dreaming taught why the world must be maintained; the land taught how. One made land care compulsory, the other made it rewarding.'' Charles Darwin called indigenous Australians ''harmless savages wandering about without knowing where they shall sleep at night and gaining their livelihood by hunting in the woods''. Gammage believes we have not learned enough from them: ''Europeans defined civilisation as being like them. They thought Aborigines didn't know anything.'' He writes: ''We have a continent to learn … we must begin to understand our country. If we succeed, one day we might become Australian.'' _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
