Finally finished reading 1491: New revelations of the
Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann. I wanted it to be more science and less journalism and more North America than South America, so I guess I need to just read more about that now.
South America:
“Speaking broadly, their solution was not to clear the forest but to replace it with one adapted to human use. They set up shop on the bluffs that mark the edge of high water – close enough to the river to fish, far enough to avoid the flood. And then, rather than centering their agriculture on annual crops, they focused on the Amazon’s wildly diverse assortment of trees.
“In his view, the Amazon’s first inhabitants laboriously cleared small plots with their stone axes. But rather than simply planting manioc and other annual crops in their gardens until the forest took them over, they planted selected trees crops along with the manioc and managed the transition. Of the 138 known domesticated plant species in the Amazon, more than half are trees. (Depending on the definition of ‘domesticated,’ the figure could be as high as 80 percent.) Sapodilla, calabash, and tucumá; babaçu, açai, and wild pineapple; coco-palm, American-oil palm, and Panama-hat palm – the Amazon’s wealth of fruits, nuts, and palms is justly celebrated. ‘Visitors are always amazed that you can walk in the forest here and constantly pick fruit from trees,’ Clement said. ‘That’s because people planted them. They’re walking through old orchards.’” (pages 340-341)
North America:
“Between these fields was the forest, which Indians were subjecting to parallel changes. Sometime in the first millennium A.D., the Indians who had burned undergrowth to facilitate grazing began systematically replanting large belts of woodland, transforming them into orchards for fruit and mast (the general name for hickory nuts, beechnuts, acorns, butternuts, hazelnuts, pecans, walnuts, and chestnuts). Chestnut was especially popular – not the imported European chestnut roasted on Manhattan street corners in the fall, but the smaller, soft-shelled, deeply sweet native American chestnut, now almost extinguished by chestnut blight. In colonial times, as many as one out of every four trees in between southwestern Canada and Georgia was a chestnut – partly the result, it would seem, of Indian burning and planting.” (pages 297-298)
South America:
“Speaking broadly, their solution was not to clear the forest but to replace it with one adapted to human use. They set up shop on the bluffs that mark the edge of high water – close enough to the river to fish, far enough to avoid the flood. And then, rather than centering their agriculture on annual crops, they focused on the Amazon’s wildly diverse assortment of trees.
“In his view, the Amazon’s first inhabitants laboriously cleared small plots with their stone axes. But rather than simply planting manioc and other annual crops in their gardens until the forest took them over, they planted selected trees crops along with the manioc and managed the transition. Of the 138 known domesticated plant species in the Amazon, more than half are trees. (Depending on the definition of ‘domesticated,’ the figure could be as high as 80 percent.) Sapodilla, calabash, and tucumá; babaçu, açai, and wild pineapple; coco-palm, American-oil palm, and Panama-hat palm – the Amazon’s wealth of fruits, nuts, and palms is justly celebrated. ‘Visitors are always amazed that you can walk in the forest here and constantly pick fruit from trees,’ Clement said. ‘That’s because people planted them. They’re walking through old orchards.’” (pages 340-341)
North America:
“Between these fields was the forest, which Indians were subjecting to parallel changes. Sometime in the first millennium A.D., the Indians who had burned undergrowth to facilitate grazing began systematically replanting large belts of woodland, transforming them into orchards for fruit and mast (the general name for hickory nuts, beechnuts, acorns, butternuts, hazelnuts, pecans, walnuts, and chestnuts). Chestnut was especially popular – not the imported European chestnut roasted on Manhattan street corners in the fall, but the smaller, soft-shelled, deeply sweet native American chestnut, now almost extinguished by chestnut blight. In colonial times, as many as one out of every four trees in between southwestern Canada and Georgia was a chestnut – partly the result, it would seem, of Indian burning and planting.” (pages 297-298)
No comments:
Post a Comment