North America before Columbus

[Gary Barton]

Please delet my name from routing list. gb

-----Original Message-----
From: Doug Millison [mailto:millison at online-journalist.com]
Sent: Friday, April 26, 2002 12:40 PM
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Subject: North America before Columbus


Some M&D readers may find this article interesting:


http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/interviews/int2002-03-07.htm

"F or years the standard view of North America before Columbus's arrival
was as a vast, grassy expanse teeming with game and all but empty of
people. Those who did live here were nomads who left few marks on the land.
South America, too, or at least the Amazon rain forest, was thought of as
almost an untouched Eden, now suffering from modern depredations. But a
growing number of anthropologists and archaeologists now believe that this
picture is almost completely false. According to this school of thought,
the Western Hemisphere before Columbus's arrival was well-populated and
dotted with impressive cities and towns-one scholar estimated that it held
ninety to 112 million people, more than lived in Europe at the time-and
Indians had transformed vast swaths of landscape to meet their agricultural
needs. They used fire to create the Midwestern prairie, perfect for herds
of buffalo. They also cultivated at least part of the rain forest, living
on crops of fruits and nuts. Charles C. Mann, in "1491" (March Atlantic),
surveys the contentious debate over what the Americas were like before
Columbus arrived-a debate that has important ramifications for how we
manage the "wilderness" we still have left, if indeed it really is
wilderness, untouched by the hand of man. [...] "