ELIZABETH | 2006-09-23
When I talked about the desperation in academia to prove INdians didn't kill hte mammoths and giant sloths, Elizabeth added a comment about the "balds" in Appalachia. These are mountain tops that Indians regularly burned off, destroying the trees. She also pointed out that large areas of the East where the "nature-;oving" Indians lived were reduced to prairie.
Here isa comment from Marshall de Bruhl's 1993 life of Sam Houston. It is a grovelingly politically correct book in general, but he did let this slip. He was discussing hte fact that white settlers of the Shanandoah Valley found it already cleared. He explained htis by the fact that, in order to get herding animals to hunt there, the Indians burned it off every year:
"The standard portrait of the native Amerians as benign ecologists is somewhat marred by this practice. One forester obserrved that had this seasonal burning xontinued, in a few centuries Vorginia would have beomce eitehr a PRAIRIE or a desert."
You know those temples that are found inthe middle of the Central American jungles? It turned out that the Indians built up civilizations there and destroyed the trees and brought on doughts and flooding that brought down each civilization. The jungle, with its thin, Amazon-like soil, then grew over it.