Native People Did Not Use Fire to Shape New England's Landscape
Phoenix666 writes:
Our team of paleo-ecologists and archaeologists collected sediment cores from 23 ponds across southern New England. We analyzed ancient pollen grains, fragments of charcoal and clues about past water depth, all preserved in the mud, allowing us to create a record of vegetation, fire and climate over thousands of years.
[...] Of course, the indigenous people of New England utilized and relied on a wide variety of natural resources: they hunted, fished, foraged, and cultivated some edible plants. Pre-Colonial societies were complex, widespread and large, with populations in the tens of thousands. But the evidence suggests they didn't use fire to open large swaths of the landscape for agriculture. Rather, over more than 10,000 years, these highly adaptable people shifted activities seasonally across the landscape, taking advantage of a wide range of resources and exerting limited, and most likely very localized, ecological impacts overall.
[...] When we analyzed the mud in our study ponds, we found the obvious signature of forest clearance by 17th-century European colonists. Pollen from forest species declined, while pollen from agricultural and weedy species, like ragweed, increased abruptly. This evidence clearly shows New England's open land habitats owe their existence to Colonial European deforestation and agriculture, especially sheep and cattle grazing, hay production, and orchard and vegetable cultivation in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Journal Reference:
W. Wyatt Oswald et al. Conservation implications of limited Native American impacts in pre-contact New England$, Nature Sustainability (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41893-019-0466-0
Interesting to think pond sediment may also one day mark the stages of our civilization, such as the Age of Cigarette Butts and the Time of AOL CDs.
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