Don't you wish you could have seen it? America before colonialism started terra forming?

[Skidmore]

http://popular-archaeology.com/issue/09012013/article/research-allows-reconstruction-of-precolonial-landscape-in-eastern-u-s

Popular Archaeology
exploring the past

Vol. 12 09012013 -

Research Allows Reconstruction of Pre-colonial Landscape in Eastern U.S.
Wed, Nov 13, 2013

It's all in the leaves.

Research Allows Reconstruction of Pre-colonial Landscape in Eastern U.S.
Other than cities, towns, and road systems, what we see today on the eastern mid-Atlantic U.S. landscape is quite different than what Native Americans saw before European contact. It was a world that essentially vanished as colonizers took root and transformed their environment to meet their needs. This is nothing new to most historians.

Thanks to recent research, however, scientists can now reconstruct that landscape with accuracy, providing information that may also help manage the environment of today.

It all has to do with milldams and leaves. According to a team of geoscientists, sediment behind milldams in Pennsylvania preserved leaves deposited just before European contact, providing a glimpse of ancient forests. To get to this, they examined samples of 300-year-old leaves buried by sediment backed up behind Denlinger's Mill in Lancaster County. The leaves fell from trees from above the location of the dam. As sediment rapidly covered and "entombed" the leaf layer, the leaves that were deposited before the construction of the dam were preserved intact. ...more

[hunter]

1. Pre-colonial American communities were like any other human communities.

Some were nice places, some were not, with a lot of people muddling-through-in-between places, suffering either capricious environments or capricious political-religious traditions, or worse, both.

Our own civilization is headed into a bad "worse, both" phase, mostly of our own making.

But humans will not be able to blame gods for this catastrophe. We've created a world civilization that is not sustainable.

[Skidmore]

2. I think the point of the article was to reconstruct

what the land looked like before settler started cutting forests and fencing fields. I find the use of clues in the soil to get at the flora from earlier time periods to be a fascinating study.

[hunter]

6. The American landscape had been "cultivated" for at least 10,000 years by humans.

It simply wasn't "cultivation" as the European invaders understood it.

The same was true in Australia, New Zealand, New Guinea, Hawaii, and all the other places Europeans labeled the locals "savages."

These places generally enjoyed carefully maintained permacultures. People planted useful trees for their grandchildren and optimized the environment for game animals and edible plants.

The people from Western Europe didn't see that.

[csziggy]

3. The Welikia Project shows Manhatten in 1609

http://welikia.org/

After a decade of research (1999 – 2009), the Mannahatta Project at the Wildlife Conservation Society un-covered the original ecology of Manhattan, one of New York City’s five boroughs. The Welikia Project (2010 – 2013) goes beyond Mannahatta to encompass the entire city, discover its original ecology and compare it what we have today. Welikia (pronounced “WAY-lee-ki-a” Hear Welikia pronounced) means “my good home” in Lenape, the Native American language of the New York City region at the time of first contact with Europeans. The Welikia Project embraces the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island and the waters in-between, while still serving up all we have learned about Mannahatta. Welikia provides the basis for all the people of New York to appreciate, conserve and re-invigorate the natural heritage of their city not matter which borough they live in.
http://welikia.org/about/overview/

They have an interactive map that can be explored - it's amazing!

[Skidmore]

4. Thank you for that URL. Will spend some time exploring it.

[PETRUS]

5. This reminds of of an interesting book I read as an undergrad.

Changes in the Land, by Cronon. The landscape had already been altered by humans before European colonization, but in ways different from what was to come.