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Introduction to the Pristine Myth
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"//Guardians of the land. One with nature. Attached to all parts of the environment//." It's a common myth in Western study of American Indians that they lived lightly on the land, neither damaging nor improving their environment. They are assumed to have been more like an animal population than like Europeans in their placid acceptance of nature's bounties and perils. Supposedly, then, the Americas were largely Pristine wilderness when the Europeans found them. Known as the pristine myth, this is a false and harmful characterization. Native communities were instrumental in shaping the land around them, often for better, sometimes for worse. To recognize this is to appreciate wonderful feats of engineering, and also to discover follies to avoid.

American Indian Land Engineering
Anthropogenic features dominated the landscape of the Americas before the arrival of European colonists. American Indians created urban landscapes, massive farming plots, and artificial gardens. These provide direct counterexamples to the pristine myth.

Tenochtitlan
In the twelfth century, Aztecs built Tenochtitlan, their capital city. Tenochtitlan was built on an artificial island in the center of lake Texcoco in Mexico. In its heyday, the island was home to 350,000 people. Aztecs built a levee across the lake east of the city, and used it to transform the saltwater lake about them into a huge freshwater pond. Drinking water was imported via aqueduct from springs on the mainland. Several dozen square miles of central Mexico were thus an artificial environment built by Aztecs.

Agriculture
American Indians domesticated and bred many plant species. Maize, now ubiquitous in the Midwest, was domesticated from a scraggly grass called teosinte. Manioc, now a staple crop across South America and Africa, was similarly domesticated. Perhaps ten percent of the Amazon rainforest grows on soil called //terra preta//. In contrast to the near-barren red clay-filled soil of most of the Amazon, //terra preta// is rich and black, with many times the yield of the regular soil. It's also manmade: American Indian farmers burned wet vegetation in low-temperature fires. These fires smoldered almost continuously, producing charcoal, which was mixed into the soil with fertilizer and pottery to produce //terra preta//. The Amazonians literally remade the ground under their feet.

Gardens
Around Cahokia, the largest city north of Mexico until the eighteenth century, Indians transformed the forests into orchards, creating an abundance of fruit trees that survives to this day. 138 plant species were domesticated in the Amazon, and most of these are tree species. Contrary to the pristine myth, Natives did not just reap an abundance from nature: they created it.

Land Burning
Left to itself, the landscape in North America follows a predictable process called succession. Within half a decade, grassland gives way to a landscape populated by small shrubs. In about ten years small pine trees trees dot the land, which by year fifty is a pine forest. After about a century, the landscape stabilizes as a mature deciduous forest with dense undergrowth. This is not the type of forest the first Europeans found when they arrived. The Spanish reported moving through forest in what are now ten contiguous states without hindrance to even horses and wagons. The forest had high trees and little to no undergrowth. Elsewhere, the British and Americans found grassland good for hunting and forests in various stages of youth. These were the result of Indian land management. From the Haudenosaunee of New York to the Salish of California, American Indians burned the land in huge fires, producing landscape types most suited to each of their ways of life. In the southeast and elsewhere, tribes replaced burnt forests with nut and fruit trees to create huge orchards.

Disaster
While American Indian tribes accomplished many amazing feats, not all attempts at land engineering were a success. Two examples of catastrophe are the collapse of the Cahokian and Mayan civilizations.

Cahokia
Mentioned above as the home of many gardens, Cahokia was also surrounded by cornfields. The city was built on a small creek, the Canteen. Needing more water for irrigation and transportation, the Cahokians diverted another river to join the creek. This project was successful for a while, but led directly to huge summer floods which ruined crops and precipitated the abandonment of the site. This disaster was repeated at several other sites in the eastern United States in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

The Mayan Civilization
Built on hostile soil in a region prone to drought, the Mayan empire depended on engineered water supplies for survival. The Amazon basin rests on limestone which absorbs water and quickly dries out the surface soil, so the Mayans relied on complex paved reservoirs for agriculture and drinking water. From 526 to 682 A.D., the large city states in the southern half of Mayan territory were embroiled in a huge war. Cities were repeatedly sacked, and the knowledge necessary to maintain the reservoirs was lost. This was one of the main factors leading to the abandonment of the cities over the next two centuries.

Disappearance
Vast man-made landscapes, carefully controlled animal populations, and a network of roads greeted the first Europeans to travel the American landscape. To them, the pristine myth would have seemed ludicrous. It owes its modern acceptance to the demise of American Indian populations. Smallpox and violence are thought to have reduced Indian populations to less than ten percent of pre-contact numbers, and by the eighteenth century, this figure was less than one percent. With almost nobody left to maintain the vast artificial landscapes, succession took over. Roads, fields, and gardens inevitably morphed back into dense forest, leaving behind only traces: ruins of cities, unusual sediment compositions, and concentrations of fruit trees. Thus, when evaluating the pristine myth, one must consider the landscape as it was, not as it is today. If we can understand it properly, we have much to learn from American Indian land engineering.