There was a site online called the Mannahatta project which went to great lengths to recreate how Manhatten looked before Henry Hudson. It’s now evolved into Welikia and aims to cover the rest of New York as well.
The book of Mannahatta was also very interesting.
As was noted, the indigenous peoples had modified the land heavily-as deer cannot live in dense woodlands, the native Americans had burned down large areas, in order to generate grasslands/meadows. There were (of course) large areas of almost virgin forests, but these were in remote areas (montains, etc.0 that had few inhabitants.
What became of the mond-builder peoples? They lived in large villages-yet they disappeared long before the europeans came. WEre they the victims of epidemic disease?
Think back to the story of the Pilgrims that everyone learns in Kindergarten.
Did the Pilgrims encounter a pristine wilderness? No, the settled at the site of an abandoned Indian village, and there were Indian villages quite close. Why was there an abandoned Indian village ready for them to take over? Because the whole village except one person had died from an epidemic. And Squanto came over to help them out because they were living in his home village, and all his friends and family were dead. And they would have starved except the local farmers taught them to grow maize.
The landscape was very different in 1791 than it was in 1491. And the landscape can change very quickly. Take where I live, Vashon Island near Seattle. In 1940 most of the island was covered with strawberry and chicken farms after having been mostly clear-cut. Now, 70 years later, most of the island is forest, because the farms were abandoned. And if you leave a field for 5 years it’s going to be covered with blackberries and scotch broom, and if you come back in 20 years, it’s going to be covered with young alder trees when you get back, and if you leave for another 20 years it’s going to be covered with mature alder trees and young fir trees, and if you leave for another 20 years it’s going to be covered with mature fir trees.
If you walk down the street in an old established neghbourhood in the northeast, you will probably be surrounded by oaks, maples, etc. towering 100 feet or more. I’ve often wondered what the land looked like when that was the major element of the forests; most forests today are already logged and/or scrub land no good for serious farming. (Are there any such frorest cover left in the USA?) Undergrowth would be limited by the canopy of leaves and the detrius of dead leaves (that nobody raked!). Dead leaves decompose slowly and choke off most other wildlife, which is why we rake them off our lawns. Similarly, pine forests with giant pine trees often have a nice, open area instead of strong undergrowth due to the accumulation of decades or needles.
Most natives of the eastern USA used slash-and-burn agriculture, yes - they would clear new fields periodically with fire as they exhausted the old, and if the fire carried on to clear even more land - bonus. Certainly within a decade or more after abandoning fields, they would be overgrown to be impassable.
No evidence I’v heard that Indians had domestic animals for food, so partly their population density would be restricted by the need for hunting for additional protein.
As briefly mentioned above, one major change is that the dominant tree was the American Chestnut, which now rarely lives past the age of ten or so before being killed by an introduced fungus.
Tenochtitlan was no small settlement.
But other than roads, sanitation, irrigation, cacao, and preventing the Sun from being swallowed by a jaguar, what have the Aztecs ever done for us?
Yes one can. Ever been to the Great Smoky Mountains?
A picture being worth a thousand words, The Great Smoky Mountains
we’re talking about an area from the atlantic coast all the way to mississippi that is fully canopied by trees.
question, what is the area in the picture bordered with on all sides, still more forests?
Yes. As I mentioned (aside from the very first places Europeans landed) their diseases preceded them.
One example is de Soto, who wandered through the US south with a few men and a herd of pigs, [inadvertently] spreading disease as he went. Everywhere he went was so densely populated one village could see several others, and along the banks of the Mississippi you could practically throw a stone from one to the next. The next time a European went through the area 50 years later (Champion, was it? Don’t have the book to hand) it was practically deserted and there were literally mounds of bones. The social structure and cultural memory were so destroyed that they ended up forgetting that their ancestors had built the mounds.
Climax vegetation in the region from coastal Virginia to the Mississippi River would have produced precisely the sort of canopy still visible in the Smoky Mountains. So yes, if undisturbed, there could easily have been a continuous canopy.
Of course the Indians disturbed the continuity. The questions are when and how much.
Regardless, it is likely that in the hundred or so years between the Indians being decimated by disease and the arrival of the English in Virginia the canopy could have largely reconstituted itself (even if its growth had previously been checked to some extent by Indian cultivation and management).
So yeah, it might well have been possible at some point after English arrival for a squirrel to jump from tree to tree to the Mississippi.
i’ll accept that, thanks. but with one last qualification: when was the last time that place was visited by a fire (natural or man-made) or a strong hurricane? no sizable effect(s)?
The area of the United States east of the Mississippi was never covered entirely in trees. There are other rivers, lakes, barren land, plains, quagmires, and I don’t know how many other land formations that don’t support substantial tree life. Now there are vast clear cut areas that have been converted into artificial plains, and the human constructions of pavement and buildings that have reduced the percentage of forest greatly, but it was never 100% forest.
But was it mainly forest with clearings, or mainly clearing with pockets of forest? I seriously doubt the majority of the land was cleared. I would like to see some cite if that were the case.
The areas that won’t support tree growth east of the Mississippi are comparatively small. They would be islands in a sea of trees, and that is particularly so in the southern US.
Again, that is with vegetation unchecked by humans. 50 or 100 years after humans vanish from the world, the eastern US as seen from above would be mostly tree canopy.
Thanks, Calvin’s Dad!
Yes, islands of in the mass of trees. At some point construction and land clearing reversed that, where the trees are now the islands.
