Succession in a Northeastern deciduous forest

Charles Mann wrote a wonderful book that every American should read, from Alaska to Ushuia, called 1491. The book asks the question, “What was going on in the Americas before Columbus came?” Mann is not an anthropologist- he’s a journalist- and he does a great job of bringing many different voices in from the scientific community, many of which disagree with each other, in order to create an intelligent conversation about the extent of Pre-Columbian civilization. In the end, the take-away message is that there were many more people here than commonly thought, and they had extensive impact on the land. They were not the harmonious nomads that they are painted as. They were farmers, fishermen, hunters, city-dwellers, and across the continent they employed novel techniques to manipulate the land for their benefit. They made vast fruit and nut woodlands in the eastern US, geometrical earthworks for capturing fish in Bolivia, and engineered new, fertile dirt in the Amazon (to name a few).
Elizabeth Dworkin owns a house in upstate New York, about four hours north of the city, and I’m lucky enough to be her guest this weekend. As I hung my head out of the Toyota Corolla window, highway breeze on my teeth, my thoughts quickly shifted from funk grooves and low-cost housing to biodiversity and historic land use.
In 1491, Mann created a great section on the misperceptions surrounding the Native American tribes of the Northeast. The misperception stems from a simple disappearing act: one moment the Indians were there, and the next moment they were gone. Between Columbus’ landing in 1492 and the settlement of the Chesapeake in the early 1600’s, there were ships cruising the coast, trading with towns. According to the journal entries of the first of these traders, towns lined the whole coast, one after another. The towns were big, had fortification walls, fields of corn and squash and veggies, and complex culture and tradable goods. However, a hundred years later, when the pilgrims settled, journal entries described a “virgin forest” all along the coast, a foreboding dark tangle of trees… Where there had recently been cities similar to those on the Mediterranean coast, now there was just wildness, wilderness, and a few nomads.
This was not a magic trick. According to Mann’s sources, there were in fact millions of Indians in the Northeast, with cities and governments and culture. And those first trade ships brought epidemics that swept through and killed up to 95 percent of the population. The “harmonious nomads” that we found in the forests and on the plains were in fact refugees fleeing from the plague.