The Ecological Indian
Subtitle: Myth and History
Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc
Published: August 1, 1999
Language: eng
Number of pages: 318
ISBN-13: 9780393047554
First sentence: BEGINNING 11,000 YEARS AGO, at the end of the period known as the Pleistocene, many animal species that had flourished just a short time before vanished from North America.
Description: "While many Americans are attached to a romantic, idealized view of the human relation to nature in North America prior to European contact, anthropologist Shepard Krech III attempts to examine what characterized actual Native American beliefs and actions. Native Americans had a vast and impressive store of knowledge about the natural world but, like everyone else, couldn't always foresee the consequences of their acts and didn't always act the way they believed they should.

Nor were their beliefs always perfectly adaptive to changing circumstances."--BOOK JACKET.

"The Ecological Indian addresses such fascinating questions as: Were Pleistocene-era humans responsible for the extinction of large mammals like the mastodon? Did the Hohokam of Arizona destroy their society by overirrigating and ultimately oversalinating their crops? What role did Native Americans play in the near-extinctions of the deer, the beaver, and the buffalo? How did Native Americans use fire?

Was the natural "Eden" that awed the first European visitors a feature of native "environmentalism" or just of very low population density?"--BOOK JACKET.