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Book Review
| Prehistoric Native Americans and Ecological Change: Human Ecosystems in Eastern North America since the Pleistocene. By Paul A. Delcourt and Hazel R. Delcourt. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004, x+203 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $90.00.
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| If there is any lingering doubt over the idea that prehistoric Native Americans profoundly changed the nature of the landscapes they inhabited, this excellent book should lay it finally and firmly to rest. The Delcourts draw upon decades of work in paleoecology and long association with other disciplines to produce a remarkably concise and thoroughly researched synthesis of information bearing upon past human land use and its ecological effects in eastern North America. Despite the technical nature of the subject matter, the book is clearly written and should be easily accessible to the public as well as to students and scholars in a variety of fields. |
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Some of the topics covered (e.g., Pleistocene overkill models) will be familiar to those who have followed this debate. Less familiar are the long-term environmental effects of Indian land use on ecological community structures. Previous studies have been hampered by an over-reliance on historical documents, which are culturally biased and limited in time, or focus on one particular kind of environmental data, a practice hampered by equifinality. When multiple data sets—pollen, sedimentation rates, charcoal influx rates, plant macrofossils, charred seeds and wood, animal bones—combine in providing evidence of landscape alteration, then landscape alteration undoubtedly took place. This is the situation for multiple cases described by the authors, from areas as disparate as the Little Tennessee River Valley, the eastern Kentucky Highlands, the Central Mississippi River Valley, and southern Ontario. It is the full incorporation of archaeological data—long called for, but seldom obtained—that sets this work apart from other recent syntheses. The applied aspects of their work are well reasoned and convincing; importantly, they are not overstated as has often been the case in historical ecology and other fields. |
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Some parts of the book may be contentious, such as arguing for a European origin for Clovis culture. On a theoretical front, the authors adopt "panarchy" as a framework, essentially an elaborated systems theory which includes aspects of cycling in natural and cultural systems as well as conceptions of "adaptive social systems." Any models which incorporate human intentionality or other emergent properties of culture are problematical in that outcomes are predestined. Similarly, the baggage of cultural evolution—for instance, the idea that cultures become increasing complex through time in terms of social organization, stratification, competition for prestige and status, and so on— weighs heavily on the panarchy model. Such cultural phenomena cannot be assumed but must be demonstrated. Other concepts derived from processual archaeology are adopted non-critically, while the large body of literature on evolutionary archaeology is essentially ignored. This is unfortunate, as evolutionary theory is, of course, explicitly designed to deal with change over time such as can be detected in the archaeological and paleoecological records. Having the Delcourts' perspective on the use of evolutionary theory in archaeology would be a valuable contribution, and it is hoped that such a discourse will be included if a second edition of this superb work should be forthcoming in the future. |
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Evan Peacock is an associate professor of anthropology at Mississippi State University. He is the co-editor of Blackland Prairies of the Gulf Coastal Plain: Nature, Culture, and Sustainability (Alabama, 2003) and is a specialist in environmental archaeology. |
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