Ethnohistory of Aboriginal Landscapes in the Southeastern United States. MA Thesis (1986) at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Published in Southern Indian Studies (1992): Vol. 42: 1-50 (original) (raw)
Related papers
1992
Native inhabitants of the Southeastern United States traditionally practiced land management strategies, including burning and clearing, that created ‘anthropogenic landscapes’. From the viewpoint of landscape ecology, analysis of historic documents including drawings and deerskin maps from the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries depicted the Native Southeastern landscape as a series of circular patches surrounded by buffer areas. This character contrasted sharply with early European coastal settlements which were more typically rectangular in shape. Differences between Native American and European land use patterns and implied perceptions of the landscape reflect distinct differences in their respective cultural models and intentionality.
Exploring Precontact Tribal Settlement Ecology: A Case Study from the North Carolina Piedmont
North American Archaeologist, 2012
Ecological studies of prehistoric and precontact tribal groups have tended to focus on the environmental aspects of ecology; far less research has explored the social, economic, and political interactions that influence interactions between a group and its environment and landscape. In this research, we present a comprehensive approach to studying tribal swidden agricultural ecology through the use of archaeological settlement patterns. We use a combination of ceramic analysis, landscape reconstruction, and discriminant function analysis to explore the relationships between settlement location, size, and various environmental and cultural features of the landscape. Our work focuses on societies of the upper Yadkin River Valley in the North Carolina Piedmont during 800–1600 CE. Our results indicate that sociopolitical factors strongly influenced ecology, suggesting that we take more inclusive approaches to studying the influences on the settlement and ecology of tribal cultures.
Native American landscape modification in pre-settlement south-west Georgia
Landscape History, 2020
Our objective was to interpret the presence and magnitude of landscape modification by Native Americans on Georgia's southern coastal plain. Specifically, we aimed to understand how the Native American presence influenced the distribution of fire-tolerant, mast-bearing and fruitbearing tree species in the fire-dominated landscape of southwest Georgia. Our study area was comprised of sixteen contiguous counties in the southwest region of Georgia, in southeast USA bordering the Atlantic, investigating the taxon Angiosperms and Gymnosperms native to the early landscape of this region. We used witness tree data collected during the early 1820s across sixteen modern-day counties to reconstruct pre-settlement forest composition, particularly pyrophillic trees that are well-adapted to tolerate fire, and mast-and fruit-bearing species. We then used geographic distribution models (Boosted Regression Tree) to interpret the presence and magnitude of landscape modification by Native Americans on Georgia's forested southwest plain. The pre-settlement distribution of pyrophillic and mastbearing trees within our study area were best explained by a combination of environmental (topographic relief, proximity to riparian zones, and soil depth) and Native American factors (AUC = 0.64 and 0.66, respectively). However, the addition of Native American presence as predictors greatly increased the explanatory power of soft mast (fruit)-bearing models (AUC = +0.17). Our results demonstrate that Native American activities had a measurable influence on pre-settlement plant communities in southwestern Georgia. However, the effects of these activities on vegetative composition were most notable in the distributions of fruit-bearing trees. In contrast, distributions of fire-tolerant and mast-bearing taxa were found to be largely explained by a combination of environmental and anthropogenic factors.
Vegetation History and Archaeobotany, 2019
Historic land survey records (LSRs) offer important details on local-and landscape-scale vegetation patterns related to Native American land-use practices prior to widespread Euro-American settlement. This study's use of an expanded range of vegetation related variables derived from LSR sources, combined with archaeological site distribution data, and analysed using complementary multivariate statistical methods, has provided new insights on the spatial and compositional dynamics of the vegetation of central New York State, USA, an area historically occupied by the Cayuga and Onondaga nations. The upland vegetation of the study area was modulated primarily by fire, followed by soil fertility, and canopy disturbance. Clear signals of Native American agriculture and silviculture were associated with a number of fire-tolerant vegetation communities that were geographically concentrated within an area most conducive to maize cultivation. Numerical classification partitioned the LSR vegetation data into distinct community types: mesophytic upland forest and xerophytic upland forest. This latter type was secondarily differentiated into an unequivocally anthropogenic landscape (Iroquoian agricultural mosaic) and a series of fire-tolerant forest and savanna communities with possible connections to silvicultural land-use practices. Distance analysis of ordination scores indicated statistically-significant spatial trends associated with the distribution of archaeological sites, with disturbance most heavily concentrated within 6 km of most sites. Given the success of this methodology, we recommend that this integrated approach become the standard for LSR-based research of Native American vegetation disturbance.