Pre-contact New England
Muir’s treatment of native Americans follows William Cronon’s understanding of native cultures as agents of change who interacted with the ecosystems they inhabited in complex ways. Her innovation here is the use of archaeological data to argue that the Iroquois expansion onto Algonquian lands was checked by the Algonquian adoption of agriculture enabling them to support populations large enough to include a body of warriors that could hold back the threat of Iroquois conquest.
Read more about this topic: Reflections In Bullough's Pond
Famous quotes containing the word england:
“Why should the generations overlap one another at all? Why cannot we be buried as eggs in neat little cells with ten or twenty thousand pounds each wrapped round us in Bank of England notes, and wake up, as the Sphinx wasp does, to find that its papa and mamma have not only left ample provision at its elbow but have been eaten by sparrows some weeks before we began to live consciously on our own accounts?”
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)