Customer Reviews

Imperfect Balance: Landscape Transformations in the Precolumbian Americas

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This book draws together a huge range of data on Native American plant and animal use and environmental management in pre-Columbian times. The chapters are by leading authorities, and are comprehensive enough to inform the scholar, while well-written and accessible enough to be valuable to the beginning student. In recent years, publishers have given us a plethora of badly informed books on traditional Native American resource management. Most of them either portray Native Americans as ecological saints or as wasteful destroyers. To such works, the present book is an ideal antidote. It discusses the major known cases in which Native American cultures intensively modified the landscape to produce highly productive, long-sustained agricultural systems. The authors wisely refrain from pontificating on the saint vs. savage issue, but the implication is clear: Native American land management systems were highly diverse but usually sustainable, at least in the medium term, and often exceedingly complex and sophisticated. Notable and very valuable are chapters reviewing the natural vegetation of each region. These not only provide necessary background for the specific case studies; they are also wonderful review articles in their own right. In particular, the chapters on South America bring together materials previously accessible only through many scattered sources in several languages. This book is an absolute "must read" for ecological anthropologists and ethnobiologists. It seems to me to be only slightly less indispensable for ecologists, environmentalists, and environmental historians. On the whole, the book is not action-oriented; it provides data, not applications. Charles Peters' chapter is a welcome exception. While sympathizing with the authors' overall goal of providing "just the facts, ma'am" (as Joe Friday used to say), I am glad Dr. Peters took the next step, and I rather wish that at least some of the other authors had gone farther in that direction.