The myth of the humanized pre-columbian landscape

Abstract

GEOGRAPHER WILLIAM M. DENEVAN of the University of Wisconsin is a leading researcher of what he calls "The Pristine Myth." He claims that "the Native American landscape of the early sixteenth century was a humanized landscape almost everywhere. Populations were large." 1 Arturo Gomez-Pompa and Andrea Kaus echo this assessment: "Scientific findings indicate that virtually every part of the globe, from the boreal forests to the humid tropics, has been inhabited, modified, or managed throughout our human past." 2 J. Baird Callicott similarly claims that "the wilderness idea is woefully ethnocentric. It ignores the historic presence and effects on practically all the world's ecosystems of aboriginal peoples.