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The plane took off in weather that was surprisingly cool for north- central Bolivia and flew east, toward the Brazilian border. In a few minutes the roads and houses disappeared, and the only evidence of human settlement was the cattle scattered over the savannah like jimmies on ice cream. Then they, too, disappeared. By that time the archaeologists had their cameras out and were clicking away in delight. Below us was the Beni, a Bolivian province about the size of Illinois and Indiana put together, and nearly as flat. For almost half the year rain and snowmelt from the mountains to the south and west cover the land with an irregular, slowly moving skin of water that eventually ends up in the province's northern rivers, which are sub- subtributaries of the Amazon. The rest of the year the water dries up and the bright- green vastness turns into something that resembles a desert. This peculiar, remote, watery plain was what had drawn the researchers' attention, and not just because it was one of the few places on earth inhabited by people who might never have seen Westerners with cameras. Clark Erickson and William Bal. Erickson is based at the University of Pennsylvania; he works in concert with a Bolivian archaeologist, whose seat in the plane I usurped that day. He is actually an anthropologist, but as native peoples have vanished, the distinction between anthropologists and archaeologists has blurred. The two men differ in build, temperament, and scholarly proclivity, but they pressed their faces to the windows with identical enthusiasm. Dappled across the grasslands below was an archipelago of forest islands, many of them startlingly round and hundreds of acres across. Each island rose ten or thirty or sixty feet above the floodplain, allowing trees to grow that would otherwise never survive the water. The forests were linked by raised berms, as straight as a rifle shot and up to three miles long. It is Erickson's belief that this entire landscape. When I went to high school, in the 1. I was taught that Indians came to the Americas across the Bering Strait about 1. My son picked up the same ideas at his schools. One way to summarize the views of people like Erickson and Bal. Indians were here far longer than previously thought, these researchers believe, and in much greater numbers. And they were so successful at imposing their will on the landscape that in 1. Famous Family Trees: ’Gone With the Wind’s’ Author & Stars To celebrate the 80th anniversary of the publication of 'Gone with the Wind,' Ancestry staff. Columbus set foot in a hemisphere thoroughly dominated by humankind. Given the charged relations between white societies and native peoples, inquiry into Indian culture and history is inevitably contentious. But the recent scholarship is especially controversial. To begin with, some researchers. Meggers, of the Smithsonian Institution. Snow, an anthropologist at Pennsylvania State University. Much of the environmental movement is animated, consciously or not, by what William Denevan, a geographer at the University of Wisconsin, calls, polemically, . As the University of Wisconsin historian William Cronon has written, restoring this long- ago, putatively natural state is, in the view of environmentalists, a task that society is morally bound to undertake. Yet if the new view is correct and the work of humankind was pervasive, where does that leave efforts to restore nature? The Beni is a case in point. Painted a sharp shade of orange, the truck immediately. The Global Financial Crisis has given us.Donald Trump. In addition to building up the Beni mounds for houses and gardens, Erickson says, the Indians trapped fish in the seasonally flooded grassland. Indeed, he says, they fashioned dense zigzagging networks of earthen fish weirs between the causeways. To keep the habitat clear of unwanted trees and undergrowth, they regularly set huge areas on fire. Over the centuries the burning created an intricate ecosystem of fire- adapted plant species dependent on native pyrophilia. The current inhabitants of the Beni still burn, although now it is to maintain the savannah for cattle. When we flew over the area, the dry season had just begun, but mile- long lines of flame were already on the march. In the charred areas behind the fires were the blackened spikes of trees? Or should we let the trees invade and create a verdant tropical forest in the grasslands, even if one had not existed here for millennia? Bal. His name was John Billington. He came on the Mayflower, which anchored off the coast of Massachusetts on November 9, 1. Billington was not a Puritan; within six months of arrival he also became the first white person in America to be tried for complaining about the police. My family has always said that he was framed. Half the 1. 02 people on the Mayflower made it through to spring, which to me was amazing. How, I wondered, did they survive? In his history of Plymouth Colony, Bradford provided the answer: by robbing Indian houses and graves. The Mayflower first hove to at Cape Cod. An armed company staggered out. Eventually it found a recently deserted Indian settlement. All through the coastal forest the Indians had . A French ship had been wrecked there several years earlier. The Patuxet Indians imprisoned a few survivors. One of them supposedly learned enough of the local language to inform his captors that God would destroy them for their misdeeds. The Patuxet scoffed at the threat. But the Europeans carried a disease, and they bequeathed it to their jailers. The epidemic (probably of viral hepatitis, according to a study by Arthur E. Spiess, an archaeologist at the Maine Historic Preservation Commission, and Bruce D. Spiess, the director of clinical research at the Medical College of Virginia) took years to exhaust itself and may have killed 9. New England. It made a huge difference to American history. English, French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese mariners regularly plied the coastline, trading what they could, occasionally kidnapping the inhabitants for slaves. New England, the Europeans saw, was thickly settled and well defended. In 1. 60. 5 and 1. Samuel de Champlain visited Cape Cod, hoping to establish a French base. He abandoned the idea. Too many people already lived there. A year later Sir Ferdinando Gorges. It had more founders than Plymouth and seems to have been better organized. Confronted by numerous well- armed local Indians, the settlers abandoned the project within months. The Indians at Plymouth would surely have been an equal obstacle to my ancestor and his ramshackle expedition had disease not intervened. Faced with such stories, historians have long wondered how many people lived in the Americas at the time of contact. Combing through old documents, he concluded that in 1. North America had 1. Mooney's glittering reputation ensured that most subsequent researchers accepted his figure uncritically. That changed in 1. Henry F. Despite the carefully neutral title, his argument was thunderous, its impact long- lasting. In the view of James Wilson, the author of The Earth Shall Weep (1. Americans, Dobyns's colleagues . Dobyns's estimate proved to be one of the opening rounds in today's culture wars. Dobyns began his exploration of pre- Columbian Indian demography in the early 1. At the invitation of a friend, he spent a few months in northern Mexico, which is full of Spanish- era missions. There he poked through the crumbling leather- bound ledgers in which Jesuits recorded local births and deaths. Right away he noticed how many more deaths there were. The Spaniards arrived, and then Indians died. It hit him, Dobyns told me recently, . Along the way he joined a rural- development project in Peru, which until colonial times was the seat of the Incan empire. Remembering what he had seen at the northern fringe of the Spanish conquest, Dobyns decided to compare it with figures for the south. He burrowed into the papers of the Lima cathedral and read apologetic Spanish histories. The Indians in Peru, Dobyns concluded, had faced plagues from the day the conquistadors showed up. Brought to Mexico apparently by a single sick Spaniard, it swept south and eliminated more than half the population of the Incan empire. Smallpox claimed the Incan dictator Huayna Capac and much of his family, setting off a calamitous war of succession. So complete was the chaos that Francisco Pizarro was able to seize an empire the size of Spain and Italy combined with a force of 1. Smallpox was only the first epidemic. Typhus (probably) in 1. Dobyns was the first social scientist to piece together this awful picture, and he naturally rushed his findings into print. Hardly anyone paid attention. But Dobyns was already working on a second, related question: If all those people died, how many had been living there to begin with? Before Columbus, Dobyns calculated, the Western Hemisphere held ninety to 1. Another way of saying this is that in 1. Americas than in Europe. His argument was simple but horrific. It is well known that Native Americans had no experience with many European diseases and were therefore immunologically unprepared. What Dobyns realized was that such diseases could have swept from the coastlines initially visited by Europeans to inland areas controlled by Indians who had never seen a white person. The first whites to explore many parts of the Americas may therefore have encountered places that were already depopulated. Indeed, Dobyns argued, they must have done so. Peru was one example, the Pacific Northwest another. In 1. 79. 2 the British navigator George Vancouver led the first European expedition to survey Puget Sound. He found a vast charnel house: human remains . Its few survivors, second lieutenant Peter Puget noted, were . The virus, an equal- opportunity killer, swept through the Continental Army and stopped the drive into Quebec. The American Revolution would be lost, Washington and other rebel leaders feared, if the contagion did to the colonists what it had done to the Indians. From the few cases in which before- and- after totals are known with relative certainty, Dobyns estimated that in the first 1. Americas died. The attacks continue to this day. See recent updates on politics, sports, health, tech, and weird news on NBC Chicago. See recent updates on politics, sports, health, tech, and weird news on NBC Chicago. See recent updates on politics, sports, health, tech, and weird news on NBC Chicago. See recent updates on politics, sports, health, tech, and weird news on NBC Chicago. Jeff Sessions for the job of attorney general and Rep. Mike Pompeo as Closed Due to Boil Order. Closed Due to Boil Order
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