Ramble: Poorly-grounded speculation on pre-contact forestry.
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- čas přidán 24. 03. 2024
- WARNING: This is speculation. I ask that you do not treat this as more substantial than it is. It's a few paltry factoids with some guesswork on top, nothing more. It is what it is.
It's frustrating when you go to research a topic and are unable to find anything useful. This happens a lot in my line of work. Here is a neat idea, except that I can't find anything on the subject to build a video out of.
My apologies for any inaccuracies in speaking about the Ojibwe, I am minimally knowledgeable about them, and while I generally prefer to stay in my lane I also didn't want to omit one of the only interesting factoids I was able to turn up.
Hopefully some of you find these thoughts interesting despite the lack of flow and dearth of evidence or objective fact within.
Link to patreon if you feel like supporting the channel and getting your name in the credits once every fortmoon.
www.patreon.com/user?u=3998481
Loved this discsussion of indigenous forestry. As always, you offer lots of great perspective.
I would love a collab between the two of you! :)
Oh man, I could definitely see this happening in a lot of areas.
Native Elder: "We do not cut down anything from the forest, we only take was has dropped."
Young White Impressionable Hippy: "Woah, you love mother nature that much?"
Native Elder: "What? No. Have you ever tried to cut down a tree with a stone axe? Not worth it."
For us (Mi'kmaq) my understanding is that most couples had their children gather underbrush and fallen dead wood for general heating fires. But for us, typical person moved around a lot despite also having somewhat permenant villages. There is a bit on us making charcoal, gathering hardwood branches for bow-wood, one of our medicines and glue is birch oil which is made using a derviative of charcoal making technology, different materials for smoking food (or groups of people at gatherings to keep the bugs away haha). Different woods for different uses. There are these oversized axes archeologists found in the states, that are hypothesized to be tree splitters for dugout canoes, and then used mallet and stone wedges to continue spliting the trees. I do not recall any source though literally describing the process of cutting down a tree (or big branch), or the general principals of wood-harvesting. It is usually applied (the craft or fire-wood purpose, this tree is ideal wood for this).
I agree with your analysis and I have a HALF BAKED idea about processing large trees. It would be possible to split large trunks using wooden wedges driven by wooden clubs. Rough wedge shapes occure naturally when limbs break and could be modified with stone tools. Then the cracks that form as the wood dries out could be exploited with the wedges to split the log into wedge shapes and maybe even "planks" if you are lucky. So if a good tree fell in a convenient place it might be left to dry out for a winter and then be processed into useful stuff? There might be nich aplications (shovels?) where boards and planks would be useful enough to make the effort? Just spitballing.
I've tried splitting planks from some large hardwoods, it's a ton of work, particularly with just wooden wedges, which don't survive long under heavy pounding. I think there is probably a size limit which will vary from species to species.
Wonderful to see First Nations' life as a coherent pattern rather than random and arbitrary activities
I might be doing a Phd on that subject. I suggest you read Daniel Fortin's last book on his master's thesis. It is called : La Vallée Laurentienne au XVIe siècle, entrevoir la construction de la niche des Iroquoiens du Saint-Laurent. Which roughly translate as : The Laurentian Valley in the 16th century, glimpse at the Saint-Lawrence Iroquoian niche construction, a historical landscape study.
Cheers!
I don't know if this will alter your calculus, but green wood is much easier to work. If I were building a bow with hand tools, especially stone tools, I would want to do the bulk of the work immediately, and the remaining wood would dry more quickly than the initial bulk, and would withstand a faster drying process without developing cracks. Additionally, I can straighten or bend the wood with fire if it already has moisture in it. If I'm making the bow out of a ring porous wood, I want it from a tree that grew fast.
I have built with green wood . It was a post and beam construction and it pulled together very nicely as it dried. You just had to hammer the pegs in a bit more in some places. It made interesting noises at night as it cooled in the summer.
I love this video, thank you! I just wanted to attempt to contribute to the conversation a little and add an additional source of information--aberrations in the "native range" of food plants. There are quite a few nut bearing trees that have a solid, contiguous range in the Southeast or west of the Appalachian range, and then isolated disjunct populations in Haudenosaunee territory and specific concentrations near known pre-contact population densities, both in the United States and Canadian sides of the St. Laurence. Some examples of these are burr oak, swamp white oak, chinquapin oak, shellbark hickory (a prime example), in New England; and American hazel being planted at portages in central Canada. Additionally, walking around the Finger Lakes you see many, many, many individual trees that are just not typical of the species--and are atypical in ways that would benefit people. Individually all of these could be just a biogeographical accident or anomaly, but together it adds to a quantity of data pointing to deliberate trade and planting of useful plants in useful areas. In historic times there is a specific example of this in the form of an apple variety called the "Munsee stripe apple" that was carried and planted by a segment of the Lenape population as they moved around with David Zeisberger's migrations. Thanks again for your good work!
With regards to isolated populations in the finger lakes region, some of it is likely human influenced, but not most. Maps don't communicate the biome very well. The finger lakes, Mohawk valley region is a pocket of standard Carolinian forest surrounded by mountainous regions, which will clearly encourage different species. We should not be surprised by ostensibly isolated populations given the geography.
@@MalcolmPL Of course, there are a lot of influences to consider which make firm conclusions difficult. From spending time in these areas it does seam like there has been some deliberate human intervention, holding their thumb down on the scale a little, if you will. The forms and specifics of the nuts falling in these areas are often different from what I have seen from the same sets of species in southern Pennsylvania.
Hi Malcolm! Request for you, and apologies if you've already covered it. But could you enlighten us on woodland aboriginal burials? Mounds, rock piles, cairns, etc. Where, why, and how they were placed; and how to spot them from natural rock deposits. Apparently there are countless in my area of Eastern Ontario, and I would love to know more and what to look for.
the way you talk makes it very easy to digest the information, I would love to listen to talk for hours about pre-contact hunting and bushcraft
Hello Malcom! Great video, love your "rambling".
I've read part of Finding the Mother Tree. It covers events in BC, but the author's family is from Quebec. The book covers how indigenous knowledge instructed her lumberjack family not to fell "Grandmother trees". It then proceeds to cover the author's scientific work on the mycelium and how trees share nutrients.
This being said, I don't remember whether that knowledge is from Quebec or BC indigenous people. I hope this can help!
Having not watched the video yet, but being a forester, the website LandFire allows you to look at climate and pollen record data to look at what plants were likely present in any given location (and subsequently we can make assumptions about management practices)
That said, in the east, many tribes likely heavily used fire to clear land and favored large masting trees like oaks beech and hickory. These species prefer upland and dry areas though. In wetter areas they favored things like Maples.
Strawberry and rubus (raspberries) fields were likely maintained (with fire) under large masting trees.
Edit: after watching the video, it sounds like you came to the same assumptions id make. I haven't seen any data on the cedar replanting but its definitely not a crazy assumption. Cedar or something like red pine could rotate to small pole/useful status in a few decades. At least for the type of constriction likely going on.
Thomas Morton in his New English Canaan also mentions the land being burned twice a year.
Interesting discussion as always. I always love how casual you make these videos. Nothing fancy, just some good casual conversation about topics you think wouldn't be interesting, but honestly are.
I was taught that in the Eastern Woodlands down south, large trees would be cut by girdling them and waiting for them to die, or by setting small fires around the base. They needed to harvest the forest giants for building large dugout canoes, especially for coastal journeys.
I can't comment on eastern Canada and pre Columbian forest BUT.... I have an 1860 edition of "Journey in the Backcountry" by Frederick Law Olmstead, American landscape architect and designer of NYC Central Park. His pre-Civil War travelouge into the Deep South in late 1850s gave great details on the still extant primordial forest, especially in southern Mississippi.
He wrote specifically about the awe inspiring long leaf pine "savannah" climax ecosystem that extends from near the coast and inland for 150 miles (?) from east Texas to South Carolina. He noted the massive trees were spaced far apart, enough so that 2 or 3 wagons could easily navigate side by side between the giants.
His travelogue is similar to descriptions in letters and diaries of my family who travelled overland in ox pulled wagons from South Carolina to Mississippi in 1807.
Even with steel axes they wouldn't attempt to chop down the trees but rather would "girdle" them to kill them. They would burn down the knee deep pine straw and plant corn. Over several years the tree would rot down until they were then burned, but the lack of canopy during those years enabled crops to grow.
They also made rails of the easily split pine and would construct pens to occasionally corral the cattle at night and habituate them to human contact. The cattle/oxen were driven out to graze the glades in the surrounding forest but tubs of salt were kept in the pens to entice the cattle/oxen to stay nearby. These "pens" are an old anglo saxon cultural relic when raising cattle in forested areas and along drover trails. A famous American Revolutionary battle occured at such a site. The battle of "Cowpens" South Carolina is kinda famous.
The pens would be kept in same spot for several years then disassembled and rebuilt farther in the woodland. The old pen site (1/2 ac size?) would have been enriched by all the manure and urine from the occasional overnight "pennings". They provided great planting sites.
I imagine the Indians here probably did the same thing in terms of girdling trees and planting beneath the standing dead trees.
Anyway, just another perspective from a different region/ecosystem
I really appreciate that you put this project idea aside when you couldn't find enough to say to be useful and came back to it after additional thought. I regard you as one of the best thinkers in your wide area of study. This time I was really struck by your idea that the Iroquois and Ojibwe forestry practices were most likely different based on their cultural differences; i.e. small villages with small structures, more reliance on hunter/gathering than agriculture and frequent changes of villages for the Ojibwe verse large villages/towns with large longhouse structures, greater reliance on agriculture, and moving about once a generation for the Iroquois. As a non-native, I often assume a cultural similarity between various native nations living in the same environment that isn't necessarily there. I'll need to avoid that assumption in the future. It also highlights why scholarly input from today's native peoples offers important insight into native people in the past.
Separately, I have given the firewood and building "timber" problems of ancient peoples a lot of thought. As you stated, cutting down large hardwoods with stone axes and even copper or bronze axes was rarely worth the time except for special projects like dugout canoes, roof timbers for ceremonial buildings[temples, meeting halls, palaces]. Because of the difficulty in chopping down large trees with stone, copper, and even bronze axes, peoples around the world relied much more on deadwood and coppiced trees for firewood and small timber. Splitting and dividing large logs with stone tools was also extremely difficult. Several year old shoots of coppiced trees are still small enough to "saw" them off with stone tools or chop them off with stone, copper, or bronze axes easily. Smaller, they dry much faster. Log houses were nearly unknown because wattle and daub or thatched buildings like the Anglo-Saxon pithouse or the earth homes of the Mandans were so much easier to build.
Hey Malcolm, your scholarship is so inspiring. Keep it up, you’re doing great. It really warmed my heart to hear my name at the end of your video. I appreciate you!
this is exactly the kind of content i'm here for
I guess it would have to be freshly felled trees in order to make sense. There's not much you could do if something is already rotted through & you can use the smaller branches & leaves for medicine, firewood, etc.
I know they didn't live too close to swamps, but they were always within a short walk or canoe ride of a village because they were excellent resources for several food & medicinal plants & Natives did like to sort of permaculture areas near their villages for a variety of purposes- swamps to produce more food, groves of fruit trees just outside the village, converting small areas into grassy fields for certain berries & to lure in more grazing animals & ground nesting birds. Some types of forest did have to be regularly burned out on purpose, though, because they would get so aggressively overgrown- particularly pine forests. And, there wasn't much need to worry about the soil quality, until after colonization, because most of North America which had been under the glaciers in the last ice age had forests which had evolved to be loamy. The glaciers actually got rid of all the earthworms & they never came back, so the garden-like soil piled up & the plants all evolved to do best in that environment, some even requiring it to even grow at all, which is why North America now has so many endangered plant species. Sadly, we're only just now beginning to prioritize effective methods to actually undo some of what we did in small areas, so we can prioritize stockpiling our Native species in areas we aren't likely to use any time soon & we can use what we learn from that to better restore some of our swamps & forests.
Practical hypotheses abound... 2 Thumbs up 👍 👍
"Typical hippie dippie crunchy granola whoo flake stuff" is a GOOD power violence sample
Elder trees are not just useful for humans who are able to understand their value when alive but essential to the forest itself. A forest is not a group of trees standing next to each other but an entity as a whole. Those old trees are weathered, stormed, invaded by bugs and such and survived. When trouble arises, experienced trees sends warnings, signals, chemicals, samples of what to do via their roots to the adjacent trees and forest gets ready (those who are having hard time imagining trees communicate may read about mycorrhizal fungi, crown shyness and other fascinating topics of ecology). Trees *are* social. So, when humans sees those giants and says "that's a lot of wood" and cuts them down, forest loses its memory if you will.
Burning of the under brush, felling of relatively "useless" trees changes the workings of forest. People turned forests into wooded savannas that way. A mosaic of rivers, ponds, marshlands, meadows, savannas and groves are more productive and diverse than a singular continuous monotypic flora. I've only heard this kind of land management from parts of pre-contact North America. This is beyond anyone has managed to do. You see, mammoths and mastodons did that before they perished. Alongside the beaver and the boar (where they are native), they were the ultimate gardeners (elephants still are, may they live forever), their way of doing things created the booming ice age ecosystems. Humans stealing the role of wolves after extirpating them is common in many parts of the world but continuing the mammoths work is just awe inspiring to me. With or without knowing exactly what they did, doesn't matter. Nature doesn't care our reasoning, just the work we put in. Humans always participate in the cycle of life, even the most ignorant and detached ones are too. This participation is destructive for the most part. What people of the north did with their environment, converting land to be more lush, carrying salmon eggs in wet moss clad chests to rivers where they don't spawn, "trading" with squirrels for nuts in exchange for corn and countless other practices, to boost it, to make it more fruitful for everything on it is what human culture should have been if are to live on this rock and water.
If all this sounds hippie to some in a bad light, know that I'm not. I ain't even American, nor I was born in its hay day. So, I can't be hippie. I'm just a guy. Like every default guy, I just wish well.
Thank you for this inspiring ramble and reading through my ramble. I'm gonna go draw some stuff :)
Love your content, don't always need to agree (although I tend to) to recognize high quality opinions and well thought out stances/essays. When you say "my usual informants," who are you referring to?
Champlain, Cartier, Sagard, Lafitau, the Jesuit relations.
I've read a few chapters from the book "Stewards of Splendour: A History of Wildlife and People in British Columbia" by Jennifer Bonnell which discusses pre-contact forestry and post-contact forestry (in British Columbia). It might be of interest to you.
The Pottawatami of southern Michigan would burn fields, probably every year, to maintain what Europeans called prairies for agricultural use. Prairies were open fields without brush which frequently had good quality soil.
Pole trees, saplings of certain species, are the most useful building material which can be gathered fairly easily, with stone axes, knives and by pushing them over and breaking them. Because this material is the most utility for the least effort, I suspect most time was spent collecting pole trees, and less time cutting down anything larger.
Are there any surviving precontact examples of Iroquoian bows? The crown height on the backs would be great insight into the diameter of the hardwoods being used. Even so, like you said they may have just worked already dead trees. However, a long dead tree may be easy to work but the wood would surely be too rotten for a good bow. A recently dead hardwood would be good but there is still the issue of splitting the trunk into a stave for a bow. An old bow maker I know believes natives may have waited for windstorms to snap a tree and take a large natural splinter as their stave. Just writing my thoughts down but I think it would be very interesting to find out how they did these things with stone tools. Modern counterparts in south america aren’t much help, most tribes in south america seem to quite uniformly use black-palm as their bows. They cut them green, and work with them machetes and dry after that, not to mention the properties of that tree are quite different from hardwoods.
The earliest surviving bows that I know of are from the 1760s. So not helpful.
If they were burning underbrush it wouldn't kill any sizable fallen branches because in order to burn the forest a lot of precaution and care and attention and people would be employed and boundary of the burning scope well defined and so if there was anything of value in that lot it would have been nabbed up.
Also I don't really get the idea of how burning underbrush helps with deer, yes it would be easier to see them and make clear shot, but it's also easier for them to see you and you have less opportunity for stealth behind brush. Also if the underbrush is all burned, what are the deer going to eat? Why would they even be in a burned forest.
I was surprised when you said you did not believe that cutting or using trees went with a philosophy, but merely practice.
Have you made a video on the general fundamental differences in perception of the Earth between native peoples and colonists? Whatever Forestry practice natives utilized, as you suggested, since their entire lives were intrinsically woven by the natural environment the Forestry practice would have been one that worked in benefit for both them as a people and the forest itself which in turn benefits the people. But then as technology increased the intimate reliance of the natural world decreased and exploitation goes up.
This trend is obvious but I also greatly appreciate technology so I feel ambivalent.
The Forestry of natives seemed to exist in a sort of stasis, a repetition of the ancestral ways more or less. Like the seasons and the patterns of nature. Europeans however were already on the trajectory towards the industrial revolution even that early on. far from a stasis that emulates the cyclic nature of earth. A society that would exponentially transform towards a never reached climax, and using more and more resources to fuel and sustain this endless revolution. I'm really rambling now...
I think there is a philosophy at the core of it. I think there's inherent assumptions in Christianity that led to the civilization we find ourselves in now. But that's a whole other thing I don't fully understand yet
If you are going to be staying in the area for a long time, a burned brush forest might offer more food value to the deer. A lot of higher calorie and easier to digest plants like to grow in burn areas, which is good for people, and deer prefer that as well. Also, deer love acorns, so a place where it is easier to find fallen acorns might attract more deer.
@@anonymousthesneaky220 thanks, this makes sense
How much trade do you suppose the people of the Eastern Woodlands with Mississippian cities, such as Cahokia? In one of your short answers videos, you mentioned that the Iroquois probably had a recognition of countries across the continent, but Cahokia is fairly geographically close. What kinds of goods do you think would have been traded if trade was reasonably common?
Also, something completely irrelevant but kind of cool that I found on Wikipedia is that a Hawaiian leiomano was found in a burial mound. It only had 5 real shark teeth, all of the others were knapped fake teeth.
I haven't come across any mention of trade with them specifically in any papers I've read, but my knowledge of the missisippians is very limited.
I've looked at a decent bit of their pottery, and from what I've seen, their pottery is very different to Iroquoian pottery, so presumably there wasn't a ton of interaction. Groups that interact frequently tend to borrow styles and motifs from each other. Mohawk and Wendat pottery are very similar to one another and even Ojibwe or Mi'kmaq pottery share some notable elements with the Iroquoian style.
I also don't really know what period trade goods would be worth a journey of that length, it looks relatively close on a globe, but in practice that's a long old way and there are mountains in between. I can't see someone travelling those kinds of distances for corn, pots or deerskins if there are closer options. And if the Mississippians wanted shells it would probably be easier to go follow the Mississippi to the sea rather than looping and portaging through the great lakes to the st Lawrence.
@@MalcolmPL Thanks!
2:12 "stone axes are between 1/3rd and a quarter as efficient as a steel axe depending on the quality."
What is the highest possible quality stone axe? How do you make it and how good is it? Is such a topic worth making a video on?
People probably wouldnt have bothered with making the most optimized stone axe possible because its a stone and a stick, its gonna dull and break no matter what you do so the time is better spent making more axe heads
Well, that depends on context. If you consider the whole world the answer is clearly jade axes, which is the stone that comes closest to steel in the key property of toughness. Locally (in this case northeastern North America) the best stone axe is greenstone scraped off of the Canadian shield by the glaciers, and in the greenstone belt in Maryland, USA, but the material was traded widely in pre-contact times. It is not quite as good as jade, but as a material generated in serpentinized facies it shares some similar properties and can support an edge geometry more acute than chert can. Which brings us to chert--it can take the sharpest edge of these materials (because knapping inherently produces a sharper edge than peck and grind processing methods), but since it has the least toughness it won't hold that super sharp edge after the first strike and you end up being forced to dial it back to an edge geometry more obtuse than the inherently less-sharp materials. Fine grained basaltic and rhyolitic materials are between greenstone and chert. Metamorphic stuff like hornestone and metamorphosed argillites or slates are all over the map and very source specific, I can't generalise these. Sandstones and quartzites are pecked and ground into "axes"--but these are better understood as a hammer or mace of some sort than a wood working tool. Now, do remember that pre-contact times are not metal deficient, copper work and the making of copper axes is probably 10,000 years old in North America (the point at which glaciers exposed the Michigan native copper deposits), beating Europe to this technology by quite a lot! But, at the time of contact the surface exposures of this material had been depleted and the North American copper trade was switching from the recovery of native copper in the north being traded south, to copper smelting in Mesoamerica resulting in copper trade to the north and this trade was leaving the east coast out, making stone axes the dominant technology at that point in history due to this availability problem.
Two videos that Malcolm has already made which might provide some insight on this are "Antler axe vs stone axe vs modern steel" which is about axes specifically, and "6 types of first nations knife" which covers the various types of materials that tools could be made of at the time.
The best stone axes are ground (not knapped) from fine-grained, hard, tough igneous or metamorphic stone. Look into the late Neolithic/chalcolithic/early bronze age of Europe. The early Yamnaya people (the progenitors of all modern Europeans aside from Basques, finns, and Sami) are well-known for these axes, though they doubtless were made all around Eurasia.
No concrete evidence, but good ideas non the less. In Neolithic Europe stone axe swinging farmers could exploit their pig's enthusiasm for uprooting anything in their way. So I'm afraid comparisons from over here won't help much.
Were some native Americans practicing pollarding? Alliteration not intended.
I haven't seen anything on that besides speculation.