Eruptions and Disruptions

Abstract

This chapter takes on a long-term perspective on key trends in the historical ecology and political ecology of Native American landscapes during the colonial era. It examines how climate change may have impacted landscape adaptation both prior to and after the arrival of Europeans. There is a detailed overview of Native American plant and animal exploitation, and how subsistence patterns changed from the 1500s to the 1800s.The chapter also devotes considerable attention to the importance of the deerskin trade in Indigenous landscape economies, and the rise of enclosure and private farms following the American Revolution. These trends are explained in terms of transformations in ideological as well as materialist views of the landscape.