1. When was the "pristine myth" invented? 19^th century By whom? Romanticist writers and painters

2. What is Denevan's hypothesis? The “Indian landscape of 1492 had largely vanished by the mid-eighteenth century, not through a European superimposition, but because of the demise of the native population.

3. According to Denevan, how large was the pre-Columbian population of Central America and the Caribbean? 5.6 million What about Mexico? 17.2 million

4. Describe the scale and rate of mortality that resulted from the arrival of Europeans. ~90% reductions in ~150 years.  Much more rapid in some regions like the Basin of Mexico

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/20321

http://www.hist.umn.edu/~rmccaa/vircatas/virtab1.htm

http://www.hist.umn.edu/~rmccaa/vircatas/virfig1.gif


5. Compare Latin America's population in 1750 with Denevan's 1492 estimate. 12 million vs. ~39 million  How might this comparison partially explain the invention of the "pristine myth"? The population had decreased and rebounded to only ~30% of the pre-Columbian population.  Observers in the second half of the 1750s were looking at a landscape that humans had largely abandoned and in which the forests had recovered.  This empty forested landscape appeared to be “pristine”

6. Skip the "Eastern Forests" section.
 
7. What was the most important tool for vegetation modification? fire

8. How did people convert forest to long-term savanna in Central America?  Fire Why would they do that? Burning maintained a grassland habitat that was favorable for game species of wildlife.

9. How does the widespread occurrence of charcoal in the Amazon, or the rainforests of Central America, suggest that humans modified forests?  Think about the tropical rain forest climate. In such a moist climate fires are rarely natural.  This suggests that large populations of humans were managing land with intentionally set fires

10. What does anthropogenic mean?  Made by people

11. What are "swidden burns"?  Swidden is a synonym for slash and burn agriculture.  Swidden burns are areas where the forest has been cleared and burned.  How did they contribute to modifying the forests? Swidden burns removed original forest and re-set ecological succession so that the forest composition was dramatically different. 

12. What does Denevan mean when he says that ~40% of Latin American forest is "secondary"? By secondary Denevan means that ~40% of the forests already had been cleared by humans and regenerated as a secondary forest.

 13. What is a "swidden fallow"? Swidden fallow is the period when farmland is allowed to rest (fallow) and forest is allowed to regenerate.  How does it make a forest anthropogenic? Because humans control the regeneration, or succession, of the forest, the forest is anthropogenic.   

14. What were "montones"?  Montones were the many large hills in which indigenous peoples of the Caribbean planted their agricultural crops.  How were they evidence of massive landscape change?  Montones covered vast areas of Hispaniola which, under natural conditions would support a tropical rainforest. This demonstrated that the people had converted large areas of natural landscapes to agricultural landscapes.                 

15. What caused the "severe landscape degradation" in central Mexico?  Indigenous farmers or Spanish cattle?  Indigenous farmers.  The Spanish cattle arrived after population growth had forced indigenous farmers to overuse their lands and extend production to marginal lands both of which caused environmental degradation.

16. How did the environment recover by the late 1700s? By the late 1700s, the population of farmers had plummeted so much that agricultural lands were allowed to rest and forest to regenerate.  

17. How did coastal Panama's vegetation change from 1502 to 1681?  What caused the change? Drastic population decline allowed the cleared, humanized landscape of 1502 to regenerate into a forested, low human population density landscape by 1681.    

18. How did the environment of Yucatan change from 800 to the 1500s?  What caused the change. Drastic population decline allowed the cleared, humanized landscape of 800 to regenerate into a forested, low human population density landscape by the 1500s.  What is interesting about Yucatan is that European-introduced diseases did not cause the population decline.     

19. What does the first sentence on p. 380 mean? In the 16^th and 17^th century virgin forests were rare in the Americas.  After the great population declines, empty lands cloaked by regenerated (secondary) forests were common.  Observers interpreted these as virgin, pristine lands.

20. Did you learn any of this perspective on indigenous population and environmental modification in your K-12 classes?  Nope. Why or why not? Because I went to school in Louisiana.  Just kidding.  Or understanding of pre-Columbian demography and environmental modification is recent.  Also, education often supports national mythology.