1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created by Charles C. Mann Page A

endured without wool; logs skidded through the forest without oxen. Distances loomed larger when people had to walk from place to place; indeed, in terms of the time required for Powhatan’s orders to reach his minions, Tsenacomoco may have been the size of England itself (it was much less populous, of course).

    Chesapeake Bay is the remains of a giant meteor crater. The impact shattered rock for miles, letting seawater infiltrate. The U.S. government suggests that salt levels should not exceed 20 milligrams per liter (mg/L); Jamestown water had more than twenty times as much and other settlements had even higher levels.
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    Just as most Europeans lived in small farm villages, most of Powhatan’s people—the “Powhatan Indians,” as the newcomers called them—lived in settlements of a few hundred inhabitants surrounded by large tracts of cleared land: fields of maize and former maize fields. The villages clustered along the three rivers—the Rappahannock, York, and James—that served as the empire’s main thoroughfares. Sailing up the James when they arrived, the English saw the banks lined with farms, fields greenly shimmering with newly planted maize, stands of tall trees interspersed among them.

    Rather than covering fenced plots with neat rows of wheat, the Powhatan planted many crops at once, as shown in this replica Wendat (Huron) garden in the Crawford Lake Conservation Area in Ontario, Canada. These farms and gardens were so different from anything the English knew that the newcomers often couldn’t recognize native fields as cultivated land. ( Photo credit 2.2 )
    Europe, too, had its own prosperous riverside farms. But there the similarities ended. To create a farm plot, Europeans cleared forestland, yanked out the stumps with horses and oxen, and plowed the result, again with horses or oxen, until it was a flat expanse of nearly bare soil. In these stripped areas farmers planted single crops: solid rustling expanses of wheat or barley or rye. Fallow plots were used as pasture. Dotting the open areas were patches of forest, clearly demarcated as such, used for hunting and wood.
    Lacking draft animals and metal tools, the Powhatan perforce used different methods and obtained different results. They toppled trees by circling their bases with a ring of fire, then laboriously hacked at the burned zone with stone axes until the trunk collapsed. Brush and slash were put to the torch, leaving a heave of blackened stumps. Around the stumps farmers dug shallow holes with long-handled hoes made from bone or clamshells, dropping in each hole a few kernels of maize and several beans. As the maize grew, the young colonist Henry Spellman observed, “the beans run up thereon”—twining themselves around the growing maize. Below the maize grew squash and gourds, pumpkin and melon, common beans and runner beans, ropy vines asprawl in every direction. Here and there patches of thick-leaved tobacco plants stood. The ensemble of charred stumps, hummocked land, and overlapping crops could stretch for considerable distances: “thirty to forty acres of treeless land per capita,” in one historian’s “conservative” estimate. Smith saw family plots that covered as much as two hundred acres—a third of a square mile.
    Except for defensive palisades, Powhatan farmers had no fences around their fields. Why screen off land if no cattle or sheep had to be kept inside? The English, by contrast, regarded well-tended fences as hallmarks of civilization, according to Virginia D. Anderson, a historian at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Fenced fields kept animals in; fenced woodlots kept poachers out. The lack of physical property demarcation signified to the English that Indians didn’t truly occupy the land—it was, so to speak, unimproved. Equally unfamiliar was the Powhatan practice of scattering their farm plots within larger cleared areas. To the Indians, fallow lands were a kind of