America's Wetland: An Environmental and Cultural History of Tidewater Virginia and North Carolina

Introduction

1 Introduction At one critical period in America’s history the Albemarle region of southeastern Virginia and northeastern North Carolina was the absolute center of the non-Spanish New World. It was here in the 1580s that England chose to locate its first colony in the Western Hemisphere. This ‘‘lost colony’’ disappeared under mysterious circumstances, still one of the unsolved questions of the Age of Exploration. Nonetheless, this was just the beginning of the successful Jamestown era of English colonization. Migrating from the expanding Virginia colony, settlers soon returned to the Albemarle region. It was the earliest region of both North and South Carolina to be settled, a full generation before Charleston. The first colonial and state capitals of North Carolina were here; in fact, this immense coastal lowland is a region of many historic firsts. The Albemarle region contains America’s most historic wetland for another reason, perhaps of even greater significance. During the last ice age, and perhaps earlier, this region was a center of human habitation surviving at the northern end of a warm coastal strip. This wetland abounded in overwintering waterfowl, fish, and game, a rich oasis at the southern end of a tundralike region. The very early Clovis people had a tool factory (Williamson quarry) in the Albemarle watershed during the late ice age, over ten thousand years ago. Furthermore, recent evidence is emerging here of an earlier pre-Clovis people of the ice age itself, fifteen thousand years ago (Cactus Hill). Finally, Pleistocene Albemarle may present an environmental context for the contentious hypothesis dis- 2 W America’s Wetland cussed in chapter 1 that ice-age man may have migrated to America from Europe (Solutrean). The early settlements of the Albemarle region both by the pre-Clovis and Clovis peoples and millennia later by the Roanoke/Jamestown settlers are linked to a common environmental feature unique in the world. Although the coastline has moved erratically westward due to rising sea levels following the Pleistocene, this swampy region has remained for thousands of years at the northern end of a warm coastal strip, a freshwater wetland abounding in food and waterways naturally conducive to early human habitation.∞ This book is an ecohistory of the Albemarle watershed, an ancient, resilient wetland ecosystem that has featured disproportionately in America ’s history and prehistory. It is an account of a unique environment and its interface with man over a lengthy period of time, starting when people first arrived here some fifteen thousand years ago, or earlier. This land of rivers and swamps created an Albemarle ‘‘tidewater culture’’ in much the same way that the Berbers of the Sahara adapted to life deprived of water or the Inuits of the Arctic to life on frozen water. In addition, this book is an account of how man has affected this wetland environment. Examples abound elsewhere of how deforestation brought droughts to Saharan Africa, how overfishing has depleted fish stocks in the North Sea, and how release of fossil fuels may be contributing to melting ice in the Arctic. The following pages show that humans’ exploitation of natural resources in this region has been remarkably short-sighted, leaving each subsequent generation that much more impoverished . Humans have been altering the Albemarle environment with unprecedented intensity only over the past one hundred years or so, but this is not just a modern phenomenon. In fact, human alteration of this environment goes back tens of thousands of years, well into prehistory, when it was not done with such intensity but continued for a far, far greater period of time. Thus, early humans probably contributed to extinction of the mammoth and other megafauna, brought domesticated dogs with them into the New World, burned immeasurable quantities of underbrush and firewood, contributed to forest fires, and cleared land for maize cultivation. The final lesson, however, is that humanity is not central to determin- Introduction W 3 ing the Albemarle’s long-term environmental future, in spite of current appearances. Humans are only part of a much larger picture in this region . Overpowering environmental events have occurred here independently of humanity with a kind of regularity barely discernible over the short term. Warming periods, land submergences, droughts, prolonged freezes, mini ice ages, lightning-caused forest fires, great storms and floods are normal themes here, over the long term. They only become disasters when humans are affected, but human activities have significantly increased...