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3 Culturally Altered Trees In my book Picture Rocks:American Indian RockArt in the NortheastWoodlands, I reflected upon the question of why there were not more petroglyphs and pictographs in this region as compared with the rock art of the American West. I suggested that some of the answers lay in the history and geography of the region. European settlement, which came early to this area and was much more intense than in the West, may have destroyed much of the rock art that was here. Also, rock in the Northeast is predominantly hard granites and dense igneous basalts,making carving here a physical challenge.The vast virgin forest, on the other hand, offered other materials on which symbols and pictures could be placed. Documentary sources indicate that much of the land in the northeast region was exploited for its timber resources beginning with the early period of European settlement in the seventeenth century.Wood was needed for the construction of homes, outbuildings, tools, and furniture and for fuel. Extensive areas were logged and the land was cleared for agricultural purposes. By the end of the nineteenth century,vast areas had been cleared,developed, planted, or grazed. Such intensive landscape modifications would have destroyed any carvings or paintings on trees that may have been present. The environmental and climatic conditions in the Northeast would have also degraded or destroyed any culturally modified trees that survived the onslaught of civilization. I have found a number of examples of Indians carving or painting tree trunks and bark from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. These examples of culturally modified trees suggest that the Indians of this region had a long tradition of using wood as an artistic medium. Perhaps the creation of images and symbols by the Indians was much more common on trees and bark than on rock. One of the earliest documentary references to a carved message on a tree is illustrated in Joseph Francis Lafitau’s Customs of the American Indians 24 / Chapter 3 Compared with the Customs of PrimitiveTimes (Lafitau 1977 [1724]:Plate III). Lafitau, a Jesuit missionary and ethnologist, depicted “a North American Indian engraving his portrait on a tree, and writing in his way what he wishes to make known by this kind of monument. At the bottom of this plate are shown in detail paintings of this sort, each one of which can be regarded as a letter” (Lafitau 1977 [1724]:6).William C. Sturtevant (1977:287) in his study of the sources of the illustrations noted that those depicted in Lafitau’s Plate III “give the impression of derivation from an original Iroquois pictograph source.” David Zeisberger, a Moravian missionary to the Indians, wrote in 1779– 1780 a history titled “Von Der Indianer Gestalt u Lebensart” in which he described the practice of Indians marking trees;this history was published in an English translation in 1910. He wrote, “If a party of Indians have spent a night in the woods,it may be easily known,not only by the structure of their sleeping huts but also by their marks on the trees, to what tribe they belong. For they always leave a mark behind made either with red pigment or charcoal . Such marks are understood by the Indians who know how to read their meaning” (Zeisberger 1910:114). In 1794, George Henry Loskiel, another Moravian missionary to the Delaware Indians, wrote the following detailed description of the Indians’ methods and reasons for carving or painting trees: Their hieroglyphics are characteristic Figures, which are more frequently painted upon trees than cut in stone.They are intended, either to caution against danger, to mark a place of safety, to direct the wanderer into the right path,to record a remarkable transaction,or to commemorate the deeds and achievements of their celebrated heroes, and are as intelligible to them as a written account is to us.For this purpose, they generally chose a tall well-grown tree,standing upon an eminence, and peeling the bark on one side, scrape the wood until it becomes white and clean. They then draw with ruddle, the Figure of the hero whose exploits they wish to celebrate, clad in his armor, and at his feet as many men with heads or arms as fell by his own hand. These drawings may last above fifty years, and it is a great consolation to the dying warrior, that his glorious deeds will be preserved so long, for the admiration and imitation of posterity...

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