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INTRODUCTION The role of Native Americans in shaping pre-European landscapes is little understood. The myth of American Indians as “natural conservationists ”—as people in balance with nature in both a spiritual and a practical sense—remains very strong indeed (Denevan 1992; Peacock 1998a), despite archaeological and historical evidence to the contrary (e.g., Krech 1999; Redman 1999). There is an enormous popular literature to that effect, the bulk of which advocates a return to, or an embracing of, a more respectful attitude toward the natural world (e.g., Bierhorst 1994; Olson 1995). Without denigrating that worthy message, we believe that it is important to more accurately portray the effects of pre-industrial humans on the landscape, for three main reasons. First, to better understand native cultures as they existed before contact it is necessary to understand what sorts of environments they inhabited , why those particular environments were chosen, and how they were exploited. Second, to understand long-term plant and animal community dynamics, the role of humans as modi¤ers of those communities must be explored (cf. Goudie 2000). Finally, the perennial question facing all ecological reconstruction efforts—reconstruction of what?—remains a legitimate one (e.g., Kline and Howell 1987; Powers 1987) that must be answered on a case-by-case basis, taking into account the goals of the reconstruction effort (Apfelbaum and Chapman 1997) as well as any and all paleo- and neoecological data that pertain to those goals. When landscape evolution in the Eastern Woodlands of North America is discussed, far too often aboriginal populations either are left out of the picture altogether or some passing mention is given to historical 3 Terrestrial Gastropods from Archaeological Contexts in the Black Belt Province of Mississippi Evan Peacock and Rebecca Melsheimer accounts of ¤re use by Indians. These historical accounts offer only the briefest glimpse of the very end of at least 12,000 years of land use by human populations that, at particular times and places, reached considerable size. Those populations systematically exploited a vast range of terrestrial and aquatic resources. Plant domestication had appeared in some parts of the Eastern Woodlands by 5,000 years ago, and intensive , maize-based agriculture by 1,000 years ago. Hundreds of thousands of archaeological sites in the Southeast alone yield testimony to a long-term human presence in the region. Yet in ecology, history, biology , geography, and other disciplines that consider human/nature interactions at a landscape scale, papers still appear every year with that most inaccurate of modi¤ers—“presettlement”—attached to descriptions of pre-European landscape conditions (e.g., Beach 1994; Foster et al. 1992; Nelson et al. 1998). It has recently been argued, based on the ubiquity of archaeological remains, that this practice should be avoided in any discussion of Holocene environments in the New World (Peacock 1998a:18). Environmental archaeology provides a forum for tying together different kinds of data from different disciplines to address questions of long-term human/nature interactions. Unfortunately, environmental archaeology is still woefully underdeveloped in the Southeast. In recent syntheses, either the environment is portrayed as a backdrop against which broad cultural patterns emerged (Smith 1986) or human effects on the landscape are minimally mentioned (Steponaitis 1986:388). The backdrop is provided by paleoenvironmental reconstruction (something of a misnomer—see Peacock and Reese, this volume), which itself was present “only in embryo form until rather recently” in the Southeast (Watson 1990:47). As Reitz (1993:129) put it, “many archaeologists in the southeastern United States still appear to be operating under the in®uence of environmental possibilism and preprocessual research interests more appropriate to the 1940s than the 1990s.” Environmental archaeology earned no place in The Development of Southeastern Archaeology (Johnson 1993), which quite accurately focused on culture history and processual archaeology, the dominant regional paradigms (Dunnell 1990). In that historical overview, papers discussing biotic remains from archaeological contexts concentrated primarily on methodological and subsistence issues, although there is some coverage of the effects of husbandry practices on plant evolution (Gremillion 1993; cf. Smith 1992). Reitz (1993:126–127) noted that with the advent of the systems-oriented New Archaeology of the 1960s, a goal of zooarchaeological studies became “to study fundamental relationships between humans and their environment, with primary emphasis on the biological aspects of environment.” Generally speaking, these “relationships” were explored in functional terms; that is, the orientation was on eco28 Peacock and Melsheimer logical systemics as opposed to evolutionary analysis and explanation. Such a functional orientation, characteristic...

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