I’m inspired by something much like the husp idea. My idea is a little more specific. How might Plateau Indian cultures have evolved differently, if they could have accessed Old World knowledge and biological resources without an accompanying conquest? I’ve done a lot of thinking on this, and I’ve developed some theories I’m fairly confident with.
FOOD
My study of prehistory indicates a hierarchy of
staple food preferences:
1. Big Game Animals
2. Fish and Small Game
3.
Roots and Seeds
4. Intensive Use of Seeds (Agriculture) as last resort.
(a healthy diet includes other foods, like fruits and greens, but the above foods are the only foods with enough protein and fat or carbs to be used as staples)
There is only a short list of food groups in nature that are rich enough for the human species. Societies will only descend the hierarchy when preferred food resources are marginalized or destroyed, most commonly due to population pressure.
Because of Pleistocene extinctions, and because amplified human hunting pressure kept bison off the Plateau, Plateau people were fisherman. But there’s reason to believe they’d rather have been big game hunters. When horses became available, Plateau people would actually ride hundreds of miles over the Rockies, through hostile territory, to hunt bison on the Plains. Why? Would you rather wear a buffalo robe or salmon skins? They also quickly adopted
cattle, amassing large ranging herds.
Only when pollution, commercial fishing, and later dams, destroyed their fishing lifestyle, did Plateau Indians accept grain farming. In contrast, many of them eagerly became ranchers and gardeners as land ownership became the norm.
The Great Basin Cultures, to the south, never had bison herds, or salmon streams. These people were specialist seed collectors. They did things for food that would have seemed desperate to Plateau people. They drove jackrabbits into painstakingly constructed nets, they set traps for packrats, they ate insects and reptiles, and they laboriously winnowed and ground tiny hard seeds into edible gruel. Food scarcity forced them to be extremely nomadic, whereas Plateau people had permanent or semi –permanent villages. Without large hides for clothing, Great Basin People wove clothing from twisted strips of jackrabbit hide or sagebrush bark.
With the salmon gone, Plateau people might have resorted to a Great Basin sort of lifestyle, but there may have been too many of them, and whites were forcing them to settle.
But, what if the Indians could have chosen which Old World things to take or leave?
I think if the Plateau Indians had had their choice, they’d have imported all of Eurasia’s larger herbivores. Think Mongolia: horses, cattle, camels (and why not elephants too? Some modern biologists want to use surviving elephants as proxies for extinct mammoths and mastodon). These animals would have probably been taken into individual ownership, but kept in unfenced communal herds, as the Indians are known to have kept their horses. Fencing, beyond corrals, seems to happen only where agriculture develops alongside pastoralism. Unlike wild bison, owned animals are less likely to succumb to overhunting, despite a high human population. If the Indians did wish to maintain wild herds, they would need to enforce hunting regulations, much like our own. The most effective way to harvest from wild herds is the use of seasonal drives into communaly constructed corals. This need not be a harrowing hunting adventure. Deer are easily caught in snares. The favored hunting techniques of yesterday would be called poaching today.
Herds of large animals would have minimized one of the Indians most important chores: landscape burning. People around the world resorted to ‘fire stick farming’ after the megafauna went extinct and took savannah and parkland biomes with them. Control of woody vegetation was once achieved largely by the megafauna. Mastodons are known to have browsed on many conifer species, and may have even pushed trees over to reach the needles. Shrub oxen ate sagebrush and rabbitbrush. Other large browsers, like the American camel, played similar roles. Without megafauna, the burden of controlling woody vegetation falls to humans, who are savannah adapted creatures. Indians thus allied themselves with the most ferocious of herbivores, fire, to maintain open spaces for hunting, berrying, and
root digging.
Despite the sedentary life offered by salmon fishing, I think many people would have preferred a nomadic life with the herds. Some of the nomadic bison hunters of the Plains are thought to have abandoned sedentary farming after the arrival of horses. Herder families can be very wealthy, and villages can be cramped and lice ridden. Violent conflict over grazing territory would probably flare up occasionally amongst herders. But presumably a relatively stable system of territories would emerge.
People in fishing villages, with their large populations, could hold their own against the herders. Fishing villages would be the group most likely to pursue horticulture. They would probably grow root vegetables in small fenced gardens for their own use, and for trade with the herders. They might grow potatoes in pine needle mulch and fish wastes. Historic fisherman would do anything to keep the rivers clean, and would detest any plowing in the watershed (an early white explorer once got severely chastised for discarding a single bone into the Kettle Falls fishery).
Gardening might make the harvest of some wild vegetables, like bitterroot, obsolete. But all indigenous farmers gather select wild foods. You can’t beat serviceberries, and venison! Some important root veggies, like parsnips, burdock, Jerusalem artichoke, and
groundnut would naturalize and could be gathered from the wild.
Horticulture would allow some villages to move away from the Columbia, to wetter forested areas and canyons. These villages might require domestic animals. Marmots would probably be domesticated, as have
rabbits and guinea pigs. Fowl would be popular. Pigs might be controversial. Some Indian groups expressed anger at pig keepers when pigs pilfered their camas grounds. If swine went feral, some wild foods would decline. Would the pork make up for it?
It seems unlikely that irrigation would be much utilized. Our geography isn’t especially conducive to primitive canals, and our rainfall is ample for the development of dry land techniques. We know stone mulch was used to grow crops like cotton in drier areas of the Southwest.
Horticultural societies are often matriarchal. Do you ever wish that women were in charge? I do.
In moist coulees and low elevation forests, sensible people would establish fruit and nut trees: chestnuts, walnuts, pome, and stone fruits, persimmons, mulberries, ext. Our region is fruit heaven. All the food trees presently known to grow wild in the region could be planted on a large scale. It is likely that the use of certain trees near villages would be ‘owned’ by families. But even today, the vast majority of fruit trees go unclaimed. We might see a pattern of use similar to prehistoric California’s populous acorn fed villages (proper squirrels would need to be introduced if nut trees are to naturalize. The Western Gray Squirrel is the best candidate). The forests were already being managed as food forests, using burning and other techniques. Smart managers could girdle dud trees and protect good ones, favoring quality in the population. Managers would hasten the recovery of our forests from the ice sheets, by fostering a greater level of tree diversity common in other pine forests. Oaks are one particularly conspicuous absence. Indian fires were already favoring a patchy mosaic landscape, which mitigated catastrophic fire. The use of large animals, and the advancement of late succession hardwoods, would reduce fire frequency and improve soils.
One hedge against deforestation is that Plateau fishing villages where fueled by driftwood, being located near places where driftwood accumulated. Plateau people had polished stone adzes for carving, but no axes for felling. Small trees were cut with bone chisels and stone adzes. Large timbers, used only for cedar planks and canoes, were obtained as driftwood or felled with fire. However, with large animals, fuel transport would be possible. If the Romans had used coppice fueled
rocket mass heaters, would they still have deforested Europe?
With abundant salmonids and mussels, Plateau people might not take aquaculture seriously, but they could benefit from the introduction of warm water fish into existing lakes and ponds (carp, catfish spiny rays). Baited basket traps are one of the easiest ways to harvest these species.
If the population became dense enough, hierarchies might emerge. We know Northwest Coast cultures became populous and complex enough to harbor slavery. The relatively egalitarian societies of the interior probably owed their
freedom to their sparse population. Salmon fishing limited villages to the river bottoms. Horticulture would allow for much more of the land to be settled, and would almost certainly increase the population. History shows the freest people live in marginal areas.
With a high population density, agriculture threatens. What is to keep broad scale wheat from developing? Aggression from herders might dissuade, but only temporarily. It’s possible that wheat, with its low yields, might be ignored, in favor of high yielding root vegetables. But with a hierarchy in place, yield might be ignored for the sake of easily amassed wealth, via grain stores. If chestnut trees really do yield as much as organic wheat, we may have a solution. But much of our wheat growing area is probably too dry for chestnuts.
My nightmare is something like the Inca potato empire, where every frozen mountainside is covered in crowded suburban potato terrace. Protein starved people in tiny stone huts are sleeping with guinea pigs and burning llama shit to stay warm. No trees. No wildlife. Everybody is kissing the ass of a totalitarian communist government that sentences entire ethnic groups to labor camps. The god-complex emperor lives in a palace and rides around on a litter carried by slaves. Some of you probably think ancient farming societies were really groovy. Not me. I’d rather not have my beating heart cut out by the Aztecs or be nailed to a cross by the Romans. Empires have been making life hell long before oil and industry. Pre-oil doomerism?
Why don’t these people ever stop after a few potato terraces or a few rice paddies? Is it the elites that end up forcing people to exploit the entire landscape? Are peasants just suicidaly competitive? How do we keep this from happening? I have a few ideas.
High population density may be inevitable since small populations are vulnerable to conquest (although, nomads like the Mongols do sometimes give farmers hell, and this might be possible again in a post oil future. Climate instability may also favor nomads). But perhaps even populous societies can stave off hierarchy and population growth through ecologically sound food production. For instance, a food system that incorporates a tree, a fish, a large animal, a few small animals, and five vegetables is like a simple mini-ecology. It will be stable and productive. If it is stable and productive enough, its users will be affluent, and affluent people plan their families. An ecologically sound food system does not need to expand. Affluent people can also be more resistant to hierarchy than starving peasants. It is hard to control people who have what they need, just as it was hard to control the tribes while the bison still roamed and the salmon still spawned. If we could design a viral food system that is so weedy and insidiously productive that it is hard to destroy, that might limit hierarchy. Imagine a populous affluent society, where everyone has plenty of leisure. Old people keep up on the news, teach the young, and forge ties with the neighbors. The young people are healthy and smart, engaged in sports and hunting, and loyal to their elders. Each household is interconnected yet self-reliant. Would you want to mess with a society like that?
I should stop here. If you liked reading this, I could write more. I still haven’t covered the topics of
shelter or technology. Also, if you like the husp topic, I think you might find my INPC talk interesting. It's in the videos section of my website.
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-Art Donnelly
