Preadaptation and European Colonization in Rural North America

Abstract

The European colonization of rural North America and its resultant mosaic of cultures and ethnicity provided a rich subject material for historical geographers. Seven descriptive themes and concepts—region, diffusion, landscape, first effective settlement, simplification, environmental perception, and humans as modifiers of the earth—have traditionally been employed by geographers in their study of rural Euroamericans, providing an impressive empirical body of knowledge upon which to base our causal analyses. Seeking explanation, we began assertively as environmental determinists, subsequently moving to economic and cultural determinism. Few sought holistic explanations. It is here suggested that cultural ecology, and in particular the concept of preadaptation, offers an additional, potent, but largely unused explanatory device for the interpretation of overseas European farm settlement. If used in conjunction with economic and cultural determinism, preadaptation can contribute to our explanatory ability.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 21 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.