LESSONS IN LANDSCAPE LEARNING

Abstract

For those of us who worry about colonization, this is a most welcome volume. Too often in the past, the question of how colonizing groups new to a place learned that landscape has rarely been addressed, or if addressed, only in the simplest of ways. In my own world, for example, deceptively complex simulation models have been crafted to show that initial colonizers could move with breathtaking speed through a continent as vast, unknown, increasingly exotic (as they moved south), and highly diverse (in both space and time) as North America, by focusing their subsistence efforts on big-game animals. In these models megafauna serves as keystone taxa, enabling people to override ecological boundaries without having to learn much more about resources and place than how to track mastodons in the forest, once their distant cousins on the Plains – mammoths – were left behind.

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