I've always liked books about places and how the environment has changed over time: ecological histories, tales of peoples' places, studies of adaptation or calamity. Reading one lately--that I won't single out because it's no more culpable than most--reminded me of a fault in the genre. And by fault, I mean giant hole, chasmic abyss, gaping lacksomeness, over which authors sometimes stretch a canvas whose tableau fools only those who are not paying attention. This gap began opening soon after large numbers of humans began writing, and goes by the name Prehistory.
Literacy begat History, which captured some of what came before and more than you can read ever since, but which also is nearly blind to all but the most exalted knowledge more than a few decades before its arrival. Eventually, Natural History felt pent up and begat Geology, and now we can read stacks of books not just about the earth and how it got that way, but also about the history of life on earth (Paleontology, Son of Geology).
That span between the arrival of human hordes capable of altering entire ecosystems and their bothering to write about it remains mostly unknown even to scholars in the field. In places like Hawai'i Island, we are lucky because Kamakau, Malo, Kalokuokamaile, and others recorded the agricultural history and knowledge of their people. But mostly the sources for historians of the land are a few explorer accounts, the occasional missionary (Christian or Capitalist) excoriation of native practices, and metaphorical allusions coded into "mythology" collected by anthropologists long ago. To the modern outsider, the non-descendants who write about such things, the prehistoric past becomes nothing more than prologue, something influential but not not the subject of the book. An acknowledgment, without so much knowledge.
In some cases, there are those who know what came before. Archaeologists have coaxed information from pollen, charcoal, and residues in clay pots; they've documented ancient landscape features that once were gardens and fields. Native people did not all go to the city and forget, and some of them know the songs and stories that told their ancestors how to take care of the land and be cared for by it. Native or not, aware or not, some people carry on ancient relationships to the land and ways of gathering from it, tending to places, or growing food that make no explicit link to the past, dumb traditions imparting wisdom.
Aside from some of the archaeology, most of this never even makes it into the prologue. Instead, we get the same modern myths. That Indians lived in a pristine wilderness, or planted corn with a fish in every hill. Maybe the author recognizes that native people managed the landscape, maybe even gives it a real chapter, but tells what was happening at the moment Europeans arrived as if this explains the preceding fourteen millenia. Admire the snapshot and move on.
Shrinking the wisdom of 600 generations into a vignette, a counterpoint to a tale of destruction, even a wistful memory, is a loss. For the cultures that learned lands and loved them as family, it is the sadness of ways gone away. For those of us now, it is loss of a future. What worked for grandparents of grandparents can work for our grand-kids who also will not have abundant oil and chemicals, who may endure drastic climate change. We in the prologue to the future would do well to do more to learn about the ecological history of prehistory.
