Includes bibliographical references (pages 231-308) and index.

"While many Americans are attached to a romantic, idealized view of the human relation to nature in North America prior to European contact, anthropologist Shepard Krech III attempts to examine what characterized actual Native American beliefs and actions. Native Americans had a vast and impressive store of knowledge about the natural world but, like everyone else, couldn't always foresee the consequences of their acts and didn't always act the way they believed they should. Nor were their beliefs always perfectly adaptive to changing circumstances." "The Ecological Indian addresses such fascinating questions as: Were Pleistocene-era humans responsible for the extinction of large mammals like the mastodon? Did the Hohokam of Arizona destroy their society by overirrigating and ultimately oversalinating their crops? What role did Native Americans play in the near-extinctions of the deer, the beaver, and the buffalo? How did Native Americans use fire? Was the natural "Eden" that awed the first European visitors a feature of native "environmentalism" or just of very low population density?"--Jacket.

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