Palynological Evidence of the Effects of the Deerskin Trade on Forest Fires during the Eighteenth Century in Southeastern North America

2007 ◽  
Vol 72 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. Thomas Foster II ◽  
Arthur D. Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
Coastal Plain ◽  
Forest Fires ◽  
Measurable Effect ◽  
Anthropogenic Changes ◽  
Palynological Data ◽  
Biophysical Environment ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Deerskin Trade

Three palynological cores from the coastal plain of Georgia and Alabama were analyzed for paleobotanical remains. Results show that the Indians of southeastern North America increased forest fires used in hunting as a response to the demand for deer hides during the early eighteenth century. Palynological data are consistent with known anthropogenic changes in the region. Charcoal abundance increased significantly between A.D. 1715 and 1770, which is the period of the most intensive hunting by the Indians. This study shows that forest fires from hunting had a significant and measurable effect on the evolution of the biophysical environment.

scholarly journals The First American Public Utility

1928 ◽  
Vol 2 (5) ◽  
pp. 9-11
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
North America ◽  
Public Utility ◽  
Great Demand ◽  
Water Power ◽  
Utility Companies ◽  
Dam Building ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century

In 1711, Englishmen interested in news from North America were entertained by a representation of the efficiency displayed by Canadian beavers in dam building, engraved in the border of a “New and Exact Map of the Dominions of the King of Great Britain” on this continent. The map is in an atlas of Herman Moll, a prominent British cartographer of the early eighteenth century. The atlas is a recent acquisition of the Society. This particular map is in great demand by public utility companies, as the first historical reference to the production of water power in America, and copies of it, when they can be found, bring from two to three hundred dollars.

Sampling of Data Derived from Historical Documents in Anthropological Research

2010 ◽  
Vol 75 (4) ◽  
pp. 973-977 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas H. Foster ◽  
Arthur Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Forest Fires ◽  
Sediment Cores ◽  
Data Sources ◽  
Historical Documents ◽  
Creek Indians ◽  
Anthropological Research ◽  
Deerskin Trade

In response to Joshua Piker's (this issue) comment on our article (Foster and Cohen 2007), we point out that our article was a description of a test of a hypothesis. Piker's (this issue) criticism of our paper is grounded in the differences between historians and anthropological archaeologists. The historic literature that Piker (this issue) cited does not inform about whether or not Creek Indians hunted where we performed the sediment cores. It merely points out that Creek hunters may have hunted with greater frequency elsewhere. But that is irrelevant to our study, which tested whether the eighteenth-century deerskin trade increased the frequency of forest fires in a particular region. Archaeologists will benefit from using historical documents but archaeologists still have to be clear about the potential biases of those interdisciplinary data sources.

Some Attempts at Imperial Co-Operation During the Reign of Queen Anne

1927 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 171-194
Author(s):  
W. T. Morgan
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Paper Money ◽  
Fundamental Causes ◽  
Mother Country ◽  
Sea Power ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Military

Recent historical investigations tend to push the fundamental causes of the American Revolution farther and farther back into the eighteenth century. It is, therefore, passing strange that the significance of the Canadian expeditions of the first decade of that century should have been neglected. These projects played an important rôle in bringing about a friendly co-operation between the continental colonies and the mother-country; they were no unimportant part of the military and naval phases of the war of the Spanish Succession; and they raised in a pointed way the whole question of sea power. In addition, the expeditions were used as pawns by the English in the diplomatic game, which eventually culminated in the treaty of Utrecht; they showed in a clear way the entire problem of imperial defence, as well as some of the tendencies in British and French imperialism in the early eighteenth century. Furthermore, such attempts at co-operation between colonists and mother-country revealed the superlative importance attached to colonial commerce by each of them, and helped create that most vexatious question of colonial paper money. Such a joint expedition against the French in North America was not only a contest between Whigs and Tories in England, but it finally became a struggle between the two great Tory rivals of the reign of Queen Anne.

Indigenous Cosmologies of the Early Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Rivett
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
North American ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Knowledge Exchange ◽  
Human Diversity ◽  
Martha's Vineyard ◽  
Martha’S Vineyard ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Comprehensive Study

Challenges to biblical linguistics made it increasingly difficult to map human diversity. Consequently, early eighteenth-century language philosophers turned to the specificity of place to integrate language and national genealogy. Edward Lhwyd designed a comprehensive study of British languages. I contrast Lhwyd and his philosophical coterie with Joseph-Francois Lafitau’s and Cotton Mather’s attempts to explain to a European audience how the peopling and languages of North America accord with Genesis. Unmoored from the need to fit indigenous words back into a Christian cosmology and somewhat detached from the broader Atlantic network of knowledge exchange, missionary and indigenous philosophers arrived at new insights into North American linguistics. Among the Wampanoag in Plymouth and Martha’s Vineyard, the Abenaki in Maine, and the Miami-Illinois, Experience Mayhew, Josiah Cotton, Sebastian Rale, Jacques Gravier, and Antoine-Robert Le Boullenger compiled massive dictionaries that in some cases remain the most lasting evidence we have of these languages.

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