The Americas before and after 1492
An Introduction to Current Geographical Research
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8378366 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Karl W Butzer (The University of Texas at Austin, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1992 |
| Volume | 82 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 345-368 |
| Publication date | 1992-09-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Annals of the Association of American Geographers (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0004-5608 • E-ISSN: 1467-8306 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1467-8306.1992.tb01964.x |
| OpenAlex | W1979446242 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 59 |
| References cited | 58 |
The controversy over the Columbian Quincentenary identifies two broad issues of fundamental interest to geography: (a) the decimation and displacement of indigenous peoples, leading to creation of new human and cultural landscapes; and (b) the relative ecological impacts of indigenous and Colonial land use, as a prelude to the global environmental transformation introduced by the Industrial Revolution. This introductory essay outlines the contributions of ten critical or synthetic reviews, setting them in a wider context of contemporary research, as a web of related themes focused on the Americas before and after 1492. These themes include: (a) pre-Columbian population densities, environmental impact, and the myth of the Indian as Ecologist; (b) the labor intensity and technological sophistication of pre-Columbian agriculture in many areas; (c) the human implications and landscape impact of catastrophic indigenous depopulation; (d) the process of Spanish settlement and landscape transformation; (e) diffusion, continuity, and syncretism in the residual indigenous landscapes; (f) the divergent policies and impacts of French and British colonization, and the comparatively limited attention given to Native American and African contributions to the North American cultural landscape; and (g) the different perceptions, cartographies, and geographies of the explorers, the indigenous peoples, and the European scholars engaged in the Columbian Encounter. The final discussion identifies themes that cannot yet be adequately reviewed, especially the impact of Colonial settlement upon the environment, as distinct from the consequences of the Industrial Era, its technology, and its demand for raw materials. The debate raised by the Encounter can and should refocus geographical research on related cultural and environmental questions that require fresh attention
Archaeology · Colonialism · Context (archaeology) · Cultural landscape · Environmental ethics · Ethnology · Geography · Indigenous · Population · Social science · Sociology · Sophistication · Archaeology and ancient environmental studies · Archaeology and Natural History · Ecology · Environmental and Cultural Studies in Latin America and Beyond · History
How about One Amazon
Shaping garden landscape with medicinal plants by migrant communities in the Atlantic Forest, Argentina
Melting the Kachinas
Historical and Applied Perspectives on Prehistoric Land Use in Eastern North America
Geography and Empire in the Late Renaissance
The Use of Mayan Scripture in the Americas’ First Christian Theology
The Hispanic Atlantic's Tasajo Trail
Unearthing Prehistoric Cultural Landscapes
The Ecological Origins and Consequences of Cattle Ranching in Sixteenth-Century New Spain
Thinking “Postnationally”
Environment, Space, and Place
Ancient Maya impacts on the Earth's surface
Impacts of the ancient Maya on soils and soil erosion in the central Maya Lowlands
Reflections on land and the frontier theme in the Anglophone world
Why the Navajo Nation was hit so hard by coronavirus
Setting a Baseline for Caribbean Fisheries
Lands, Livestock and the Law
Climate and human influences on historical fire regimes (AD 1400–1900) in the eastern Great Basin (USA)
Distinguishing prehistoric human influence on late-Holocene forests in southern Ontario, Canada
Human–vegetation interactions during the Holocene in North America
Geoarchaeology, Environment, and Societal Stability
Pre‐Hispanic and Colonial Flood Plain Destabilization in the Texcoco Region and Lower Teotihuacan Valley, Mexico
Marginal Spaces in the Urban Landscape
Encountering indigeneity
The politics of landscape and nature, 1992-93
Cltural landscapes and ecology, 1995–96
Cultural ecology (and political ecology) in the ‘environmental borderlands
Population geography
Landscape legacies of the African diaspora in Brazil
Pinturas , land and lawsuits
Restoring the Photographed Past
Mapping Global Agricultural History
Biological Transfer, Agricultural Change, and Environmental Implications of 1492
The future is new
Zoogeography and imperial defence
On “The Reinvention of Cultural Geography” by Price and Lewis
Ecology in the Long View
Inherited legacies of ecological imperialism in central Mexico
The ‘natural’ vegetation of the Mexican Bajío
Indigenous land claims in the Anglophone world
Recent Literature in Discovery History
Emerging Empires and Opportunistic Land-Use Legacies
Debating Destiny
Grassland Geopoetics
Mesoamerican-Mississippian interaction across the far Southern Plains by long-range Toyah intermediaries
Evidence for Forest Clearance, Agriculture, and Human-Induced Erosion in Precolumbian El Salvador
Retrospective on Nature–Society Geography
The Legacies of 2007
The prospects of terrace agriculture as an adaptation to climate change inLatinAmerica
Aboriginal overkill
The Journalist's Dilemma
Humboldt's Nodes and Modes of Interdisciplinary Environmental Science in the Andean World
The "Pristine Myth" Revisited
An Argument for Critical and Comparative Research on the Urban Economic Geography of the Americas
Wetland Farming and the Early Anthropocene
Change and continuity in Western Pueblo households during the historic period in the American Southwest
The human transformation of the Earth's surface
Demographic and Landscape Change in the Lake Pátzcuaro Basin, Mexico
Karl Wilhelm Butzer
The Making of the American landscape
Holocene Ethnobotanical and Paleoecological Record of Human Impact on Vegetation in the Little Tennessee River Valley, Tennessee
The Native Population of the Americas in 1492
Seigneurial System in Early Canada
Give Us Good Measure
Death by Migration
Plagues and People
On the Fringes of Conquest
The West Indies
The Columbian exchange
Archaeology as Human Ecology
Columbian Consequences. Vol. 2. Archaeological and Historical Perspectives on the Spanish Borderlands East
The Atlantic Slave Trade
The Caribbean in the Wider World, 1492–1992
Historical Atlas of Canada
Canal Irrigation in Prehistoric Mexico
The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex
The Worlds of Christopher Columbus
Landschaftsumgestaltung als Folge von Besiedlung, Vegetationsänderung und Landnutzung durch die altindianische Bevölkerung im Staat Tlaxcala, Mexiko
Deutung von Orts- und Flurnetzen im Hochland von Mexiko als kultreligiöse Reliktformen altindianischer Besiedlung
The invention of American tradition
Mayans, missionaries, evidence and truth
Man-induced soil erosion of the Southern Piedmont
Stable isotopes in human skeletons of Southern Ontario
The Worlds of Christopher Columbus
Pueblo, Hardscrabble, Greenhorn
The American Backwoods Frontier
Current Paleoethnobotany
The Transatlantic Slave Trade
The Shaping of America
The Atlantic Slave Trade. A Census
American Foods and Europe's Population Growth 1750-1850
Discrepancies Between Environmental Attitude and Behaviour
A Simulation of the Sixteenth-Century Population Collapse in the Basin of Mexico
Historical Valley Floor Sedimentation in the Upper Mississippi Valley
Middle American Folk Soil Taxonomy
Irrigation in the Bajío Region of Colonial Mexico
Circa 1492
The Ends of the Earth
Canada before Confederation
The Caribbean in the Wider World, 1492-1992
A Cultural Geography of North American Indians
Irrigation in the Bajio Region of Colonial Mexico
The Transatlantic Slave Trade
Islam under the Crusaders
Land and Society in Golden Age Castile
North American Exploration
Columbian Encounters
Patterns of Spanish Emigration to the Indies until 1600
Contact Period Rural Overpopulation in the Basin of Mexico
| Unique citing works | 59 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1,79 |
| Citation span | 1993 - 2025 (33) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 49 |