The Western European-centric education we received in school, and what we may have read, seen on television and at the movies portrays the inhabitants of the Americas before the arrival of Christopher Columbus in 1492 as inferior people. They were viewed as living in harmony with nature, and not shaping their environment.

More accurately as increasing archaeological evidence indicates, the population of the Americas was much greater that we have been led to believe. And even more contrary to supposed knowledge of the past, Native Americans in both South America and North America managed their habitat in manners which made the Americas far more advanced than anything known in Western Europe.

We have long acknowledged that some of the more important foods in the world today came from the Americas. But what few understand is that agriculture, society and the human condition throughout the world are forever changed by what was learned from American Indians.

From this and other information that has been learned over the past several years, we should also understand that the idyllic natural world many people imagine in the Americas before the arrival of Columbus is only a myth.

These things and more are much clearer to me since I purchased the book ‘1491’, by Charles C. Mann, at a visitor center during a recent tour of Hopewell Culture sites in southern Ohio. I encourage you to read this book. It will help you to rid yourself of any notion that the Americas were any more a natural world than Europe and Asia.

A passage about European settlers taking boats up the Mohawk River, through central New York, to watch the Indians burning large tracts of land as a means of managing the land to suit their needs.

Here it was the Three Sisters that were the mainstay of agriculture: maize, beans and squash. These were planted together in mounds, complementing one another.

We can see some reminders of the Indian agriculture here in Warren County with the oak and white pine forests, species which sprouted well after forest fires.

This is the reason the U.S. Forest Service and the Pennsylvania Game Commission perform prescribed burns. Oaks do not sprout well in heavy detritus. But burn that detritus and it is a different story.

White oak acorns and American chestnut nuts were important items on the Indian diet.

Slash and burn farming as practiced by North American Indians and Indians of the Amazon ‘jungle’ were not replaced by superior European farming methods. Quite the contrary, to this day we have not been able to equal or replicate the Indian ways.

Deforestation of the Amazon jungle is considered a major environmental issue today. But the jungle preservationists are now trying to preserve is not the same habitat as existed in the Amazon Basin before the mass arrival of Europeans.

Forests are dynamic. Large forest tracts, plains areas also, in the Americas were altered increasingly over thousands of years as Indians developed new agriculture technology. They were so successful that they looked down on the much smaller, much smellier Europeans.

If Indians lived in harmony with nature, it is only from the perspective that they were able to modify nature to suit their needs without throwing the entire ecosystem out of balance.

For current residents of the Americas it is important to learn how superior agricultural societies managed the land so successfully over thousands of years.

But so much of the knowledge of the Native Americans was lost when they were ravaged by a series of diseases imported from Europe that man have wiped out 90 percent of the American Indians.

Equally bad, Euro-American archaeologists, paleontologists and historians have largely ignored evidence among oral traditions of the Indians.

A visit to the Seneca National Museum, in Salamanca, should give you at least a starting point for getting your understanding and appreciation of pre-Columbian culture.

Spending a few days exploring the Hopewell Culture in southern Ohio was just a third, or fourth, step in our learning quest. We plan to visit old Indian cultural sites in the U.S. Southwest before too much time passes.