{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.025308241401687217, 'fraction_numerical': 0.007787151200519144, 'mean_word_length': 5.531779661016949, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Cultivated Landscapes of Native North America (review)

In the first of a three work series on American agriculture on the eve of the Columbian Encounter, William Doolittle describes and discusses agricultural practices in North America prior to the arrival of Europeans. Doolittle’s demarcation of North America extends from present day northern Mexico (roughly the southern edge of the border states) northward into Canada. This extensive and thorough work appeals to researchers interested in understanding both the intricacies of pre-European farming in the New World and the ways to effectively study past landscapes. In this Doolittle’s book is notable on two fronts, not only is it encyclopedic in its description of former agricultural systems of North America, it is also an insightful treatise on how to conduct historic research on sometimes (quite literally) ephemeral land use patterns. Through Doolittle’s careful historicism we learn how best to reconstruct past landforms. Doolittle carefully constructs a discussion of pre-European agriculture based on a profoundly geographic principle. The book’s “focus is on fields, not crops” (p. 7), and complements Doolittle’s definition of academic geography as “the study of the surface of the earth, with emphasis on the shaping processes and combinations of elements such as soils and human activities that result in distinctive regions” (Doolittle 1992, 310). To enforce this notion of academic geography, Doolittle avoids organizing the text based on traditional regional distinctions, instead focusing on how diverse landscape elements enable different agricultural strategies and thus the formation of distinctive agricultural land patterns. This organizational strategy makes this substantial book highly readable and allows the reader to compile the wealth of information contained within its pages. The text is organized into six chapters: Introduction, Horticulture, Rainfed Systems, Dryland Systems, Wetland Systems, and Conclusion. The introduction provides an overview of the text to follow and demonstrates how geographers make a significant contribution to the study of aboriginal agricultural systems. By understanding field layout, location, and particular characteristics, geographers can demonstrate how farmers, and people in general, are intertwined with earth system processes as well as each other. This recognition has long been one of the hallmarks of academic geography, although recent efforts at creating a myth of the integrative discipline have glossed over these starting points. In this, Doolittle’s book transcends a study of aboriginal cultivation in North America. He shows how trying to understand what anthropogenic features are on the land in fact strengthens our understanding of human-environment interactions in ways that other disciplines do not. Cultivated Landscapes of Native North Asociation of American Geographers 67(1): 1-16. Shortridge, J. R. (1996) Keeping Tabs on Kansas: Reflections on Regionally Based Field Study. Journal of Cultural Geography 16 (1): 5-16. References