Doug: >I'm the first to admit I don't know the literature, and you probably don't >either. As a matter of fact, I do know the literature on indigenous peoples much more than J. Donald Hughes, based on the evidence. Anybody who has a glancing familarity with Maya scholarship knows that the charge that Mayan agriculture was wasteful has been superseded. You should do the same thing I did, if you are interested, Doug. Take a stroll over to Labyrinth Bookstore and examine the latest literature on the subject. I found out through the Columbia Library. It's what responsible scholars do, you know. >Dated scholarship in that all these years are dates, perhaps, but in what >other sense except that it disagrees with your romantic visions? Dated in the sense that advances in aerial photography, soil chemistry, etc. has rendered them so. I made a point of looking into the latest Mayan scholarship for the simple reason that PEN-L was abuzz with this question as soon as I began posting about American Indians and ecology. That and the charge that American Indians drove bison off cliffs, picked up by David Harvey, were the two most frequently cited items to prove that indigenous societies were non-ecological. I have read extensively about these two questions, because I felt challenged by them. I thought that perhaps Hughes had discovered some new material, but instead I was depressed and angry to learn that he was merely recycling outdated and damaging ideas. I now understand the real reason O'Connor rejected my articles on the American Indian that Buhle had submitted to him. I was casting pearls before swine. Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
