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A Time Before New Hampshire: The Story of a Land and Native Peoples
Michael J. Caduto tells the complete story of the land of New Hampshire - starting with the formation of earth 4.6 billion years ago and continuing with changes to its peoples and the environment through the seventeenth century.
Caduto takes the reader on an exploration through New Hampshire's rich and diverse history - using first-hand experiences, re-creations of natural and human environments, journeys through historical landscapes, and visits with the families of ancient people - to present a thorough profile of the early beginnings of the Granite State.
The volume features an epilogue by Charlie True, Member of the Tribal Council, Abenaki Nation of New Hampshire, and nearly one hundred photographs, illustrations, and detailed maps depicting past peoples, historical trails, and indigenous cultures and environments of New Hampshire.
Caduto takes the reader on an exploration through New Hampshire's rich and diverse history - using first-hand experiences, re-creations of natural and human environments, journeys through historical landscapes, and visits with the families of ancient people - to present a thorough profile of the early beginnings of the Granite State.
The volume features an epilogue by Charlie True, Member of the Tribal Council, Abenaki Nation of New Hampshire, and nearly one hundred photographs, illustrations, and detailed maps depicting past peoples, historical trails, and indigenous cultures and environments of New Hampshire.
- GenresHistory
288 pages, Hardcover
First published April 1, 2003
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
August 3, 2022
Two and a half stars, rounding up. I guess I am glad I read this. The previous local New England history book I read (which is so local that it's not even on Goodreads and has no ISBN) starts with the settlement of the town sometime in the late 1700's, and the previous settlers of the area are not even mentioned. But is this a good book? No, it isn't. It is a good starting point for doing more serious reading, but it is somewhat vapid and very biased.
I'll start with the main flaw of the book. It attempts to convey a lot of information--it starts literally with the Big Bang. But it then goes on to relate this information without presenting the sources of the evidence. I don't mean that it isn't referenced--like I said, you can definitely follow up on other readings. They'll only be as new as 2003, but it's something. The problem is that it doesn't tell you how we know what we're being told. I think Caduto does not believe his readership capable of sustaining a level of attention that a basic pop science book can expect. So we get told stuff, but you don't know exactly what parts are his own fancy and what parts rely on solid anthropological, geological, and archeological evidence.
This results in a book that should probably be about 120 pages soaking wet. It's only as long as it is because of the pictures, which dot almost every page, and because of what I'll call Caduto's Fancies. This is where he regales us with the fruits of his imagination, presenting made-up scenes of Indian life, or transporting The Imaginary You to the time of the mastodons. Caduto's Fancies are so cringeworthy that I almost groaned audibly every time I came upon a font change. Maybe a different reader would enjoy them, but they made my skin crawl.
Before I go on to the second problem with the book, I want to point out that it may well be seriously out of date in terms of its scientific information. Almost 20 years have passed since its writing, and it seemed a bit incorrect even at the time of writing. For example, in one of the first human chapters, Caduto tells us that the Indians traveled with wolf puppies. This is probably his attempt to indicate to us that the Indians had indigenous dogs (true) and that they evolved from wolves through artificial selection, or something like that (which is decidedly false, as we know now). Even around the time that he was writing the book, it was becoming apparent that this theory of dog evolution is wrong.
Other things that may be wrong: the time of the settlement of the Americas is continuously debated, and more recent fossil evidence has put some of the numbers he cites into question. He does not discuss the linguistic relationships between the peoples of the Americas at all. Dinosaurs had feathers, they weren't scaly lizards. Etc., etc., I could go on. It's not fair, perhaps, to gripe about a book that was not written for a serious scientific audience, and Caduto himself is not an academic, so really he did an impressive amount of research (albeit often relying on secondary sources, namely pop science books) to write this. So, it's not the worst thing. I'm just pointing out that you shouldn't trust those parts of the book that appear to be factual.
Now we get to the second problem with this book. It is embarrassingly, cringingly biased toward the Noble Savage narrative of the native population. The fawning tone and the repeated reminders that, unlike the colonial baddies and the evil Westerners, the Indians thanked their food and asked the trees for permission before felling them and turning them into canoes--it's all really grating. I say this as someone who is quite sympathetic to the plight of the Indians. The Northeast population was displaced and decimated rapidly, in just a century. This book won't give you much of an idea of how that happened, but yes, we know it was bad. Old World diseases, war, habitat destruction. Read Guns, Germs and Steel if this is not familiar.
But what would a book on this topic look like to satisfy me? Well, first of all, it would not take for granted certain details of history that are controversial. To wit: there is a major disagreement among scientists about how exactly the megafauna of the New World went extinct. Caduto barely mentions this subject, even though the controversy was already raging by the time he was writing that book. (Just do a quick Google Scholar search on "megafauna extinction" and you'll find a lot of literature on this). All he says is that there's no way that the Indians could have been responsible, because mammoths weren't a big part of their diet. Um, that's it? How do you know? And is diet the only reason that we humans kill animals? It's not going to reflect poorly on the surviving Indians to point out that global human expansion has caused a lot of extinctions; people all over the globe may have caused them. Like I said, this is controversial, and many argue that humans weren't a factor, or not the only factor. But they argue, they don't just take it on faith.
A brief but egregious transgression: Caduto actually falls for the "bad Indian, good Indian" cliché. He presents Iroquoians at the very end of the book as bloodthirsty villains bent on revenge. Did he learn about Iroquoians by watching that Last of the Mohicans movie? Ugh.
Another, topic where he fails to do justice to the complexity of the issues is the ecological impact of the lifestyle. He portrays the Algonquian peoples of the Northeast of the US as being peaceful gardeners who are totally in harmony with their surroundings. Again, unlike the baddie Westerners, they (groan, clichés) use every part of the... well, not buffalo, but everything around them. But you know what? So did pretty much everyone back before 1600. And if they were so good at living in harmony with the environment, why did they have to pick up and move camp every 10 years? He says their lifestyle used a lot of land and depleted the resources to a point where the villages became unlivable and had to be abandoned for multiple decades. That doesn't sound like harmony; it sounds like a land where life was difficult, and which did not support large population growth. If I may point out for comparison, Europeans somehow worked out a way to live in the same villages for millennia without moving camp unless their towns burned to the ground accidentally. I'm not saying one way is good and another bad, but it's not clear-cut. I wish there was less judgment and more sober analysis.
Other things that bugged me: the social/cultural anthropology part of the book is extremely thin. There are multiple chapters about food and material culture, but hardly any information about relations between tribes, for example. Yes, I know that there are certain things we don't know and probably never will, but I suspect some of the skew here reflects Caduto's own interests. I think he was more interested in how the natives gardened and did woodwork than anything else. And I'll admit, the latter topic was actually pretty fascinating. I already knew that the Northeast natives used fire to manage forest land, but I didn't know that they used fire to make up for their lack of metal tools, too. Human ingenuity!
There are some topics you won't learn about by reading this book. First, while it's called "A Time before New Hampshire", the book stops way before NH became settled as a British colony. If you read this book, you won't know exactly when, or what the early relations between the settlers and the natives were like. You also won't learn what the relations with other tribes were like. You won't learn what species in New England are invasive, and how they were introduced. You won't learn about grapes! I mean, we're just a bit south of Vineland here, come on! And there are things I don't even know that I don't know.
I'll wrap this up. Clearly, this book fired me up enough to write a very long review. It pissed me off mightily at times and it made me groan, but it wasn't boring. And that's worth 3 stars in itself.
I'll start with the main flaw of the book. It attempts to convey a lot of information--it starts literally with the Big Bang. But it then goes on to relate this information without presenting the sources of the evidence. I don't mean that it isn't referenced--like I said, you can definitely follow up on other readings. They'll only be as new as 2003, but it's something. The problem is that it doesn't tell you how we know what we're being told. I think Caduto does not believe his readership capable of sustaining a level of attention that a basic pop science book can expect. So we get told stuff, but you don't know exactly what parts are his own fancy and what parts rely on solid anthropological, geological, and archeological evidence.
This results in a book that should probably be about 120 pages soaking wet. It's only as long as it is because of the pictures, which dot almost every page, and because of what I'll call Caduto's Fancies. This is where he regales us with the fruits of his imagination, presenting made-up scenes of Indian life, or transporting The Imaginary You to the time of the mastodons. Caduto's Fancies are so cringeworthy that I almost groaned audibly every time I came upon a font change. Maybe a different reader would enjoy them, but they made my skin crawl.
Before I go on to the second problem with the book, I want to point out that it may well be seriously out of date in terms of its scientific information. Almost 20 years have passed since its writing, and it seemed a bit incorrect even at the time of writing. For example, in one of the first human chapters, Caduto tells us that the Indians traveled with wolf puppies. This is probably his attempt to indicate to us that the Indians had indigenous dogs (true) and that they evolved from wolves through artificial selection, or something like that (which is decidedly false, as we know now). Even around the time that he was writing the book, it was becoming apparent that this theory of dog evolution is wrong.
Other things that may be wrong: the time of the settlement of the Americas is continuously debated, and more recent fossil evidence has put some of the numbers he cites into question. He does not discuss the linguistic relationships between the peoples of the Americas at all. Dinosaurs had feathers, they weren't scaly lizards. Etc., etc., I could go on. It's not fair, perhaps, to gripe about a book that was not written for a serious scientific audience, and Caduto himself is not an academic, so really he did an impressive amount of research (albeit often relying on secondary sources, namely pop science books) to write this. So, it's not the worst thing. I'm just pointing out that you shouldn't trust those parts of the book that appear to be factual.
Now we get to the second problem with this book. It is embarrassingly, cringingly biased toward the Noble Savage narrative of the native population. The fawning tone and the repeated reminders that, unlike the colonial baddies and the evil Westerners, the Indians thanked their food and asked the trees for permission before felling them and turning them into canoes--it's all really grating. I say this as someone who is quite sympathetic to the plight of the Indians. The Northeast population was displaced and decimated rapidly, in just a century. This book won't give you much of an idea of how that happened, but yes, we know it was bad. Old World diseases, war, habitat destruction. Read Guns, Germs and Steel if this is not familiar.
But what would a book on this topic look like to satisfy me? Well, first of all, it would not take for granted certain details of history that are controversial. To wit: there is a major disagreement among scientists about how exactly the megafauna of the New World went extinct. Caduto barely mentions this subject, even though the controversy was already raging by the time he was writing that book. (Just do a quick Google Scholar search on "megafauna extinction" and you'll find a lot of literature on this). All he says is that there's no way that the Indians could have been responsible, because mammoths weren't a big part of their diet. Um, that's it? How do you know? And is diet the only reason that we humans kill animals? It's not going to reflect poorly on the surviving Indians to point out that global human expansion has caused a lot of extinctions; people all over the globe may have caused them. Like I said, this is controversial, and many argue that humans weren't a factor, or not the only factor. But they argue, they don't just take it on faith.
A brief but egregious transgression: Caduto actually falls for the "bad Indian, good Indian" cliché. He presents Iroquoians at the very end of the book as bloodthirsty villains bent on revenge. Did he learn about Iroquoians by watching that Last of the Mohicans movie? Ugh.
Another, topic where he fails to do justice to the complexity of the issues is the ecological impact of the lifestyle. He portrays the Algonquian peoples of the Northeast of the US as being peaceful gardeners who are totally in harmony with their surroundings. Again, unlike the baddie Westerners, they (groan, clichés) use every part of the... well, not buffalo, but everything around them. But you know what? So did pretty much everyone back before 1600. And if they were so good at living in harmony with the environment, why did they have to pick up and move camp every 10 years? He says their lifestyle used a lot of land and depleted the resources to a point where the villages became unlivable and had to be abandoned for multiple decades. That doesn't sound like harmony; it sounds like a land where life was difficult, and which did not support large population growth. If I may point out for comparison, Europeans somehow worked out a way to live in the same villages for millennia without moving camp unless their towns burned to the ground accidentally. I'm not saying one way is good and another bad, but it's not clear-cut. I wish there was less judgment and more sober analysis.
Other things that bugged me: the social/cultural anthropology part of the book is extremely thin. There are multiple chapters about food and material culture, but hardly any information about relations between tribes, for example. Yes, I know that there are certain things we don't know and probably never will, but I suspect some of the skew here reflects Caduto's own interests. I think he was more interested in how the natives gardened and did woodwork than anything else. And I'll admit, the latter topic was actually pretty fascinating. I already knew that the Northeast natives used fire to manage forest land, but I didn't know that they used fire to make up for their lack of metal tools, too. Human ingenuity!
There are some topics you won't learn about by reading this book. First, while it's called "A Time before New Hampshire", the book stops way before NH became settled as a British colony. If you read this book, you won't know exactly when, or what the early relations between the settlers and the natives were like. You also won't learn what the relations with other tribes were like. You won't learn what species in New England are invasive, and how they were introduced. You won't learn about grapes! I mean, we're just a bit south of Vineland here, come on! And there are things I don't even know that I don't know.
I'll wrap this up. Clearly, this book fired me up enough to write a very long review. It pissed me off mightily at times and it made me groan, but it wasn't boring. And that's worth 3 stars in itself.
June 10, 2023
A little more detail about things I wasn't curious enough about to spend that much time reading - but still interesting. I skimmed through the long descriptions of land, flora, and even fauna, picking out the sparkly bits and then slowed down and soaked in all the info about what life was like at different times for the people who lived in New Hampshire. Among some of the more interesting items was this piece on pottery, as I was taking a pottery class. Still in awe of early people for coming up with ways to shape earth into so many art forms.
September 8, 2023
A good overhead view of the Alnobak/Abenaki people of NH. Book would have been better if he cut the geology lesson at the beginning of the book and instead focused more on that.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews