Gathering the Bones, XXV: Iron, Butchery, And An Ecotone

 

Look what they found at Hattusa in 2015! It is unfortunately Galatian rather than Early Iron Age, but it's definitely a saw. I'll throw in a 17th C BC bronze saw below, but as an insight into my method, if the Blogspot automatic pagesetter leaves ugly spaces. I'm not fixing them!

I'm thinking about saws in connection with butchery rather than carpentry today, which means that I'm also thinking about pemmican, so I'm going to start by retelling the story of Fenimore Cooper's 1843 Wyandote: Or, the Hutt'd Knoll, which I may have talked about before here. (I'm holding it in my mind that I have, as an incentive to the brevity I find so impossible.)

Wyandote is a frontier novel, and a Western, "Indian" novel, as they said at the time. It is also a difficult one for American readers. Cooper was an Indian lover who supported Removal, and a champion of the uniqueness, originality, and value of American culture at a time when Americans of culture were hopeless in thrall to European norms, but at the same time a man of strictly hierarchical values who often suggested in his fiction that he would be much more strongly opposed to the Revolutionary settlement if he thought he could get away with it. The villains in Wyandote are the frontier farmers who live as tenants on the land ("patent") of a retired British army officer. At the outbreak of the American Revolution, they ally with some Indians and stage an "Indian" attack on their landlord in an attempt to convert their tenancy into freehold at the expense of massacring the officer, his wife, daughter, Maude, adopted daughter, and loyal retainers, because eggs, omelets. The "Wyandote" of the title, is introduced to us as the shiftless, drunken Indian, Saucy Nick, who in spite of his overt status on the page, flirts with  protagonist status, being omnicompetent off page, carrying off various adventures, and then, in what would be the climax of the fight, single-handedly defeating the enemy in desperate battle in the dark. Yet he also murders the British officer, to all appearances his friend, in cold blood shortly after declaring himself "Wyandote," and no longer "Saucy Nick." At first glance it is an almost perverse plot development, not that we'd expect any less of Cooper, who, after writing a romance explicitly pairing cousins, brings a brother and adoptive sister together.

And the perversity doesn't end there, as often in Cooper romances, the plot makes much more sense with a bit of added history and some race mixing. substitute Joseph Brant for Saucy Nick and one of Sir William Johnson's daughters for Maude, and it all makes sense, even the romance. Maude, is, under Indian law, the officer's daughter right up to the moment when she repudiates that status in order to pursue her relationship with his son. This instantly restores her uncle, Nick/Wyandote's, status as a Tuscarora sachem and her guardian, and her ownership of the patent. The contradictions between Indian and English inheritance are, as always, reconciled by marrying the Indian heiress to the English,and the murder becomes instantly understandable in a class and status-conscious society as a tragic clash of cultures. (And also because the officer had idiotically inserted himself into a rescue mission even though he is too old for the work.)

As an interpretation of the plot, I am hanging a great deal here on the patent itself, "the hutt'd knoll." Or, rather, on Nick/Wyandote's references to it in terms of its ability to sustain beaver. It is a natural hillock showing above a hundred-acre beaver pond, itself the centre of a disc of good land about the size of the officer's thousand acre patent, in the wilderness of the upper Susquehanna not far from Binghamton. It used to yield (maintain?) four beaver a year, but no longer does, and the local Indians are willing to sell, Nick tells the officer, "clearing" the patent of Indian claims, as required by New York law. The quality of the drained land under the pond is praised immoderately in the text. The soil is, of course rich, but years of decay under the pond have freed it of the stumps and roots that troubled frontier farmers. The hillock, a natural rocky eminence in the middle of the former pond, recalls a beaver lodge and is the natural place for a fortified manor, the "hut" of the title. This is why the tenants covet it, and why Nick darkly warns that it held beaver in the past, and might again. Of course, if Nick is using "beaver" in the  vulgar way that you might expect of Shakespeare, but not a Regency writer, that's exactly what happens. It used to maintain Maude's mother, and when Maude, a mature woman and mother, returns to New York as the wife of a major-general, and finds Nick (his crime never to be known by anyone but the reader) and the other retainers living in retirement at the knoll, it is still "maintaining" her, only with rents instead of pelts. 

Okay, yes, blah blah blah, Cooper the secret key to early American history, get over it, can't you, Lund? The dynamics of the fur trade are very simple. People go out to do very hard work on the trail and trapline. They have to be fed with a portable and durable food. That's your pemmican, and parched corn. Their work is thus based on the land, and we can ask ourselves how many acres and farmers are needed for each coureur de bois. The answer is "not a lot of land" for the corn, and "Hunh?" for the pemmican, because buffalo are just there. This here article I found with Google says that a 90lb bag of pemmican was the standard unit, and accounted for two buffalo. Which brings me to Robert Morrissey's People of the Ecotone: Environment and Indigenous Power at the Center of Early America, which is a book in the UW Press's Weyerhauser Environmental Books Series, because this is 2026. Blogspot spellcheck doesn't recognise "Weyerhauser," by the way. Forgetting is the best greenwashing! Also, if you go to the link, you will find that the fabled forest products company characterising its "work" as managing 40,000 square miles of "timberland" in Canada and the United States. It's a giant landlord! (The fine print notes subsidiaries that are still in "wood products.")

By runt35, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=49643959

Morrissey's core point is that the American tallgrass prairie is an arid zone biome that for some reason extended in 1700 far into the moister areas of the Midwest, in an approximate peninsula with its peak at Indianapolis. The "ecotone" in the title acknowledges that, in spite of its prodigiously uninterrupted flatness, the region is actually described by early travellers as being comprised of thick floodplain, mast forest on glacial moraines, and   tallgrass prairie on the abundant land between. Pioneering ecologists called this an "ecotone" and characterised it as a an area of microregions with boundaries where different biomes competed. Morrissey, after giving due and perhaps excessive attention to climate based deterministic historical claims says, "No, it was anthropogenic." The "People of the Ecotone" burned off the prairie to keep it in buffalo and elk. Then they processed all the meat they took, and that's why towns like Kaskaskia were so big and so desperate for slave labour, leading to the Fox Wars. They needed people to work in the meat packing plants! That deliberately anachronistic formulation is a tribute to Kaskaskia's status as Chicago's Grand-Dad here, but let's put it out there right now that a US Army  standard barrel of salt pork was expected to contain 163lbs of salt port and to weigh 272lbs. Salt pork is rated at 3400 (kilo-)calories/lb per the summary of a site that shows up on Google (can't get more accurate than that!), the same as given for pemmican, about twice that for white flour, and four times that for white rice. Salt pork isn't the winner here because of the weight of water you are carrying around with you, but it's got pemmican beat all hollow in terms of labour! 

So I'm really glad that Morrissey wrote this book, which is definitely key to understanding what was happening in the Illinois country in the lead up to the French and Indian War, which was so largely precipitated by Langlade's sacking of Piqua and the "insult" to the Suffering Traders, and thus flows out of the Fox Wars, in that the rise of Illinois, and figures like Langlade, can be seen as the rise of Kaskaskia at the expense of the Meskwaki, and of Illinois at the expense of Canada. And now I'm going to argue with him. 

Lynn Collins, who played Deja Thoris in 2012's misbegotten John Carter,
which failed because of its disastrous narrative structure and not because people
didn't give it a chance, "has claimed English, Scottish, Irish, and Cherokee
ancestry."

Morrissey offers us an introductory chapter about how it all came to be. a long run picture is sketched. First there was the Early Woodlands, which practiced the "Eastern Agricultural Complex," an early farming practice reliant on various chenopods, which it is hard to believe anyone is surprised to hear was thrown over in favour of maize corn with the Mississippians, or, as not unfairly reduced, to Cahokia. Cahokia "fell" about 1150, and was succeeded by the more regionalised "Southeastern Ceremonial Complex," which shifts our geographical focus towards the American South and what they used to call "the Southern Death Cult," which, to my  mind, says it all. The ecotone region, was, on Morrissey's accounting, depopulated, although he points to SECC-affiliated cultural horizons at its margins, such as the Fort Ancient horizon, and argues that they were not buffalo hunters, either.  Finally, a new culture reliant on firestick pastoralism developed in the ecotone producing buffalo meat production arose thereafter. Cahokia and post-Cahokian. Each of the prehistoric transitions is attributed to climate change; but the changes that brought about the one that Morrissey wants to focus are attributed, to simplify (he wants a two-way, "ecological" approach) to human agency. 

Collinsville city hall.
https://mythicmississippi.illinois.edu/030116-collinsville-city-hall/

Mars is a thing here because Percival Lowell constructed his model of an irrigated Mars on the basis of several scientific and quasi-scientific claims about the cosmic and human history of human civilisation. According to Lowell, the Sun was shrinking and cooling, initiating an ongoing aridification of first Mars, now Earth, and even, eventually, Venus. The retreat of civilisation from the spreading deserts was a leitmotif of human history, as was the hydraulic battle against this loss of arable and the homes that went with it. One of the "proofs" of this thesis was the historic drought that ended the Cliff Dweller ("Anasazi" civilisation), according to various astronomer/historians who flocked to Arizona to look at the planets and ruined pueblos, and count the rings on bristlecone pines. All very fascinating, and the rise and fall of Cahokia was slotted into the story. After tsome tergiversation about pre-Indian Moundbuilders, the arc of the First Nations towards urban civilisation became a story of repeated heartbreak caused by the external drivers of climate change.

Roman knives found at London.
https://www.bladesmithsforum.com/index.php?/topic/17595-roman-knives/

One wonders how far "the horseradish capital of the world" actually fell. The Church of the Holy Family was established on Cahokia's central mound in 1696 as a Sulpician mission. The Church moved to nearby Fort Chartres in the mid-Eighteenth century turmoil that Morrissey focusses on, but the town was still a river port with several thousands of population in the 1790s and sort of disappeared into "Collinsville" as part of a general anglicising movement. The town has 25,000 inhabitants today, and some funky folk art as well as a presumably very spicy annual horseradish festival. (I don't know that. I just made it up. Wikipedia also notes a water tower shaped like a ketchup bottle and the 1918 lynching of a German immigrant by "local coal miners.") The gap between ancient Cahokia and the modern age is at the least rather shorter than accounts suggest, and perhaps not a gap at all. It is fairly clear that people stopped doing Cahokian things in Cahokia in about 1150, but not that people stopped living there or appreciating its logistical advantages. 

Without going too far into the microhistory --the reader is free to suspect that I haven't got that far-- I'm going to stake a claim for technology in this narrative. Mark Maltby's chapter in Bird, ed., Agriculture and Industry in South-Eastern Britain reviews a chapter looking at animal bone reports from 70 sites in 13 towns in southern England, but my particular interest is in London, where beef cattle bones increased in proportion of the total sample over time, indicating the increasing importance of cattle, and evidence of specialist butchery techniques, as indicated by both the handling of the bones (marrow bones have been split with special knives to extract the valuable marrow. Note marrow's importance for the production of premium grades of pemmican in the recipes linked to, above.) Jackie Keily and Quita Mould look at leatherworking, find evidence of the growth of vegetable-tanned leather production with the introduction of Roman rule, and tie it both to army demands and geography, with the search for the holy grail of Roman London industrial archaeology, the missing tannery, focussing on the Walbrook area, at the outskirts of the city, such as it was, with convenient access to the flint-and-clay province upstream of the city where human activity began to extend in Roman times. Leatherworking tools have also been found. 

Butchery is one of the most totalising techne in human technology. Cattle butchery, in particular, is hard work. It has been going on since before iron, of course, and the techniques of the ecotone's pedestrian buffalo hunters can be traced back into the Paleolithic. After bringing down their prey in whatever way seemed best (and it is very  hard to believe that gunpowder weapons did not change that massively), hunters have skinned the animal, quartered it, smoked meat that could not be easily carried, and carried the quarters and flat ribs back to settlements. It sounds like a somewhat wasteful process that couldn't make full use of the animal, and also, more importantly, as though tool technology was an important bottleneck on production. 

It's that damn Mantle Site axe again. 
Researchers Andrea Carnevale and Dr. Michael Barkham examine a
collection of Basque iron tools from the 16th Century. Image courtesy
Yap Films Inc.
https://ictnews.org/archive/how-did-a-spanish-axe-wind-up-in-toronto-
100-years-before-europeans/

The industrial processing of animals, admittedly sheep rather than cattle, is attested in Hittite contexts. Again, tool dependency? We have here again the problem that we have perfect synchronicity for massive change coming out of the spread if iron technology through North America, but all off a century, or two, or as little as a half century in some chronologies, from the time being right. How do we reconcile a major wave of change in 1450 with the actual driver of technological change, European contact, just fifty years later? Missing Vikings are such an attractive prospect --but systemic chronological displacement, perhaps to dispose of inconvenient questions about early First Nations assimilation of European technology, are more plausible.

Much of Morrissey's argument hangs on the way that two charismatic species, buffalo and humans, reshaped the ecotone. Cooper's long-forgotten novel explores another landscape, and another collaboration between two charismatic species. Fitting landscape to the beaver, perhaps, and ejecting it, certainly, is as much the core of Wyandote as the way that Saucy Nick's long stride and fast overland travel is as important to marking him out as the novel's secret protagonist as his off-page role as a war chief in Dunmore's War, as respected in council as fierce in battle. (Quite a contrast with the quasi-drunkard he appears to be in the pages, until he becomes, or becomes again, Wyandote.) Morrisey talks at length about the wetlands, but not as a potential site for anthopogenic transformation as beaver habitat. But why can the anthropogenic modification, and its ecological obverse face as beaver modified human culture, be extended down into the bottoms? 

And, for that matter, I am missing a third charismatic species, the American chestnut, in the moraine uplands. As rare as these might be, and as little as I believe the claims emanating from the blight era about the chestnut's centrality in the American forest, I am still astonished to find so little mention of  it in the French travelogues which Morrissey has consulted, and I have not. Is this an artefact of research emphasis, or is the chestnut a fourth charismatic species, to be considered alongside the pig? And here we are back to iron tools, and this time barrels, for salting pork. 

So this is an important book, and a valuable one, and one that demands a much larger book to bring in cattle, pigs, chestnuts, beavers, and muskrats. And maybe to get away from historic and ":natural" climactic determinism, perhaps so we can talk more about anthropogenic modification of our global habitat.