and demanding of resources to permit a century and a half ’s wait, as it were,
to reuse farming sites.
A scholar with observational experience in the tropics, Doolittle per-
ceives an important disadvantage in swiddens, too, even where the ‘‘true’’
version is practiced: Burning not only brings sudden exposure of former
forest floors to sunlight but invites rapid infestations of weeds. Establish-
ing food crops is arduous at best. For this reason and more, Doolittle argues
that most Indians preferred permanent crop fields managed with brief fal-
lows, or rests. After fallow, or each spring, natives carefully weeded each
field, heaping grasses and brush, drying it on the site, then burning. In
a Frenchman living among the Pascagoulas by the Gulf coast of Mississippi
watched just this procedure. Doolittle catalogs additional scores of Euro-
pean documents of preparations of old fields for planting. What, then, of
the tradition of the ubiquity of fire in native culture? Doolittle discovers only
twelve documents referring to firing forests for crop fields, most famously
John Smith’s report in which Powhatan women plant around dead, still-
standing trees. Smith has been endlessly cited, but his and the few addi-
tional written records that suggest—merely suggest—swidden hardly com-
pare with the scores of documents presenting the preservation and nurture
of old fields. Too, Doolittle reminds us, fire had many purposes other than
creating open land for farming. We must not assume slash-and-burn wher-
ever there is archaeological or documentary evidence of burning. Natives
fired not only heaped and dried trash, as with the Pascagoula, but employed
fire in hunting—to drive deer, for example, to bowmen, and to create grassy
and shrubby browse for prey—and in warfare. They also used fire to en-
courage certain plants, creating growing space for fruit- and nut-bearers,
for instance. And Indians were known to conduct what are now called con-
trolled or prescribed burns, in which thickets and other understory are
burned away beneath trees, clearing forests of low cover for human ene-
mies, snakes, and vermin. ‘‘The notion of swidden,’’ Doolittle concludes,
‘‘should perhaps be more appropriately labeled a myth.’’^11
Still, the geographer almost concedes one significant exception, that
being the sandy, acidic-soiled Atlantic littoral. A sixteenth-century Jesuit
missionary among the Guale people of coastal Georgia, whom Doolittle ac-
knowledges, wrote that ‘‘the land is so miserable, they move their huts,
from time to time, to seek other lands that can bear fruit.’’^12 This may well
have been the case the entire length of the coast, in fact, where if farm-
ing were possible at all, frequent shifting of fields, in addition to seasonal
commuting to fishing and hunting grounds, was the rule. Perhaps John