Origin and History
If I hadn’t gone into the field of ecology, I likely would have ended up a paleontologist or archaeologist. As a child, nothing thrilled me more than finding exquisite fossils or Indian artifacts and learning about the ancient history of the landscape aro
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Origin and History
We know now what was unknown to all the preceding caravan of generations: that men are only fellow-voyagers with other creatures in the odyssey of evolution. Aldo Leopold (1949)
If I hadn’t gone into the field of ecology, I likely would have ended up a paleontologist or archaeologist. As a child, nothing thrilled me more than finding exquisite fossils or Indian artifacts and learning about the ancient history of the landscape around me. I was fortunate to spend my childhood on top of the absurdly fossiliferous Cincinnatian strata of southwestern Ohio. The bedrock is Paleozoic limestone and shale, mostly of Upper Ordovician age (about 450 million years old) and packed with incredible densities of brachiopods, bivalves, cephalopods, crinoids, bryozoans, corals, graptolites, and my favorites—trilobites (e.g., Flexicalymene meeki). Trapped in their death sediments, the animals often are so densely packed that they pile on top of one another, with hardly any bare sediment showing. I was more familiar with these extinct creatures than with living ones, with the notable exception of the local reptiles and amphibians. I spent hours examining broken slabs of bedrock along creeks and road cuts and imagining long-extinct animals crawling about on the ancient shallow sea floor. This personal contact with deep history made the area where I lived—and my place in the world—seem much more meaningful. The area where I grew up also was a center of the mound-building cultures: the Adena, Hopewell, and Fort Ancient peoples of the Early to Late Woodland period and beyond (roughly from 1000 BCE to 1000 CE, and up to 1650 CE for 33 R.F. Noss, Forgotten Grasslands of the South: Natural History and Conservation, DOI 10.5822/978-1-61091-225-9_2, © 2013 Island Press
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Forgotten Grasslands of the South
the Fort Ancient culture).With family and on school field trips, I regularly visited burial and ceremonial mounds and other earthworks. My favorite then and today is Serpent Mound, a bizarre quarter-mile-long effigy mound of an uncoiling serpent, its head aligned with the summer solstice sunset and the coils apparently to the winter solstice sunrise and the equinox sunrise. I cannot, to this day, visit Serpent Mound without getting goose bumps, and I sometimes see it in my dreams. As a college student I volunteered for some archaeological digs, and with dental tools I dug out the skull of a passenger pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius) from a refuse pit in a Fort Ancient village site along the Miami River near Dayton. Picturing these mysterious people, flocks of now-extinct pigeons, and big animals such as bear, puma, elk, and bison roaming the hills around my home was entertaining, but also sad. I wished I had lived a thousand years earlier, when life was richer. Now, as a conservationist, I am interested in history not only because it helps me appreciate my place in the world. More important in the present context, knowledge about the origin and history of southern grasslands is directly germane to decisions that conservati
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