Because written accounts of the pre-contact Americas are limited or nonexistent, it is difficult to ascertain exactly what the continent would have been like had a traveler traversed every portion of its diverse terrain. The landscape, ecology, and climates were as diverse as its people. While there were some large nations of Native Americans with some small-scale urbanization in North America, the region was not densely populated. The more urbanized regions of Central and South America belie the fact that these were also mainly rural regions with disparate and scattered populations. Therefore, it is impossible to definitively answer the question of what the Americas were like before Columbus’s arrival.
It is possible, however, to consider what the Europeans did bring with them when they arrived. Diseases were of course the most devastating thing the Europeans brought, perhaps even more so than their advanced weapons. In some areas, almost the entire population was decimated; one of the primary effects of contact was “to wipe out between two-thirds and 90 percent of the people in the Americas (“In '1493,' Columbus Shaped A World To Be.”). The reason why the Native Americans succumbed so rapidly to diseases like small pox and influenza is rooted in biology and epidemiology; basically the populations...
The majority of Native Americans were hunter-gatherers who kept no livestock, too, and living in close quarters with animals is one of the main causes of disease (“In '1493,' Columbus Shaped A World To Be.”).
The view that Native Americans lived in total harmony with nature and barely left any ecological footprint is, however, false. One only need to consider the example of Easter Island to realize how a pre-contact civilization can easily destroy natural environment with hardly any advanced technologies. In North America, Native Americans who were not hunter-gatherers and who did practice agriculture would have left a tremendous ecological footprint. Agriculture can place strain on the land, and dramatically and irreversibly alter both ecology and climate (Mann 2002). Recent archaeological research from Bolivia reveals startling evidence that some pre-contact civilizations altered their landscapes in almost unimaginable ways: creating “forest islands” that allowed them to grow non-native trees, comprising “30,000 square miles of forest mounds surrounded by raised fields and linked by causeways,” (Mann, 2002). This research contradicts what many people believe about what the Americas…
