national headquarters. the whole thing with ending the vietnam war was, nudge, nudge, wink, wink, if north vietnam attacks, i will on my own authority, without consulting congress, send in the planes, bomb the north vietnamese army tanks. i'm here for you. well, nixon was not there for them in 1975. and that deal. so i think president nixon inherited a bad situation. and in many ways, made a number of things worse. but that's something we need to debate further. yeah. >> i was just wondering, a lot of people say that vietnam was a pointlesses war. but if had not occurred, could it -- we have ended up in a bigger war with china over taiwan or japan? >> right. that was one of the arguments

that -- which johnson sort of half heartedly made, or not very persuasively, that if we do not stop them in vietnam, they'll be in san francisco. well, we have a partial answer to that. in the actual historical record. the retreat from vietnam, kind of the collapse of america's confidence following the war, saw the soviet union become more aggressive. saw adventures for the soviet union and cuba and angola, africa. so we actually did see further aggression until the soviets had their own vietnam in afghanistan. so the problem with these counter factual what-ifs, i would say i would limit myself to that, that we did see the big, bad soviet union did get its own hubris, its own -- became more aggressive, and then ov overextended itself and then the united states did on to the

russians as they did on to us in se vietn vietnam, we did on to them in afghanistan. we can debate about the wisdom of that in retrospect. >> what, in your opinion, was the impact on the generation from vietnam, the '60s protest, the generation that followed the baby boomers? what impact did that have on them, the greatest? >> well, what impact on the baby bust? you know, what happened to those generation who followed the boomers? what we know about political patterns, the gi generation is something like 70% democratic. government is good. still a very great confidence in the ability of the federal government to solve any problem. boomers are badly divided, almost perfectly polarized. and the busters, those born after '62, '64, my generation,

are roughly turning out about 40% republican, 40% independent and 20% democratic. 1990 was the first time in 60 years that the majority of voters under the age of 30 were actually voting republican. so there's more of a cynicism, kind of a we won't be fooled again, distrust of the left and the right kind of wait and see. some ways, a more kind of libertitarian ethos. cut taxes, cut federal spending to the cities. some ways, i'm almost afraid, a social darwinian ethos among people my own age group. and i'm certainly not a champion of that. thank you. i was -- i was just signaled that was the last question. so thank you very much for coming out here today. and i appreciated your excellent

questions. next week on history bookshelf, lucy barber discusses her book, "marching on washington", the forging of an american political tradition. it covers marches on washington beginning with the 1894 march, calling for public works programs for the unemployed, and continues through the 1963 civil rights march and anti vietnam war protests. history bookshelf airs on american history tv, every saturday at noon. in this program, anthropologist helen roundtree uses her years of scientific and history particular research to describe how natives of the piedmont region made use of their food and shelter. the professor argues that the indian women's brains were like computers because of their detailed knowledge of hundreds of useful plants. the presentation is part of a conference titled, "from the

earth," the environment, virginia's past and future at the virginia historical society. the field of environmental history examines the physical impact of humans on the environment, how we use nature and how we think about nature. the ecological richness of the area we now call virginia has served thousands of people before it became virginia. and so the subject of early virginia indians is a fascinating one. and there's no one living person who can better tell that story than our speaker today. we're very fortunate to have dr. helen roundtree, whose presentation today marks the sixth time she has spoken at the historical society. that is more than any other speaker in the 24 years that the

historical society has held these noontime talks. those of you who have heard her speak before know what i'm talking about, and those of you who haven't will learn why she keeps being invited back. she is an excellent writer, even though she was telling me she is a bit of an english eccentric in her world view and attitudes about life. somewhat delightfully so, i would say. and she has a rich academic background, beginning at the college of william them airy, where she earned her undergraduate degree, and eventually went to the university of utah and got her doctorate at the university of wisconsin. she wrote her dissertation on virginia indians, and has pursued that interest ever since. so it seems to be endlessly fascinating. and here's where it kind of got interesting for me. she started teaching at old dominion university in 1968, and was there for the next 31 1 is

she /2 years, starting out as she told me, in a condemned building where her office was located. and then she went off to get her terminal degree, her doctorate. and is when she came back, she had graduated into an office made of cardboard. [ laughter ] >> so she has come a long way to be here in the virginia historical society auditorium today. she is a cultural anthropologist, and as we heard, some of us heard this morning, she has done fieldwork on a number of the tribes, and has visited most of the indian reservations in the united states. she's the past president of the american society offeth know history, and in 1995 won the state council on higher education's outstanding faculty award. she has written several books, and would be happy to talk to you afterwards and sign copies you may want to purchase. so please welcome dr. helen roundtree, who will speak to us on the topic before it was virginia, setting the scene. dr. roundtree.

[ applause ] i may be -- have been invited more than anybody else, but it's because i usually talk about her, who shall be nameless today. [ laughter ] >> i don't plan to mention any individuals today. i was asked to talk about people and the land, and i'm going to stay to the subject. my students used to complain, i stuck to the subject. drove them nuts. [ laughter ] >> the indian attitude to the land here before all of the invaders came, including my ancestors, the indian attitude to the land was probably complex, but there was one element of it that shines through in some of the early accounts. and that is, the entire region

is useful, as is! i want to explain why and how that was possible. we need to start off with a couple of basic premises. which we have made no intellectually, but emotionally, it's going to be harder to grasp. at times it is even for me now. indians were rational people. they did things for reasons. they didn't do things to be exotic. they were rational people who observed, who memorized what they observed, and then used it well. and in my studies in the last four decades, i've come to appreciate deeply just how much is involved. i think the women in particular had minds like computers, and the men weren't far behind. [ laughter ] i'm not being sexist. i'm being factual.

the men had -- [ laughter ] i'm supposed to talk about the land, remember? the men had to know their territory, too. but not in the same -- not the same species. not as many species, and they had to learn animal behavior and what they brought into the family food budget was based upon that. it wasn't a matter of memorizing plants like a modern bottom inconsistent, so if the men were behind, it's not meant to be sexist. division of labor, remember. all right. these were people living in a world where there were no draft animals. these aren't much use for that. [ laughter ] neither are deer. or elk. you can tame them, but you can't domesticate them worth a flip. and if you haven't got domesticated animals, you're not going to have wheeled vehicles. there's no reason for them. and also, for regional reasons,

they had no iron tools, much less steel ones. no wheeled transport. instead, if you wanted to haul a lot of people for a lot of distance, you had to use canoes. and the canoes, being log dugouts, not birch bark, that's actually much farther north where you get that kind of birch, these were heavy canoes and meant a lot of hard work. and i've ex pounded upon that before. when you don't have iron ore steel tools, it means you got to make your tools that can do less drastic alterations to the earth. wood, shell, bone, et cetera. so you got a technology then that even when the people applied themselves was not going to do anything like, as spectacular or drastic as the europeans were able to do, right from 1607, let alone now. where they wanted to get trade

and especially distant trade, it was very often done on foot through a network of trails. i was not able to reconstruct all that many in eastern virginia, sorry. i've told a lot of our older country roads run along those trails. but in the general region, it's easier to see. but since we're talking about long distance, most of it on foot, we're also talking then about relatively lightweight luxury goods. so when people wanted ordinary, everyday technology, they had to get to work and make their own. locally. their own immediate environment had to supply them. you don't send off to china for something. the cultivateds crops they had were also limited in their usefulness. if you have a good year, it's wonderful. however, if you have got a dry year, worse yet, a drought, these nonnative crops, especially corn, are going to produce poorly or not at all.

and through general throw chronology, we have been able to reconstruct, and that's my own calibration, by the way, which years were good years and which were bad years. and there were quite a few years, but there were also some perfectly rotten ones. and if the corn crop fails, you're going to have to make up the difference. this had to be done by using wild resources. and that meant in turn, here dom the ladies, you have to know where exactly they are, what plants are useful for what, and at what season and on and son and on. and that's where a computer like memory really helps. so both sexes, men for hunting, obviously, but also the women, had to know their territories thoroughly. now, in these territories, which the people were learning, thoroughly, this gives you some idea of what language groups and major tribal entities there were when the english arrived.

and you can see which ones are coastal plain, i've got the boundaries shown in hills, with the boundary with the piedmont, and then the mountains. all of these people had to know their territories. really, really thoroughly. and except for the boundary between the piedmont and the coastal plain, most of these people were in a reasonably peaceful state. the piedmont coastal plain was a hostile boundary. north and south of it seems to have been friendly, most of the time. but even that -- wasn't going to make for specialization, i grow this crop, you grow that crop. it wasn't going to make for a lot of everyday trade. and even -- whoops. i want to go back two. come on. back. there we are. even then, limited numbers of things that people would even be interested in. and, of course, the chiefs wound

up -- most of it. this whole region we're talking about, although most of my land escape slides are going to be in eastern virginia. that's where i mostly worked and almost all of the landscape is going to be my own photographer. the people living there were aware the nature of streams changed. you've generally got relatively narrow, fast-moving ones in the piedmont and the mountain region, which means that if you want to construct a fish trap, i tried in vain to tell this to the hampton history museum, if you're going to set a trap up on a river like that, it needs to be relatively narrow. you make a stone fence that will at least keep in the bigger fish, and then down at the apex, you put in a nice reed container, they are about eight feet. museum directors love them, they are not -- repeat, not relevant to the coastal plain, much less to hampton. can you think of a trap like that being built across hampton roads? [ laughter ]

on the coastal plain, especially the outer coastal plain, you've got these wide, wide estuaries, which are useful for some things but among other things, the fish traps you find are going to be entirely different. john white got partially right, de vie got it correct, you can see in the upper left there, except the heart shaped bay is meant to be out at the end of the fence. when they reinvented fish pounds like this, this is what they came up with. this has one or two sets of bays. up in the potomac, more like three sets of bays. very efficient way, though, these traps, to catch fish. for months on end. it's a passive way to get plenty of fish for supper. but they were a lot of work, because you've got limited technology to build them. in the old days, you would have some stakes and some reed bundles or bundles of cedar bow, and any storm, doesn't take a hurricane, can take it out. so the men were constantly doing

repair work. and for this, you don't need a memory like a computer [ coughing ] . in the waterways, especially in the eastern part of virginia, maryland and north carolina, you've got varying so lynntys, which in turn will make for varying kinds of shellfish, oyster or saltwater, by preference. hard clams, ditto, but there are fresh water clams that are quite useful, including margarita feria which occasionally produces fresh water pearls. they are not real common in virginia. if you want to get lots of pearls from that kind of clan, you need to go up a little schuylkill river or northward nowada nowadays. you can see as you go farther away from the mouth of the bay, and also up into higher ground, the waters are fresher. and there you can get other things like really useful marsh plants that i will return to. but there's a lot of variety. lots of variety. and it all produces stuff that can be used.

this shows you the major shellfish areas. this, by the way, comes from the national park service, cartgraphers drawings, and when uva press saw them, they said, oh, too colorful, we lose prestige. and they published the book with really yukky colors. in my lectures, i still use john wolf's original maps, thank you very much. but this shows you where the fish are, where the oysters and the clams are. and by the way, the oysters and the hard shell clams used to go up higher. sea water was lower, and intuitively, we think that the saltwater, therefore, would be lower up, coming up lower in the rivers. didn't work that way. the land had not yet been so much paved over and roofed over with houses. there was much less runoff from the rains that fell. and is that pushed fresh water farther down the rivers.

makes sense, but initially, it sounds counterintuitive. so the sea level was lower. but the rivers were actually somewhat fresher than they are now. okay. this is one of the useful marsh plants that you can get. if you are a fresh water or very, very, very slightly saltwater. this is the plant that john smith dubbed tuck ahoe. probably the indian word, which means roughly something to be pounded up, applied to several species. but this is the one that john smith described being prepared. this is arrow arum. and it does. raw, it's no better than poison. smith was right. i tested some of it fresh, and it was just like a bee sting. you can get anaphylactic shock from it. nasty stuff. but it does make very useful tube tubers. we'll talk about them again in a moment. okay. the dark green area indicates

where tuckahoe is able to grow, if the bottom is right in these various rivers and streams. and where it's particularly rich, neither tuckahoe, or another root that does not taste like a bee sting, instead it tastes like a sewer. or wild rice. which does occur all through the eastern wood lands, not just in ojibwa area, where they get it commercially. where you see these stars, you've got what are called red basket marshes. they are the marshes that you want to have in your territory if the corn crop fails. you make your bread out of what these things produce instead. seeds of wild rice. tubers of arrow arum and calla lily, and you can keep your family going. and funny thing, notice, there are more indian settlements. i didn't include the populations of them, but also heavier population. per town. up river. rather than down by the bay. and you find that all the way around the chesapeake bay rim.

it's interesting. fun to track out. only took me ten years. varying topography of land. not only that, they've also -- there's also going to be a lot of variation in soil, which i'll come to in a moment. but variable topography also means then, wherever you can get a flood plain, rather than hills. this is jamestown island, that's that crumby looking kind of olive green watery looking place that's so good for mosquitoes. still is. but just inland from it, you can see some lighter yellow, and that's good farmland. in fact, some of it is actually part of the james river flood plain and has some naturally fertile soil. wonderful for corn. so the land itself is going to vary. ancient flood plains. i marked them out on this map. i still don't really like the map. what i want is something in 3-d and color but i hand-drew it, is

it's got it's limitations. and ignore the big black stuff. but there are flood plains all up and down the rivers. and that is where you're likely to find the best corn-growing soil and also the flatter soil that you want if you're going to have a farm. it's less likely to erode. so indian people could be picky. they had really good reason. the women had apparently some very definite ideas about what would make a good corn crop. so do modern scientists. funny thing. and do they correlate? well, i checked with the scientists. i actually did go and talk to some soil scientists. but among other things, i went into soil maps county by county by county. have done it for delaware, coastal plain and maryland, virginia and north carolina. just out of curiosity. and i didn't just do it on general soil types, which my colleague, randy turner did in his dissertation and found, yeah, it correlates. i found that sometimes very specific soils, number 298 --

this is not in color, but 298 down by the word "pertin bay" is the best available. and funny thing, that's the site where powatan lived. i promised i wouldn't mention individuals. you can actually pin it down by specific soil type. in this case, i think i remember, it is state sandy loem. farther up the river is fantastic, and it is the state soil now. this is what the indian women found. we know where they were doing their farming, thanks to dear old schmidt. and if you take river valleys, and then correlate them with kinds of soil, that's the rappahannock river, bingo. look how many of the towns are by the yellow soils. it's about an 80% correlation on

the rappahannock river. it correlates. i waited ten years to find that out. ha-ha-ha. and it was worth it. yep. good stuff. and the indian women knew it first. of course, they had 600 years of trial and error. and 600 years is probably enough for experimenting. but it worked. it worked. now, at our latitude, on our coastal plain, and certainly in the piedmont and the ridge and valley province, we tend to have mix mixed dissiddous hardwood forest. i understand the extent of pine barrens in historic virginia is under dispute. there are academic cat fights about it. and i haven't looked into those. but the vast majority of parts of virginia, at least, were predominantly hardwood forests, mixed in with pine. i attended a seminar at the university of georgia for a summer with archaeologists, back in '89, and found this they were

thinking entirely differently from me. i grew up -- i'm a coastal virginian, of course. and the good people live in the coastal plain, and poor folks got to piedmont. you know that kind of attitude, don't you? whether you give it or receive it. it's the opposite from carolina on around through georgia, alabama and into mississippi. it's the opposite for the indians, at least. because where you've got so many pine forests, it is less productive of food like nuts that deer and other critters love so much. there was less good hunting. the soils were more poorly drained. it can be very, very flat. and that can be bad for farming. and the richer, prehistoric indian societies, usually called the mound builders, the mississippian complex, these were all piedmont and mountain people. and i heard that down in georgia, and i went into culture shock. i said, bunch of foreigners!

but where we are, you've got mixed dissiddous forest. oftentimes it comes right smack down to just near the chesapeake bay, within a mile or so of it. i've driven all over these peninsulas. and it's good hunting territory, because it's good deer-producing territory. all through these necks. until you get right close down to the saltwater area. and, of course, i live in the salt wear water area, and it's cruddy. but it's great. it's also rich in plant foods, if your comes cats like corn bean and squash come from meso america, like in here and the rainfall in mexico city where i also lived for a city, different from here, wet all summer long. maybe semi desert, but it was scattered out. i kept getting damp. ask that's not the case here. we have a bad summer about one in three summers. and sometimes they clump up.

so you want a lot of wild plants. wild plants. when i started messing with wild plants, reading bow ton california manuals and pestering botanists, i found there were 1100 native species in the coastal plain of virginia, almost as many in the piedmont, that people could get edible parts from, if they were willing to do that much work. you can narrow it down to about 100 requiring only a moderate amount of work. and you can live quite well. the major ones i'm showing are in -- i don't know if you can read it at this distance. it's a real busy picture, sorry. but i put that in a book where i knew people were going to have to use a magnifying glass anyway. the uplands with disi haddous forecasts, things you can get in all year long and also seasonal ones. whatever the nutting season is, this is also a major hunting

season. you hunt the animals that eat the nuts, and then you eat the nuts instead. it's quite simple. but there are all kinds of things. and most of the medicinal stuff that i found the coastal plain used were also dissiddous forest, but that's because i had to get my more recent indian information from cherokee and ear convey resources, they don't live on the coastal plain. lots of stuff you can get dissiddous forest. you can also on the lower terrace, if you're not raising corn and beans, in a little plot of land, it produces all kinds of useful things. in the first two years, that's where you go to get the plants to make courtage. you can't go to walmart and buy string. you make your own. and you go to last year's field for the plants that produces it. mainly milk weed, common milk weed, and indian hemp.

then an area we don't usually think of as being useful, but it was essential to the indians, this is fresh water marsh. and i'm showing you the virginia plant there on the marsh. if you're really hungry, you eat marsh periwinkles and get protein. you also get a lot of shell, but you expel that out the other end. and then, of course, the waterways themselves with all kinds of wild fowl, fish, shellfish, et cetera, et cetera. and the more fresh water marsh you got and the more estuaries you got, especially shallow ones, the better off you are. that's the major reason why the rich folks were in the coastal plain in indian times. they were able to get lots of stuff from the land, and also lots of stuff from the water. all eco zones got used. go back a minute to the business of the plants. these are some of the plants, and they're only some of the plants that are useful with a bit less wor