Written accounts of Native Americans cultivating the land in New England overstate the importance of agriculture in the pre-contact period, according to a new study. Here, an engraving by Theodor De Bry, after a drawing by Jacques Le Moyne, depicts Timucua Indians at Fort Caroline, a French settlement established in what is now Florida, hoeing and sowing seeds, including beans and maize. The image may be the only contemporaneous visual depiction by Europeans showing the importance of agriculture to Native Americans in the New World.Courtesy of the Lewis Ansbacher Map Collection, permanently housed in the Morris Ansbacher Map Room, Jacksonville (Florida) Public Library.

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• Gdm2000 To Rso

Written accounts of Native Americans cultivating the land in New England overstate the importance of agriculture in the pre-contact period, according to a new study. Here, an engraving by Theodor De Bry, after a drawing by Jacques Le Moyne, depicts Timucua Indians at Fort Caroline, a French settlement established in what is now Florida, hoeing and sowing seeds, including beans and maize. The image may be the only contemporaneous visual depiction by Europeans showing the importance of agriculture to Native Americans in the New World.Courtesy of the Lewis Ansbacher Map Collection, permanently housed in the Morris Ansbacher Map Room, Jacksonville (Florida) Public Library. Peter Shaw Ashton stepped into his first Asian tropical forest 50 years ago last March. For what he has accomplished in those steamy reaches, he has been awarded the Japan Prize in the category of “Science and Technology of Harmonious Coexistence.”He had his most formative harmonious encounter in the tropics just at the start of his career, with high-spirited forest-dwellers. “I was a fresh graduate of Cambridge University, and I wanted to be a grad student under my professor, naturalist John Corner,” says Ashton.

“He told me, ‘Look, if you want to work in the tropics, you can’t go out for three months on a research grant and do something quick and come back and make some great generalization which will get you through a doctoral dissertation. You’ve got to get yourself a job.’ How was I going to do that? This was the end of the colonial era. I said, ‘The last thing they need is Brits out there at a time of all this change.’ ‘Don’t worry,’ said Corner, ‘every now and then a letter comes from someone who wants a botanist in some remote place in the world.’“Meantime, I worked at a gas station,” Ashton continues, “where I was soon red for technical incompetence. I then knew that forest botany was my sole ability, and fortunately the opportunity was not long in coming.” After about six months, Corner got a letter from the sultan’s government in Brunei. “‘They’re looking for a botanist to document the timber trees,’ he told me.

‘Would you be interested?’ Unbelievable! Forest botanist to his Highness, the Sultan of Brunei!

It sounds like something from the nineteenth century, and indeed in a way it was. So I went off by ship and worked for His Highness Sultan Omar for five years. Those first years are always the best.”Brunei, on the island of Borneo, is about the size of Rhode Island. At that time, says Ashton, “more than 70 percent of Borneo was covered in primeval, uncut, forest. Now, little remains, even to the mountain tops, except in the national parks—themselves threatened by illegal harvesting—and inaccessible limestone peaks.” Yesterday’s forest, “with about 800 tree species and teeming with critters,” he says, “has been converted into a forest with a single tree species, most often oil palm, and the brown rat—and barn owls and king cobras.”Ashton set about writing taxonomic accounts of the timber trees, particularly the dipterocarps: what used to be called Philippine mahoganies, huge trees that dominate the canopy. No one knew which or how many species were there. He ended up with descriptions of 156 dipterocarp species and rough records of many other species.

“There are about 3,000 tree species in Brunei,” he says. “in other words, 10 times the number of species in the United States. So it was a huge task.”In the process of doing the job, he spent 28 months in longhouses or under canvas with the indigenous Iban Dayak, a tribe once known for their headhunting achievements. “I learned my botany from them. I had no library, just a couple of books and no herbarium.

I had four Dayak collectors and tree climbers. They didn’t have any English, and I jumped in at the deep end. They were wonderful people, good company, with a robust sense of humor and a theology close to my own. They would climb these trees—70 meters, you know—sit out on a branch, smoke a cigarette, speak to the gibbons, and possibly urinate on you if you were sitting close by on the ground.” A couple of these Dayak colleagues were in the audience when Ashton accepted his Japan Prize at a ceremony in Tokyo (see “”).

“They were totally marvelous, with tattoos down their necks, and I was in a wing collar.” He saluted these early masters in his acceptance speech.Ashton made a major discovery in Brunei. Although no rigorous research into the matter had been done, the then current wisdom of John Corner and other leading tropical botanists held that the extraordinary coexistence of so many tree species in a tropical forest is the result of a random distribution process—that the mix of species changes with each new generation of trees as the image in a kaleidoscope changes with a twist of the barrel, and that the reason a few dominant species don’t take over the forest and drive diversity out is that the seeds of forest-tree species are not widely dispersed, but fall close to their parents. The random-mix theory implies that the species are ecologically complementary, which has implications for speciation and evolution, says Ashton.

It also suggests that forest managers can’t do much to encourage one species over another. But Ashton began to realize that the forests he tramped through were not just a random mix.

As he moved onto different soils—sandstone or shale—more than half the species changed. He noticed that each hill possessed a distinct species assemblage, repeated on other hills with similar soil nutrients and drainage. “I got permission from the forest service to put in some small study plots and analyze them by methods current at that time,” says Ashton. “I was accepted eventually as a graduate student and went back to Cambridge and clunked away with a hand calculator on my data. I showed quantitatively that indeed there was a relationship between habitat and the species composition of forests, and that was hugely important.”.

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He moved his attention to Sarawak, next door to Brunei, and conducted similar studies in a much bigger area, about the size of New England. “I was doing a lot of eld work, but I was married by then and had small children and education priorities and so forth, and so I started looking for other jobs. I began to realize to my great disappointment that my only choice might be to go into academia, kicking and screaming—into the ivory tower as opposed to the green forest, to lose the smell of resin in the air, other than from the waxing of the oor. And that’s how it worked.”Ashton truly loves the tropics. He gave an interview to U.S. Public radio after he won his Japan Prize and was asked to recall his favorite moment in the forest.

Projected Defence Geographic Centre. 2010-09-24 true false urn:ogc:def:crs:EPSG::29873 Timbalai 1948 / RSO Borneo (m) Original projection definition in chains. 1 chain = 792 inches. Adopts Sears 1922 metric conversion of 39.370147 inches per metre.

Replaced by CRS code 3376 in East Malaysia and CRS code 5247 in Brunei. See CRS code 29872 for Shell ops in E Malaysia.

Exploration and production operations in Brunei. Formerly also large and medium scale topographic mapping and engineering survey. ProjectedDefence Geographic Centre.2010-09-24truefalseurn:ogc:def:crs:EPSG::29873Timbalai 1948 / RSO Borneo (m)Original projection definition in chains. 1 chain = 792 inches. Adopts Sears 1922 metric conversion of 39.370147 inches per metre. Replaced by CRS code 3376 in East Malaysia and CRS code 5247 in Brunei. See CRS code 29872 for Shell ops in E Malaysia.Exploration and production operations in Brunei.

Gdm2000 To Rso

Formerly also large and medium scale topographic mapping and engineering survey. Timbalai 1948 / RSO Borneo (m) 29873 Timbalai 1948 4298 ellipsoidal 6402 Geodetic latitude 9901 Lat north Geodetic longitude 9902 Lon east Timbalai1948 6298 Greenwich 8901 0 Everest 1830 (1967 Definition) 7016 6377298.556 300.8017 Cartesian 4400 Easting 9906 E east Northing 9907 N north. Timbalai 1948 / RSO Borneo (m)29873Timbalai 19484298ellipsoidal6402Geodetic latitude9901LatnorthGeodetic longitude9902LoneastTimbalai19486298Greenwich89010Everest 1830 (1967 Definition)8.5Cartesian4400Easting9906EeastNorthing9907Nnorth.