Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Forests
Most of today's forests are mere remnants of their former selves. Five hundred years ago, nearly all
of what is now the United States east of the Mississippi River was continuous forest — as was most
of the Far West and Northwest. The same was true of virtually all of Western and Central Europe, as
well as virtually all of humid Africa, Asia, Central and South America. And I don't mean the well-
tended greenery you see today in many places. No sirree. I'm talking underbrush and thickets and
dead limbs and all kinds of other stuff that limited visibility and mobility. It was ripe for disorienta-
tion and ambush. You could get lost in it.
And in a sense, that is what happened. Numerous peoples became separate, forest-dwelling societies
whose woodsy surroundings provided isolation that contributed to development of distinctive cul-
tures. Today numerous traditional societies inhabit regions of tropical rainforest, particularly in the
Amazon Basin, but also in Central Africa and Southeastern Asia. Road building can be very diffi-
cult in these areas, and thus the forests, like the oceans in the case above, continue to isolate inhabit-
ants from the outside world and promote cultural differences. In these environments, rivers — natural
highways — have often served as avenues of diffusion.
Mountains
Rugged terrain, andparticularly mountains, hashistorically tended tomake communications difficult,
and thereby encourage cultural diversity. For example, an estimated 700 languages are spoken on the
island of New Guinea, which is about the size of Texas and Arkansas combined and has a popula-
tion of perhaps 7 million. It makes no sense that so many languages coexist in such a relatively small
space until you consider the topography. New Guinea has an extremely mountainous spine that has
been eroded over the years into numerous steeply sided valleys that have no roads and few tracks
between them. Add the dense tropical forest, and the results are hundreds of relatively isolated pock-
ets of people that have, at least with respect to language, gone their own ways.
Also, the “thin air” that comes with the high altitudes of mountainous terrain has proven to be an im-
pediment to diffusion of culture. For example, many facets of traditional Native American culture are
alive and well in the Central Andes, where millions of people still speak Quechua, the language of the
Incas. Although these peoples came under Spanish rule, the Spaniards themselves generally avoided
settling in the high Andes because they found adaptation to the “thin air” to be extremely difficult.
Accordingly, native culture in that area did not give way to imported culture.
