Rethinking History

ISSN: 1364-2529 (Print) 1470-1154 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rrhi20

Every place is an archive: Environmental history

and the interpretation of physical evidence

William J. Turkel

To cite this article: William J. Turkel (2006) Every place is an archive: Environmental
history and the interpretation of physical evidence, Rethinking History, 10:2, 259-276, DOI:
10.1080/13642520600649507

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13642520600649507

Published online: 17 Aug 2006.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 475

View related articles

Citing articles: 1 View citing articles

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rrhi20
Rethinking History
Vol. 10, No. 2, June 2006, pp. 259 – 276

Every Place is an Archive:

Environmental History
and the Interpretation
of Physical Evidence
William J. Turkel

Practitioners of environmental history often turn to the interpretation of

material traces to support their arguments about the past. This kind of
unwritten evidence—a footprint is a mundane example—signifies a past event
by virtue of a causal and/or physical connection with it. Here a series of case
studies is used to explore the analogy between environmental historians’
interpretation of physical evidence and the interpretive practices of geologists,
foresters, archaeologists, forensic scientists and others who also reconstruct the
past from similar clues. In thinking about this kind of interpretive work,
students of historical methodology have often referred to the historian as a kind
of detective or scientist. These two modes of inquiry have different
concomitants and consequences. Interpretation is always part of a wider
struggle to determine the future. By carefully considering the roles that
material traces play in historical consciousness, we are led to a new way of
thinking about the possibilities of environmental history.

Keywords: Archive of Place; Clues; Environmental History; Evidential

Paradigm; Historical Consciousness; Historical Detection

Environmental history is a relatively popular and relatively new approach

that draws some of its appeal from its synthetic and materialist leanings,
and some from its use of unwritten evidence taken from scientific and
technical literature. The strength of the field is evident in the ability of its
practitioners to situate human institutions in a dialectic with natural
contexts and to draw attention to causal factors that were previously
ISSN 1364-2529 (print)/ISSN 1470-1154 (online) ª 2006 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/13642520600649507
260 W. J. Turkel
ignored. When pushed too far, however, the advantages of the approach
become drawbacks. Synthesis requires discernment, lest the details that
matter be lost in accretion. John Muir’s observation that ‘whenever we try
to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the
universe’ should serve as a warning to would-be synthesizers as much as it
does an inspiration. Materialist explanation becomes problematic if non-
material aspects of human agency are elided. And, as historians of science
and technology have been arguing for a least a generation, technologies and
scientific knowledge are socially constructed, locally produced and situated;
they cannot be uncritically assumed to be universally true or valid. As the
field matures, environmental historians face the problem of finding the
unwritten evidence that they need and using it critically.
Here, an analogy is developed between what environmental historians do
when they interpret material traces of the past, and what other kinds of
interpretive specialists—people who are typically not historians—do with
similar evidence. Following earlier discussions of historical methodology,
this analogy will be cast in two modes: historian as detective (e.g. Winks
1969; Ginzburg 1989) and historian as scientist (e.g. Gaddis 2002). These
modes are not mutually exclusive, of course. Historians qua historians are
not really detectives or scientists, and, for that matter, detectives sometimes
act like scientists and vice versa. Although each of the modes can be useful
for particular problems, the thrust of the argument will favour the idea of
historian as detective. Evidence, written or unwritten, is typically not used
by historians to disconfirm hypotheses in a search for universal general-
izations (see the useful discussion in Gaddis 2002, pp. 62 – 66). Rather, what
is at stake is often the probative value of evidence in a particular setting, and
the ways that it is, or can be, deployed. To make the point, a handful of short
case studies is presented. Each is really just a vignette, and whatever
connections there are between the individual cases are not explored. Instead,
they are studied for the light they may shed on historical methodology, to
suggest one kind of future that this kind of past might have.
Material traces of past events are commonplace: seeing a footprint in the
mud we may infer that someone walked by after the last rainfall, when the
ground was soft. We readily distinguish the tracks of a child from those of
an adult, human tracks from those made by other animals, or bicycle tracks
from those of motorcycles or cars. Such inference is a very human ability,
and is always performed within the context of prior acts of interpretation.
In certain settings it becomes important to be able to infer more from
tracks, and some people specialize in these more intensive kinds of reading.
Hunters or wildlife biologists, for example, can readily distinguish the
characteristically round hoofprints and tell-tale dew-claw marks of a
 Rethinking History 261
caribou from the more pointed and elongate tracks of a moose (Shackleton
1999). Forensic investigators can determine the size of a shoe and its
manufacturer from footprints, and can make reliable predictions about the
weight, height and gait of the wearer as well (Nickell and Fischer 1998).
But tracks are not the only material trace of the past; in fact, every single
aspect of our environment bears some physical and/or causal connection to
past events. Every thing has a history, and our ability to reconstruct the past
of anything is limited only by the knowledge that we bring to bear and by
our ability to detect or discriminate or identify or measure the trace. A
shoeprint that has been contaminated with blood may be invisible to the
naked eye. If sprayed with a chemical reagent called luminol, it will glow in
the dark. The blood itself may be matched to a particular animal by the
proteins that it contains. If human, it can be matched to a group of people
by antigen-antibody reactions (the ABO system of blood groups), or
matched to a particular individual by DNA. What is made of such evidence,
however, is rarely straightforward. Different people may have a stake in the
outcome and this is reflected in the conclusions that they draw. In a sense,
the idea that different interpreters will draw different conclusions from the
same material evidence is merely a corollary of the historian’s methodo-
logical dictum that one should, as E. H. Carr put it, ‘Study the historian
before you begin to study the facts’ (1961, p. 26).
In this spirit, let us turn to a few cases where people who were not
historians reconstructed past events from physical evidence. We begin with
a case study that sounds like an X-File. One day in the autumn of 1974, two
fishermen hiked up to lac l’Espérance, a small lake (about half a kilometre
long) near Senneterre in south-western Quebec. Rather than settling down
to fish, as they planned to do, the men decided to return to their camp for
reasons that are not clear now. Before leaving, one of the men used his
boot to scuff a small drainage at the edge of the lake, allowing some of the
water to trickle through the gravel to a larger adjoining lake. Upon
returning to lac l’Espérance a few hours later, the men found that the small
lake had completely disappeared. In its place was a stand of flat-topped
stumps, each sawed or sheared off at about the same level from the ground
(Veillette 1983).
Rumours of this uncanny event circulated around Senneterre, where they
were heard the following summer by a visiting party that included a field
geologist. Curious, the visitors went to the place where the lake was
supposed to have been and collected some samples of wood. They turned
these over to the Geological Survey of Canada. Since Canada does not have
a branch of the FBI to investigate the paranormal, the job fell to a geologist
named Veillette, who was asked to look into the matter in the summer of
262 W. J. Turkel
1978. Veillette began by studying aerial photographs of the region. Those
taken in 1973 for the cartographic service of the Quebec Ministère de
l’Energie et des Ressources clearly showed a small lake where one was
supposed to have been. Aerial photos taken in 1975 for the Canadian
department of Energy, Mines and Resources, however, did not. Clearly
something unusual had occurred in the intervening time. Veillette decided
to visit the site to gather more evidence.
There he found traces of the lake’s former shoreline. The lake had been
separated by a narrow ridge of sand and gravel from an adjacent, larger lake
at a slightly lower elevation. When this ridge was breached, the small lake
drained into the larger one in a matter of hours, catastrophically washing
away thousands of cubic meters of the gravel ridge in the process. Of more
interest to Veillette were the aged and brownish stumps that had been at the
bottom of the small lake, submerged by as much as five meters of water.
Many of these had flat tops, although a few were pointed—something that
had not been mentioned in previous reports. There were also some logs
with flat upper surfaces scattered among the flat-top stumps. Veillette
noticed that the stumps with pointed tops were located in what would have
been the shallower regions of the lake, while those with the flat tops were
deeper. He, too, collected samples of the wood to study.
The story of the small lake’s rise and fall was later reconstructed by
Veillette. Around twenty thousand years ago, at the height of the last Ice Age,
south-western Quebec was covered by a massive ice sheet (Geological Survey
of Canada 1968). As the ice sheet melted, a number of characteristic post-
glacial landscape features were created, including what are known as eskers.
An esker is a long ridge composed of sand and gravel that was deposited by a
meltwater stream flowing through a tunnel on the bottom edge of the melt-
ing ice sheet. Such an esker, created millennia before, was what eventually
divided the small lake from its larger neighbor, at least for a while.
Veillette used radiocarbon dating of organic mud deposits to show that
the region of lac l’Espérance was colonized by vegetation about nine
thousand years ago. With increased precipitation, a small stream formed,
flowing toward the esker and seeping through it into the larger lake.
Beginning more than thirty-six hundred years ago, beavers built a dam on
this stream, creating a number of stumps that were subsequently submerged
as a pond formed. The overflow created by the beaver dam continued to seep
through the esker. Organic matter that formed in the pond gradually sedi-
mented, however, creating a seal that prevented seepage, and allowing a
small lake to form. Radiocarbon dating of the older, flat-topped stumps and
the newer, pointed ones showed that beavers continued to be active in the
area for hundreds of years. (Veillette postulated some kind of erosive process
 Rethinking History 263
to account for why the older stumps were not also pointed.) The original
dam was eventually submerged to a depth of more than five meters, at which
point the area had become the edge of a lake and was no longer desirable
habitat for the animals. The small lake continued to expand along the esker.
By 1974, the original beaver dam had been submerged to a depth of almost
nine meters. The small lake was overlapping the esker and downcutting had
become inevitable. When the fisherman created a small drainage, water
flowing through it carried away some sand and gravel, which created a larger
drainage, which allowed much more material to be carried away, and so on,
positive feedback undoing in a few hours what had been done over the
course of millennia (Veillette 1983).
Veillette’s process of reconstruction illustrates the fact that unwritten
evidence can be used to infer events of the very long-term past, and that
multiple time scales may be relevant in a way that is less frequently seen in
traditional historical writing. His story of the lake, for example, unfolded in
geological, glacial and human time frames. His reconstruction also shows
that there is a widespread division of interpretive labor. In figuring out what
happened at lac L’Espérance, he made use of aerial photographs and topo-
graphic maps that were created by teams of people employed by provincial
and federal government agencies. Interpretive specialists worked at many
stages in the creation of these representations. Photogrammetrists were
responsible for studying the aerial photographs and identifying bodies of
water, determining relief, locating buildings and railways and characterizing
vegetation that could later be plotted on maps. Field surveyors went to the
place itself to determine the exact location of features seen in the photo-
graphs, and to collect detail that could not be otherwise inferred. Veillette
also made use of the work of palynologists, who reconstructed past plant
assemblages and climates from layers of pollen grains trapped in sediment.
He drew on the interpretations of glaciologists who reconstructed the
movements of the retreating ice sheet. One colleague who was a botanist
identified the tree species for him from the samples of wood. Another
colleague who was a paleohydrologist told Veillette what the water table in
the area was like four thousand years earlier. And so on.
Veillette’s process of reconstruction also serves as an example of what
Carlo Ginzburg called ‘the evidential paradigm’. In an influential essay,
Ginzburg drew attention to a mode of thought whereby interpreters use
latent or seemingly insignificant traces to draw wide-ranging conclusions
about an external and knowable (if opaque) reality (1989). Such reasoning
is ubiquitous. In a bewildering variety of settings, people who are not
historians try to reconstruct past events from the material traces that they
find in particular places. The sites where this kind of reconstruction occurs
264 W. J. Turkel
may be exploration camps, abandoned villages, airplane or automobile
crashes, archaeological digs, oil spills, seismographic stations, crime scenes,
railway cuts, burned-over forests or toxic waste dumps. Typically these
reconstructions have a chronological dimension. This may be as simple as
determining that one event occurred before another. For example, a
forensic anthropologist studying a fractured skull knows that the cracks
caused by subsequent blows could not cross the cracks of earlier blows, and
thus can determine in what order the injuries were inflicted (Maples and
Browning 1994). In other situations, the chronology of a reconstructed
series of events may be a fully determined timeline, as when a dendo-
chronologist uses the differential growth seen in tree rings from year to year
to plot climatic fluctuations (Roberts 1998).
The story of the disappearing lake is a useful reminder that historians,
scientists and detectives, although similarly motivated by curiosity, have
very different standards for what counts as an ultimately satisfying narrative
explanation. Veillette’s account served as a showcase for his interpretive
skills and those of the members of his wider community, and it conveyed
the flavor of his day-to-day activities. As natural history it is fascinating; as
history, per se, the insignificance of human agency makes the story seem
irrelevant. In fact, Veilette’s reconstruction was not representative of his
own work in two important senses: it was not valued and exchanged rela-
tive to other work, and as a result, it was not contested. To put the matter a
different way, who paid for what Veillette and his colleagues ordinarily did?
How were their conclusions used to support practical activity? What
happened when an individual or group with other interests opposed the
results or the use to which they were being put? Let us turn to a few cases
that are more representative of the ways that the interpretation of material
traces of the past takes part in political economy.
For the second case study we jump from Quebec to British Columbia,
where softwood lumber and pulp make up almost half of the exports in the
province. This is big business: in 1996, these exports totaled more than 11
billion Canadian dollars (Wood 2001). Each year, thousands of hectares of
pine forest are destroyed by bark beetles, and to keep these infestations in
check the provincial Ministry of Forests conducts an annual airborne
survey to map infected trees so that they can be eradicated before the
insects spread. During the survey, an observer sketches the location of
infected trees onto a map; the only way that he or she can determine from
the air that a given tree has been infected is because such trees turn reddish-
brown late in the summer (Rankin et al. 2000).
This change in color is caused by the activity of insects and fungi. The
adult bark beetle bores into the tree and lays its eggs in the phloem, the
 Rethinking History 265
vascular tissue that carries sugars and other dissolved foods through the
tree. When the beetle larvae hatch from the eggs, they feed on the phloem
and the cambium, a layer of cells between the wood and the bark. In boring
into the tree, the beetle also introduces a fungus that colonizes and kills the
sapwood, which conducts water and sap through the tree. Eventually the
insects and fungi girdle the tree and kill it. When the tree comes under
attack, it becomes less and less able to produce the green pigment chloro-
phyll. The needles turn reddish-brown (BC Ministry of Forests 1994).
During the airborne survey, the foresters use this color as a sign that a given
tree has been infected. By this time, however, the tree is dead and the
infestation has probably spread to surrounding trees. If the surveyors were
observing the trees from the ground, they would see many more signs of
bark beetle infection, some of which would provide an earlier warning: the
grooves left by boring, known as ‘galleries’; characteristic open scars and
rope-like calluses on the bark; the scattershot exit holes left by emerging
adults after they lay the eggs; irregular bare patches where the bark has
fallen off altogether; tubes of yellow pitch where the tree secreted resin in its
defense; and blue stains caused by the fungus (Pielou 1988).
Not all of the infected trees are damaged enough to appear red when the
airborne survey is done, and there are not enough foresters to do much
closer inspection: there are 52 million hectares of forest in British Columbia.
As a consequence, the foresters usually miss a number of beetle infestations,
which cost more money to eradicate in subsequent years. In 1999, researchers
began evaluating a pair of NASA-designed glasses that allow an observer to
see plant stress. Invented two years earlier, the glasses effectively block the
green portion of visible light, so that healthy vegetation looks grey or black,
while stressed plants stand out as yellowish-brown or pink. Foresters
wearing the glasses during airborne surveying were able to detect signifi-
cantly more bark beetle infestations than those without them (Rankin et al.
2000). Although the foresters did not necessarily frame their activity in
these terms, what they were doing was inferring a cause from its effects,
interpreting material signs to reconstruct a history of insect and fungal
infection. Those who wore the plant stress detection glasses were able to see
the signs of more recent events; those without the glasses were limited to
seeing the signs of activity that was longer past.
In the previous case study, we saw an extensive division of interpretive
labor and were led to ask what this implied for political economy. Foresters
who work for the provincial Ministry of Forests are paid by the govern-
ment. Others work for the companies that hold various kinds of licenses to
harvest timber in the province. Although the interests of the government
and those of the timber companies overlap, they certainly do not coincide.
266 W. J. Turkel
Under the terms of the licenses, the companies are responsible for
inventorying and managing the forest and for reforestation after logging
(Vyse 2001). The companies clearly want to turn a profit, and so must
decide how best to allocate their funds. They have to pay foresters to do
surveying and other kinds of interpretive activity; in a sense, the company is
constantly in the position of having to decide what to learn. The projected
cost of every act of interpretation is ultimately balanced against its
projected benefit. This is true of the government, too. Such calculations,
whether explicitly made or not, enter into situations where many indi-
viduals or groups have a stake in the outcome, as the third case study more
clearly shows.
In 1993, the geological surveys of Canada and the province of British
Columbia teamed up with interests in the private sector to conduct a wide
range of geological, geochemical and geophysical surveys of the interior
plateau of British Columbia in an effort to locate and assess unexploited
mineral deposits. Mineral exploration in the region is hampered by the
glacial drift and extensive forests that cover much of the area. In one
attempt to get round this problem, an environmental consulting company
was contracted to do a ‘helicopter-mounted reconnaissance-level survey’ of
a place called Fish Lake. Over the space of three days in May, the survey
crew flew the helicopter along the lines of a grid measuring about 30 by
50 kilometers. Every 2.5 kilometers the helicopter dipped down and the
person doing the sampling (securely attached to the hovering helicopter by
a couple of safety lines) leaned out to snip off one of the pine tree tops.
These samples were passed on to the Geological Survey of Canada in
Ottawa. There, biogeochemists first dried the plant tissues and then burned
them and tested the ash for concentrations of various metals such as copper
and gold. Finally, these concentrations were plotted on a map showing
where each sample was obtained (Dunn 1997).
To make sense of the results, the biogeochemists reconstructed the
history of the Fish Lake region at three timescales, again drawing on the
interpretations of many other specialists. In geological time, magma crys-
tallizing beneath the earth’s surface forced hot fluids into the surrounding
rock. Since trace elements like copper and gold did not readily fit into the
crystallizing mineral, they became concentrated in the fluids instead, later
cooling into metal-rich veins. In glacial time this bedrock was covered with
the sand and gravel created by the weathering of exposed surfaces, and
millennia of biological activity on the surface resulted in the gradual
formation of soil. Within the last century or two, pines growing in the
region extended their roots deep into the soil, the glacial drift and, in
places, the bedrock. Drawing water and nutrients up through this root
 Rethinking History 267
system, they also extracted materials that they did not need for growth (like
copper and gold), and these became concentrated in the tree tops, twig ends
and bark. In a sense, the trees served to amplify the geochemical signature
of the substrate they were growing on (Dunn 1997).
One motive for learning about the past—for scientists working in the
field no less than historians—is the desire to influence the present and the
future. Other exploratory work done at Fish Lake had shown that there was
a large copper-gold porphyry deposit there. As various stakeholders
maneuvered to determine the fate of the region and its resources, each tried
to recreate a usable past for the place from the material traces they found
there. Proponents of an open-pit mine were encouraged by the geological
history of the region to believe that the ore deposit was probably massive
and of relatively high grade. Opponents of the mine adduced support from
different views of the region’s past. The federal fisheries department and
sport anglers, for example, could point to the zoogeographical history of
Fish Lake to argue that the population of rainbow trout that would be
destroyed by mining was genetically unique. Native groups invoked
archaeological studies that demonstrated millennia of indigenous use and
occupation (Turkel 2004).
Such conflicts might occur on a local or regional scale, as in the case of
Fish Lake, or a national or international one. A good example of the latter
comes from concerns about freshwater acidification. In the 1970s it became
apparent that pollutants like sulfur dioxide could be transported a long
distance in the atmosphere. When deposited in freshwater, the pollutants
were thought to be responsible for the acidification of lakes and streams
and the subsequent loss of freshwater fish. The situation was complicated
by the fact that the atmospheric pollutants did not respect national
boundaries. Parts of southern Canada were downwind from factories in the
United States, and vice versa, and countries like Sweden and Norway were
downwind from factories in the United Kingdom. The situation was further
complicated by alternative suggestions that the lakes and streams in
question may have always been acidic, that the decline in fish might be a
response to climatic stress or that acidification might actually be due to
changes in land use. Needless to say, the alternative explanations tended
to be favored by the putative polluters. The problem eventually led to
international cooperation and collaboration. In 1991, Canada and the US
negotiated an agreement to reduce North American sulfur dioxide
emissions, and to date both countries have more than met the terms of
the agreement. In Europe, the UK, Norway and Sweden collaborated on a
five-year ‘Anglo-Scandinavian Surface Waters Acidification Programme’
(1984 – 89) to study every aspect of the problem. One result of this program
268 W. J. Turkel
was the discovery that many lakes had become more acidic in the last 150
years than they had been at any time in the previous ten millennia, and that
this acidification occurred in parallel with the development of industry. The
claim that acidification was brought about by climate change or changes in
land use was thus disproved. Such studies had political ramifications, of
course. In the UK, for example, the Thatcher government used the evidence
to justify closing coal mines and switching to other energy sources (Mason
1990, 1992; Jeffries et al. 2003).
The task of reconstructing ecological relations in historic and prehistoric
times is of interest to the interpretive specialists that we have been talking
about—geologists, foresters, biogeochemists and many others—but also to
people working in a range of disciplines in the humanities and social
sciences: historical geographers, human ecologists, historical ecologists and
environmental historians, to name a few (Roberts and Butlin 1995). While
there is a shared emphasis on unwritten sources across the disciplines, the
explanatory role that the interpretation of those sources plays in each is
necessarily different. Here, the idea of historian as detective is preferable to
that of historian as scientist. Followed too far, the trail of the scientist turns
out to be a red herring, and the resulting explanations fail to convince those
of our colleagues who have no interest in herrings, red or otherwise (as
Detective Inspector Derek Grim put it in Ben Elton’s ‘Thin Blue Line’). For
what makes a particular work environmental history? The questions that it
asks, surely, but also the sources it uses. A successful and canonical work like
William Cronon’s Changes in the Land (1983) is based not only on
traditional primary sources like letters, journals and legal records, but also
on the literature of the relevant environmental and human sciences: ecology,
palynology, phytogeography, anthropology, archaeology and geography
among others. Trying to write a history ‘which extends its boundaries
beyond human institutions . . . to the natural ecosystems which provide the
context for those institutions’ (1983, p. vii) requires a massive expansion in
the kinds of sources which are deemed to be relevant.
This evidential catholicity holds many pitfalls for the unwary. Every place
is an archive that accumulates material traces of its past, and the continuity
of that unwritten archive makes it possible to write very long-term histories
of any place, as we have seen in some of our case studies. As another
example, if a spike in the frequency of maize pollen can be reliably dated it
can indicate when a group of people started cultivating an important New
World food crop. But pollen grains are equally informative about the
history of plants before human beings arrived in the Americas, or before
human beings even evolved, for that matter. It becomes possible to trace
any story back millennia, back to human origins, back to the Big Bang, and
 Rethinking History 269
one version of history, which goes under the name ‘Big History’, prides
itself on doing exactly that, on providing ‘a unified account of the past at all
scales’ (Christian 2004).
Every historian faces the problem of selection, and proponents of big
history no doubt feel as if they just have to be more selective than most.
Opponents of the approach, however, may think that it leads to an
unwarranted anthropocentrism, to whiggery on a breathtaking scale. David
Christian’s narrative, for example, has to end somewhere and it ends with
us. But how did we get here? His account is divided into five parts using a
logarithmic temporal scale. Part one covers the origins of time and space
and the universe; part two, the evolution of life; part three, the evolution of
humans; part four, the emergence of ‘civilizations’ in the last ten thousand
years (his scare quotes); part five, the modern world. For Christian, the
narrative of big history is a ‘modern creation myth’.
Other very long-term histories are framed in ways that some will find
equally troubling. Guns, Germs and Steel exemplifies the approach of
historian as scientist, or, more accurately, vice versa. In it, Jared Diamond
argues for a form of geographic determinism: ‘if the populations of
Aboriginal Australia and Eurasia could have been interchanged during the
Late Pleistocene, the original Aboriginal Australians would now be the
ones occupying most of the Americas and Australia, as well as Eurasia,
while the original Aboriginal Eurasians would be the ones now reduced to
downtrodden population fragments in Australia’ (1999, p. 405). On this
formulation, what was most important in human history was the geo-
graphical configuration of the starting point thirteen thousand years ago,
with associated natural resources and environmental possibilities. The
kinds of factors that historians typically emphasize, especially human
agency in all its non-material aspects, are given short shrift (cf. Mazlish
1999, McNeill and McNeill 2003).
An attempt to narrate the very long-term past may be methodologically
sound but falter when confronted with the ‘so what?’ question: why should
anyone care what happened in this place tens of millions of years ago? In his
ecological history of North America, The Eternal Frontier, the Australian
paleontologist Tim Flannery seems to have decided that deep time would be
interesting to Americans if it was a story of the United States. ‘I believe that
the history of the US is in some ways an exemplar—the example of
examples—of a story recapitulated countless times in North America
over the past 65 million years’ (2001, p. 4). One of his examples was the
evolution of horses, from dog-sized animals that lived in North American
rainforests fifty million years ago and ate herbs, fruit and seeds, through a
series of diversifications, near-extinctions, and repeated dispersals into
270 W. J. Turkel
Eurasia and Africa. This story, as with many of his others, was fascinating
in itself. Flannery’s attempt to read it as one example of a Turnerian
frontier process weakened an account that would have been much stronger
without it.
In fact, the problem with the historian acting as a scientist, especially
over the very long term, is that historians tend to have different explanatory
goals than scientists do, and tend to use causation in a different way. Marc
Bloch has a clear discussion of this in The Historian’s Craft (1953, pp. 190 –
191; see also Gaddis 2002, pp. 91 – 109). Using the somewhat forensic
example of a hapless fellow who falls off a precipice, Bloch notes that we
might blame the man’s death on the existence of gravity, the evolution of
the earth or the placement of a path to facilitate transhumance. The
preferred explanation, however, is simply a misstep. ‘It is not that this
antecedent was most necessary to the occurrence of the event. Many others
were just as necessary. But it was distinguished from all the rest by several
very striking characteristics: it occurred last; it was the least permanent, the
most exceptional in the general order of things; finally, by virtue of this
greater particularity, it seems the antecedent which could have been most
easily avoided’ (1953, p. 191). The Big Bang was ultimately necessary for the
man’s demise, but as a cause it suffers from what Gaddis calls the ‘principle
of diminishing relevance’, where perceived relevance is inversely propor-
tional to the length of time between cause and consequence. Gaddis also
argues that historians exhibit ‘a preference for parsimony in consequences,
but not causes’. The Big Bang does not seem to most historians like a good
cause for a man’s death, not because it wasn’t necessary, but rather because
it is a necessary cause for too much . . . everything in the universe, in fact.
The search for ultimate causation has more appeal for those in search of
more inclusive generalizations.
The big-picture environmental history practiced by Christian, Diamond
and Flannery is not representative of the field as a whole. For many
environmental historians, the dramatic expansion of potential sources
has not led to an equally dramatic extension of temporal scale and a con-
comitant search for meanings to justify such a grand enterprise. But what
kind of alternatives are there? Analogy is a useful mode of thought here,
because it allows us to study the other side of the equation. How do other
interpretive specialists respond to the ‘so what?’ question? What role does
an increase in potential evidence play for those who are not historians? Let
us turn to another case study. For this we will jump to Manitoba.
Three black bear carcasses were found in a garbage dump one hundred
kilometers north of Winnipeg in July, 1995. Each of the animals had been
shot in the head or neck and disemboweled, had its gallbladder removed,
 Rethinking History 271
then been covered with garbage. Since the bear gallbladder is an important
element in traditional Chinese medicine, investigators suspected that the
bears had been killed so that the organs could be sold. Two of the dead
bears were adult females and their orphaned cubs were seen in the dump
searching for food, although attempts to capture them failed. When shots
were reported on the evening of 13 July, conservation officers and members
of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police apprehended two suspects at the
dump. Neither had bear gall bladders in their possession. The following
day, two of the cubs were found dead, their carcasses also shot in the head
and missing gall bladders, although the animals ‘were too young for the
galls to have any commercial or medicinal value’. Yet another bear carcass
was found the day after, in a similar condition to the previous ones
(Anderson 1999, p. 856).
Since the suspects had already been released, the best hope that the
conservation officers had of making a case was to tie them to the poaching of
the two cubs. DNA evidence linked one of the suspects to the scene, but did
not indicate when they were there. The conservation officers needed a way to
prove exactly when the cubs had died, and for that turned to insect evidence.
Forensic entomology is now a staple of human death investigation: insects
colonize a dead body in a predictable fashion, laying eggs in wounds and at
the body’s natural orifices, and these eggs hatch like clockwork, the timing
depending on ambient temperature and other known factors (Goff 2000).
From evidence taken from the cubs’ carcasses, Gail Anderson, a forensic
entomologist at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, was able to
determine that the cubs had been killed on the evening of 13 July, exactly
when the suspects were apprehended shooting at the dump. If the cubs had
been killed earlier, the eggs that were collected on their carcasses would have
already developed to maggots; if they had been killed later it would have
taken longer for the eggs to hatch in the laboratory than it did. Both of the
suspects were convicted of poaching and sentenced to serve jail terms, the
judge finding the insect evidence ‘most compelling’ (Anderson 1999, p. 858).
As Karl Jacoby reminds us in Crimes against Nature, poaching ‘speak[s]
not only to the human relationship with nature but also to the distribution
of power within human society—of the ability of some groups of humans
to legitimize certain environmental practices and to criminalize others’
(2001, p. xvi). In this case we saw one of the ways that the interpretation of
material traces plays a role not only in political economy but in the
enforcement of law as well. When stakeholders use physical evidence to
press for a particular version of the past and a course of action in the pre-
sent, important matters often turn on something seemingly insignificant.
In this example, jail time for the poachers was predicated on when some
272 W. J. Turkel
maggots hatched. In an earlier case, decisions about digging a multi-billion
dollar open-pit mine were based, in part, on trout genetics and on metal
concentrations in tree-tops.
Insignificance seems to be of concern to some environmental historians
these days, although the preoccupation is not with the evidence but rather
with the findings. The 2003 meetings of the American Society for
Environmental History were dedicated to the theme of ‘mainstreaming
the marginal’, and at least one senior scholar is currently trying to measure
the influence that the field has had on historiography in general. In a recent
issue of the journal Environmental History, Ellen Stroud wrote, ‘What we
need are not more histories about yet another forest, river, or wolf
population (and I say this as someone who is finishing a book on forests),
but works that use the insights developed in earlier histories of forests and
rivers and wolves to tell us things we did not yet know about political
history, about economic history, about social history, about History writ
large’ (2003, p. 621). In another recent issue, a book review began, ‘Just
when you think that everything possible has been written about Yellow-
stone National Park, yet another book is published’ (Pritchard 2003,
p. 331). Instead of choosing to write about forests and rivers and wolves,
and then worrying about how to gain the attention of colleagues outside the
field, environmental historians might do better to look for new kinds of
evidence to bring to bear on the questions that they think are most
important. The final case study exemplifies this approach.
Archaeologists have argued that the ancestors of the Kaska, an
Athapaskan people living in northern British Columbia and the Yukon,
had a society and economy based on hunting large mammals in the boreal
forest. These animals—moose, sheep, bear and beaver—are widely dis-
persed, and thus human social groups that prey on them have to be
relatively small. Bison, which were important to indigenous groups living to
the southeast of the Kaska, are not presently found in the area. Further-
more, there is no ethnographic record of the Kaska eating bison, and no
recorded term for it in their language.
In the 1990s, the archaeologist Thomas Loy studied a small number of
stone artifacts from a site on the Toad River in Kaska territory. The tools
had been collected by a botanist in 1958 and were in the Royal British
Columbia Museum. The archaeological site was subsequently destroyed by
modifications to the Alaskan Highway and by river erosion. Initially, Loy
believed that the tools would not be very informative. On stylistic grounds,
they were thought to have been created within the last three thousand years,
but without any other evidence from the site there was not much to go on.
Loy examined the tools under a microscope, however, and saw that there
 Rethinking History 273
were extensive deposits of blood residue on them. ‘Three of the tools had
readily visible hairs and fragments of tissue embedded in the residue
deposits’ (Loy 1993, p. 46). He decided to subject the tools to a broad
spectrum of tests, treating the individual artifact as a site. As a result, he was
able to show that the tools were manufactured out of chert from a nearby
quarry; that the residue dated to 2160 + 160 years before present; that they
were originally hafted in wood from local conifers; that the orientation of
the residues suggested cutting or butchering and the overlaying showed that
the tools were used many times; and that the animals that were butchered
with the tools were bison. As a result of his work it became necessary for
archaeologists and anthropologists to revise the accepted idea of the
subsistence activities for the group to include the ‘socially complex hunting
strategies necessary for predation on herd animals’ (1993, p. 57).
In a paper in the Journal of American History, William Cronon
encouraged environmental historians to tell ‘not just stories about nature,
but stories about stories about nature’ (1992, p. 1375). In considering the
work of interpretive specialists who are not historians, we have done exactly
that. Every time someone reads a track, a core sample, a landscape, a pollen
grain, a blood spatter, a tree ring, or any of a nearly infinite number of
other traces, they are telling a story about nature and a story about the past.
Suppose we reconceptualize environmental history to be this enterprise,
this tacking back and forth between reading unwritten sources and reading
others reading them. For want of a better term, we might call this approach
‘historical detection’. Like a detective, the historian is concerned with
evidence, with clues, with causes that lie outside the general order of things,
and events that might have been avoided. Like a detective, too, the historian
must be concerned with the ways that evidence is socially constructed and
the uses to which it is put in the present. Operating in this mode has a
number of advantages. First, we do not lose the details that matter in an
attempt to go ever deeper into the past. Material traces are uniformly
informative about literate and non-literate societies, densely and sparsely
occupied places, and human and prehuman times. But new kinds of
physical evidence can also be used to reconstruct more recent pasts (as with
the plant stress detection glasses), to resolve the timing of events with
greater precision (as in forensic entomology), and to find traces of
previously unknown activities (as in the use of blood and tissue residues on
artifacts). A second advantage is that we have a better sense of the radical
division of interpretive labor. Use of the evidential paradigm is not limited
to Sherlock Holmes or to crime scene investigators, but is shared by many
interpretive specialists. And division of labor is a good indicator of political
economy at work. Specialists cannot know everything. They have to decide
274 W. J. Turkel
what to learn, and they are motivated by perceived benefits: interpretation
of physical evidence plays a role in the delineation of property rights, the
justification of ideologies and the enforcement of laws. What different
stakeholders choose to learn determines how they see the past, and their
vision of the past will always be contested by others with different interests.
The third advantage is that we do not lose sight of the fact that technologies
and scientific knowledge are social constructs that are not authoritative and
not univocal. When we look at interpretive specialists going about their
business, we see them create evidence, deploy it and contest it in the search
for a usable past.

Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Marcel Fortin, who worked with him on
an earlier paper about the disappearing lake, Gail Anderson, who
answered some questions about her case, and Harriet Ritvo, who read a
draft of this paper. The author also received feedback and encouragement
from Deborah Fitzgerald, Shepard Krech III, the PXY group and
participants in the MIT Science, Technology and Society colloquium.
The suggestions made by the anonymous reviewers were insightful, and
the author has adopted most of them here. Any remaining errors are his
own.

References
Anderson, G.S. (1999) ‘Wildlife forensic entomology: Determining time of death in two
illegally killed black bear cubs, a case report’, Journal of Forensic Sciences, vol. 44,
no. 4, pp. 856 – 859.
BC Ministry of Forests (1994) Bark Beetles of BC, Ministry of Forests, Victoria, BC.
Bloch, Marc (1953) The Historian’s Craft, Vintage, New York.
Carr, Edward Hallett (1961) What is History?, Vintage, New York.
Christian, David (2004) Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History, Berkeley,
University of California.
Cronon, William (1983) Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New
England, Hill & Wang, New York.
Cronon, William (1992) ‘A place for stories: Nature, history and narrative’, Journal of
American History, vol. 78, no. 4, pp. 1347 – 1376.
Diamond, Jared (1999) Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies,
W.W. Norton, New York.
Dunn, Colin E. (1997) ‘Biogeochemical surveys in the interior plateau of British
Columbia’, in Interior Plateau Geoscience Project: Summary of Geological,
Geochemical and Geophysical Studies, eds L.J. Diakow, J.M. Newell and
P. Metcalfe, British Columbia Geological Survey, Victoria, BC, pp. 205 – 218.
 Rethinking History 275
Flannery, Tim (2001) The Eternal Frontier: An Ecological History of North America and
Its Peoples, Grove Press, New York.
Gaddis, John Lewis (2002) The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past,
Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Geological Survey of Canada (1968) ‘Glacial map of Canada’, 1253A.
Ginzburg, Carlo (1989) ‘Clues: Roots of an evidential paradigm’, in Clues, Myths and the
Historical Method, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD, pp. 96 – 125.
Goff, M. Lee (2000) A Fly for the Prosecution: How Insect Evidence Helps Solve Crimes,
Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.
Jacoby, Karl (2001) Crimes against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden
History of American Conservation, University of California Press, Berkeley.
Jeffries, D.S., Brydges, T.G., Dillon, P.J. and Keller, W. (2003) ‘Monitoring the results of
Canada/U.S.A. acid rain control programs: some lake responses’, Environmental
Monitoring and Assessment, vol. 88, pp. 3 – 19.
Loy, Thomas H. (1993) ‘The artifact as site: an example of the biomolecular analysis
of organic residues on prehistoric tools’, World Archaeology, vol. 25, no. 1,
pp. 44 – 63.
Maples, William R. and Browning, Michael (1994) Dead Men Do Tell Tales, Doubleday,
New York.
Mason, B.J. (ed.) (1990) The Surface Waters Acidification Programme, Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge.
Mason, B.J. (1992) Acid Rain: Its Causes and Effects on Inland Waters, Clarendon Press,
Oxford.
Mazlish, Bruce (1999) ‘Big questions? Big history?’ History and Theory, vol. 38, no. 2,
pp. 232 – 248.
McNeill, John R. and McNeill, William H. (2003) The Human Web: A Birds-Eye View of
World History, W.W. Norton, New York.
Nickell, Joe and Fischer, John F. (1998) Crime Science: Methods of Forensic Detection,
University Press of Kentucky, Lexington.
Pielou, E.C. (1988) The World of the Northern Evergreens, Cornell University Press,
Ithaca, NY.
Pritchard, James (2003) ‘Selling Yellowstone: Capitalism and the Construction of Nature,
by Mark Daniel Barringer’, Environmental History, vol. 8, no. 2, pp. 331 – 333.
Rankin, Leo, Heath, Jamie and Murtha, Peter (2000) ‘Efficacy of NASA plant stress
glasses for pine beetle detection’, Compact Airborne Spectrographic Imagery
(CASI) Symposium, Victoria, BC.
Roberts, Neil (1998) The Holocene: An Environmental History, 2nd edn, Blackwell,
Oxford.
Roberts, Neil, and Butlin, Robin A. (1995) ‘Ecological relations in historical times: an
introduction’, in Ecological Relations in Historical Times: Human Impact and
Adaptation, eds R.A. Butlin and N. Roberts, Blackwell, Oxford, pp. 1 – 14.
Shackleton, David M. (1999) Hoofed Mammals of British Columbia, Royal British
Columbia Museum, Vancouver.
Stroud, Ellen (2003) ‘From six feet under the field: dead bodies in the classroom’,
Environmental History, vol. 8, no. 4, pp. 618 – 627.
Turkel, William J. (2004) ‘The archive of place: environment and the contested past of a
North American plateau’, Ph.D. dissertation, Program in the History and Social
Study of Science and Technology, MIT.
276 W. J. Turkel
Veillette, J.J. (1983) ‘The rise and fall of a small lake’, Geoscience Canada, vol. 10, no. 3,
pp. 128 – 132.
Vyse, Alan (2001) ‘Forestry’, in British Columbia: The Pacific Province, ed. C.J.B. Wood,
Western Geographical Press, Victoria, BC, pp. 289 – 310.
Winks, Robin W. (ed.) (1969) The Historian as Detective: Essays on Evidence, Harper &
Row, New York.
Wood, Colin J.B. (2001) ‘Spatial economy’, in British Columbia: The Pacific Province,
ed. C.J.B. Wood, Western Geographical Press, Victoria, BC, pp. 175 – 195.