Carl Ortwin Sauer

Describes the stages of Spain's brutal conquest and administration of the New World, from 1492 to 1519, emphasizing its dislocation of advanced native cultures.

Cerros de trincheras is the native term for hills with entrenchments, man-made rock walls or terraces on isolated steep hills. Review of the literature mentioning this feature in prehistoric Sonora.

This book is a "review of the impact of European colonialization on the cultural and natural landscapes of native North America. In this text, ...the author has focused on rare & neglected first-hand French and Spanish source materials to provide us with ecologically and ethnographically rich, stunningly detailed and articulate portraits of the American Landscape, and the culturally sophisticated Native land-management systems which were already in place at the dawn of Euro-American history. Far from a vast and open wilderness's America was, at its dawn, already a human environment, as Sauer so clearly demonstrates, and our history as a people would swing on the ability of our early 'Founding fathers,' often no more than glorified European real estate agents, to perceive the intricacies of these eco-systems as they lay before them like an open book"--Back cover.