Anthony Barberis’s Reviews > 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus > Status Update

'By 1800 the [Western] hemisphere was thick with artificial wilderness. If “forest primeval” means woodland unsullied by the human presence, Denevan has written, there was much more of it in the nineteenth century than in the seventeenth.

The product of demographic calamity, the newly created wilderness was indeed beautiful. But it was built on Indian graves and every bit as much a ruin as the temples of the Maya.'