In his book, Changes in the Land, William Cronon explores the relationship between the European and indigenous populations and local ecologies between 1620 and 1800. As he states at the outset of the book:
             "My thesis is simple: the shift from Indian to European dominance in New England entailed important changes -- well known to historians -- in the ways these people organized their lives, but it also involved fundamental reorganizations -- less well-known to historians -- in the region's plant and animal communities."(vii)
             Cronon's approach involves an investigation not only of the role a rapidly changing human population played in the altering of the ecology of New England, but the impact that ecology had on the local populations through time. By augmenting a traditional historical study with tools from anthropology and the biological sciences, Cronon develops a unique and sophisticated analysis of the period.
             With an emphasis on their centrality to the understanding of the changes taking place in local ecosystems, Cronon describes relationships between Indian and European groups, with particular interest in the variety of responses different European groups met with from different indigenous populations. Cronon underscores the importance of viewing these contacts not as being wholly representative of "European" or "Indian" populations, but as discrete meetings with their own situational patterns of interaction, though they may have historical precedents. In this sense, the smaller colonial towns and Native American groups parallel the distributed nature of ecosystems and microclimates.
             Working within these smaller ecosystems, the Indians of precolonial New England subsisted off the land in a migratory fashion. Cronon distinguishes between the Indians of northern New England, who relied almost exclusively on hunting and fishing in response to an often fairly inhospitable climate and those of southern New England...