I had heard of it, but knew little about it. I suspected it was either a do-gooder lament about how the noble red man had been scourged by whitey, or it was some "Chariots of the Gods meets Atlantis" nonsense.

I knew from the Missouri mound builders and the large agricultural communities of the Indians the first colonists encountered in New England, that they were not hunter-gatherer primitives, but I knew they did not approach the civilizations of the Andes or Central America, or even our own Southwest.

I may have to check that book out.
I do know that the land was not primeval forest, that even Neolithic human activity can alter a landscape profoundly, often by making it more sustainably productive, but even the Australian aborigines knew that. They managed their rangeland quite successfully to make it more diverse and productive on a vast scale, simply by burning it off at just the right time of year, making it more attractive to wildlife.

And (please don't tell TB), they did it without our concept of individually owned "private property". 8)