 It is only relatively recently that numerous archaeological finds have definitively shown that Native Americans were very present in the Adirondacks before European contact, hunting, making pottery, and raising maize and beans.The European impression of a wild region devoid of human connection set up a narrative about wilderness that would persist through the next 200-some years of the region's history.While society's perception of the Adirondacks' value changed, they were always seen as a land of natural resources and physical beauty, not of human history.