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February 14 - February 17, 2024
In a crisply argued paper in Science in 1964, Haynes drew attention to the correlation between the birth of “an ice-free, trans-Canadian corridor” and the “abrupt appearance of Clovis artifacts some 700 years later.” Thirteen thousand to fourteen thousand years ago, he suggested, a window in time opened. During this interval—and, for all practical purposes, only during this interval—paleo-Indians could have crossed Beringia, slipped through the ice-free corridor, and descended into southern Alberta, from where they would have been able to spread throughout North America. The implication was
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near-simultaneous appearance of Clovis artifacts throughout North America—and “the swift extermination of the more conspicuous native American large mammals.”
Highly mobile, scattered in small bands, carnivorous to a fault, the paleo-Indians conjured by archaeologists were, above all, “stout-hearted, daring, and voracious big-game hunters,”
According to Greenberg’s linguistic analysis, paleo-Indians had crossed over Beringia not once, but thrice.
Using their previously calculated rate of genetic change as a standard, they estimated when the original group had migrated to the Americas: 22,414 to 29,545 years ago. Indians had come to the Americas ten thousand years before Clovis.
Native Americans may have been in the Americas for twenty thousand or even thirty thousand years.
If Monte Verde is correct, as most believe, people were thriving from Alaska to Chile while much of northern Europe was still empty of mankind and its works.
If McNeill were writing A World History today, discoveries like those at Huaricanga would force him to add two more areas to the book. The first and better known is Mesoamerica, where half a dozen societies, the Olmec first among them, rose in the centuries before Christ. The second is the Peruvian littoral, home of a much older civilization that has come to light only in the twenty-first century.*
Between 3200 and 2500 B.C., large-scale public buildings, the temple at Huaricanga among them, rose up in at least seven settlements on the Peruvian coast—an extraordinary efflorescence for that time and place. When the people of the Norte Chico were building these cities, there was only one other urban complex on earth: Sumer.
Much as historians of early Eurasia focus on the Tigris-Euphrates, Nile, Indus, and Huang He Valleys, historians of the Americas focus on Mesoamerica and the Andes.
By contrast, there was very little exchange of people, goods, or ideas between Mesoamerica and the Andes. Travelers on the Silk Road between China and the Mediterranean had to cross desert and the Hindu Kush, both formidable obstacles. But there was no road whatsoever across the two thousand miles of jagged mountains and thick rainforest between Mesoamerica and the Andes.
If the anti-Clovis arguments are correct, paleo-Indians walked or paddled to Peru fifteen thousand years ago or more. But Peru’s first known inhabitants appear in the archaeological record sometime before 10,000 B.C
Because human beings rarely volunteer to spend their days loading baskets with heavy rocks to build public monuments, Haas, Creamer, and Ruiz argued that these cities must have had a centralized government that instigated and directed the work. In the Norte Chico, in other words, Homo sapiens experienced a phenomenon that at that time had occurred only once before, in Mesopotamia: the emergence, for better or worse, of leaders with enough prestige, influence, and hierarchical position to induce their subjects to perform heavy labor. It was humankind’s second experiment with government.
the MFAC hypothesis: the maritime foundations of Andean civilization. He proposed that there was little subsistence agriculture around Aspero because it was a center of fishing, and that the later, highland Peruvian cultures, including the mighty Inka, all had their origins not in the mountains but in the great fishery of the Humboldt Current. Rather than being founded on agriculture, the ancient cities of coastal Peru drew their sustenance from the sea.
the stories are all the same: foraging societies develop agriculture; the increased food supply leads to a population boom; the society grows and stratifies, with powerful clerics at the top and peasant cultivators at the bottom; massive public works ensue, along with intermittent social strife and war. If the MFAC hypothesis was true, early civilization in Peru was in one major respect strikingly unlike early civilization in Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, and China.
The grain in wild grasses develops near the top of the stem. As it matures, the stem slowly breaks up—shatters, in the jargon—letting the seed dribble to the ground. In wild wheat and barley, a common single-gene mutation blocks shattering. For the plant the change is highly disadvantageous, but it facilitates harvest by humans—the grain waits on the stem to be collected. The discovery and planting of nonshattering grain is thought to have been integral to the Neolithic revolution in the Middle East.
A milpa is a field, usually but not always recently cleared, in which farmers plant a dozen crops at once, including maize, avocados, multiple varieties of squash and bean, melon, tomatoes, chilis, sweet potato, jicama (a tuber), amaranth (a grain-like plant), and mucuna (a tropical legume).
Maize in the milpa, the Yale archaeologist Michael D. Coe wrote, “is the key … to the understanding of Mesoamerican civilization. Where it flourished, so did high culture.”
Maize and the milpa slowly radiated throughout the Americas, stopping their advance only where the climate grew too cold or dry. By the time of the Pilgrims, fields of mixed maize, beans, and squash lined the New England coast and in many places extended for miles into the interior. To the south, maize reached to Peru and Chile.
That zero is not the same as nothing is a concept that baffled Europeans as late as the Renaissance. How can you calculate with nothing? they asked.
Peru symbolically gave two miles of its shoreline to Bolivia in 1992. Bolivia Mar—Bolivia-by-the-Sea—is a little island of Bolivia entirely surrounded by Peru.
Surprisingly, Peru has more arable land above nine thousand feet than below. By diverting snowmelt from the ever-present Andes icecaps to high farm terraces, Wari was able literally to rise above the drought and flooding of lower elevations.
Cultures rise and fall, but there is no other known time when a large-scale society disintegrated—and was replaced by nothing. “When the Roman Empire fell apart,” he said, “Italy didn’t empty out—no cities, no major societies—for more than a thousand years. But the Maya heartland did just that.” What happened?
Morley of Harvard, probably the most celebrated Mayanist of his day, espoused what is still the best-known theory: The Maya collapsed because they overshot the carrying capacity of their environment. They exhausted their resource base, began to die of starvation and thirst, and fled their cities en masse, leaving them as silent warnings of the perils of ecological hubris.
The first two sections of this book were devoted to two different ways that researchers have recently repudiated this perspective. I showed that they have raised their estimates of indigenous populations in 1492, and their reasons for it; and then why most researchers now believe that Indian societies have been here longer than had been imagined, and grew more complex and technologically accomplished than previously thought. In this section I treat another facet of Holmberg’s Mistake: the idea that native cultures did not or could not control their environment.
Covering five square miles and housing at least fifteen thousand people, Cahokia was the biggest concentration of people north of the Río Grande until the eighteenth century.
Archaeologists have tentative indications of early domestication in spots from Illinois to Alabama by 1000 B.C. But agriculture did not begin to flower, so to speak, until the Adena.
The Adena interaction sphere lasted from about 800 B.C. to about 100 B.C.
Based in southern Ohio, the Hopewell interaction sphere lasted until about 400 A.D. and extended across two-thirds of what is now the United States. Into the Midwest came seashells from the Gulf of Mexico, silver from Ontario, fossil shark’s teeth from Chesapeake Bay, and obsidian from Yellowstone. In return the Hopewell exported ideas: the bow and arrow, monumental earthworks, fired pottery (Adena pots were not put into kilns), and, probably most important, the Hopewell religion.
Given Cahokia’s engineering expertise, though, solutions were within reach: terracing hillsides, diking rivers, even moving Cahokia. Like all too many dictators, Cahokia’s rulers focused on maintaining their hold over the people, paying little attention to external reality. By 1350 A.D. the city was almost empty. Never again would such a large Indian community exist north of Mexico.
Revamping the landscape both allowed Maya cities to expand and made them more vulnerable. Despite constant maintenance, erosion silted up reservoirs, hurricanes destroyed terraces, and weeds and sediment choked irrigation networks. Over time the Maya found themselves simultaneously maintaining existing systems and pushing out to cover past mistakes.
The war between Kaan and Mutal lasted more than a century and consumed much of the Maya heartland. Kaan’s strategy was to surround Mutal and its subordinate city-states with a ring of enemies. By conquest, negotiation, and marriage alliance, Kaan succeeded in encircling its enemy—but not in winning the war.
The biggest difficulty in reconstructing the pre-Colombian past is the absence of voices from that past. Mesoamerican peoples left behind texts that are slowly giving up their secrets, but in other areas the lack of written languages has left a great silence.
much of the red Amazonian soil is weathered, harshly acid, and almost bereft of essential nutrients—one reason ecologists refer to the tropical forest as a “wet desert.”
Their long-term existence has not damaged the forest, Meggers told me, a testament to slash-and-burn’s power to keep human groups sustainably within the rigid ecological limits of the tropics.
At Marajó, Meggers and Evans soon noticed an oddity: the earliest traces of Marajóara culture were the most elaborate. As the centuries advanced, the quality of the ceramics inexorably declined.
Far from being a failed offshoot of another, higher culture, she concluded, Marajó was “one of the outstanding indigenous cultural
achievements of the New World,” a powerhouse that lasted for more than a thousand years, had “possibly well over 100,000” inhabitants, and covered thousands of square miles. Rather than damaging the forest, Marajó’s “large population, highly intensive subsistence, [and] major systems of public works” had improved it: the places formerly occupied by the Marajóara showed the most luxuriant and diverse growth.
Over time, the Meggers-Roosevelt dispute grew bitter and personal; inevitable in a contemporary academic context, it featured charges of colonialism, elitism, and membership in the CIA. Particularly vexing to Meggers was that some of the same people who demanded minutely detailed proof for pre-Clovis sites had cheerfully accepted Roosevelt’s revisionism about Marajó. A big, prosperous city rising up on its own in the stifling Amazon forest? Meggers could not contain her disbelief.
the first Amazonians did avoid the Dilemma of Rainfall Physics. Speaking broadly, their solution was not to clear the forest but to replace it with one adapted to human use. They set up shop on the bluffs that mark the edge of high water—close enough to the river to fish, far enough to avoid the flood. And then, rather than centering their agriculture on annual crops, they focused on the
“Visitors are always amazed that you can walk in the forest here and constantly pick fruit from trees,” Clement said. “That’s because people planted them. They’re walking through old orchards.”
“slash-and-char.” Instead of completely burning organic matter to ash, ancient farmers burned it incompletely to make charcoal, then stirred the charcoal into the soil. In addition to its benefits to the soil, slash-and-char releases much less carbon into the air than slash-and-burn,
Instead it suggests that for a long time clever people who knew tricks that we have yet to learn used big chunks of Amazonia nondestructively. Faced with an ecological problem, the Indians fixed it. Rather than adapt to Nature, they created it. They were in the midst of terraforming the Amazon when Columbus showed up and ruined everything.
Ever since 1492, the hemispheres have become more and more alike, as people mix the world’s organisms into a global stew. Thus bananas and coffee, two African crops, become the principal agricultural exports of Central America; maize and manioc, domesticated in Mesoamerica and Amazonia respectively, return the favor by becoming staples in tropical Africa. Meanwhile, plantations of rubber trees, an Amazon native, undulate across Malaysian hillsides; peppers and tomatoes from Mesoamerica form the culinary backbones of Thailand and Italy; Andean potatoes lead Ireland to feast and famine; and
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native species, too, burst and blasted, freed from constraints by the disappearance of Native Americans. The forest that the first New England colonists thought was primeval and enduring was actually in the midst of violent change and demographic collapse.
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.
