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July 9 - July 14, 2021
Indian activists dislike this line of reasoning. “I can’t tell you how many white people have told me that ‘science’ shows that Indians were just a bunch of interlopers,” Vine Deloria Jr., a political scientist at the University of Colorado at Boulder, said to me in a conversation before his death in 2005.
In Deloria’s opinion, archaeology was mainly about easing white guilt. Determining that Indians superseded other people fit neatly into this plan. “If we’re only thieves who stole our land from someone else,” Deloria said, “then they can say, ‘Well, we’re just the same. We’re all immigrants here, aren’t we?’
there’s no evidence that the first “wrong” was a wrong—nothing is known about the contacts among the various waves of paleo-Indian migration. But in any case whether most of today’s Native Americans actually arrived first or second is irrelevant to an assessment of their cultural achievements. In every imaginable scenario, they left Eurasia before the first whisper of the Neolithic Revolution.
Researchers have long known that a second, independent Neolithic Revolution occurred in Mesoamerica. The exact timing is uncertain—archaeologists keep pushing back the date—but it is now thought to have occurred about ten thousand years ago, not long after the Middle East’s Neolithic Revolution.
The ancestors of wheat, rice, millet, and barley look like their domesticated descendants; because they are both edible and highly productive, one can easily imagine how the idea of planting them for food came up. Maize can’t reproduce itself, because its kernels are securely wrapped in the husk, so Indians must have developed it from some other species. But there are no wild species that resemble maize.
No one eats teosinte, because it produces too little grain to be worth harvesting. In creating modern maize from this unpromising plant, Indians performed a feat so improbable that archaeologists and biologists argued for decades over how it was achieved.
Coupled with squash, beans, and avocados, maize provided Mesoamerica with a balanced diet, one arguably more nutritious than its Middle Eastern or Asian equivalent. (Andean agriculture, based on potatoes and beans, and Amazonian agriculture, based on manioc [cassava], had wide impact but on a global level were less important than maize.)
The Olmec were but the first of many societies that arose in Mesoamerica in this epoch. Most had religions that focused on human sacrifice, dark by contemporary standards, but their economic and scientific accomplishments were bright.
the first recorded zero in the Americas occurred in a Maya carving from 357 A.D., possibly before the Sanskrit. And there are monuments from before the birth of Christ that do not bear zeroes themselves but are inscribed with dates in a calendrical system based on the existence of zero.
Does this mean that the Maya were then more advanced than their counterparts in, say, Europe? Social scientists flinch at this question, and with good reason. The Olmec, Maya, and other Mesoamerican societies were world pioneers in mathematics and astronomy—but they did not use the wheel.
Those looking for a tale of cultural superiority can find it in zero; those looking for failure can find it in the wheel. Neither line of argument is useful, though. What is most important is that by 1000 A.D. Indians had expanded their Neolithic revolutions to create a panoply of diverse civilizations across the hemisphere.
recent archaeological investigations have revealed that at this time the Andes housed two mountain states, each much larger than previously appreciated.
Tiwanaku took advantage of the extreme ecological differences among the Pacific coast, the rugged mountains, and the altiplano (the high plains) to create a dense web of exchange: fish from the sea; llamas from the altiplano; fruits, vegetables, and grains from the fields around the lake.
With its running water, closed sewers, and gaudily painted walls, Tiwanaku was among the world’s most impressive cities.
North and west of Tiwanaku, in what is now southern Peru, was the rival state of Wari, which then ran for almost a thousand miles along the spine of the Andes. More tightly organized and military minded than Tiwanaku, the rulers of Wari stamped out cookie-cutter fortresses and stationed them all along their borders.
Housing perhaps seventy thousand souls, Wari was a dense, alley-packed craze of walled-off temples, hidden courtyards, royal tombs, and apartments up to six stories tall. Most of the buildings were sheathed in white plaster, making the city sparkle in the mountain sun.
In 1000 A.D., at the time of our imaginary overflight, both societies were reeling from a succession of terrible droughts.
Then came a run of punishing dry spells, many more than a decade in duration, interrupted by gigantic floods. (Sediment and tree-ring records depict the sequence.) The disaster’s cause is still in dispute, but some climatologists believe that the Pacific is subject to “mega-Niño events,” murderously strong versions of the well-known El Niño patterns that play havoc with American weather today.
In 1925 and 1926, a strong El Niño—not a mega-Niño, but one that was bigger than usual—blasted Amazonia with so much dry heat that sudden fires killed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people in the forest.
Here, though, one must be careful. Europe was racked by a “little ice age” of extreme cold between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries, yet historians rarely attribute the rise and fall of European states in that period to climate change.
Similarly, the mega-Niños were but one of many stresses on Andean civilizations at the time, stresses that in their totality neither Wari nor Tiwanaku had the political resources to survive.
Almost wholly unexcavated since its discovery, the Calakmul we came to lay swathed in dry, scrubby vegetation that crawled like a swarm of thorns up its two huge pyramids.
In 1994 they identified the city-state’s ancient name: Kaan, the Kingdom of the Snake. Six years later they discovered that Kaan was the focus of a devastating war that convulsed the Maya city-state for more than a century. And Kaan is just one of the score of Maya settlements that in the last few decades have been investigated for the first time.
A collection of about five dozen kingdoms and city-states in a network of alliances and feuds as convoluted as those of seventeenth century Germany, the Maya realm was home to one of the world’s most intellectually sophisticated cultures.
the Maya heartland entered a kind of Dark Ages. Many of the greatest cities emptied, as did much of the countryside around them. Incredibly, some of the last inscriptions are gibberish, as if scribes had lost the knowledge of writing...
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Some natural scientists attribute this collapse, close in time to that of Wari and Tiwanaku, to a massive drought. The Maya, packed by the millions into land poorly suited to intensive farming, were dangerously close to surpassing the capacity of their ecosystems. The drought, possibly caused by a mega-Niño, pushed the society, already so close to the edge, over the cliff. Such scenarios resonate with contemporary ecological fears, helping to make them popular outside the academy. Within the academy skepticism is more common.
As is often the case, the Toltec’s rapid military success led to political strife. A Shakespearian struggle at the top, complete with accusations of drunkenness and incest, forced out the long-ruling king, Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl, in (probably) 987 A.D. He fled with boatloads of loyalists to the Yucatán Peninsula, promising to return. By the time of our plane trip, Quetzalcoatl had apparently conquered the Maya city of Chichén Itzá and was rebuilding it in his own Toltec image.
the murals and embossed plates at Chichén Itzá that depict a Toltec army bloodily destroying a Maya force are hard to dismiss.)
Despite this apparent evidence of their power, Cahokia’s rulers were setting themselves up for future trouble. By mining the forests upstream for firewood and floating the logs downriver to the city, they were removing ground cover and increasing the likelihood of catastrophic floods. When these came, as they later did, kings who gained their legitimacy from their claims to control the weather would face angry questioning from their subjects.
By 1000 A.D., trade relationships had covered the continent for more than a thousand years; mother-of-pearl from the Gulf of Mexico has been found in Manitoba, and Lake Superior copper in Louisiana.
Amazonians practiced a kind of agro-forestry, farming with trees, unlike any kind of agriculture in Europe, Africa, or Asia.
Near the Atlantic was the chiefdom of Marajó, based on an enormous island at the mouth of the river. Marajó’s population, recently estimated at 100,000, may have been equaled or even surpassed by a still-nameless agglomeration of people six hundred miles upstream, at Santarém, a pleasant town that today is sleeping off the effects of Amazonia’s past rubber and gold booms.
According to William I. Woods, an archaeologist and geographer at the University of Kansas, the region could have supported as many as 400,000 inhabitants, at least in theory, making it one of the bigger population centers in the world. And so on. Western scholars have written histories of the world since at least the twelfth century. As children of their own societies, these early historians naturally emphasized the culture they knew best, the culture their readership most wanted to hear about. But over time they added the stories of other places in the world: chapters about China, India,
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Much of this world vanished after Columbus, swept away by disease and subjugation. So thorough was the erasure that within a few generations neither conqueror nor conquered knew that this world had existed. Now, though, it is returning to view. It seems incumbent on us to take a look.
On March 22, 1621, an official Native American delegation walked through what is now southern New England to negotiate with a group of foreigners who had taken over a recently deserted Indian settlement. At the head of the party was an uneasy triumvirate: Massasoit, the sachem (political-military leader) of the Wampanoag confederation, a loose coalition of several dozen villages that controlled most of southeastern Massachusetts; Samoset, sachem of an allied group to the north; and Tisquantum, a distrusted captive, whom Massasoit had reluctantly brought along as an interpreter.
Massasoit was an adroit politician, but the dilemma he faced would have tested Machiavelli. About five years before, most of his subjects had fallen before a terrible calamity. Whole villages had been depopulated—indeed, the foreigners ahead now occupied one of the empty sites.
In a gamble, Massasoit intended to abandon, even reverse, a long-standing policy. Europeans had been visiting New England for at least a century. Shorter than the natives, oddly dressed, and often unbearably dirty, the pallid foreigners had peculiar blue eyes that peeped out of the masks of bristly, animal-like hair that encased their faces. They were irritatingly garrulous, prone to fits of chicanery, and often surprisingly incompetent at what seemed to Indians like basic tasks. But they also made useful and beautiful goods—copper kettles, glittering colored glass, and steel knives and
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Over time, the Wampanoag, like other native societies in coastal New England, had learned how to manage the European presence. They encouraged the exchange of goods, but would only allow their visitors to stay ashore for brief, carefully controlled excursions. Those who overstayed their welcome were forcefully reminded of the limited duration of Indian hospitality.
the shoreline groups put themselves in the position of classic middlemen, overseeing both European access to Indian products and Indian access to European products. Now Massasoit was visiting a group of British with the intent of changing the rules.
To the colonists, Massasoit could be distinguished from his subjects more by manner than by dress or ornament.
Tisquantum was critical to the colony’s survival, contemporary scholars agree. He moved to Plymouth after the meeting and spent the rest of his life there. Just as my teacher said, Tisquantum told the colonists to bury several small fish in each maize hill, a procedure followed by European colonists for two centuries.
Winslow didn’t know that fish fertilizer may not have been an age-old Indian custom, but a recent invention—if it was an Indian practice at all.
Tisquantum had learned English because British sailors had kidnapped him seven years before. To return to the Americas, he in effect had to escape twice—once from Spain, where his captors initially sold him into slavery, and once from England, to which he was smuggled from Spain, and where he served as a kind of living conversation piece at a rich man’s house.
Skipping over the complex course of Tisquantum’s life is understandable in a textbook with limited space. But the omission is symptomatic of the complete failure to consider Indian motives, or even that Indians might have motives.
This variant of Holmberg’s Mistake dates back to the Pilgrims themselves, who ascribed the lack of effective native resistance to the will of God.
Vietnam War–era denunciations of the Pilgrims as imperialist or racist simply replicated the error in a new form. Whether the cause was the Pilgrim God, Pilgrim guns, or Pilgrim greed, native losses were foreordained; Indians could not have stopped colonization, in this view, and they hardly tried.
The fall of Indian societies had everything to do with the natives themselves, researchers argue, rather than being religiously or technologically determined.
the claim is not that indigenous cultures should be blamed for their own demise but that they helped to determine their own fates.)
The accounts of the initial encounters between Indians and Europeans are windows into the past, even if the glass is smeared and distorted by the chroniclers’ prejudices and misapprehensions.
The separate nations of Europe were linguistically and culturally different one from another; native societies were astonishingly diverse. Yet despite these great dissimilarities the stories of the encounter run in broad parallel. When native met newcomer, both groups tried to benefit, as people will. In almost every case, each side believed itself to be superior—ethnocentrism seems to be a near-universal human quality—and from this belief was convinced that it could control the encounter to its advantage. But even though these various groups had wildly varying ideas about what they wanted and
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