1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

by Charles C. Mann

Human sacrifice is such a charged subject that its practice by the Triple Alliance has inevitably become shrouded in myths. Two are important here. The first is that human sacrifice was never practiced—the many post-conquest accounts of public death-spectacles are all racist lies. It was indeed in the Spanish interest to exaggerate the extent of human sacrifice, because ending what Cortés called this “most horrid and abominable custom” became a post hoc rationale for conquest. But the many vividly depicted ceremonies in Mexica art and writing leave little doubt that it occurred—and on a large scale.

The second myth is that in its appetite for death as spectacle the Triple Alliance was fundamentally different from Europe. Criminals beheaded in Palermo, heretics burned alive in Toledo, assassins drawn and quartered in Paris—Europeans flocked to every form of painful death imaginable, free entertainment that drew huge crowds.

In most if not all European nations, the bodies were impaled on city walls and strung along highways as warnings. “The corpses dangling from trees whose distant silhouettes stand out against the sky, in so many old paintings, are merely a realistic detail,” Braudel observed.

Between 1530 and 1630, according to Cambridge historian V. A. C. Gatrell, England executed seventy-five thousand people. At the time, its population was about three million, perhaps a tenth that of the Mexica empire. Arithmetic suggests that if England had been the size of the Triple Alliance, it would have executed, on average, about 7,500 people per year, roughly twice the number Cortés estimated for the empire.

In both places the public death was accompanied by the reading of ritual scripts. And in both the goal was to create a cathartic paroxysm of loyalty to the government—in the Mexica case, by recalling the spiritual justification for the empire; in the European case, to reassert the sovereign’s divine power after it had been injured by a criminal act.

Who today would want to live in the Greece of Plato and Socrates, with its slavery, constant warfare, institutionalized pederasty, and relentless culling of surplus population? Yet Athens had a coruscating tradition of rhetoric, lyric drama, and philosophy. So did Tenochtitlan and the other cities in the Triple Alliance. In fact, the corpus of writings in classical Nahuatl, the language of the Alliance, is even larger than the corpus of texts in classical Greek.

In what may have been the first large-scale compulsory education program in history, every male citizen of the Triple Alliance, no matter what his social class, had to attend one sort of school or another until the age of sixteen. Many tlamatinime (the plural form of the word) taught at the elite academies that trained the next generation of priests, teachers, and high administrators.

Many if not most tlamatinime saw existence as Nabokov feared: “a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.”

In Nahuatl rhetoric, things were frequently represented by the unusual device of naming two of their elements—a kind of doubled Homeric epithet. Instead of directly mentioning his body, a poet might refer to “my hand, my foot” (noma nocxi), which the savvy listener would know was a synecdoche, in the same way that readers of English know that writers who mention “the crown” are actually talking about the entire monarch, and not just the headgear.

My neck my back. Sorry had to

On the ever-changing earth, wrote León-Portilla, the Mexican historian, “nothing is ‘true’ in the Nahuatl sense of the word.” Time and again, the tlamatinime wrestled with this dilemma. How can beings of the moment grasp the perduring? It would be like asking a stone to understand mortality.

Cut short by Cortés, Mexica philosophy did not have the chance to reach as far as Greek or Chinese philosophy. But surviving testimony intimates that it was well on its way.

Having grown separately for millennia, the Americas were a boundless sea of novel ideas, dreams, stories, philosophies, religions, moralities, discoveries, and all the other products of the mind. Few things are more sublime or characteristically human than the cross-fertilization of cultures. The simple discovery by Europe of the existence of the Americas caused an intellectual ferment. How much grander would have been the tumult if Indian societies had survived in full splendor!

Pacific Northwest Indian artists carved beautiful masks, boxes, bas-reliefs, and totem poles within the dictates of an elaborate aesthetic system based on an ovoid shape that has no name in European languages.

British ships in the nineteenth century radically transformed native art by giving the Indians brightly colored paints that unlike native pigments didn’t wash off in the rain. Indians incorporated the new pigments into their traditions, expand...

An astute politician, Cortés studied the Triple Alliance with a view to dismembering it.

Thanks to their guns, horses, and steel blades, the foreigners won every battle, even with Tlaxcala’s huge numerical advantage. But Cortés’s force shrank with every fight. He was on the verge of losing everything when the four Tlaxcala kings abruptly reversed course. Concluding from the results of their battles that they could wipe out the Europeans, though at great cost, the Indian leaders offered what seemed a win-win deal: they would stop attacking Cortés, sparing his life, the lives of the surviving Spaniards, and those of many Indians, if he in return would join with Tlaxcala in a united assault on the hated Triple Alliance.

Tenochtitlan dazzled its invaders—it was bigger than Paris, Europe’s greatest metropolis. The Spaniards gawped like yokels at the wide streets, ornately carved buildings, and markets bright with goods from hundreds of miles away.

Even more astounding than the great temples and immense banners and colorful promenades were the botanical gardens—none existed in Europe. The same novelty attended the force of a thousand men that kept the crowded streets immaculate.

The Mexica reacted to the sacrilegious abduction of their leader with the same baffled horror with which Europeans later reacted to Cromwell’s execution of Charles I in 1649. Not wanting to act in a way that could result in Motecuhzoma’s death, the Mexica took seven months to mount a counterattack.

Under the leadership of a vigorous new tlatoani, Cuitlahuac, the Indians forced the invaders into narrow alleys where horses were of little advantage. Under a pitiless hail of spears, darts, and arrows, Cortés and his men retreated down the long causeways that linked the island city to the mainland. In a single brutal night the Mexica utterly vanquished Cortés, killing three-quarters of his men.

Because the Mexica did not view the goal of warfare as wiping out enemies to the last man, they did not hunt down the last Spaniards. A costly mistake: Cortés was among the escapees.

A man of unfathomable determination, Cortés never thought of giving up. He persuaded several other vassal states to join his anti Alliance alliance with Tlaxcala. Negotiating furiously, he assembled a force of as many as 200,000 men and built thirteen big ships in an audacious plan to assault Tenochtitlan from the water. He followed this plan and ever after has been identified by history as the city’s conqueror. But all of his bold resolve would have come to nothing without the vast indigenous army whose leaders believed they could use the Spanish presence to catalyze the destruction of the Triple Alliance.

When Cortés and his Indian allies finally attacked, the Mexica resisted so fiercely despite their weakness that the siege has often been described as the costliest battle in history—casualty estimates range up to 100,000. Absent smallpox, it seems likely that Cortés would have lost. In the event, he was able to take the city only by systematically destroying it.

When Cortés landed, according to the Berkeley researchers Cook and Borah, 25.2 million people lived in central Mexico, an area of about 200,000 square miles. After Cortés, the population of the entire region collapsed. By 1620–25, it was 730,000, “approximately 3 percent of its size at the time that he first landed.” Cook and Borah calculated that the area did not recover its fifteenth-century population until the late 1960s.

Europe’s defenders argue that the mass deaths cannot be described as genocide.

Lol fucking how

“Very probably the greatest demographic disaster in history, the depopulation of the New World, for all its terror and death, was largely an unintended tragedy,” wrote Steven Katz in his monumental Holocaust in Historical Context.

I mean fair point but do those victimized care?

True, the conquistadors did not want the Indians to die off en masse. But that desire did not stem from humanitarian motives. Instead, the Spanish wanted native peoples to use as a source of forced labor.

Later on, some of the newcomers indeed campaigned in favor of eradicating natives. The poet-physician Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., for instance, regarded the Indian as but “a sketch in red crayon of a rudimental manhood.”

Following such impulses, a few Spanish—and a few French, Portuguese, and British—deliberately spread disease. Many more treated Indians cruelly, murderously so, killing countless thousands. But the pain and death caused from the deliberate epidemics, lethal cruelty, and egregious racism pale in comparison to those caused by the great waves of disease, a means of subjugation that the Europeans could not control and in many cases did not know they had.

Europeans may not have known about microbes, but they thoroughly understood infectious disease. Almost 150 years before Columbus set sail, a Tartar army besieged the Genoese city of Kaffa. Then the Black Death visited. To the defenders’ joy, their attackers began dying off. But triumph turned to terror when the Tartar khan catapulted the dead bodies of his men over the city walls, deliberately creating an epidemic inside.

Coming from places that had suffered many such experiences, Europeans fully grasped the potential consequences of smallpox. “And what was their collective response to this understanding?” asked Ward Churchill, a longtime pro-Indian activist. Did they recoil in horror and say, “Wait a minute, we’ve got to halt the process, or at least slow it down until we can get a handle on how to prevent these effects”? Nope. Their response pretty much across-the-board was to accelerate their rate of arrival, and to spread out as much as was humanly possible.

Neither European nor Indian had a secular understanding of disease. “Sickness was the physical manifestation of the will of God,” Robert Crease, a philosopher of science at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, told me. “You could pass it on to someone, but doing that was like passing on evil, or bad luck, or a bad spirit—the transmission also reflected God’s will.”

the anthropologist J. Jorge Klor de Alva observed, the Mexica lament their losses, but, “the Spaniards are rarely judged in moral terms, and Cortés is only sporadically considered a villain. It seems to be commonly understood”—at least by this bleakly philosophical, imperially minded group—“that the Spaniards did what any other group would have done or would have been expected to do if the opportunity had existed.”

In an editorial about Black’s analysis of Indian HLA profiles, Jean-Claude Salomon, a medical researcher at France’s Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, asked if the likely inevitability of native deaths could “reduce the historical guilt of Europeans.” In a sense it does, Salomon wrote. But it did not let the invaders off the hook—they caused huge numbers of deaths, and knew that they had done it.

Guilt is not readily passed down the generations, but responsibility can be. A first step toward satisfying that responsibility for Europeans and their descendants in North and South America would be to treat indigenous people today with respect—something that, alas, cannot yet be taken for granted.

The first European adventurers in the Western Hemisphere did not make careful population counts, but they repeatedly described indigenous America as a crowded, jostling place—“a beehive of people,” as Las Casas put it in 1542. To Las Casas, the Americas seemed so thick with people “that it looked as if God has placed all of or the greater part of the entire human race in these countries.”

To most historians, the colonial accounts came to seem exaggerated, though exactly why was not often explained. (“Sixteenth-century Europeans,” Cook and Borah dryly remarked, “did indeed know how to count.”) Especially in North America, historians’ guesses at native numbers kept slipping down. By the 1920s they had dwindled to forty or fifty million in the entire hemisphere. Twenty years after that, the estimates had declined by another factor of five.

Zambardino, the computer scientist who decried the margin of error in these estimates, noted that even an extremely conservative extrapolation of known figures would still project a precontact population in central Mexico alone of five to ten million, “a very high population, not only in terms of the sixteenth century, but indeed on any terms.”

To Fenn, the smallpox historian, the squabble over the number of deaths and the degree of blame obscures something more important. In the long run, Fenn says, the consequential finding of the new scholarship is not that many people died but that many people lived.

*Because the point is persistently misunderstood, it bears repeating that Indians’ relative genetic homogeneity does not imply genetic inferiority.

Spaniards simply represented a wider genetic array. Asserting their superiority is like saying that the motley mob at a football game is somehow intrinsically superior to the closely related attendees of a family reunion.

To simplify considerably, helper-T cells occur in two main types, one that targets microorganisms and one that targets parasites. The body cannot sustain large numbers of both, and hence adult immune systems tend to be skewed toward one or the other, usually depending on whether as children they were more often exposed to microorganisms or parasites. Indians have historically been burdened by flukes, tapeworms, and nematodes, so they have long had majorities of parasite-fighting helper-T cells. Europeans, who grew up in germ-filled environments, usually lean the other way. As a result, the three researchers suggested, adult Indians were—and possibly still are—more vulnerable to infectious diseases than adult Europeans.

Regarding Europe as the world’s intellectual capital, the intrigued Lund sent most of the skeletons to a museum in his native Copenhagen. He was certain that researchers there would quickly study and identify them. Instead the bones remained in boxes, rarely disturbed, for more than a century.

North American researchers tended to scoff at the notion that some mysterious non-Indians had lived fifteen thousand years ago in the heart of Brazil, but South Americans, Pena among them, were less dismissive.

The Botocudo were an indigenous group that lived a few hundred miles north of what is now Rio de Janeiro. (The name comes from botoque, the derogatory Portuguese term for the big wooden discs that the Botocudo inserted in their lower lips and earlobes, distending them outward.)

All human beings have two genomes. The first is the genome of the DNA in chromosomes, the genome of the famous human genome project, which proclaimed its success with great fanfare in 2000. The second and much smaller genome is of the DNA in mitochondria; it was mapped, to little public notice, in 1981.

More than that, every woman’s mitochondrial DNA is identical not only to her mother’s mitochondrial DNA, but to that of her mother’s mother’s mitochondrial DNA, and her mother’s mother’s mother’s mitochondrial DNA, and so on down the line for many generations. The same is not true for men.

People with similar mitochondria have, in the jargon, the same “haplogroup.” If two ethnic groups share the same haplogroup, it is molecular proof that the two groups are related; their members belong to the same female line.

just four mitochondrial haplogroups account for 96.9 percent of Native Americans—another example of Indians’ genetic homogeneity, but one without any known negative (or positive) consequences. Three of the four Indian haplogroups are common in southern Siberia. Given the inheritance rules for mitochondrial DNA, the conclusion that Indians and Siberians share common ancestry seems, to geneticists, inescapable.

in the 1980s and 1990s a gush of new information about the first Americans came in from archaeological digs, anthropological laboratories, molecular biology research units, and linguists’ computer models. The discoveries once again fractured the consensus about the early American history, miring it in dispute.