1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

by Charles C. Mann

(A genetic bottleneck occurs when a population becomes so small that individuals are forced to mate with relatives, which can produce deleterious hereditary effects.)

Positive or negative, in both images Indians lacked what social scientists call agency—they were not actors in their own right, but passive recipients of whatever windfalls or disasters happenstance put in their way.

1530s. Las Casas, a conquistador who repented of his actions and became a priest, spent the second half of his long life opposing European cruelty in the Americas. To his way of thinking, Indians were natural creatures who dwelt, gentle as cows, in the “terrestrial paradise.” In their prelapsarian innocence, he believed, they had been quietly waiting—waiting for millennia—for Christian instruction.

Like Las Casas, Bancroft believed that Indians had existed in societies without change—except that Bancroft regarded this timelessness as an indication of sloth, not innocence.

Earlier writers thought of Indians as important, though uncivilized, but later books froze them into a formula: “lazy, childlike, and cruel.”

It is always easy for those living in the present to feel superior to those who lived in the past.

Holmberg’s Mistake

Throughout all of the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century, nationalism was ascendant, and historians identified history with nations, rather than with cultures, religions, or ways of life.

In 1997 the theory abruptly came unglued. Some of its most ardent partisans, Haynes among them, publicly conceded that an archaeological dig in southern Chile had turned up compelling evidence of human habitation more than twelve thousand years ago. And because these people lived seven thousand miles south of the Bering Strait, a distance that presumably would have taken a long time to traverse, they almost certainly arrived before the ice-free corridor opened up.

No consensus has emerged, but a growing number of researchers believe that the New World was occupied by a single small group that crossed the Bering Strait, got stuck on the Alaska side, and trickled to the rest of the Americas in several separate groups, very possibly in boats along the Pacific coast.

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 Determining that Indians superseded other people fit neatly into this plan.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?’ ”

The Neolithic Revolution is the invention of farming, an event whose significance can hardly be overstated. “The human career,” wrote the historian Ronald Wright, “divides in two: everything before the Neolithic Revolution and everything after it.” It began in the Middle East about eleven thousand years ago, in the western half of the Fertile Crescent, which arcs between southern Iraq and Israel, reaching into southern Turkey along the way.

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.

What would be visible from the windows? Fifty years ago, most historians would have given a simple answer to this question: two continents of wilderness, populated by scattered bands whose ways of life had changed little since the Ice Age. The sole exceptions would have been Mexico and Peru, where the Maya and the ancestors of the Inka were crawling toward the foothills of Civilization.

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. “Divine providence,” the colonist Daniel Gookin wrote, favored “the quiet and peaceable settlement of the English.”

Later writers tended to attribute European success not to European deities but to European technology. In a contest where only one side had rifles and cannons, historians said, the other side’s motives were irrelevant.

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;

view. “Indians were seen as trivial, ineffectual patsies,” Salisbury, a historian emeritus at Smith College, told me. “But that assumption—a whole continent of patsies—simply didn’t make sense.”

“When you look at the historical record, it’s clear that Indians were trying to control their own destinies,” Salisbury said. “And often enough they succeeded”—only to learn, as all peoples do, that the consequences were not what they expected.

In the absence of written records, researchers have developed techniques for teasing out evidence of the past. Among them is “glottochronology,” the attempt to estimate how long ago two languages separated from a common ancestor by evaluating their degree of divergence on a list of key words.

The Mi’kmaq in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia scoffed at the notion of European superiority. If Christian civilization was so wonderful, why were its inhabitants all trying to settle somewhere else?

Guns are an example. As Chaplin, the Harvard historian, has argued, New England Indians were indeed disconcerted by their first experiences with European guns: the explosion and smoke, the lack of a visible projectile. But the natives soon learned that most of the British were terrible shots, from lack of practice—their guns were little more than noisemakers.

Even for a crack shot, an unrifled, early seventeenth-century gun had fewer advantages over a longbow than may be supposed.

template, one that explained the otherwise perplexing fact that every Indian culture, large or small, eventually succumbed to Europe. (Shouldn’t there have been some exceptions?)

The Inka goal was to knit the scores of different groups in western South America—some as rich as the Inka themselves, some poor and disorganized, all speaking different languages—into a single bureaucratic framework under the direct rule of the emperor. The unity was not merely political: the Inka wanted to meld together the area’s religion, economics, and arts.

Territorial empires directly occupy territories with their armies, throw out the old rulers, and annex the land.

In hegemonic empires, the internal affairs of conquered areas remain in the hands of their original rulers, who become vassals. Territorial empires are tightly controlled but costly to maintain; hegemonic empires are inexpensive to maintain, because the original local rulers incur the costs of administration, but the loose tie between master and vassal encourages rebellion. Every conquest-minded state is a mixture of both, but all Native American empires leaned toward the hegemonic.

The Inka losses were not foreordained. Their military was hampered by the cult of personality around its deified generals,

If not technology or the horse, what defeated the Inka? As I said, some of the blame should be heaped on the overly centralized Inka command structure, a problem that has plagued armies throughout time.

According to Cieza de León, Wayna Qhapaq, Atawallpa’s father, died when “a great plague of smallpox broke out [in 1524 or 1525], so

severe that more than 200,000 died of it, for it spread to all parts of the kingdom.”

The main generals and much of the officer corps died, wrote the Inka chronicler Santacruz Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamayhua, “all their faces covered with scabs.” So did the two regents left in Qosqo by Wayna Qhapaq to administer the empire.

epidemic. Smallpox radiated throughout the empire like ink spreading through tissue paper. Millions of people simultaneously experienced its symptoms: high fever, vomiting, severe pain, oozing blisters everywhere on the body.

Because the royal mummies were not considered dead, their successors obviously could not inherit their wealth. Each Inka’s panaqa retained all of his possessions forever, including his palaces, residences, and shrines; all of his remaining clothes, eating utensils,

fingernail parings, and hair clippings; and the tribute from the land he had conquered. In consequence, as Pedro Pizarro realized, “the greater part of the people, treasure, expenses, and vices [in Tawantinsuyu] were under the control of the dead.”

After smallpox wiped out much of the political elite, each panaqa tried to move into the vacuum, stoking the passions of the civil war. Different mummies at different times backed different claimants to the Inka throne.

To Dobyns, the moral of this story was clear. The Inka, he wrote in his 1963 article, were not defeated by steel and horses but by disease and factionalism. In this he was echoing conclusions drawn centuries before by Pedro Pizarro.

In both, as in New England, epidemic disease arrived before the first successful colonists. When the Europeans actually arrived, the battered, fragmented cultures could not unite to resist the incursion. Instead one party, believing that it was about to lose the struggle for dominance, allied with the invaders to improve its position. The alliance was often successful, in that the party gained the desired advantage. But its success was usually temporary and the culture as a whole always lost.

history. In fact, Europeans routinely lost when they could not take advantage of disease and political fragmentation.

When Columbus landed, Cook and Borah concluded, the central Mexican plateau alone had a population of 25.2 million. By contrast, Spain and Portugal together had fewer than ten million inhabitants. Central Mexico, they said, was the most densely populated place on earth, with more than twice

as many people per square mile than China or India.

Based on their work and his own, Dobyns argued that the Indian population in 1491 was between 90 and 112 million people. Another way of saying this is that when Columbus sailed more people lived in the Americas than in Europe.

But the worst thing he did, some researchers say, was entirely without malice—he brought pigs.

Today most historians and anthropologists believe the culprit was disease. In the view of Ramenofsky and Patricia Galloway, an anthropologist at the University of Texas, the source of contagion was very likely not De Soto’s army but its ambulatory meat locker: his three hundred pigs. De Soto’s company was too small to be an effective biological weapon. Sicknesses like measles and smallpox would have burned through his six hundred men long before they reached the Mississippi. But that would not have been true for his pigs.

“As more and more excavation is done, one would expect to see more evidence for [dense populations] than has thus far emerged.” Dean R. Snow,

Most important, neither society should be judged—or in the event judged each other—entirely by its brutality. 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?

Not so fast, say the activists. 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. The Genoese fled Kaffa, leaving it open to the Tartars. But they did not run away fast enough; their ships spread the disease to every port they visited.

Coming from places that had suffered many such experiences, Europeans fully grasped the potential consequences of smallpox.

In all the indigenous accounts of the conquest and its aftermath, 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.”

“Those who carried the microbes across the Atlantic were responsible, but not guilty,” Salomon concluded. 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. Recognizing and obeying past treaties wouldn’t be a bad idea, either.