1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

by Charles C. Mann

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.

Europe’s defenders argue that the mass deaths cannot be described as genocide. The epidemics often were not even known to Europeans, still less deliberately caused by them.

But that desire did not stem from humanitarian motives. Instead, the Spanish wanted native peoples to use as a source of forced labor.

To resupply themselves with labor, the Spaniards began importing slaves from Africa.

Europeans may not have known about microbes, but they thoroughly understood infectious disease.

The conquistadors knew the potential impact of disease, but its actual impact, which they could not control, was in the hands of God.

Humboldt’s “Aztecs” were actually the people of three nations, the members of the Triple Alliance.

So various were the peoples of the Americas that continent-wide generalizations are risky to the point of folly.

Many natives, seeking to categorize the newcomers, were open to the possibility that they might belong to the realm of the supernatural.

Did the existence of Indians negate the Bible, and Christianity with it?

The Lost Tribes theory was endorsed by authorities from Bartolomé de Las Casas to William Penn, founder of Pennsylvania, and the famed minister Cotton Mather.

Libby won a well-deserved Nobel Prize in 1960. By that time, carbon dating was already revolutionizing archaeology.

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.”

The implication was that every Indian society in the hemisphere was descended from Clovis.

At about the time of Clovis—between 13,800 and 11,400 years ago, according to a 2009 study—almost every one of these species vanished. So complete was the disaster that many of today’s big American mammals, such as caribou, moose, and brown bear, are immigrants from Asia.

The extinctions permanently changed American landscapes and American history.

Extinction, he claimed, was the nigh-inevitable outcome when beasts with no exposure to Homo sapiens suddenly encountered “a new and thoroughly superior predator, a hunter who preferred killing and persisted in killing animals as long as they were available.”

Typical, Denny thought. In his view, archaeologists’ main function was to make white people feel good about themselves—an opinion that archaeologists have learned, to their cost, is not Denny’s alone.

“Archaeologists are trapped in their own prejudices,”

Activist critiques like those from Denny and Deloria have had relatively little impact on mainstream archaeologists and anthropologists.

As I mentioned before, a scientific team led by Douglas Wallace found in 1990 that almost all Indians belong to one of four mitochondrial haplogroups, three of which are common in Asia (mitochondria with similar genetic characteristics, such as a particular mutation or version of a gene, belong to the same haplogroup).

In other words, just one group of paleo-Indians colonized the Americas, but it did so two or three times.

Cotton was a key element in regional trade.

The isthmus is a medley of mountains, beaches, wet tropical forests, and dry savannas, and is the most ecologically diverse area in Mesoamerica.

Despite the strife among them, all of them played a role in the region’s greatest achievement, the development of Mesoamerican agriculture, arguably the world’s most ecologically savvy form of farming, and of its centerpiece, Zea mays, the crop known to agronomists as maize.

A major lesson is the central place of maize, usually represented by a vertical ear with two leaves falling to the side, a talismanic symbol reminiscent of a fleur-de-lys.

In the Maya creation story, the famous Popul Vuh, humans were literally created from maize.

Maize had an equivalent impact on much of the rest of the world after Columbus introduced it to Europe.

Even greater was the impact in Africa, where maize was transforming agriculture by the end of the sixteenth century. “The probability is that the population of Africa was greatly increased because of maize and other American Indian crops,” Alfred Crosby told me. “Those extra people helped make the slave trade possible.”

In Mesoamerica, timekeeping provided the stimulus that accounting gave to the Middle East.

In Mesoamerican cultures, the date of one’s birth was such an important augury of the future that people often acquired that day as their name.

European agricultural production exploded after the arrival of the moldboard plow.

The complexity of a society’s technology has little to do with its level of social complexity—something that we, in our era of rapidly changing, seemingly overwhelming technology, have trouble grasping.

It is a small reminder that Indians were neither the peaceful, love-thy-neighbor types envisioned by some apologists or the brutal, ceaselessly aggressive warriors decried by some political critics.

Native Americans’ interactions with their environments were as diverse as Native Americans themselves, but they were always the product of a specific historical process.

The biggest difficulty in reconstructing the pre-Colombian past is the absence of voices from that past.

Hints of past events can be found in Native American oral traditions, to be sure, but these are concerned more with interpreting eternal truths than the details of journalism and history.

Archaeologists have traditionally avoided tropical forests, because the climate destroys all wood, cloth, and organic material—except for ceramics and stone, there is little left to dig up. And the Amazon basin, essentially an astoundingly large river valley made of deposited mud, has almost no stone, so archaeologists wouldn’t even find that.

her main accomplishment may have been inadvertently to keep new ideas about Amazonian history from the public eye—ideas about its past that may, according to their advocates, play a role in safeguarding its future.

Rather than being the timeless indigenous adaptation portrayed in ecology textbooks, many archaeologists now view slash-and-burn agriculture as a relatively modern technique whose spread was driven by European technology.

Steel tools, he told me, “had a major, transformative effect on all the trade and marriage relations in a whole area.

Slash-and-burn, supposedly a quintessentially Amazonian trait, “is a modern intrusion.”

Slash-and-burn was a product of European axes—and European diseases, which so shrank Indian groups that they adopted this less laborious but also less productive method of agriculture.

The few carbon dates available suggest that the fields date from about three thousand years ago to about five hundred years ago—roughly the time the conquistadors arrived, bringing European diseases.

Because the mounds, weirs, and fields required enormous labor to construct and maintain, Erickson argued that these societies must have had large populations—“tens or even hundreds of thousands of people.”

The ecological constraints on tropical soils are in large part due to the gravitational energy of raindrops. Rainfall, drumming down day in and day out, pounds the top few inches of earth into slurry from which nutrients are easily leached and which itself easily washes away.

Balée cautiously estimated, in a widely cited article published in 1989, that at least 11.8 percent, about an eighth, of the nonflooded Amazon forest was “anthropogenic”—directly or indirectly created by humans.

As a rule, terra preta has more “plant-available” phosphorus, calcium, sulfur, and nitrogen than is common in the rain forest; it also has much more organic matter, better retains moisture and nutrients, and is not rapidly exhausted by agricultural use when managed well.

By about the time of Christ the central Amazon had at least some large, settled villages—Neves, Petersen, and Bartone excavated one on a high bank about thirty miles up the Río Negro.

Until about 200 million years ago Eurasia and the Americas were lashed together in a single landmass that geologists call Pangaea.