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March 7 - May 6, 2025
“the pristine myth”—the belief that the Americas in 1491 were an almost untouched, even Edenic land, “untrammeled by man,”
To green activists, as the University of Wisconsin historian William Cronon has written, restoring this long-ago, putatively natural state is a task that society is morally bound to undertake. Yet if the new view is correct and the work of humankind was pervasive, where does that leave efforts to restore nature?
beliefs about Indians’ inherent simplicity and innocence refer mainly to their putative lack of impact on the environment.
Samuel Eliot Morison, twice a Pulitzer Prize winner, closed his two-volume European Discovery of America with the succinct claim that Indians had created no lasting monuments or institutions. Imprisoned in changeless wilderness, they were “pagans expecting short and brutish lives, void of any hope for the future.” Native people’s “chief function in history,” the British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, Baron Dacre of Glanton, proclaimed in 1965, “is to show to the present an image of the past from which by history it has escaped.”
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.
It didn’t appear in Europe until the twelfth century, when it came in with the Arabic numerals we use today (fearing fraud, some European governments banned the new numbers). Meanwhile, the first recorded zero in the Americas occurred in a Maya carving from 357 A.D., possibly before the Sanskrit.
University of Chicago archaeologist Alan L. Kolata excavated at Tiwanaku during the 1980s and early 1990s. He has written that by 1000 A.D. the city had a population of as much as 115,000, with another quarter million in the surrounding countryside—numbers that Paris would not reach for another five centuries.
One way to sum up the new scholarship is to say that it has begun, at last, to fill in one of the biggest blanks in history: the Western Hemisphere before 1492. It was, in the current view, a thriving, stunningly diverse place, a tumult of languages, trade, and culture, a region where tens of millions of people loved and hated and worshipped as people do everywhere. 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.
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 hatchets—unlike anything else in New England. Moreover, they would exchange these valuable items for cheap furs of the sort used by Indians as blankets.
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the Wampanoag were part of a tripartite alliance with two other confederations: the Nauset, which comprised some thirty groups on Cape Cod; and the Massachusett, several dozen villages clustered around Massachusetts Bay. All of these people spoke variants of Massachusett, a member of the Algonkian language family, the biggest in eastern North America at the time.
According to one modern reconstruction, Dawnland diets at the time averaged about 2,500 calories a day, better than those usual in famine-racked Europe.
Now and then, as a sign of victory, slain foes were scalped, much as British skirmishes with the Irish sometimes finished with a parade of Irish heads on pikes.
Eating an incredibly nutritious diet, working hard but not broken by toil, the people of New England were taller and more robust than those who wanted to move in—“as
The Wendat (Huron) in Ontario, a chagrined missionary reported, thought the French possessed “little intelligence in comparison to themselves.” Europeans, Indians told other Indians, were physically weak, sexually untrustworthy, atrociously ugly, and just plain smelly.
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?
Expeditions from France and Spain were usually backed by the state, and generally staffed by soldiers accustomed to hard living. English voyages, by contrast, were almost always funded by venture capitalists who hoped for a quick cash-out.
Peru, Dobyns learned, was one of the world’s cultural wellsprings, a place as important to the human saga as the Fertile Crescent. Yet the area’s significance had been scarcely appreciated outside the Andes, partly because the Spaniards so thoroughly ravaged Inka culture, and partly because the Inka themselves, wanting to puff up their own importance, had actively concealed the glories of the cultures before them.
In 1491 the Inka ruled the greatest empire on earth. Bigger than Ming Dynasty China, bigger than Ivan the Great’s expanding Russia, bigger than Songhay in the Sahel or powerful Great Zimbabwe in the West Africa tablelands, bigger than the cresting Ottoman Empire, bigger than the Triple Alliance (as the Aztec empire is more precisely known), bigger by far than any European state, the Inka dominion extended over a staggering thirty-two degrees of latitude—as if a single power held sway from St. Petersburg to Cairo. The empire encompassed every imaginable type of terrain, from the rainforest of
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Their methods were audacious, brutal, and efficient: they removed entire populations from their homelands; shuttled them around the biggest road system on the planet, a mesh of stone-paved thoroughfares totaling as much as 25,000 miles; and forced them to work with other groups, using only Runa Sumi, the Inka language, on massive, faraway state farms and construction projects.*
the Inka developed a form of writing unlike any other, sequences of knots on strings that formed a binary code reminiscent of today’s computer languages (see Appendix B, “Talking Knots”).
The colonial account of Inka history closest to indigenous sources is by Juan de Betanzos, a Spanish commoner who rose to marry an Inka princess and become the most prominent translator for the colonial government.
To keep track of the florid abundance of shrines and lines, Cobo observed, the empire “had more than a thousand men in the city of Qosqo who did nothing but remember these things.”
By his death in 1493, Thupa Inka had sent his armies deep into Ecuador and Chile, doubling the size of Tawantinsuyu again. In terms of area conquered during his lifetime, he was in the league of Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan.
Because the Inka believed that idleness fomented rebellion, the Spanish traveler Pedro Cieza de León reported, he ordered unemployed work brigades “to move a mountain from one spot to another” for no practical purpose. Cieza de León once came upon three different highways running between the same two towns, each built by a different Inka.
The new Inka took the name Washkar Inka (“Golden Chain Inka”).
Because Wayna Qhapaq had not actually married Washkar’s mother—the union was properly incestuous but not properly legitimate—the new Inka demanded that his mother participate ex post facto in a wedding ceremony with his father’s mummy. Even for the Andes this was an unusual step.
Cieza de León saw the battleground and from the wreckage and unburied remains thought the dead could have numbered sixteen thousand. The victors captured and beheaded Washkar’s main general. Atawallpa mounted a bowl atop the skull, inserted a spout between the teeth, and used it as a cup for his chicha.
Almost at a stroke, just 168 men had dealt a devastating blow to the greatest empire on earth.
Yet the scale of Pizarro’s triumph at Cajamarca cannot be gainsaid. He had routed a force fifty times larger than his own, won the greatest ransom ever seen, and vanquished a cultural tradition that had lasted five millennia—all without suffering a single casualty.
To make boats, Andean cultures wove together reeds rather than cutting up trees into planks and nailing them together. Although smaller than big European ships, these vessels were not puddle-muddlers; Europeans first encountered Tawantinsuyu in the form of an Inka ship sailing near the equator, three hundred miles from its home port, under a load of fine cotton sails. It had a crew of twenty and was easily the size of a Spanish caravelle. Famously, the Inka used foot-thick cables to make suspension bridges across mountain gorges. Because Europe had no bridges without supports below, they
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In a frightening innovation, the Inka heated stones in campfires until they were red hot, wrapped them in pitch-soaked cotton, and hurled them at their targets. The cotton caught fire in midair. In a sudden onslaught the sky would rain burning missiles. During a counterattack in May 1536 an Inka army used these missiles to burn Spanish-occupied Qosqo to the ground.
The Inka, he wrote in his 1963 article, were not defeated by steel and horses but by disease and factionalism.
Europeans routinely lost when they could not take advantage of disease and political fragmentation.
microorganisms were slow to penetrate the Yucatán Peninsula, where most of the Maya polities were too small to readily play off against each other. In consequence, Spain never fully subdued the Maya. The Zapatista rebellion that convulsed southern Mexico in the 1990s was merely the most recent battle in an episodic colonial war that began in the sixteenth century.
“They died by scores and hundreds,” recalled one eyewitness to the 1565 outbreak. “Villages were depopulated. Corpses were scattered over the fields or piled up in the houses or huts.… The fields were uncultivated; the herds were untended [and] the price of food rose to such an extent that many persons found it beyond their reach. They escaped the foul disease, but only to be wasted by famine.”
Dobyns calculated that in the first 130 years of contact about 95 percent of the people in the Americas died.
in 1491 North America had 1.15 million inhabitants. Alfred L. Kroeber, the renowned Berkeley anthropologist, built upon Mooney’s work in the 1930s. Kroeber cut back the tally still further, to 900,000—a population density of less than one person for every six square miles. Just 8.4 million Indians, Kroeber suggested, had lived in the entire hemisphere.
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.
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.
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.
Unlike Europeans, Indians did not live in constant contact with many animals.
By contrast, swine, mainstays of European agriculture, transmit anthrax, brucellosis, leptospirosis, trichinosis, and tuberculosis. Pigs breed exuberantly and can pass diseases to deer and turkeys, which then can infect people. Only a few of De Soto’s pigs would have had to wander off to contaminate the forest.
Between the visits of De Soto and La Salle, according to Timothy K. Perttula, an archaeological consultant in Austin, Texas, the Caddoan population fell from about 200,000 to about 8,500—a drop of nearly 96 percent. In the eighteenth century, the tally shrank further, to 1,400. An equivalent loss today would reduce the population of New York City to 56,000,
European populations have at least thirty-five main HLA classes, whereas Indian groups have no more than seventeen. In addition, Native American HLA profiles are dominated by an unusually small number of types.
“The small Pox! The small Pox!” John Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail. “What shall We do with it?” His worries were on target: the virus, not the British, stopped the Continental army’s drive into Quebec in 1776. In retrospect, Fenn told me, “One of George Washington’s most brilliant moves was to inoculate the army against smallpox during the Valley Forge winter of ’78.” Without inoculation, she said, the smallpox epidemic could easily have handed the colonies back to the British.
Comanche (the name, awarded by an enemy group, means “people who fight us all the time”).
Cultures are like books, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss once remarked, each a volume in the great library of humankind. In the sixteenth century, more books were burned than ever before or since. How many Homers vanished? How many Hesiods? What great works of painting, sculpture, architecture, and music vanished or never were created? Languages, prayers, dreams, habits, and hopes—all gone. And not just once, but over and over again. In our antibiotic era, how can we imagine what it means to have entire ways of life hiss away like steam? How can one assay the total impact of the
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The sun’s role was hellishly difficult, Tlacaelel said. Even when the strife among Ometeotl’s sons quieted enough to allow the sun to shine, it still had to battle the stars and moon every day as it rose in the sky—a literal struggle of light against darkness. Each day of sunlight was a victory that must be fought and won again the next day. Because the sun could not hold out forever against its foes, one sixteenth-century Nahuatl account explained, it would one day inevitably lose—there was no getting around it. “In this Sun it shall come to pass / That the earth shall move, / That there
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In their penchant for ceremonial public slaughter, the Alliance and Europe were more alike than either side grasped.
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.
