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CONTENTS
Title Page
Dedication
List of Maps
Preface
INTRODUCTION / Holmberg’s Mistake
- A View from Above
PART ONE / Numbers from Nowhere?- Why Billington Survived
- In the Land of Four Quarters
- Frequently Asked Questions
PART TWO / Very Old Bones- Pleistocene Wars
- Cotton (or Anchovies) and Maize (Tales of Two
Civilizations, Part I)- Writing, Wheels, and Bucket Brigades (Tales of Two
Civilizations, Part II
PART THREE / Landscape with Figures- Made in America
- Amazonia
- The Artificial Wilderness
CODA- The Great Law of Peace
Afterword to the Vintage Edition
Appendixes
A. Loaded Words
B. Talking Knots
C. The Syphilis Exception
D. Calendar Math
Notes
Bibliography
Map Credits
Illustration Credits
Acknowledgments
Charles C. Mann 1491
Also by Charles C. Mann
Acclaim for Charles C. Mann’s 1491
Copyright
For the woman in the next-door office—
Cloudlessly, like everything else
—CCM
NATIVE AMERICA, 1491 A.D.
Native America, 1491 A.D.
Native America, 1000 A.D.
Massachusett Alliance, 1600 A.D.
Peoples of the Dawnland, 1600 A.D.
Tawantinsuyu: Land of the Four Quarters, 1527 A.D.
Tawantinsuyu: Expansion of the Inka Empire, 1438–1527
A.D.
Triple Alliance, 1519 A.D.
Paleo-Indian Migration Routes: North America, 10,000
B.C.
Norte Chico: The Americas’ First Urban Complex, 3000–
1800 B.C.
Mesoamerica, 1000 B.C.–1000 A.D.
Wari and Tiwanaku, 700 A.D.
Moundbuilders, 3400 B.C.–1400 A.D.
The American Bottom, 1300 A.D.
The Hundred Years’ War: Kaan and Mutal Battle to
Control the Maya Heartland, 526–682 A.D.
Amazon Basin
Humanized Landscapes, 1491 A.D.
The seeds of this book date back, at least in part, to 1983, when I wrote an
article for Science about a NASA program that was monitoring atmospheric
ozone levels. In the course of learning about the program, I flew with a
research team in a NASA plane equipped to sample and analyze the
atmosphere at thirty thousand feet. At one point the group landed in Mérida,
in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. For some reason the scientists had the next
day off, and we all took a decrepit Volkswagen van to the Maya ruins of
Chichén Itzá. I knew nothing about Mesoamerican culture—I may not even
have been familiar with the term “Mesoamerica,” which encompasses the
area from central Mexico to Panama, including all of Guatemala and Belize,
and parts of El Salvador, Honduras, Costa Rica, and Nicaragua, the
homeland of the Maya, the Olmec, and a host of other indigenous groups.
Moments after we clambered out of the van I was utterly enthralled.
On my own—sometimes for vacation, sometimes on assignment—I
returned to Yucatán five or six times, three times with my friend Peter
Menzel, a photojournalist. For a German magazine, Peter and I made a
twelve-hour drive down a terrible dirt road (thigh-deep potholes, blockades
of fallen timber) to the then-unexcavated Maya metropolis of Calakmul.
Accompanying us was Juan de la Cruz Briceño, Maya himself, caretaker of
another, smaller ruin. Juan had spent twenty years as a chiclero, trekking
the forest for weeks on end in search of chicle trees, which have a gooey
sap that Indians have dried and chewed for millennia and that in the late
nineteenth century became the base of the chewing-gum industry. Around a
night fire he told us about the ancient, vine-shrouded cities he had stumbled
across in his rambles, and his amazement when scientists informed him that
his ancestors had built them. That night we slept in hammocks amid tall,
headstone-like carvings that had not been read for more than a thousand
years.
My interest in the peoples who walked the Americas before Columbus
only snapped into anything resembling focus in the fall of 1992. By chance
one Sunday afternoon I came across a display in a college library of the
special Columbian quincentenary issue of the Annals of the Association of
American Geographers. Curious, I picked up the journal, sank into an
armchair, and began to read an article by William Denevan, a geographer at
the University of Wisconsin. The article opened with the question, “What
was the New World like at the time of Columbus?” Yes, I thought, what was
it like? Who lived here and what could have passed through their minds
when European sails first appeared on the horizon? I finished Denevan’s
article and went on to others and didn’t stop reading until the librarian
flicked the lights to signify closing time.
I didn’t know it then, but Denevan and a host of fellow researchers had
spent their careers trying to answer these questions. The picture they have
emerged with is quite different from what most Americans and Europeans
think, and still little known outside specialist circles.
A year or two after I read Denevan’s article, I attended a panel discussion
at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of
Science. Called something like “New Perspectives on the Amazon,” the
session featured William Balée of Tulane University. Balée’s talk was about
“anthropogenic” forests—forests created by Indians centuries or millennia
in the past—a concept I’d never heard of before. He also mentioned
something that Denevan had discussed: many researchers now believe their
predecessors underestimated the number of people in the Americas when
Columbus arrived. Indians were more numerous than previously thought,
Balée said—much more numerous. Gee, someone ought to put all this stuff
together, I thought. It would make a fascinating book.
I kept waiting for that book to appear. The wait grew more frustrating
when my son entered school and was taught the same things I had been
taught, beliefs I knew had long been sharply questioned. Since nobody else
appeared to be writing the book, I finally decided to try it myself. Besides, I
was curious to learn more. The book you are holding is the result.
Some things this book is not. It is not a systematic, chronological account
of the Western Hemisphere’s cultural and social development before 1492.
Such a book, its scope vast in space and time, could not be written—by the
time the author approached the end, new findings would have been made
and the beginning would be outdated. Among those who assured me of this
were the very researchers who have spent much of the last few decades
wrestling with the staggering diversity of pre-Columbian societies.
Nor is this book a full intellectual history of the recent changes in
perspective among the anthropologists, archaeologists, ecologists,
geographers, and historians who study the first Americans. That, too, would
be impossible, for the ramifications of the new ideas are still rippling
outward in too many directions for any writer to contain them in one single
work.
Instead, this book explores what I believe to be the three main foci of the
new findings: Indian demography (Part I), Indian origins (PartII), and
Indian ecology (Part III). Because so many different societies illustrate
these points in such different ways, I could not possibly be comprehensive.
Instead, I chose my examples from cultures that are among the best
documented, or have drawn the most recent attention, or just seemed the
most intriguing.
Throughout this book, as the reader already will have noticed, I use the
term “Indian” to refer to the first inhabitants of the Americas. No question
about it, Indian is a confusing and historically inappropriate name. Probably
the most accurate descriptor for the original inhabitants of the Americas is
Americans. Actually using it, though, would be risking worse confusion. In
this book I try to refer to people by the names they call themselves. The
overwhelming majority of the indigenous peoples whom I have met in both
North and South America describe themselves as Indians. (For more about
nomenclature, see Appendix A, “Loaded Words.”)
In the mid-1980s I traveled to the village of Hazelton, on the upper Skeena
River in the middle of British Columbia. Many of its inhabitants belong to
the Gitksan (or Gitxsan) nation. At the time of my visit, the Gitksan had just
lodged a lawsuit with the governments of both British Columbia and
Canada. They wanted the province and the nation to recognize that the
Gitksan had lived there a long time, had never left, had never agreed to give
their land away, and had thus retained legal title to about eleven thousand
square miles of the province. They were very willing to negotiate, they said,
but they were not willing to not be negotiated with.
Flying in, I could see why the Gitksan were attached to the area. The
plane swept past the snowy, magnificent walls of the Rocher de Boule
Mountains and into the confluence of two forested river valleys. Mist
steamed off the land. People were fishing in the rivers for steelhead and
salmon even though they were 165 miles from the coast.
The Gitanmaax band of the Gitksan has its headquarters in Hazelton, but
most members live in a reserve just outside town. I drove to the reserve,
where Neil Sterritt, head of the Gitanmaax council, explained the litigation
to me. A straightforward, level-voiced man, he had got his start as a mining
engineer and then come back home with his shirtsleeves rolled up, ready for
a lengthy bout of legal wrangling. After multiple trials and appeals, the
Supreme Court of Canada ruled in 1997 that British Columbia had to
negotiate the status of the land with the Gitksan. Talks were still ongoing in
2005, two decades after the lawsuit first began.
After a while Sterritt took me to see ‘Ksan, a historical park and art
school created in 1970. In the park were several re-created longhouses, their
facades covered in the forcefully elegant, black-and-red arcs of Northwest
Coast Indian art. The art school trained local Indians in the techniques of
translating traditionally derived designs into silk-screen prints. Sterritt left
me in a back room of the schoolhouse and told me to look around. There
was more in the room than he may have realized, for I quickly found what
looked like storage boxes for a number of old and beautiful masks. Beside
them was a stack of modern prints, some of which used the same designs.
And there were boxes of photographs, old and new alike, many of splendid
artworks.
In Northwest Coast art the subjects are flattened and distorted—it’s as if
they’ve been reduced from three dimensions to two and then folded like
origami. At first I found all the designs hard to interpret, but soon some
seemed to pop right out of the surface. They had clean lines that cut space
into shapes at once simple and complex: objects tucked into objects,
creatures stuffed into their own eyes, humans who were half beast and
beasts who were half human—all was metamorphosis and surreal
commotion.
A few of the objects I looked at I understood immediately, many I didn’t
understand at all, some I thought I understood but probably didn’t, and
some maybe even the Gitksan didn’t understand, in the way that most
Europeans today can’t truly understand the effect of Byzantine art on the
spirits of the people who saw it at the time of its creation. But I was
delighted by the boldly graphic lines and dazzled by the sense that I was
peeking into a vibrant past that I had not known existed and that continued
to inform the present in a way I had not realized. For an hour or two I went
from object to object, always eager to see more. In assembling this book, I
hope to share the excitement I felt then, and have felt many times since.
INTRODUCTION
Holmberg’s Mistake
A View from Above
IN THE BENI
The plane took off in weather that was surprisingly cool for central Bolivia
and flew east, toward the Brazilian border. In a few minutes the roads and
houses disappeared, and the only traces of human settlement were the cattle
scattered over the savanna like sprinkles on ice cream. Then they, too,
disappeared. By that time the archaeologists had their cameras out and were
clicking away in delight.
Below us lay the Beni, a Bolivian province about the size of Illinois and
Indiana put together, and nearly as flat. For almost half the year rain and
snowmelt from the mountains to the south and west cover the land with an
irregular, slowly moving skin of water that eventually ends up in the
province’s northern rivers, which are upper tributaries of the Amazon. The
rest of the year the water dries up and the bright green vastness turns into
something that resembles a desert. This peculiar, remote, often watery plain
was what had drawn the researchers’ attention, and not just because it was
one of the few places on earth inhabited by some people who might never
have seen Westerners with cameras.
Clark Erickson and William Balée, the archaeologists, sat up front.
Erickson, based at the University of Pennsylvania, worked in concert with a
Bolivian archaeologist, who that day was elsewhere, freeing up a seat in the
plane for me. Balée, of Tulane, is actually an anthropologist, but as
scientists have come to appreciate the ways in which past and present
inform each other, the distinction between anthropologists and
archaeologists has blurred. The two men differ in build, temperament, and
scholarly proclivity, but they pressed their faces to the windows with
identical enthusiasm.
Scattered across the landscape below were countless islands of forest,
many of them almost-perfect circles—heaps of green in a sea of yellow
grass. Each island rose as much as sixty feet above the floodplain, allowing
trees to grow that otherwise could not endure the water. The forests were
bridged by raised berms, as straight as a rifle shot and up to three miles
long. It is Erickson’s belief that this entire landscape—thirty thousand
square miles or more of forest islands and mounds linked by causeways—
was constructed by a technologically advanced, populous society more than
a thousand years ago. Balée, newer to the Beni, leaned toward this view but
was not yet ready to commit himself.
Erickson and Balée belong to a cohort of scholars that in recent years has
radically challenged conventional notions of what the Western Hemisphere
was like before Columbus. When I went to high school, in the 1970s, I was
taught that Indians came to the Americas across the Bering Strait about
thirteen thousand years ago, that they lived for the most part in small,
isolated groups, and that they had so little impact on their environment that
even after millennia of habitation the continents remained mostly
wilderness. Schools still impart the same ideas today. One way to
summarize the views of people like Erickson and Balée would be to say that
they regard this picture of Indian life as wrong in almost every aspect.
Indians were here far longer than previously thought, these researchers
believe, and in much greater numbers. And they were so successful at
imposing their will on the landscape that in 1492 Columbus set foot in a
hemisphere thoroughly marked by humankind.
Given the charged relations between white societies and native peoples,
inquiry into Indian culture and history is inevitably contentious. But the
recent scholarship is especially controversial. To begin with, some
researchers—many but not all from an older generation—deride the new
theories as fantasies arising from an almost willful misinterpretation of data
and a perverse kind of political correctness. “I have seen no evidence that
large numbers of people ever lived in the Beni,” Betty J. Meggers, of the
Smithsonian Institution, told me. “Claiming otherwise is just wishful
thinking.” Indeed, two Smithsonian-backed archaeologists from Argentina
have argued that many of the larger mounds are natural floodplain deposits;
a “small initial population” could have built the remaining causeways and
raised fields in as little as a decade. Similar criticisms apply to many of the
new scholarly claims about Indians, according to Dean R. Snow, an
anthropologist at Pennsylvania State University. The problem is that “you
can make the meager evidence from the ethnohistorical record tell you
anything you want,” he says. “It’s really easy to kid yourself.” And some
have charged that the claims advance the political agenda of those who seek
to discredit European culture, because the high numbers seem to inflate the
scale of native loss.
Disputes also arise because the new theories have implications for
today’s ecological battles. Much of the environmental movement is
animated, consciously or not, by what geographer William Denevan calls
“the pristine myth”—the belief that the Americas in 1491 were an almost
untouched, even Edenic land, “untrammeled by man,” in the words of the
Wilderness Act of 1964, a U.S. law that is one of the founding documents of
the global environmental movement. 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?
The Beni is a case in point. In addition to building roads, causeways,
canals, dikes, reservoirs, mounds, raised agricultural fields, and possibly
ball courts, Erickson has argued, the Indians who lived there before
Columbus trapped fish in the seasonally flooded grassland. The trapping
was not a matter of a few isolated natives with nets, but a society-wide
effort in which hundreds or thousands of people fashioned dense,
zigzagging networks of earthen fish weirs (fish-corralling fences) among the
causeways. Much of the savanna is natural, the result of seasonal flooding.
But the Indians maintained and expanded the grasslands by regularly setting
huge areas on fire. Over the centuries the burning created an intricate
ecosystem of fire-adapted plant species dependent on indigenous pyrophilia.
The Beni’s current inhabitants still burn, although now it is mostly to
maintain the savanna for cattle. When we flew over the region, the dry
season had just begun, but mile-long lines of flame were already on the
march. Smoke rose into the sky in great, juddering pillars. In the charred
areas behind the fires were the blackened spikes of trees, many of them of
species that activists fight to save in other parts of Amazonia.
The future of the Beni is uncertain, especially its most thinly settled
region, near the border with Brazil. Some outsiders want to develop the area
for ranches, as has been done with many U.S. grasslands. Others want to
keep this sparsely populated region as close to wilderness as possible. Local
Indian groups regard this latter proposal with suspicion. If the Beni
becomes a reserve for the “natural,” they ask, what international
organization would let them continue setting the plains afire? Could any
outside group endorse large-scale burning in Amazonia? Instead, Indians
propose placing control of the land into their hands. Activists, in turn,
regard that idea without enthusiasm—some indigenous groups in the U.S.
Southwest have promoted the use of their reservations as repositories for
nuclear waste. And, of course, there is all that burning.
HOLMBERG’S MISTAKE
“Don’t touch that tree,” Balée said.
I froze. I was climbing a low, crumbly hill and had been about to support
myself by grasping a scrawny, almost vine-like tree with splayed leaves.
“Triplaris americana,” said Balée, an expert in forest botany. “You have to
watch out for it.” In an unusual arrangement, he said, T. americana plays
host to colonies of tiny red ants—indeed, it has trouble surviving without
them. The ants occupy minute tunnels just beneath the bark. In return for
shelter, the ants attack anything that touches the tree—insect, bird, unwary
writer. The venom-squirting ferocity of their attack gives rise to T.
americana’s local nickname: devil tree.
At the base of the devil tree, exposing its roots, was a deserted animal
burrow. Balée scraped out some dirt with a knife, then waved me over,
along with Erickson and my son Newell, who were accompanying us. The
depression was thick with busted pottery. We could see the rims of plates
and what looked like the foot of a teakettle—it was shaped like a human
foot, complete with painted toenails. Balée plucked out half a dozen pieces
of ceramic: shards of pots and plates, a chipped length of cylindrical bar
that may have been part of a pot’s support leg. As much as an eighth of the
hill, by volume, was composed of such fragments, he said. You could dig
almost anywhere on it and see the like. We were clambering up an immense
pile of broken crockery.
The pile is known as Ibibate, at fifty-nine feet one of the tallest known
forested mounds in the Beni. Erickson explained to me that the pieces of
ceramic were probably intended to help build up and aerate the muddy soil
for settlement and agriculture. But though this explanation makes sense on
engineering grounds, he said, it doesn’t make the long-ago actions of the
moundbuilders any less mysterious. The mounds cover such an enormous
area that they seem unlikely to be the byproduct of waste. Monte Testaccio,
the hill of broken pots southeast of Rome, was a garbage dump for the
entire imperial city. Ibibate is larger than Monte Testaccio and but one of
hundreds of similar mounds. Surely the Beni did not generate more waste
than Rome—the ceramics in Ibibate, Erickson argues, indicate that large
numbers of people, many of them skilled laborers, lived for a long time on
these mounds, feasting and drinking exuberantly all the while. The number
of potters necessary to make the heaps of crockery, the time required for
labor, the number of people needed to provide food and shelter for the
potters, the organization of large-scale destruction and burial—all of it is
evidence, to Erickson’s way of thinking, that a thousand years ago the Beni
was the site of a highly structured society, one that through archaeological
investigation was just beginning to come into view.
Accompanying us that day were two Sirionó Indians, Chiro Cuéllar and
his son-in-law Rafael. The two men were wiry, dark, and nearly beardless;
walking beside them on the trail, I had noticed small nicks in their earlobes.
Rafael, cheerful almost to bumptiousness, peppered the afternoon with
comments; Chiro, a local figure of authority, smoked locally made
“Marlboro” cigarettes and observed our progress with an expression of
amused tolerance. They lived about a mile away, in a little village at the end
of a long, rutted dirt road. We had driven there earlier in the day, parking in
the shade of a tumbledown school and some old missionary buildings. The
structures were clustered near the top of a small hill—another ancient
mound. While Newell and I waited by the truck, Erickson and Balée went
inside the school to obtain permission from Chiro and the other members of
the village council to tramp around. Noticing that we were idle, a couple of
Sirionó kids tried to persuade Newell and me to look at a young jaguar in a
pen, and to give them money for this thrill. After a few minutes, Erickson
and Balée emerged with the requisite permission—and two chaperones,
Chiro and Rafael. Now, climbing up Ibibate, Chiro observed that I was
standing by the devil tree. Keeping his expression deadpan, he suggested
that I climb it. Up top, he said, I would find some delicious jungle fruit. “It
will be like nothing you have experienced before,” he promised.
From the top of Ibibate we were able to see the surrounding savanna.
Perhaps a quarter mile away, across a stretch of yellow, waist-high grass,
was a straight line of trees—an ancient raised causeway, Erickson said.
Otherwise the countryside was so flat that we could see for miles in every
direction—or, rather, we could have seen for miles, if the air in some
directions had not been filled with smoke.
Afterward I wondered about the relationship of our escorts to this place.
Were the Sirionó like contemporary Italians living among the monuments of
the Roman Empire? I asked Erickson and Balée that question during the
drive back.
Their answer continued sporadically through the rest of the evening, as
we rode to our lodgings in an unseasonable cold rain and then had dinner. In
the 1970s, they said, most authorities would have answered my question
about the Sirionó in one way. Today most would answer it in another,
different way. The difference involves what I came to think of, rather
unfairly, as Holmberg’s Mistake.
Although the Sirionó are but one of a score of Native American groups in
the Beni, they are the best known. Between 1940 and 1942 a young doctoral
student named Allan R. Holmberg lived among them. He published his
account of their lives, Nomads of the Longbow, in 1950. (The title refers to
the six-foot bows the Sirionó use for hunting.) Quickly recognized as a
classic, Nomads remains an iconic and influential text; as filtered through
countless other scholarly articles and the popular press, it became one of the
main sources for the outside world’s image of South American Indians.
The Sirionó, Holmberg reported, were “among the most culturally
backward peoples of the world.” Living in constant want and hunger, he
said, they had no clothes, no domestic animals, no musical instruments (not
even rattles and drums), no art or design (except necklaces of animal teeth),
and almost no religion (the Sirionó “conception of the universe” was
“almost completely uncrystallized”). Incredibly, they could not count
beyond three or make fire (they carried it, he wrote, “from camp to camp in
a [burning] brand”). Their poor lean-tos, made of haphazardly heaped palm
fronds, were so ineffective against rain and insects that the typical band
member “undergoes many a sleepless night during the year.” Crouched over
meager campfires during the wet, buggy nights, the Sirionó were living
exemplars of primitive humankind—the “quintessence” of “man in the raw
state of nature,” as Holmberg put it. For millennia, he thought, they had
existed almost without change in a landscape unmarked by their presence.
Then they encountered European society and for the first time their history
acquired a narrative flow.
Holmberg was a careful and compassionate researcher whose detailed
observations of Sirionó life remain valuable today. And he bravely
surmounted trials in Bolivia that would have caused many others to give up.
During his months in the field he was always uncomfortable, usually
hungry, and often sick. Blinded by an infection in both eyes, he walked for
days through the forest to a clinic, holding the hand of a Sirionó guide. He
never fully recovered his health. After his return, he became head of the
anthropology department at Cornell University, from which position he led
its celebrated efforts to alleviate poverty in the Andes.
Nonetheless, he was wrong about the Sirionó. And he was wrong about
the Beni, the place they inhabited—wrong in a way that is instructive, even
exemplary.
Before Columbus, Holmberg believed, both the people and the land had
no real history. Stated so baldly, this notion—that the indigenous peoples of
the Americas floated changelessly through the millennia until 1492—may
seem ludicrous. But flaws in perspective often appear obvious only after
they are pointed out. In this case they took decades to rectify.
The Bolivian government’s instability and fits of anti-American and anti-
European rhetoric ensured that few foreign anthropologists and
archaeologists followed Holmberg into the Beni. Not only was the
government hostile, the region, a center of the cocaine trade in the 1970s
and 1980s, was dangerous. Today there is less drug trafficking, but
smugglers’ runways can still be seen, cut into remote patches of forest. The
wreck of a crashed drug plane sits not far from the airport in Trinidad, the
biggest town in the province. During the drug wars “the Beni was
neglected, even by Bolivian standards,” according to Robert Langstroth, a
geographer and range ecologist in Wisconsin who did his dissertation
fieldwork there. “It was a backwater of a backwater.” Gradually a small
number of scientists ventured into the region. What they learned
transformed their understanding of the place and its people.
Just as Holmberg believed, the Sirionó were among the most culturally
impoverished people on earth. But this was not because they were
unchanged holdovers from humankind’s ancient past but because smallpox
and influenza laid waste to their villages in the 1920s. Before the epidemics
at least three thousand Sirionó, and probably many more, lived in eastern
Bolivia. By Holmberg’s time fewer than 150 remained—a loss of more than
95 percent in less than a generation. So catastrophic was the decline that the
Sirionó passed through a genetic bottleneck. (A genetic bottleneck occurs
when a population becomes so small that individuals are forced to mate
with relatives, which can produce deleterious hereditary effects.) The
effects of the bottleneck were described in 1982, when Allyn Stearman of
the University of Central Florida became the first anthropologist to visit the
Sirionó since Holmberg. Stearman discovered that the Sirionó were thirty
times more likely to be born with clubfeet than typical human populations.
And almost all the Sirionó had unusual nicks in their earlobes, the traits I
had noticed on the two men accompanying us.
Even as the epidemics hit, Stearman learned, the group was fighting the
white cattle ranchers who were taking over the region. The Bolivian
military aided the incursion by hunting down the Sirionó and throwing them
into what were, in effect, prison camps. Those released from confinement
were forced into servitude on the ranches. The wandering people Holmberg
traveled with in the forest had been hiding from their abusers. At some risk
to himself, Holmberg tried to help them, but he never fully grasped that the
people he saw as remnants from the Paleolithic Age were actually the
persecuted survivors of a recently shattered culture. It was as if he had come
across refugees from a Nazi concentration camp, and concluded that they
belonged to a culture that had always been barefoot and starving.
Far from being leftovers from the Stone Age, in fact, the Sirionó are
probably relative newcomers to the Beni. They speak a language in the
Tupí-Guaraní group, one of the most important Indian language families in
South America but one not common in Bolivia. Linguistic evidence, first
weighed by anthropologists in the 1970s, suggests that they arrived from
the north as late as the seventeenth century, about the time of the first
Spanish settlers and missionaries. Other evidence suggests they may have
come a few centuries earlier; Tupí-Guaraní–speaking groups, possibly
including the Sirionó, attacked the Inka empire in the early sixteenth
century. No one knows why the Sirionó moved in, but one reason may be
simply that the Beni then was little populated. Not long before, the previous
inhabitants’ society had disintegrated.
To judge by Nomads of the Longbow, Holmberg did not know of this
earlier culture—the culture that built the causeways and mounds and fish
weirs. He didn’t see that the Sirionó were walking through a landscape that
had been shaped by somebody else. A few European observers before
Holmberg had remarked upon the earthworks’ existence, though some
doubted that the causeways and forest islands were of human origin. But
they did not draw systematic scholarly attention until 1961, when William
Denevan came to Bolivia. Then a doctoral student, he had learned of the
region’s peculiar landscape during an earlier stint as a cub reporter in Peru
and thought it might make an interesting topic for his thesis. Upon arrival
he discovered that oil-company geologists, the only scientists in the area,
believed the Beni was thick with the remains of an unknown civilization.
Convincing a local pilot to push his usual route westward, Denevan
examined the Beni from above. He observed exactly what I saw four
decades later: isolated hillocks of forest; long raised berms; canals; raised
agricultural fields; circular, moat-like ditches; and odd, zigzagging ridges.
“I’m looking out of one of these DC-3 windows, and I’m going berserk in
this little airplane,” Denevan said to me. “I knew these things were not
natural. You just don’t have that kind of straight line in nature.” As Denevan
learned more about the landscape, his amazement grew. “It’s a completely
humanized landscape,” he said. “To me, it was clearly the most exciting
thing going on in the Amazon and adjacent areas. It may be the most
important thing in all of South America, I think. Yet it was practically
untouched” by scientists. It is still almost untouched—there aren’t even any
detailed maps of the earthworks and canals.
Beginning as much as three thousand years ago, this long-ago society—
Erickson believes it was probably founded by the ancestors of an Arawak-
speaking people now called the Mojo and the Bauré—created one of the
largest, strangest, and most ecologically rich artificial environments on the
planet. These people built up the mounds for homes and farms, constructed
the causeways and canals for transportation and communication, created the
fish weirs to feed themselves, and burned the savannas to keep them clear of
invading trees. A thousand years ago their society was at its height. Their
villages and towns were spacious, formal, and guarded by moats and
palisades. In Erickson’s hypothetical reconstruction, as many as a million
people may have walked the causeways of eastern Bolivia in their long
cotton tunics, heavy ornaments dangling from their wrists and necks.
Flying over eastern Bolivia in the early 1960s, the young
geographer William Denevan was amazed to see that the
landscape (bottom)—home to nothing but cattle ranches for
generations—still bore evidence that it had once been inhabited
by a large, prosperous society, one whose very existence had been
forgotten. Incredibly, such discoveries are still being made. In
2002 and 2003, Finnish and Brazilian researchers revealed the
remains of dozens of geometrical earthworks (top) in the western
Brazilian state of Acre where the forest had just been cleared for
cattle ranches.
Today, hundreds of years after this Arawak culture passed from the scene,
the forest on and around Ibibate mound looks like the classic Amazon of
conservationists’ dreams: lianas thick as a human arm, dangling blade-like
leaves more than six feet long, smooth-boled Brazil nut trees, thick-bodied
flowers that smell like warm meat. In terms of species richness, Balée told
me, the forest islands of Bolivia are comparable to any place in South
America. The same is true of the Beni savanna, it seems, with its different
complement of species. Ecologically, the region is a treasure, but one
designed and executed by human beings. Erickson regards the landscape of
the Beni as one of humankind’s greatest works of art, a masterpiece that
until recently was almost completely unknown, a masterpiece in a place
with a name that few people outside Bolivia would recognize.
“EMPTY OF MANKIND AND ITS WORKS”
The Beni was no anomaly. For almost five centuries, Holmberg’s Mistake—
the supposition that Native Americans lived in an eternal, unhistoried state
—held sway in scholarly work, and from there fanned out to high school
textbooks, Hollywood movies, newspaper articles, environmental
campaigns, romantic adventure books, and silk-screened T-shirts. It existed
in many forms and was embraced both by those who hated Indians and
those who admired them. Holmberg’s Mistake explained the colonists’ view
of most Indians as incurably vicious barbarians; its mirror image was the
dreamy stereotype of the Indian as a Noble Savage. 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.
The Noble Savage dates back as far as the first full-blown ethnography of
American indigenous peoples, Bartolomé de Las Casas’s Apologética
Historia Sumaria, written mainly in the 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. Las
Casas’s contemporary, the Italian commentator Pietro Martire d’Anghiera,
shared these views. Indians, he wrote (I quote the English translation from
1556), “lyve in that goulden world of whiche owlde writers speake so
much,” existing “simplye and innocentlye without inforcement of lawes.”
In our day, beliefs about Indians’ inherent simplicity and innocence refer
mainly to their putative lack of impact on the environment. This notion
dates back at least to Henry David Thoreau, who spent much time seeking
“Indian wisdom,” an indigenous way of thought that supposedly did not
encompass measuring or categorizing, which he viewed as the evils that
allowed human beings to change Nature. Thoreau’s ideas continue to be
influential. In the wake of the first Earth Day in 1970, a group named Keep
America Beautiful, Inc., put up billboards that portrayed an actor in Indian
dress quietly weeping over polluted land. The campaign was enormously
successful. For almost a decade the image of the crying Indian appeared
around the world. Yet though Indians here were playing a heroic role, the
advertisement still embodied Holmberg’s Mistake, for it implicitly depicted
Indians as people who never changed their environment from its original
wild state. Because history is change, they were people without history.
Las Casas’s anti-Spanish views met with such harsh attacks that he
instructed his executors to publish the Apologética Historia forty years after
his death (he died in 1566). In fact, the book did not appear in complete
form until 1909. As the delay suggests, polemics for the Noble Savage
tended to meet with little sympathy in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. Emblematic was the U.S. historian George Bancroft, dean of his
profession, who argued in 1834 that before Europeans arrived North
America was “an unproductive waste…Its only inhabitants were a few
scattered tribes of feeble barbarians, destitute of commerce and of political
connection.” 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.
In different forms Bancroft’s characterization was carried into the next
century. Writing in 1934, Alfred L. Kroeber, one of the founders of
American anthropology, theorized that the Indians in eastern North America
could not develop—could have no history—because their lives consisted of
“warfare that was insane, unending, continuously attritional.” Escaping the
cycle of conflict was “well-nigh impossible,” he believed. “The group that
tried to shift its values from war to peace was almost certainly doomed to
early extinction.” *1 Kroeber conceded that Indians took time out from
fighting to grow crops, but insisted that agriculture “was not basic to life in
the East; it was an auxiliary, in a sense a luxury.” As a result, “Ninety-nine
per cent or more of what [land] might have been developed remained
virgin.”
Four decades later, 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.”
Textbooks reflected academic beliefs faithfully. In a survey of U.S.
history schoolbooks, the writer Frances Fitzgerald concluded that the
characterization of Indians had moved, “if anything, resolutely backward”
between the 1840s and the 1940s. Earlier writers thought of Indians as
important, though uncivilized, but later books froze them into a formula:
“lazy, childlike, and cruel.” A main textbook of the 1940s devoted only a
“few paragraphs” to Indians, she wrote, “of which the last is headed ‘The
Indians Were Backward.’”
These views, though less common today, continue to appear. The 1987
edition of American History: A Survey, a standard high school textbook by
three well-known historians, summed up Indian history thusly: “For
thousands of centuries—centuries in which human races were evolving,
forming communities, and building the beginnings of national civilizations
in Africa, Asia, and Europe—the continents we know as the Americas stood
empty of mankind and its works.” The story of Europeans in the New
World, the book informed students, “is the story of the creation of a
civilization where none existed.”
It is always easy for those living in the present to feel superior to those
who lived in the past. Alfred W. Crosby, a University of Texas historian,
noted that many of the researchers who embraced Holmberg’s Mistake lived
in an era when the driving force of events seemed to be great leaders of
European descent and when white societies appeared to be overwhelming
nonwhite societies everywhere. 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. But the Second World War taught the West that non-Westerners—the
Japanese, in this instance—were capable of swift societal change. The rapid
disintegration of European colonial empires further adumbrated the point.
Crosby likened the effects of these events on social scientists to those on
astronomers from “the discovery that the faint smudges seen between stars
on the Milky Way were really distant galaxies.”
Meanwhile, new disciplines and new technologies were creating new
ways to examine the past. Demography, climatology, epidemiology,
economics, botany, and palynology (pollen analysis); molecular and
evolutionary biology; carbon-14 dating, ice-core sampling, satellite
photography, and soil assays; genetic microsatellite analysis and virtual 3-D
fly-throughs—a torrent of novel perspectives and techniques cascaded into
use. And when these were employed, the idea that the only human
occupants of one-third of the earth’s surface had changed little for
thousands of years began to seem implausible. To be sure, some researchers
have vigorously attacked the new findings as wild exaggerations. (“We have
simply replaced the old myth [of untouched wilderness] with a new one,”
scoffed geographer Thomas Vale, “the myth of the humanized landscape.”)
But after several decades of discovery and debate, a new picture of the
Americas and their original inhabitants is emerging.
Advertisements still celebrate nomadic, ecologically pure Indians on
horseback chasing bison in the Great Plains of North America, but at the
time of Columbus the great majority of Native Americans could be found
south of the Río Grande. They were not nomadic, but built up and lived in
some of the world’s biggest and most opulent cities. Far from being
dependent on big-game hunting, most Indians lived on farms. Others
subsisted on fish and shellfish. As for the horses, they were from Europe;
except for llamas in the Andes, the Western Hemisphere had no beasts of
burden. In other words, the Americas were immeasurably busier, more
diverse, and more populous than researchers had previously imagined.
And older, too.
THE OTHER NEOLITHIC REVOLUTIONS
For much of the last century archaeologists believed that Indians came to
the Americas through the Bering Strait about thirteen thousand years ago at
the tail end of the last Ice Age. Because the sheets of polar ice locked up
huge amounts of water, sea levels around the world fell about three hundred
feet. The shallow Bering Strait became a wide land bridge between Siberia
and Alaska. In theory, paleo-Indians, as they are called, simply walked
across the fifty-five miles that now separate the continents. C. Vance
Haynes, an archaeologist at the University of Arizona, put the crowning
touches on the scheme in 1964, when he noted evidence that at just the right
time—that is, about thirteen thousand years ago—two great glacial sheets in
northwest Canada parted, leaving a comparatively warm, ice-free corridor
between them. Down this channel paleo-Indians could have passed from
Alaska to the more habitable regions in the south without having to hike
over the ice pack. At the time, the ice pack extended two thousand miles
south of the Bering Strait and was almost devoid of life. Without Haynes’s
ice-free corridor, it is hard to imagine how humans could have made it to
the south. The combination of land bridge and ice-free corridor occurred
only once in the last twenty thousand years, and lasted for just a few
hundred years. And it happened just before the emergence of what was then
the earliest known culture in the Americas, the Clovis culture, so named for
the town in New Mexico where its remains were first definitely observed.
Haynes’s exposition made the theory seem so ironclad that it fairly flew into
the textbooks. I learned it when I attended high school. So did my son,
thirty years later.
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. (In any case, new research
had cast doubt on the existence of that corridor.) Given the near
impossibility of surpassing the glaciers without the corridor, some
archaeologists suggested that the first Americans must have arrived twenty
thousand years ago, when the ice pack was smaller. Or even earlier than that
—the Chilean site had suggestive evidence of artifacts more than thirty
thousand years old. Or perhaps the first Indians traveled by boat, and didn’t
need the land bridge. Or maybe they arrived via Australia, passing the South
Pole. “We’re in a state of turmoil,” the consulting archaeologist Stuart
Fiedel told me. “Everything we knew is now supposed to be wrong,” he
added, exaggerating a little for effect.
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 straggled to the rest of the
Americas in two or three separate groups, with the ancestors of most
modern Indians making up the second group. Researchers differ on the
details; some scientists have theorized that the Americas may have been hit
with as many as five waves of settlement before Columbus, with the earliest
occurring as much as fifty thousand years ago. In most versions, though,
today’s Indians are seen as relative latecomers.
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. Deloria is the author of many books,
including Red Earth, White Lies, a critique of mainstream archaeology. The
book’s general tenor is signaled by its index; under “science,” the entries
include “corruption and fraud and,” “Indian explanations ignored by,” “lack
of proof for theories of,” “myth of objectivity of,” and “racism of.” In
Deloria’s opinion, archaeology is mainly about easing white guilt.
Determining that Indians superseded other people fits 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 moral logic of the we’re-all-immigrants argument that Deloria cites
is difficult to parse; it seems to be claiming that two wrongs make a right.
Moreover, 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.
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 next few millennia the wheel and the
metal tool sprang up in the same area. The Sumerians put these inventions
together, added writing, and in the third millennium B.C. created the first
great civilization. Every European and Asian culture since, no matter how
disparate in appearance, stands in Sumer’s shadow. Native Americans, who
left Asia long before agriculture, missed out on the bounty. “They had to do
everything on their own,” Crosby said to me. Remarkably, they succeeded.
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. In 2003, though, archaeologists discovered ancient
seeds from cultivated squashes in coastal Ecuador, at the foot of the Andes,
which may be older than any agricultural remains in Mesoamerica—a third
Neolithic Revolution. This Neolithic Revolution probably led, among many
other things, to the cultures in the Beni. The two American Neolithics
spread more slowly than their counterpart in Eurasia, possibly because
Indians in many places had not had the time to build up the requisite
population density, and possibly because of the extraordinary nature of the
most prominent Indian crop, maize. *2
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. Its closest
genetic relative is a mountain grass called teosinte that looks strikingly
different—for one thing, its “ears” are smaller than the baby corn served in
Chinese restaurants. 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 have 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.)
About seven thousand years elapsed between the dawn of the Middle
Eastern Neolithic and the establishment of Sumer. Indians navigated the
same path in somewhat less time (the data are too sketchy to be more
precise). Pride of place must go to the Olmec, the first technologically
complex culture in the hemisphere. Appearing in the narrow “waist” of
Mexico about 1800 B.C., they lived in cities and towns centered on temple
mounds. Strewn among them were colossal male heads of stone, many six
feet tall or more, with helmet-like headgear, perpetual frowns, and
somewhat African features, the last of which has given rise to speculation
that Olmec culture was inspired by voyagers from Africa. 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.
They invented a dozen different systems of writing, established widespread
trade networks, tracked the orbits of the planets, created a 365-day calendar
(more accurate than its contemporaries in Europe), and recorded their
histories in accordion-folded “books” of fig tree bark paper.
Arguably their greatest intellectual feat was the invention of zero. In his
classic account Number: The Language of Science, the mathematician
Tobias Dantzig called the discovery of zero “one of the greatest single
accomplishments of the human race,” a “turning point” in mathematics,
science, and technology. The first whisper of zero in the Middle East
occurred about 600 B.C. When tallying numbers, the Babylonians arranged
them into columns, as children learn to do today. To distinguish between
their equivalents to 11 and 101, they placed two triangular marks between
the digits: 1 1, so to speak. (Because Babylonian mathematics was based
on 60, rather than 10, the example is correct only in principle.) Curiously,
though, they did not use the symbol to distinguish among their versions of
1, 10, and 100. Nor could the Babylonians add or subtract with zero, let
alone use zero to enter the realm of negative numbers. Mathematicians in
India first used zero in its contemporary sense—a number, not a placeholder
—sometime in the first few centuries A.D. 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. 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. Amazingly, they had invented the wheel but did not employ it for
any purpose other than children’s toys. 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.
Five hundred years later, when Columbus sailed into the Caribbean, the
descendants of the world’s Neolithic Revolutions collided, with
overwhelming consequences for all.
A GUIDED TOUR
Imagine, for a moment, an impossible journey: taking off in a plane from
eastern Bolivia as I did, but doing so in 1000 A.D. and flying a surveillance
mission over the rest of the Western Hemisphere. 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.
Today our understanding is different in almost every perspective. Picture
the millennial plane flying west, from the lowlands of the Beni to the
heights of the Andes. On the ground beneath as the journey begins are the
causeways and canals one sees today, except that they are now in good
repair and full of people. (Fifty years ago, the earthworks were almost
completely unknown, even to those living nearby.) After a few hundred
miles the plane ascends to the mountains—and again the historical picture
has changed. Until recently, researchers would have said the highlands in
1000 A.D. were occupied by scattered small villages and one or two big
towns with some nice stonework. But recent archaeological investigations
have revealed that at this time the Andes housed two mountain states, each
much larger than previously appreciated.
The state closest to the Beni was based around Lake Titicaca, the 120-
mile-long alpine lake that crosses the Peru-Bolivia border. Most of this
region has an altitude of twelve thousand feet or more. Summers are short;
winters are correspondingly long. This “bleak, frigid land,” wrote the
adventurer Victor von Hagen, “seemingly was the last place from which one
might expect a culture to develop.” But in fact the lake is comparatively
warm, and so the land surrounding it is less beaten by frost than the
surrounding highlands. Taking advantage of the better climate, the village
of Tiwanaku, one of many settlements around the lake, began after about
800 B.C. to drain the wetlands around the rivers that flowed into the lake
from the south. A thousand years later the village had grown to become the
center of a large polity, also known as Tiwanaku.
NATIVE AMERICA, 1000 A.D.
Less a centralized state than a clutch of municipalities under the common
religio-cultural sway of the center, 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. Flush with wealth, Tiwanaku city swelled into a
marvel of terraced pyramids and grand monuments. Stone breakwaters
extended far out into Lake Titicaca, thronged with long-prowed boats made
of reeds. With its running water, closed sewers, and gaudily painted walls,
Tiwanaku was among the world’s most impressive cities.
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. The comparison seems fitting; at the time, the
realm of Tiwanaku was about the size of modern France. Other researchers
believe this population estimate is too high. Twenty or thirty thousand in the
central city is more likely, according to Nicole Couture, a University of
Chicago archaeologist who helped edit the definitive publication of Kolata’s
work in 2003. An equal number, she said, occupied the surrounding
countryside.
Which view is right? Although Couture was confident of her ideas, she
thought it would be “another decade” before the matter was settled. And in
any case the exact number does not affect what she regards as the key point.
“Building this enormous place up here is really remarkable,” she said. “I
realize that again every time I come back.”
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. The capital city—called, eponymously, Wari—was in
the heights, near the modern city of Ayacucho. 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. Perhaps eighty years earlier,
dust storms had engulfed the high plains, blackening the glaciers in the
peaks above. (Ice samples, dug out in the 1990s, suggest the assault.) 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. Mega-Niños occurred every few centuries
between 200 and 1600 A.D. 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. Rivers dried up, their bottoms carpeted with dead fish.
A mega-Niño in the eleventh century may well have caused the droughts of
those years. But whatever the cause of the climatic upheaval, it severely
tested Wari and Tiwanaku society.
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. Fierce winters helped drive the Vikings from Greenland
and led to bad harvests that exacerbated social tensions in continental
Europe, but few would claim that the little ice age caused the Reformation.
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. Soon after 1000 A.D.
Tiwanaku split into flinders that would not be united for another four
centuries, when the Inka swept them up. Wari also fell. It was succeeded
and perhaps taken over by a state called Chimor, which oversaw an empire
that sprawled over central Peru until it, too, was absorbed by the Inka.
Such newly discovered histories appear everywhere in the Americas.
Take the plane north, toward Central America and southern Mexico, into the
bulge of the Yucatán Peninsula, homeland of the Maya. Maya ruins were
well known forty years ago, to be sure, but among them, too, many new
things have been discovered. Consider Calakmul, the ruin that Peter Menzel
and I visited in the early 1980s. 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. When Peter
and I spoke to William J. Folan of the Universidad Autónoma de Campeche,
who was just beginning to work at the city, he recommended that we not try
going to the ruin unless we could rent a heavy truck, and not even to try
with the truck if it had rained. Our visit to Calakmul did nothing to suggest
that Folan’s advice was wrong. Trees enveloped the great buildings, their
roots slowly ripping apart the soft limestone walls. Peter photographed a
monument with roots coiled around it, boa constrictor style, five or six feet
high. So overwhelming was the tropical forest that I thought Calakmul’s
history would remain forever unknown.
Happily, I was wrong. By the early 1990s Folan’s team had learned that
this long-ignored place covered as much as twenty-five square miles and
had thousands of buildings and dozens of reservoirs and canals. It was the
biggest-ever Maya polity. Researchers cleaned and photographed its
hundred-plus monuments—and just in time, for epigraphers (scholars of
ancient writing) had in the meantime deciphered Maya hieroglyphics. 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. About a century before our imaginary surveillance
tour, though, 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 and were reduced to meaningless imitation of
their ancestors. By the time of our overflight, half or more of what once had
been the flourishing land of the Maya was abandoned.
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. The archaeological record shows that southern Yucatán was
abandoned, while Maya cities in the northern part of the peninsula soldiered
on or even grew. Peculiarly, the abandoned land was the wettest—with its
rivers, lakes, and rainforest, it should have been the best place to wait out a
drought. Conversely, northern Yucatán was dry and rocky. The question is
why people would have fled from drought to lands that would have been
even more badly affected.
And what of the rest of Mesoamerica? As the flight continues north, look
west, at the hills of what are now the Mexican states of Oaxaca and
Guerrero. Here are the quarrelsome city-states of the N˜ udzahui (Mixtec),
finally overwhelming the Zapotec, their ancient rivals based in the valley
city of Monte Albán. Further north, expanding their empire in a hot-brained
hurry, are the Toltec, sweeping in every direction from the mile-high basin
that today houses Mexico City. 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. (Prominent
archaeologists disagree with each other about these events, but the murals
and embossed plates at Chichén Itzá that depict a Toltec army bloodily
destroying a Maya force are hard to dismiss.)
Continue the flight to what is now the U.S. Southwest, past desert farms
and cliff dwellings, to the Mississippian societies in the Midwest. Not long
ago archaeologists with new techniques unraveled the tragedy of Cahokia,
near modern St. Louis, which was once the greatest population center north
of the Río Grande. Construction began in about 1000 A.D. on an earthen
structure that would eventually cover fifteen acres and rise to a height of
about a hundred feet, higher than anything around it for miles. Atop the
mound was the temple for the divine kings, who arranged for the weather to
favor agriculture. As if to lend them support, fields of maize rippled out
from the mound almost as far as the eye could see. 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.
Continue north, to the least settled land, the realm of hunters and
gatherers. Portrayed in countless U.S. history books and Hollywood
westerns, the Indians of the Great Plains are the most familiar to non-
scholars. Demographically speaking, they lived in the hinterlands, remote
and thinly settled; their lives were as far from Wari or Toltec lords as the
nomads of Siberia were from the grandees of Beijing. Their material
cultures were simpler, too—no writing, no stone plazas, no massive temples
—though Plains groups did leave behind about fifty rings of rock that are
reminiscent of Stonehenge. The relative lack of material goods has led some
to regard these groups as exemplifying an ethic of living lightly on the land.
Perhaps, but North America was a busy, talkative place. 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.
Or forgo the northern route altogether and fly the imaginary plane east
from the Beni, toward the mouth of the Amazon. Immediately after the
Beni, one encounters, in what is now the western Brazilian state of Acre,
another society: a network of small villages associated with circular and
square earthworks in patterns quite unlike those found in the Beni. Even
less is known about these people; the remains of their villages were
discovered only in 2003, after ranchers clearing the tropical forest
uncovered them. According to the Finnish archaeologists who first
described them, “it is obvious” that “relatively high population densities”
were “quite common everywhere in the Amazonian lowlands.” The Finns
here are summing up the belief of a new generation of researchers into the
Amazon: the river was much more crowded in 1000 A.D. than it is now,
especially in its lower half. Dense collections of villages thronged the bluffs
that line the shore, with their people fishing in the river and farming the
floodplains and sections of the uplands. Most important were the village
orchards that marched back from the bluffs for miles. Amazonians practiced
a kind of agro-forestry, farming with trees, unlike any kind of agriculture in
Europe, Africa, or Asia.
Not all the towns were small. 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. The ancient inhabitation
beneath and around the modern town has barely been investigated. Almost
all that we know is that it was ideally located on a high bluff overlooking
the mouth of the Tapajós, one of the Amazon’s biggest tributaries. On this
bluff geographers and archaeologists in the 1990s found an area more than
three miles long that was thickly covered with broken ceramics, much like
Ibibate. 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, Persia, Japan, and
other places. Researchers tipped their hats to non-Western accomplishments
in the sciences and arts. Sometimes the effort was grudging or minimal, but
the vacant reaches in the human tale slowly contracted.
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. Now,
though, it is returning to view. It seems incumbent on us to take a look.
PART ONE
Numbers from Nowhere?
Why Billington Survived
THE FRIENDLY INDIAN
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. It was all he
could do to hold together the remnants of his people. Adding to his
problems, the disaster had not touched the Wampanoag’s longtime enemies,
the Narragansett alliance to the west. Soon, Massasoit feared, they would
take advantage of the Wampanoag’s weakness and overrun them.
Desperate threats require desperate countermeasures. 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
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. It was like happening upon a dingy kiosk that would swap fancy
electronic goods for customers’ used socks—almost anyone would be
willing to overlook the shopkeeper’s peculiarities.
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. At the same time, the Wampanoag fended off Indians from the
interior, preventing them from trading directly with the foreigners. In this
way 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. He would permit the newcomers to
stay for an unlimited time—provided they formally allied with the
Wampanoag against the Narragansett.
Tisquantum, the interpreter, had shown up alone at Massasoit’s home a
year and a half before. He spoke fluent English, because he had lived for
several years in Britain. But Massasoit didn’t trust him. He seems to have
been in Massasoit’s eyes a man without anchor, out for himself. In a
conflict, Tisquantum might even side with the foreigners. Massasoit had
kept Tisquantum in a kind of captivity since his arrival, monitoring his
actions closely. And he refused to use him to negotiate with the colonists
until he had another, independent means of communication with them.
That March Samoset—the third member of the triumvirate—appeared,
having hitched a ride from his home in Maine on an English ship that was
plying the coast. Not known is whether his arrival was due to chance or if
Massasoit had asked him to come down because he had picked up a few
English phrases by trading with the British. In any case, Massasoit first had
sent Samoset, rather than Tisquantum, to the foreigners.
Samoset had walked unaccompanied and unarmed into the circle of rude
huts in which the British were living on March 17, 1621. The colonists saw
a robust, erect-postured man wearing only a loincloth; his straight black hair
was shaved in front but flowed down his shoulders behind. To their further
amazement, this almost naked man greeted them in broken but
understandable English. He left the next morning with a few presents. A day
later he came back, accompanied by five “tall proper men”—the phrase is
the colonist Edward Winslow’s—with three-inch black stripes painted down
the middle of their faces. The two sides talked inconclusively, each warily
checking out the other, for a few hours. Now, on the 22nd, Samoset showed
up again at the foreigners’ ramshackle base, this time with Tisquantum in
tow. Meanwhile Massasoit and the rest of the Indian company waited out of
sight.
Samoset and Tisquantum spoke with the colonists for about an hour.
Perhaps they then gave a signal. Or perhaps Massasoit was simply
following a prearranged schedule. In any case, he and the rest of the Indian
party appeared without warning at the crest of a hill on the south bank of
the creek that ran through the foreigners’ camp. Alarmed by Massasoit’s
sudden entrance, the Europeans withdrew to the hill on the opposite bank,
where they had emplaced their few cannons behind a half-finished stockade.
A standoff ensued.
Finally Winslow exhibited the decisiveness that later led to his selection
as colony governor. Wearing a full suit of armor and carrying a sword, he
waded through the stream and offered himself as a hostage. Tisquantum,
who walked with him, served as interpreter. Massasoit’s brother took charge
of Winslow and then Massasoit crossed the water himself, followed by
Tisquantum and twenty of Massasoit’s men, all ostentatiously unarmed. The
colonists took the sachem to an unfinished house and gave him some
cushions to recline on. Both sides shared some of the foreigners’ homemade
moonshine, then settled down to talk, Tisquantum translating.
To the colonists, Massasoit could be distinguished from his subjects more
by manner than by dress or ornament. He wore the same deerskin shawls
and leggings and like his fellows had covered his face with bug-repelling oil
and reddish-purple dye. Around his neck hung a pouch of tobacco, a long
knife, and a thick chain of the prized white shell beads called wampum. In
appearance, Winslow wrote afterward, he was “a very lusty man, in his best
years, an able body, grave of countenance, and spare of speech.” The
Europeans, who had barely survived the previous winter, were in much
worse shape. Half of the original colony now lay underground beneath
wooden markers painted with death’s heads; most of the survivors were
malnourished.
Their meeting was a critical moment in American history. The foreigners
called their colony Plymouth; they themselves were the famous Pilgrims.*3
As schoolchildren learn, at that meeting the Pilgrims obtained the services
of Tisquantum, usually known as “Squanto.” In the 1970s, when I attended
high school, a popular history text was America: Its People and Values, by
Leonard C. Wood, Ralph H. Gabriel, and Edward L. Biller. Nestled among
colorful illustrations of colonial life was a succinct explanation of
Tisquantum’s role:
A friendly Indian named Squanto helped the colonists. He showed
them how to plant corn and how to live on the edge of the wilderness.
A soldier, Captain Miles Standish, taught the Pilgrims how to defend
themselves against unfriendly Indians.
My teacher explained that maize was unfamiliar to the Pilgrims and that
Tisquantum had demonstrated the proper maize-planting technique—
sticking the seed in little heaps of dirt, accompanied by beans and squash
that would later twine themselves up the tall stalks. And he told the Pilgrims
to fertilize the soil by burying fish alongside the maize seeds, a traditional
native technique for producing a bountiful harvest. Following this advice,
my teacher said, the colonists grew so much maize that it became the
centerpiece of the first Thanksgiving. In our slipshod fashion, we students
took notes.
The story in America: Its People and Values isn’t wrong, so far as it goes.
But the impression it gives is entirely misleading.
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. Squanto’s teachings, Winslow concluded, led to “a good
increase of Indian corn”—the difference between success and starvation.
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. So
little evidence has emerged of Indians fertilizing with fish that some
archaeologists believe that Tisquantum actually picked up the idea from
European farmers. The notion is not as ridiculous as it may seem.
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. In his
travels, Tisquantum stayed in places where Europeans used fish as fertilizer,
a practice on the Continent since medieval times.
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. The alliance Massasoit negotiated with Plymouth was successful
from the Wampanoag perspective, for it helped to hold off the Narragansett.
But it was a disaster from the point of view of New England Indian society
as a whole, for the alliance ensured the survival of Plymouth colony, which
spearheaded the great wave of British immigration to New England. All of
this was absent not only from my high school textbooks, but from the
academic accounts they were based on.
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. By the end of the
nineteenth century, the Indians of the Northeast were thought of as rapidly
fading background details in the saga of the rise of the United States
—“marginal people who were losers in the end,” as James Axtell of the
College of William and Mary dryly put it in an interview. 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.
Beginning in the 1970s, Axtell, Neal Salisbury, Francis Jennings, and
other historians grew dissatisfied with this view. “Indians were seen as
trivial, ineffectual patsies,” Salisbury, a historian at Smith College, told me.
“But that assumption—a whole continent of patsies—simply didn’t make
sense.” These researchers tried to peer through the colonial records to the
Indian lives beneath. Their work fed a tsunami of inquiry into the
interactions between natives and newcomers in the era when they faced
each other as relative equals. “No other field in American history has grown
as fast,” marveled Joyce Chaplin, a Harvard historian, in 2003.
The fall of Indian societies had everything to do with the natives
themselves, researchers argue, rather than being religiously or
technologically determined. (Here the claim is not that indigenous cultures
should be blamed for their own demise but that they helped to determine
their own fates.) “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.
This chapter and the next will explore how two different Indian societies,
the Wampanoag and the Inka, reacted to the incursions from across the sea.
It may seem odd that a book about Indian life before contact should devote
space to the period after contact, but there are reasons for it. First, colonial
descriptions of Native Americans are among the few glimpses we have of
Indians whose lives were not shaped by the presence of Europe. 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.
Second, although the stories of early contact—the Wampanoag with the
British, the Inka with the Spanish—are as dissimilar as their protagonists,
many archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians have recently come to
believe that they have deep commonalities. And the tales of other Indians’
encounters with the strangers were alike in the same way. From these
shared features, researchers have constructed what might be thought of as a
master narrative of the meeting of Europe and America. Although it remains
surprisingly little known outside specialist circles, this master narrative
illuminates the origins of every nation in the Americas today. More than
that, the effort to understand events after Columbus shed unexpected light
on critical aspects of life before Columbus. Indeed, the master narrative led
to such surprising conclusions about Native American societies before the
arrival of Europeans that it stirred up an intellectual firestorm.
COMING OF AGE IN THE DAWNLAND
Consider Tisquantum, the “friendly Indian” of the textbook. More than
likely Tisquantum was not the name he was given at birth. In that part of the
Northeast, tisquantum referred to rage, especially the rage of manitou, the
world-suffusing spiritual power at the heart of coastal Indians’ religious
beliefs. When Tisquantum approached the Pilgrims and identified himself
by that sobriquet, it was as if he had stuck out his hand and said, Hello, I’m
the Wrath of God. No one would lightly adopt such a name in contemporary
Western society. Neither would anyone in seventeenth-century indigenous
society. Tisquantum was trying to project something.
Tisquantum was not an Indian. True, he belonged to that category of
people whose ancestors had inhabited the Western Hemisphere for
thousands of years. And it is true that I refer to him as an Indian, because
the label is useful shorthand; so would his descendants, and for much the
same reason. But “Indian” was not a category that Tisquantum himself
would have recognized, any more than the inhabitants of the same area
today would call themselves “Western Hemisphereans.” Still less would
Tisquantum have claimed to belong to “Norumbega,” the label by which
most Europeans then referred to New England. (“New England” was coined
only in 1616.) As Tisquantum’s later history made clear, he regarded
himself first and foremost as a citizen of Patuxet, a shoreline settlement
halfway between what is now Boston and the beginning of Cape Cod.
Patuxet was one of the dozen or so settlements in what is now eastern
Massachusetts and Rhode Island that comprised the Wampanoag
confederation. In turn, 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 Algonquian language family, the biggest in eastern North
America at the time. (Massachusett thus was the name both of a language
and of one of the groups that spoke it.) In Massachusett, the name for the
New England shore was the Dawnland, the place where the sun rose. The
inhabitants of the Dawnland were the People of the First Light.
MASSACHUSETT ALLIANCE, 1600 A.D.
Ten thousand years ago, when Indians in Mesoamerica and Peru were
inventing agriculture and coalescing into villages, New England was barely
inhabited, for the excellent reason that it had been covered until relatively
recently by an ice sheet a mile thick. People slowly moved in, though the
area long remained cold and uninviting, especially along the coastline.
Because rising sea levels continually flooded the shore, marshy Cape Cod
did not fully lock into its contemporary configuration until about 1000 B.C.
By that time the Dawnland had evolved into something more attractive: an
ecological crazy quilt of wet maple forests, shellfish-studded tidal estuaries,
thick highland woods, mossy bogs full of cranberries and orchids, fractally
complex snarls of sandbars and beachfront, and fire-swept stands of pitch
pine—“tremendous variety even within the compass of a few miles,” as the
ecological historian William Cronon put it.
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. In
the 1970s and 1980s linguists applied glottochronological techniques to the
Algonquian dictionaries compiled by early colonists. However tentatively,
the results indicated that the various Algonquian languages in New England
all date back to a common ancestor that appeared in the Northeast a few
centuries before Christ.
The ancestral language may derive from what is known as the Hopewell
culture. Around two thousand years ago, Hopewell jumped into prominence
from its bases in the Midwest, establishing a trade network that covered
most of North America. The Hopewell culture introduced monumental
earthworks and, possibly, agriculture to the rest of the cold North. Hopewell
villages, unlike their more egalitarian neighbors, were stratified, with
powerful, priestly rulers commanding a mass of commoners. Archaeologists
have found no evidence of large-scale warfare at this time, and thus suggest
that Hopewell probably did not achieve its dominance by conquest. Instead,
one can speculate, the vehicle for transformation may have been Hopewell
religion, with its intoxicatingly elaborate funeral rites. If so, the adoption of
Algonquian in the Northeast would mark an era of spiritual ferment and
heady conversion, much like the time when Islam rose and spread Arabic
throughout the Middle East.
Hopewell itself declined around 400 A.D. But its trade network remained
intact. Shell beads from Florida, obsidian from the Rocky Mountains, and
mica from Tennessee found their way to the Northeast. Borrowing
technology and ideas from the Midwest, the nomadic peoples of New
England transformed their societies. By the end of the first millennium
A.D., agriculture was spreading rapidly and the region was becoming an
unusual patchwork of communities, each with its preferred terrain, way of
subsistence, and cultural style.
Scattered about the many lakes, ponds, and swamps of the cold uplands
were small, mobile groups of hunters and gatherers—“collectors,” as
researchers sometimes call them. Most had recently adopted agriculture or
were soon to do so, but it was still a secondary source of food, a supplement
to the wild products of the land. New England’s major river valleys, by
contrast, held large, permanent villages, many nestled in constellations of
suburban hamlets and hunting camps. Because extensive fields of maize,
beans, and squash surrounded every home, these settlements sprawled along
the Connecticut, Charles, and other river valleys for miles, one town
bumping up against the other. Along the coast, where Tisquantum and
Massasoit lived, villages often were smaller and looser, though no less
permanent.
Unlike the upland hunters, the Indians on the rivers and coastline did not
roam the land; instead, most seem to have moved between a summer place
and a winter place, like affluent snowbirds alternating between Manhattan
and Miami. The distances were smaller, of course; shoreline families would
move a fifteen-minute walk inland, to avoid direct exposure to winter
storms and tides. Each village had its own distinct mix of farming and
foraging—this one here, adjacent to a rich oyster bed, might plant maize
purely for variety, whereas that one there, just a few miles away, might
subsist almost entirely on its harvest, filling great underground storage pits
each fall. Although these settlements were permanent, winter and summer
alike, they often were not tightly knit entities, with houses and fields in
carefully demarcated clusters. Instead people spread themselves through
estuaries, sometimes grouping into neighborhoods, sometimes with each
family on its own, its maize ground proudly separate. Each community was
constantly “joining and splitting like quicksilver in a fluid pattern within its
bounds,” wrote Kathleen J. Bragdon, an anthropologist at the College of
William and Mary—a type of settlement, she remarked, with “no name in
the archaeological or anthropological literature.”
In the Wampanoag confederation, one of these quicksilver communities
was Patuxet, where Tisquantum was born at the end of the sixteenth
century.
Tucked into the great sweep of Cape Cod Bay, Patuxet sat on a low rise
above a small harbor, jigsawed by sandbars and shallow enough that
children could walk from the beach hundreds of yards into the water before
the waves went above their heads. To the west, maize hills marched across
the sandy hillocks in parallel rows. Beyond the fields, a mile or more away
from the sea, rose a forest of oak, chestnut, and hickory, open and park-like,
the underbrush kept down by expert annual burning. “Pleasant of air and
prospect,” as one English visitor described the area, Patuxet had “much
plenty both of fish and fowl every day in the year.” Runs of spawning
Atlantic salmon, short-nose sturgeon, striped bass, and American shad
annually filled the harbor. But the most important fish harvest came in late
spring, when the herring-like alewives swarmed the fast, shallow stream
that cut through the village. So numerous were the fish, and so driven, that
when mischievous boys walled off the stream with stones the alewives
would leap the barrier—silver bodies gleaming in the sun—and proceed
upstream.
Tisquantum’s childhood wetu (home) was formed from arched poles
lashed together into a dome that was covered in winter by tightly woven
rush mats and in summer by thin sheets of chestnut bark. A fire burned
constantly in the center, the smoke venting through a hole in the center of
the roof. English visitors did not find this arrangement peculiar; chimneys
were just coming into use in Britain, and most homes there, including those
of the wealthy, were still heated by fires beneath central roof holes. Nor did
the English regard the Dawnland wetu as primitive; its multiple layers of
mats, which trapped insulating layers of air, were “warmer than our English
houses,” sighed the colonist William Wood. The wetu was less leaky than
the typical English wattle-and-daub house, too. Wood did not conceal his
admiration for the way Indian mats “deny entrance to any drop of rain,
though it come both fierce and long.”
Around the edge of the house were low beds, sometimes wide enough for
a whole family to sprawl on them together; usually raised about a foot from
the floor, platform-style; and always piled with mats and furs. Going to
sleep in the firelight, young Tisquantum would have stared up at the
diddering shadows of the hemp bags and bark boxes hanging from the
rafters. Voices would skirl up in the darkness: one person singing a lullaby,
then another person, until everyone was asleep. In the morning, when he
woke, big, egg-shaped pots of corn-and-bean mash would be on the fire,
simmering with meat, vegetables, or dried fish to make a slow-cooked
dinner stew. Outside the wetu he would hear the cheerful thuds of the large
mortars and pestles in which women crushed dried maize into nokake, a
flour-like powder “so sweet, toothsome, and hearty,” colonist Gookin wrote,
“that an Indian will travel many days with no other but this meal.” Although
Europeans bemoaned the lack of salt in Indian cuisine, they thought it
nourishing. 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.
In the wetu, wide strips of bark are clamped between arched inner
and outer poles. Because the poles are flexible, bark layers can be
sandwiched in or removed at will, depending on whether the
householder wants to increase insulation during the winter or let
in more air during the summer. In its elegant simplicity, the wetu’s
design would have pleased the most demanding modernist
architect.
Pilgrim writers universally reported that Wampanoag families were close
and loving—more so than English families, some thought. Europeans in
those days tended to view children as moving straight from infancy to
adulthood around the age of seven, and often thereupon sent them out to
work. Indian parents, by contrast, regarded the years before puberty as a
time of playful development, and kept their offspring close by until
marriage. (Jarringly, to the contemporary eye, some Pilgrims interpreted
this as sparing the rod.) Boys like Tisquantum explored the countryside,
swam in the ponds at the south end of the harbor, and played a kind of
soccer with a small leather ball; in the summer and fall they camped out in
huts in the fields, weeding the maize and chasing away birds. Archery
practice began at age two. By adolescence boys would make a game of
shooting at each other and dodging the arrows.
The primary goal of Dawnland education was molding character. Men
and women were expected to be brave, hardy, honest, and uncomplaining.
Chatterboxes and gossips were frowned upon. “He that speaks seldom and
opportunely, being as good as his word, is the only man they love,” Wood
explained. Character formation began early, with family games of tossing
naked children into the snow. (They were pulled out quickly and placed
next to the fire, in a practice reminiscent of Scandinavian saunas.) When
Indian boys came of age, they spent an entire winter alone in the forest,
equipped only with a bow, a hatchet, and a knife. These methods worked,
the awed Wood reported. “Beat them, whip them, pinch them, punch them,
if [the Indians] resolve not to flinch for it, they will not.”
Tisquantum’s regimen was probably tougher than that of his friends,
according to Salisbury, the Smith College historian, for it seems that he was
selected to become a pniese, a kind of counselor-bodyguard to the sachem.
To master the art of ignoring pain, future pniese had to subject themselves
to such miserable experiences as running barelegged through brambles. And
they fasted often, to learn self-discipline. After spending their winter in the
woods, pniese candidates came back to an additional test: drinking bitter
gentian juice until they vomited, repeating this bulimic process over and
over until, near fainting, they threw up blood.
Patuxet, like its neighboring settlements, was governed by a sachem, who
upheld the law, negotiated treaties, controlled foreign contacts, collected
tribute, declared war, provided for widows and orphans, and allocated
farmland when there were disputes over it. (Dawnlanders lived in a loose
scatter, but they knew which family could use which land—“very exact and
punctuall,” Roger Williams, founder of Rhode Island colony, called Indian
care for property lines.) Most of the time, the Patuxet sachem owed fealty to
the great sachem in the Wampanoag village to the southwest, and through
him to the sachems of the allied confederations of the Nauset in Cape Cod
and the Massachusett around Boston. Meanwhile, the Wampanoag were
rivals and enemies of the Narragansett and Pequots to the west and the
many groups of Abenaki to the north. As a practical matter, sachems had to
gain the consent of their people, who could easily move away and join
another sachemship. Analogously, the great sachems had to please or bully
the lesser, lest by the defection of small communities they lose stature.
Sixteenth-century New England housed 100,000 people or more, a figure
that was slowly increasing. Most of those people lived in shoreline
communities, where rising numbers were beginning to change agriculture
from an option to a necessity. These bigger settlements required more
centralized administration; natural resources like good land and spawning
streams, though not scarce, now needed to be managed. In consequence,
boundaries between groups were becoming more formal. Sachems, given
more power and more to defend, pushed against each other harder. Political
tensions were constant. Coastal and riverine New England, according to the
archaeologist and ethnohistorian Peter Thomas, was “an ever-changing
collage of personalities, alliances, plots, raids and encounters which
involved every Indian [settlement].”
Armed conflict was frequent but brief and mild by European standards.
The casus belli was usually the desire to avenge an insult or gain status, not
the wish for conquest. Most battles consisted of lightning guerrilla raids by
ad hoc companies in the forest: flash of black-and-yellow-striped bows
behind trees, hiss and whip of stone-tipped arrows through the air, eruption
of angry cries. Attackers slipped away as soon as retribution had been
exacted. Losers quickly conceded their loss of status. Doing otherwise
would have been like failing to resign after losing a major piece in a chess
tournament—a social irritant, a waste of time and resources. Women and
children were rarely killed, though they were sometimes abducted and
forced to join the winning group. Captured men were often tortured (they
were admired, though not necessarily spared, if they endured the pain
stoically). 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. In especially large clashes, adversaries might meet in
the open, as in European battlefields, though the results, Roger Williams
noted, were “farre less bloudy, and devouring then the cruell Warres of
Europe.” Nevertheless, by Tisquantum’s time defensive palisades were
increasingly common, especially in the river valleys.
Inside the settlement was a world of warmth, family, and familiar custom.
But the world outside, as Thomas put it, was “a maze of confusing actions
and individuals fighting to maintain an existence in the shadow of change.”
And that was before the Europeans showed up.
TOURISM AND TREACHERY
British fishing vessels may have reached Newfoundland as early as the
1480s and areas to the south soon after. In 1501, just nine years after
Columbus’s first voyage, the Portuguese adventurer Gaspar Corte-Real
abducted fifty-odd Indians from Maine. Examining the captives, Corte-Real
found to his astonishment that two were wearing items from Venice: a
broken sword and two silver rings. As James Axtell has noted, Corte-Real
probably was able to kidnap such a large number of people only because the
Indians were already so comfortable dealing with Europeans that big groups
willingly came aboard his ship. *4
The earliest written description of the People of the First Light was by
Giovanni da Verrazzano, an Italian mariner-for-hire commissioned by the
king of France in 1523 to discover whether one could reach Asia by
rounding the Americas to the north. Sailing north from the Carolinas, he
observed that the coastline everywhere was “densely populated,” smoky
with Indian bonfires; he could sometimes smell the burning hundreds of
miles away. The ship anchored in wide Narragansett Bay, near what is now
Providence, Rhode Island. Verrazzano was one of the first Europeans the
natives had seen, perhaps even the first, but the Narragansett were not
intimidated. Almost instantly, twenty long canoes surrounded the visitors.
Cocksure and graceful, the Narragansett sachem leapt aboard: a tall,
longhaired man of about forty with multicolored jewelry dangling about his
neck and ears, “as beautiful of stature and build as I can possibly describe,”
Verrazzano wrote.
His reaction was common. Time and time again Europeans described the
People of the First Light as strikingly healthy specimens. 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 proper men and women for feature and limbes as can be founde,” in
the words of the rebellious Pilgrim Thomas Morton. Because famine and
epidemic disease had been rare in the Dawnland, its inhabitants had none of
the pox scars or rickety limbs common on the other side of the Atlantic.
Native New Englanders, in William Wood’s view, were “more amiable to
behold (though [dressed] only in Adam’s finery) than many a compounded
fantastic [English dandy] in the newest fashion.”
The Pilgrims were less sanguine about Indians’ multicolored,
multitextured mode of self-presentation. To be sure, the newcomers
accepted the practicality of deerskin robes as opposed to, say, fitted British
suits. And the colonists understood why natives’ skin and hair shone with
bear or eagle fat (it warded off sun, wind, and insects). And they could
overlook the Indians’ practice of letting prepubescent children run about
without a stitch on. But the Pilgrims, who regarded personal adornment as a
species of idolatry, were dismayed by what they saw as the indigenous
penchant for foppery. The robes were adorned with animal-head mantles,
snakeskin belts, and bird-wing headdresses. Worse, many Dawnlanders
tattooed their faces, arms, and legs with elaborate geometric patterns and
totemic animal symbols. They wore jewelry made of shell and swans’-down
earrings and chignons spiked with eagle feathers. If that weren’t enough,
both sexes painted their faces red, white, and black—ending up, Gookin
sniffed, with “one part of their face of one color; and another, of another,
very deformedly.”
In 1585–86 the artist John White spent fifteen months in what is
now North Carolina, returning with more than seventy
watercolors of American people, plants, and animals. White’s
work, later distributed in a series of romanticized engravings (two
of which are shown here), was not of documentary quality by
today’s standards—his Indians are posed like Greek statues. But
at the same time his intent was clear. To his eye, the people of the
Carolinas, cultural cousins to the Wampanoag, were in superb
health, especially compared to poorly nourished, smallpox-
scarred Europeans. And they lived in what White viewed as well-
ordered settlements, with big, flourishing fields of maize.
And the hair! As a rule, young men wore it long on one side, in an equine
mane, but cropped the other side short, which prevented it from getting
tangled in their bow strings. But sometimes they cut their hair into such
wild patterns that attempting to imitate them, Wood sniffed, “would torture
the wits of a curious barber.” Tonsures, pigtails, head completely shaved but
for a single forelock, long sides drawn into a queue with a raffish short-cut
roach in the middle—all of it was prideful and abhorrent to the Pilgrims.
(Not everyone in England saw it that way. Inspired by asymmetrical Indian
coiffures, seventeenth-century London blades wore long, loose hanks of
hair known as “lovelocks.”)
As for the Indians, evidence suggests that they tended to view Europeans
with disdain as soon as they got to know them. 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 British and French, many of whom had not
taken a bath in their entire lives, were amazed by the Indian interest in
personal cleanliness.) A Jesuit reported that the “savages” were disgusted by
handkerchiefs: “They say, we place what is unclean in a fine white piece of
linen, and put it away in our pockets as something very precious, while they
throw it upon the ground.” 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?
For fifteen days Verrazzano and his crew were the Narragansett’s honored
guests—though the Indians, Verrazzano admitted, kept their women out of
sight after hearing the sailors’ “irksome clamor” when females came into
view. Much of the time was spent in friendly barter. To the Europeans’
confusion, their steel and cloth did not interest the Narragansett, who
wanted to swap only for “little bells, blue crystals, and other trinkets to put
in the ear or around the neck.” On Verrazzano’s next stop, the Maine coast,
the Abenaki did want steel and cloth—demanded them, in fact. But up north
the friendly welcome had vanished. The Indians denied the visitors
permission to land; refusing even to touch the Europeans, they passed goods
back and forth on a rope over the water. As soon as the crew members sent
over the last items, the locals began “showing their buttocks and laughing.”
Mooned by the Indians! Verrazzano was baffled by this “barbarous”
behavior, but the reason for it seems clear: unlike the Narragansett, the
Abenaki had long experience with Europeans.
PEOPLES OF THE DAWNLAND, 1600 A.D.
During the century after Verrazzano Europeans were regular visitors to
the Dawnland, usually fishing, sometimes trading, occasionally kidnapping
natives as souvenirs. (Verrazzano had grabbed one himself, a boy of about
eight.) By 1610 Britain alone had about two hundred vessels operating off
Newfoundland and New England; hundreds more came from France, Spain,
Portugal, and Italy. With striking uniformity, these travelers reported that
New England was thickly settled and well defended. In 1605 and 1606
Samuel de Champlain, the famous explorer, visited Cape Cod, hoping to
establish a French base. He abandoned the idea. Too many people already
lived there. A year later Sir Ferdinando Gorges—British, despite the name
—tried to found a community in Maine. It began with more people than the
Pilgrims’ later venture in Plymouth and was better organized and supplied.
Nonetheless, the local Indians, numerous and well armed, killed eleven
colonists and drove the rest back home within months.
Many ships anchored off Patuxet. Martin Pring, a British trader, camped
there with a crew of forty-four for seven weeks in the summer of 1603,
gathering sassafras—the species was common in the cleared, burned-over
areas at the edge of Indian settlements. To ingratiate themselves with their
hosts, Pring’s crew regularly played the guitar for them (the Indians had
drums, flutes, and rattles, but no string instruments). Despite the
entertainment, the Patuxet eventually got tired of the foreigners camping
out on their land. Giving their guests a subtle hint that they should be
moving on, 140 armed locals surrounded their encampment. Next day the
Patuxet burned down the woodlands where Pring and his men were
working. The foreigners left within hours. Some two hundred Indians
watched them from the shore, politely inviting them to come back for
another short visit. Later Champlain, too, stopped at Patuxet, but left before
wearing out his welcome.
Tisquantum probably saw Pring, Champlain, and other European visitors,
but the first time Europeans are known to have affected his life was in the
summer of 1614. A small ship hove to, sails a-flap. Out to meet the crew
came the Patuxet. Almost certainly the sachem would have been of the
party; he would have been accompanied by his pniese, including
Tisquantum. The strangers’ leader was a sight beyond belief: a stocky man,
even shorter than most foreigners, with a voluminous red beard that covered
so much of his face that he looked to Indian eyes more beast than human.
This was Captain John Smith of Pocahontas fame. According to Smith, he
had lived an adventurous and glamorous life. As a youth, he claimed, he had
served as a privateer, after which he was captured and enslaved by the
Turks. He escaped and awarded himself the rank of captain in the army of
Smith. *5 Later he actually became captain of a ship and traveled to North
America several times. On this occasion he had sailed to Maine with two
ships, intending to hunt whales. The party spent two months chasing the
beasts but failed to catch a single one. Plan B, Smith wrote later, was “Fish
and Furs.” He assigned most of the crew to catch and dry fish in one ship
while he puttered up and down the coast with the other, bartering for furs.
In the middle of this perambulating he showed up in Patuxet.
Despite Smith’s peculiar appearance, Tisquantum and his fellows treated
him well. They apparently gave him a tour, during which he admired the
gardens, orchards, and maize fields, and the “great troupes of well-
proportioned people” tending them. At some point a quarrel occurred and
bows were drawn, Smith said, “fortie or fiftie” Patuxet surrounding him.
His account is vague, but one imagines that the Indians were hinting at a
limit to his stay. In any case, the visit ended cordially enough, and Smith
returned to Maine and then England. He had a map drawn of what he had
seen, persuaded Prince Charles to look at it, and curried favor with him by
asking him to award British names to all the Indian settlements. Then he put
the maps in the books he wrote to extol his adventures. In this way Patuxet
acquired its English name, Plymouth, after the city in England (it was then
spelled “Plimoth”).
Smith left his lieutenant, Thomas Hunt, behind in Maine to finish loading
the other ship with dried fish. Without consulting Smith, Hunt decided to
visit Patuxet. Taking advantage of the Indians’ recent good experience with
English visitors, he invited people to come aboard. The thought of a
summer day on the foreigners’ vessel must have been tempting. Several
dozen villagers, Tisquantum among them, canoed to the ship. Without
warning or pretext the sailors tried to shove them into the hold. The Indians
fought back. Hunt’s men swept the deck with small-arms fire, creating “a
great slaughter.” At gunpoint, Hunt forced the survivors belowdecks. With
Tisquantum and at least nineteen others, he sailed to Europe, stopping only
once, at Cape Cod, where he kidnapped seven Nauset.
In Hunt’s wake the Patuxet community raged, as did the rest of the
Wampanoag confederacy and the Nauset. The sachems vowed not to let
foreigners rest on their shores again. Because of the “worthlesse” Hunt,
lamented Gorges, the would-be colonizer of Maine, “a warre [was] now
new begunne between the inhabitants of those parts, and us.” Despite
European guns, the Indians’ greater numbers, entrenched positions,
knowledge of the terrain, and superb archery made them formidable
adversaries. About two years after Hunt’s offenses, a French ship wrecked
at the tip of Cape Cod. Its crew built a rude shelter with a defensive wall
made from poles. The Nauset, hidden outside, picked off the sailors one by
one until only five were left. They captured the five and sent them to groups
victimized by European kidnappers. Another French vessel anchored in
Boston Harbor at about the same time. The Massachusett killed everyone
aboard and set the ship afire.
Tisquantum was away five years. When he returned, everything had
changed—calamitously. Patuxet had vanished. The Pilgrims had literally
built their village on top of it.
THE PLACE OF THE SKULL
According to family lore, my great-grandmother’s great-grandmother’s
great-grandfather was the first white person hanged in North America. His
name was John Billington. He emigrated aboard the Mayflower, which
anchored off the coast of Massachusetts on November 9, 1620. Billington
was not among the company of saints, to put it mildly; within six months of
arrival he became the first white person in America to be tried for sassing
the police. His two sons were no better. Even before landing, one nearly
blew up the Mayflower by shooting a gun at a keg of gunpowder while
inside the ship. After the Pilgrims landed the other son ran off to live with
some nearby Indians, leading to great consternation and an expedition to
fetch him back. Meanwhile Billington père made merry with other non-
Puritan lowlifes and haphazardly plotted against authority. The family was
“one of the profanest” in Plymouth colony, complained William Bradford,
its long-serving governor. Billington, in his opinion, was “a knave, and so
shall live and die.” What one historian called Billington’s “troublesome
career” ended in 1630 when he was hanged for shooting somebody in a
quarrel. My family has always claimed that he was framed—but we would
say that, wouldn’t we?
Growing up, I was always tickled by this raffish personal connection to
history: part of the Puritans, but not actually puritanical. As an adult, I
decided to learn more about Billington. A few hours at the library sufficed
to convince me that some aspects of our agreeable family legend were
untrue. Although Billington was in fact hanged, at least two other
Europeans were executed in North America before him. And one of them
was convicted for the much more interesting offense of killing his pregnant
wife and eating her. My ancestor was probably only No. 3, and there is a
whisper of scholarly doubt about whether he deserves to be even that high
on the list.
I had learned about Plymouth in school. But it was not until I was poking
through the scattered references to Billington that it occurred to me that my
ancestor, like everyone else in the colony, had voluntarily enlisted in a
venture that had him arriving in New England without food or shelter six
weeks before winter. Not only that, he joined a group that, so far as is
known, set off with little idea of where it was heading. In Europe, the
Pilgrims had refused to hire the experienced John Smith as a guide, on the
theory that they could use the maps in his book. In consequence, as Smith
later crowed, the hapless Mayflower spent several frigid weeks scouting
around Cape Cod for a good place to land, during which time many
colonists became sick and died. Landfall at Patuxet did not end their
problems. The colonists had intended to produce their own food, but
inexplicably neglected to bring any cows, sheep, mules, or horses. To be
sure, the Pilgrims had intended to make most of their livelihood not by
farming but by catching fish for export to Britain. But the only fishing gear
the Pilgrims brought was useless in New England. Half of the 102 people
on the Mayflower made it through the first winter, which to me seemed
amazing. How did they survive?
In his history of Plymouth colony, Governor Bradford himself provides
one answer: robbing Indian houses and graves. The Mayflower hove to first
at Cape Cod. An armed company of Pilgrims staggered out. Eventually they
found a deserted Indian habitation. The newcomers—hungry, cold, sick—
dug open burial sites and ransacked homes, looking for underground stashes
of food. After two days of nervous work the company hauled ten bushels of
maize back to the Mayflower, carrying much of the booty in a big metal
kettle the men had also stolen. “And sure it was God’s good providence that
we found this corn,” Winslow wrote, “for else we know not how we should
have done.”
The Pilgrims were typical in their lack of preparation. 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. Like Silicon Valley in the heyday of the Internet bubble, London was
the center of a speculative mania about the Americas. As with the dot-com
boom, a great deal of profoundly fractured cerebration occurred. Decades
after first touching the Americas, London’s venture capitalists still hadn’t
figured out that New England is colder than Britain despite being farther
south. Even when they focused on a warmer place like Virginia, they
persistently selected as colonists people ignorant of farming; multiplying
the difficulties, the would-be colonizers were arriving in the middle of a
severe, multiyear drought. As a result, Jamestown and the other Virginia
forays survived on Indian charity—they were “utterly dependent and
therefore controllable,” in the phrase of Karen Ordahl Kuppermann, a New
York University historian. The same held true for my ancestor’s crew in
Plymouth.
Inexperienced in agriculture, the Pilgrims were also not woods-people;
indeed, they were so incurious about their environment that Bradford felt
obliged to comment in his journal when Francis Billington, my ancestor’s
son, climbed to the top of a tall tree to look around. As Thoreau noted with
disgust, the colonists landed at Plymouth on December 16, but it was not
until January 8 that one of them went as far away as two miles—and even
then the traveler was, again, Francis Billington. “A party of emigrants to
California or Oregon,” Thoreau complained,
with no less work on their hands,—and more hostile Indians,—would
do as much exploring in the first afternoon, and the Sieur de
Champlain would have sought an interview with the savages, and
examined the country as far as the Connecticut [River, eighty miles
away], and made a map of it, before Billington had climbed his tree.
Huddled in their half-built village that first terrible winter, the colonists
rarely saw the area’s inhabitants, except for the occasional shower of brass-
or claw-tipped arrows. After February, glimpses and sightings became more
frequent. Scared, the Pilgrims hauled five small cannons from the
Mayflower and emplaced them in a defensive fortification. But after all the
anxiety, their first contact with Indians went surprisingly easily. Within days
Tisquantum came to settle among them. And then they heard his stories.
No record survives of Tisquantum’s first journey across the Atlantic, but
arithmetic gives some hint of the conditions in Hunt’s ship. John Smith had
arrived with two ships and a crew of forty-five. If the two ships had been of
equal size, Hunt would have sailed with a crew of about twenty-two.
Because Hunt, Smith’s subordinate, had the smaller of the two vessels, the
actual number was surely less. Adding twenty or more captured Indians thus
meant that the ship was sailing with at least twice its normal complement.
Tisquantum would have been tied or chained, to prevent rebellion, and
jammed into whatever dark corner of the hull was available. Presumably he
was fed from the ship’s cargo of dried fish. Smith took six weeks to cross
the Atlantic to England. There is no reason to think Hunt went faster. The
only difference was that he took his ship to Málaga, on Spain’s
Mediterranean coast. There he intended to sell all of his cargo, including the
human beings.
The Indians’ appearance in this European city surely caused a stir. Not
long before, Shakespeare had griped in The Tempest that the populace of the
much bigger city of London “would not give a doit [a small coin] to a lame
beggar, [but] will lay out ten to see a dead Indian.” Hunt managed to sell
only a few of his captives before local Roman Catholic priests seized the
rest—the Spanish Church vehemently opposed brutality toward Indians. (In
1537 Pope Paul III proclaimed that “Indians themselves indeed are true
men” and should not be “deprived of their liberty” and “reduced to our
service like brute animals.”) The priests intended to save both Tisquantum’s
body, by preventing his enslavement, and his soul, by converting him to
Christianity. It is unlikely that Tisquantum was converted, though it’s
possible that he allowed the friars to think he had been. In any case, this
resourceful man convinced them to let him return home—or, rather, to try to
return. He got to London, where he stayed with John Slany, a shipbuilder
with investments in Newfoundland. Slany apparently taught Tisquantum
English while maintaining him as a curiosity in his townhouse. Meanwhile,
Tisquantum persuaded him to arrange for passage to North America on a
fishing vessel. He ended up in a tiny British fishing camp on the southern
edge of Newfoundland. It was on the same continent as Patuxet, but
between them were a thousand miles of rocky coastline and the Mi’Kmac
and Abenaki alliances, which were at war with one another.
Because traversing this unfriendly territory would be difficult,
Tisquantum began looking for a ride to Patuxet. He extolled the bounty of
New England to Thomas Dermer, one of Smith’s subordinates, who was
then staying in the same camp. Dermer, excited by Tisquantum’s promise of
easy wealth, contacted Ferdinando Gorges. Gorges, a longtime, slightly
dotty enthusiast about the Americas, promised to send over a ship with the
men, supplies, and legal papers necessary for Dermer to take a crack at
establishing a colony in New England. Dermer, with Tisquantum, was
supposed to meet the ship when it arrived in New England.
One Edward Rowcraft captained the ship sent by Gorges from England.
According to Gorges’s principal biographer, Rowcraft “appears to have
been unfit for such an enterprise.” This was an understatement. In a bizarre
episode, Rowcraft sailed to the Maine coast in early 1619; promptly spotted
a French fishing boat; seized it for supposedly trespassing on British
property (North America); placed its crew in chains aboard his own ship;
sent that ship back to Gorges with the prisoners; continued his journey on
the smaller French vessel, which led to a mutiny; quelled the mutiny;
stranded the mutineers on the Maine coast; discovered that a) without the
mutineers he didn’t have enough people to operate the captured ship and b)
it was slowly filling up with water from leaks; and decided to sail
immediately for Britain’s colony in Jamestown, Virginia, which had the
facilities to repair the hull—a course that entailed skipping the promised
rendezvous with Dermer. At Jamestown, Rowcraft managed, through
inattentiveness, to sink his ship. Not long afterward he was killed in a
brawl.
Incredibly, Dermer failed to execute his part of the plan, too. In orthodox
comedy-of-errors style, he did not wait for Rowcraft in Maine, as he was
supposed to, but sailed back to England, Tisquantum in tow. (The two ships
more or less crossed paths in the Atlantic.) Dermer and Tisquantum met
personally with Gorges. *6 Evidently they made an excellent impression,
for despite Dermer’s proven inability to follow instructions Gorges sent him
back with Tisquantum and a fresh ship to meet Rowcraft, who was
supposed to be waiting for them in New England. Dermer touched land in
Maine and discovered that Rowcraft had already left. On May 19, 1619,
still accompanied by Tisquantum, he set out for Massachusetts, hoping to
catch up with Rowcraft (he didn’t know that Rowcraft had sunk his own
ship).
What Tisquantum saw on his return home was unimaginable. From
southern Maine to Narragansett Bay, the coast was empty—“utterly void,”
Dermer reported. What had once been a line of busy communities was now
a mass of tumbledown homes and untended fields overrun by blackberries.
Scattered among the houses and fields were skeletons bleached by the sun.
Slowly Dermer’s crew realized they were sailing along the border of a
cemetery two hundred miles long and forty miles deep. Patuxet had been hit
with special force. Not a single person remained. Tisquantum’s entire social
world had vanished.
Looking for his kinsfolk, he led Dermer on a melancholy march inland.
The settlements they passed lay empty to the sky but full of untended dead.
Tisquantum’s party finally encountered some survivors, a handful of
families in a shattered village. These people sent for Massasoit, who
appeared, Dermer wrote, “with a guard of fiftie armed men”—and a captive
French sailor, a survivor of the shipwreck on Cape Cod. Massasoit asked
Dermer to send back the Frenchman. And then he told Tisquantum what had
happened.
One of the French sailors had learned enough Massachusett to inform his
captors before dying that God would destroy them for their misdeeds. The
Nauset scoffed at the threat. But the Europeans carried a disease, and they
bequeathed it to their jailers. Based on accounts of the symptoms, the
epidemic was probably of viral hepatitis, according to a study by Arthur E.
Spiess, of the Maine Historic Preservation Commission, and Bruce D.
Spiess, of the Medical College of Virginia. (In their view, the strain was,
like hepatitis A, probably spread by contaminated food, rather than by
sexual contact, like hepatitis B or C.) Whatever the cause, the results were
ruinous. The Indians “died in heapes as they lay in their houses,” the
merchant Thomas Morton observed. In their panic, the healthy fled from the
sick, carrying the disease with them to neighboring communities. Behind
them remained the dying, “left for crows, kites, and vermin to prey upon.”
Beginning in 1616, the pestilence took at least three years to exhaust itself
and killed as much as 90 percent of the people in coastal New England.
“And the bones and skulls upon the severall places of their habitations made
such a spectacle,” Morton wrote, that the Massachusetts woodlands seemed
to be “a new-found Golgotha,” the Place of the Skull, where executions
took place in Roman Jerusalem.
The religious overtones in Morton’s metaphor are well placed. Neither
the Indians nor the Pilgrims had our contemporary understanding of
infectious disease. Each believed that sickness reflected the will of celestial
forces. As the writer and historian Paula Gunn Allen put it,
The idea that the realm of the spirits or the supernatural was
powerfully engaged in the day-to-day life of nations as well as of
villagers was commonly held on both sides of the Atlantic…. Both
[Indians and Europeans] predicted events by the position of certain
stars on the ecliptic plane around earth as much as by visionary
techniques, and both assumed the reality of malicious as well as
beneficent supernaturals.
The only real question in the minds of either side was whether Indian
spiritual forces could affect Europeans, and vice versa. (As an experiment,
Cotton Mather, a celebrated New England minister, tried to exorcise the
“daemons in a possessed young woman” with incantations in Massachusett.
To his satisfaction, the results demonstrated empirically that Indian magic
had no effect on Christian devils.) Until the sickness Massasoit had directly
ruled a community of several thousand and held sway over a confederation
of as many as twenty thousand. Now his group was reduced to sixty people
and the entire confederation to fewer than a thousand. The Wampanoag,
wrote Salisbury, the Smith historian, came to the obvious logical
conclusion: “their deities had allied against them.”
The Pilgrims held similar views. Governor Bradford is said to have
attributed the plague to “the good hand of God,” which “favored our
beginnings” by “sweeping away great multitudes of the natives…that he
might make room for us.” Indeed, more than fifty of the first colonial
villages in New England were located on Indian communities emptied by
disease. The epidemic, Gorges said, left the land “without any [people] to
disturb or appease our free and peaceable possession thereof, from when we
may justly conclude, that GOD made the way to effect his work.”
Much as the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which killed tens of thousands
in one of Europe’s richest cities, prompted spiritual malaise across Europe,
the New England epidemic shattered the Wampanoag’s sense that they lived
in balance with an intelligible world. On top of that, the massive death toll
created a political crisis. Because the hostility between the Wampanoag and
the neighboring Narragansett had restricted contact between them, the
disease had not spread to the latter. Massasoit’s people were not only beset
by loss, they were in danger of subjugation.
In this engraving taken from a John White watercolor of an East
Coast village, the palisaded wall suggests that warfare was
common enough to merit the considerable labor of cutting down
many trees with stone tools, but the forces were not large enough
to require moats, stone walls, earthen embankments, or any other
big defensive fortification.
After learning about the epidemic, the distraught Tisquantum first
returned with Dermer to southern Maine. Apparently concluding he was
never going to meet Rowcraft, Dermer decided in 1620 to make another
pass at New England. Tisquantum returned, too, but not with Dermer.
Instead he walked home—the long, risky journey he had wanted to avoid.
In the interim, yet another English expedition had attacked the Wampanoag,
killing several without apparent provocation. Understandably enraged,
Indians attacked Dermer several times on his journey south; he was
eventually slain on Martha’s Vineyard by another former Indian abductee.
For his part, Tisquantum was seized on his journey home, perhaps because
of his association with the hated English, and sent to Massasoit as a captive.
As he had before, Tisquantum talked his way out of a jam. This time he
extolled the English, filling Massasoit’s ears with tales of their cities, their
great numbers, their powerful technology. Tisquantum said, according to a
colonist who knew him, that if the sachem “Could make [the] English his
Friends then [any] Enemies yt weare to[o] strong for him”—in other words,
the Narragansett—“would be Constrained to bowe to him.” The sachem
listened without trust. Within a few months, word came that a party of
English had set up shop at Patuxet. The Wampanoag observed them suffer
through the first punishing winter. Eventually Massasoit concluded that he
possibly should ally with them—compared to the Narragansett, they were
the lesser of two evils. Still, only when the need for a translator became
unavoidable did he allow Tisquantum to meet the Pilgrims.
Massasoit had considerable experience with Europeans—his father had
sent Martin Pring on his way seventeen years before. But that was before
the epidemic, when Massasoit had the option of expelling them. Now he
told the Pilgrims that he was willing to leave them in peace (a bluff, one
assumes, since driving them away would have taxed his limited resources).
But in return he wanted the colonists’ assistance with the Narragansett.
To the Pilgrims, the Indians’ motives for the deal were obvious. They
wanted European technology on their side. In particular, they wanted guns.
“He thinks we may be [of] some strength to him,” Winslow said later, “for
our pieces [guns] are terrible to them.”
In fact Massasoit had a subtler plan. It is true that European technology
dazzled Native Americans on first encounter. But the relative positions of
the two sides were closer than commonly believed. Contemporary research
suggests that indigenous peoples in New England were not technologically
inferior to the British—or, rather, that terms like “superior” and “inferior”
do not readily apply to the relationship between Indian and European
technology.
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, a seventeenth-century gun had fewer advantages over
a longbow than may be supposed. Colonists in Jamestown taunted the
Powhatan in 1607 with a target they believed impervious to an arrow shot.
To the colonists’ dismay, an Indian sank an arrow into it a foot deep, “which
was strange, being that a Pistoll could not pierce it.” To regain the upper
hand, the English set up a target made of steel. This time the archer “burst
his arrow all to pieces.” The Indian was “in a great rage”; he realized, one
assumes, that the foreigners had cheated. When the Powhatan later captured
John Smith, Chaplin notes, Smith broke his pistol rather than reveal to his
captors “the awful truth that it could not shoot as far as an arrow could fly.”
At the same time, Europeans were impressed by American technology.
The foreigners, coming from a land plagued by famine, were awed by
maize, which yields more grain per acre than any other cereal. Indian
moccasins were so much more comfortable and waterproof than stiff,
moldering English boots that when colonists had to walk for long distances
their Indian companions often pitied their discomfort and gave them new
footwear. Indian birchbark canoes were faster and more maneuverable than
any small European boat. In 1605 three laughing Indians in a canoe literally
paddled circles round the lumbering dory paddled by traveler George
Weymouth and seven other men. Despite official disapproval, the stunned
British eagerly exchanged knives and guns for Indian canoes. Bigger
European ships with sails had some advantages. Indians got hold of them
through trade and shipwreck, and trained themselves to be excellent sailors.
By the time of the epidemic, a rising proportion of the shipping traffic along
the New England coast was of indigenous origin.
Reading Massasoit’s motives at this distance is a chancy business. But it
seems likely that he did not want to ally with the foreigners primarily for
their guns, as they believed. Although the sachem doubtless relished the
possibility of additional firepower, he probably wanted more to confront the
Narragansett with the unappetizing prospect of attacking one group of
English people at the same time that their main trading partners were other
English people. Faced with the possibility of disrupting their favored
position as middlemen, the Narragansett might think twice before staging
an incursion. Massasoit, if this interpretation is correct, was trying to
incorporate the Pilgrims into the web of native politics. Not long before
Massasoit had expelled foreigners who stayed too long in Wampanoag
territory. But with the entire confederation now smaller than one of its
former communities, the best option seemed to be allowing the Pilgrims to
remain. It was a drastic, even fatal, decision.
MACHINATIONS
Tisquantum worked to prove his value to the Pilgrims. He was so successful
that when some anti-British Indians abducted him the colonists sent out a
military expedition to get him back. They did not stop to ask themselves
why he might be making himself essential, given how difficult it must have
been to live in the ghost of his childhood home. In retrospect, the answer
seems clear: the alternative to staying in Plymouth was returning to
Massasoit and renewed captivity.
Recognizing that the Pilgrims would be unlikely to keep him around
forever, Tisquantum decided to gather together the few survivors of Patuxet
and reconstitute the old community at a site near Plymouth. More ambitious
still, he hoped to use his influence on the English to make this new Patuxet
the center of the Wampanoag confederation, thereby stripping the
sachemship from Massasoit, who had held him captive. To accomplish
these goals, he intended to play the Indians and English against each other.
The scheme was risky, not least because the ever-suspicious Massasoit
sent one of his pniese, Hobamok, to Plymouth as a monitor. (Hobamok, like
Tisquantum, apparently adopted a new name in his dealings with the
British; “Hobamok” was the source of evil in Wampanoag cosmology.)
Sometimes the two men were able to work together, as when Hobamok and
Tisquantum helped the Pilgrims negotiate a treaty with the Massachusett to
the north. They also helped establish a truce with the Nauset of Cape Cod
after Bradford promised to pay back the losses caused by their earlier grave
robbing.
By fall the settlers’ situation was secure enough that they held a feast of
thanksgiving. Massasoit showed up with ninety people, most of them young
men with weapons. The Pilgrim militia responded by marching around and
firing their guns in the air in a manner intended to convey menace.
Gratified, both sides sat down, ate a lot of food, and complained about the
Narragansett. Ecce Thanksgiving.
All the while, Tisquantum covertly tried to persuade other Wampanoag
that he was better able to protect them against the Narragansett than
Massasoit. In case of attack, Tisquantum claimed, he could respond with an
equal number of Indian troops—and the Pilgrims, who might be able to
intimidate the enemy. He evidently believed that the Narragansett did not
have enough experience with European guns to know that they were not as
fearsome as they first appeared. To advance his case, Tisquantum told other
Indians that the foreigners had hidden away casefuls of the agent that
caused the epidemic, and that he could manipulate them into unleashing it.
Even as Tisquantum attempted to foment Indian distrust of Massasoit, he
told the colonists that Massasoit was going to double-cross them by leading
a joint attack on Plymouth with the Narragansett. And he attempted to trick
the Pilgrims into attacking the sachem.
In the spring of 1622 Tisquantum accompanied a delegation to the
Massachusett in Boston Harbor. Minutes after they left, Bradford later
recalled, one of the surviving Patuxet “came running in seeming great fear”
to inform the settlers that the Narragansett “and he thought also Massasoit”
were planning to attack. The idea clearly was that the colonists, enraged by
the putative assault, would rise up and smite Massasoit. Tisquantum would
be away, so his hands would seem clean. Instead everything went awry. In
Indian villages people could only be summoned by shouting; once a canoe
had gone a few hundred yards, it could not readily be called back. But when
the news came of the impending attack, Bradford ordered the Pilgrims to
fire a cannon to order back the expedition and Tisquantum. Meanwhile
Hobamok, who had acquired some English, indignantly denied the story. In
a move that Tisquantum apparently had not anticipated, Bradford
dispatched Hobamok’s wife to Massasoit’s home to find out what the
sachem was doing. She reported that “all was quiet.” Actually, this wasn’t
entirely true. Massasoit was furious—at Tisquantum. He demanded that the
Pilgrims send their translator to him for a quick execution.
Bradford refused; Tisquantum’s language skills were too vital.
Tisquantum is one of my subjects, Massasoit said. You Pilgrims have no
jurisdiction over him. And he offered a cache of fur to sweeten the deal.
When the colony still would not surrender Tisquantum, Massasoit sent a
messenger with a knife and told Bradford to lop off Tisquantum’s hands and
head. To make his displeasure manifest, he summoned Hobamok home and
cut off contact with the Pilgrims. Nervous, the colonists began building
defensive fortifications. Worse, almost no rain fell between mid-May and
mid-July, withering their crops. Because the Wampanoag had stopped
trading with them, the Pilgrims would not be able to supplement their
harvest.
Tisquantum, afraid of Massasoit’s wrath, was unable to take a step
outside of Plymouth without an escort. Nonetheless, he accompanied
Bradford on a trip to southeast Cape Cod to negotiate another pact. They
were on the way home when Tisquantum suddenly became sick. He died in
a few days, his hopes in ruins. In the next decade tens of thousands of
Europeans came to Massachusetts. Massasoit shepherded his people
through the wave of settlement, and the pact he signed with Plymouth lasted
for more than fifty years. Only in 1675 did one of his sons, angered at being
pushed around by colonists’ laws, launch what was perhaps an inevitable
attack. Indians from dozens of groups joined in. The conflict, brutal and sad,
tore through New England.
The Europeans won. Historians attribute part of the victory to Indian
unwillingness to match the European tactic of massacring whole villages.
Another reason for the newcomers’ triumph was that by that time they
outnumbered the natives. Groups like the Narragansett, which had been
spared by the epidemic of 1616, were crushed by a smallpox epidemic in
1633. A third to half of the remaining Indians in New England died. The
People of the First Light could avoid or adapt to European technology but
not European disease. Their societies were destroyed by weapons their
opponents could not control and did not even know they had.
In the Land of Four Quarters
“LIKE A CLUB RIGHT BETWEEN THE EYES”
In the early 1960s, Henry F. Dobyns, a young anthropologist working on a
rural-aid project in Peru, dispatched assistants to storehouses of old records
throughout the country. Dobyns himself traveled to the central cathedral in
Lima. Entering the nave, visitors passed by a chapel on the right-hand side
that contained the mummified body of Francisco Pizarro, the romantic,
thuggish Spaniard who conquered Peru in the sixteenth century. Or, rather,
they passed by a chapel that was thought to contain the conqueror’s
mummified body; the actual remains turned up years later, stashed inside
two metal boxes beneath the main altar. Dobyns was not visiting the
cathedral as a sightseer. Instead, he descended into the structure’s basement
—cold, dank, poorly lighted—to inspect birth and death registers kept there.
Dobyns belonged to a research team led by his doctoral advisor, Allan R.
Holmberg of Cornell, the Holmberg after whom I have unkindly named
Holmberg’s Mistake. Holmberg had persuaded Cornell to let him lease an
old colonial estate in rural Peru (the Carnegie Corporation, a charitable
foundation despite its name, provided the funds). The estate included an
entire village, whose inhabitants, most of them Indian, were its
sharecroppers. “It was really a form of serfdom,” Dobyns told me. “The
villagers were just heartbreakingly poor.” Holmberg planned to test
strategies for raising their incomes. Because land tenure was a contentious
issue in Peru, he had asked Dobyns to finalize the lease and learn more
about the estate’s history. With his adjutants, Dobyns visited a dozen
archives, including those in the cathedral.
Dobyns had been dipping his toe into archival research for more than a
decade, with results he found intriguing. His first foray into the past
occurred in 1953, while he was visiting his parents in Phoenix, Arizona,
during a school break. A friend, Paul H. Ezell, asked him for some help with
his doctoral thesis. The thesis concerned the adoption of Spanish culture by
the Pima Indians, who occupy a 372,000-acre reservation south of Phoenix.
Many of the region’s colonial-era records survived in the Mexican town of
Altar, in the border state of Sonora. Ezell wanted to examine those records,
and asked Dobyns to come along. One weekend the two men drove from
Phoenix to Nogales, on the border. From Nogales, they went south, west,
and up into the highlands, often on dirt roads, to Altar.
Then a huddle of small houses surrounding a dozen little stores, Altar
was, Dobyns said, “the end of the earth.” Local women still covered their
heads with shawls. Gringo visitors, few in number, tended to be prospectors
chasing rumors of lost gold mines in the mountains.
After surprising the parish priest by their interest in his records, the two
young men hauled into the church their principal research tool: a Contura
portable copier, an ancestor to the Xerox photocopier that required freshly
stirred chemicals for each use. The machine strained the technological
infrastructure of Altar, which had electricity for only six hours a day. Under
flickering light, the two men pored through centuries-old ledgers, the pages
beautifully preserved by the dry desert air. Dobyns was struck by the
disparity between the large number of burials recorded at the parish and the
far smaller number of baptisms. Almost all the deaths were from diseases
brought by Europeans. The Spaniards arrived and then Indians died—in
huge numbers, at incredible rates. It hit him, Dobyns told me, “like a club
right between the eyes.”
At first he did nothing about his observation. Historical demography was
not supposed to be his field. Six years later, in 1959, he surveyed more
archives in Hermosilla and found the same disparity. By this point he had
almost finished his doctorate at Cornell and had been selected for
Holmberg’s project. The choice was almost haphazard: Dobyns had never
been to Peru.
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. Incredibly, the
first full history of the fall of the Inka empire did not appear until more than
three hundred years after the events it chronicled: William H. Prescott’s
History of the Conquest of Peru, published in 1847. Prescott’s thunderous
cadences remain a pleasure to read, despite the author’s firmly stated belief,
typical for his time, in the moral inferiority of the natives. But the book had
no successor. More than a century later, when Dobyns went to Lima,
Prescott’s was still the only complete account. (A fine history, John
Hemming’s Conquest of the Incas, appeared in 1970. But it, too, has had no
successor, despite a wealth of new information.) “The Inka were largely
ignored because the entire continent of South America was largely
ignored,” Patricia Lyon, an anthropologist at the Institute for Andean
Studies, in Berkeley, California, explained to me. Until the end of
colonialism, she suggested, researchers tended to work in their own
countries’ possessions. “The British were in Africa, along with the Germans
and French. The Dutch were in Asia, and nobody was in South America,”
because most of its nations were independent. The few researchers who did
examine Andean societies were often sidetracked into ideological warfare.
The Inka practiced a form of central planning, which led scholars into a
sterile Cold War squabble about whether they were actually socialists avant
la lettre in a communal Utopia or a dire precursor to Stalinist Russia.
Given the lack of previous investigation, it may have been inevitable that
when Dobyns traced births and deaths in Lima he would be staking out new
ground. He collected every book on Peruvian demography he could find.
And he dipped into his own money to pay Cornell project workers to
explore the cathedral archives and the national archives of Peru and the
municipal archives of Lima. Slowly tallying mortality and natality figures,
Dobyns continued to be impressed by what he found. Like any scholar, he
eventually wrote an article about what he had learned. But by the time his
article came out, in 1963, he had realized that his findings applied far
beyond Peru.
The Inka and the Wampanoag were as different as Turks and Swedes. But
Dobyns discovered, in effect, that their separate battles with Spain and
England followed a similar biocultural 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?) And then, reasoning backward in time from this master
narrative, he proposed a new way to think about Native American societies,
one that transformed not only our understanding of life before Columbus
arrived, but our picture of the continents themselves.
TAWANTINSUYU
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 upper Amazonia to the deserts of the Peruvian coast and
the twenty-thousand-foot peaks of the Andes between. “If imperial potential
is judged in terms of environmental adaptability,” wrote the Oxford
historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto, “the Inka were the most impressive
empire builders of their day.”
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. 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. *7 To monitor this cyclopean enterprise, 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”). So successful were the Inka at remolding
their domain, according to the late John H. Rowe, an eminent archaeologist
at the University of California at Berkeley, that Andean history “begins, not
with the Wars of [South American] Independence or with the Spanish
Conquest, but with the organizing genius of [empire founder] Pachakuti in
the fifteenth century.”
TAWANTINSUYU The Land of the Four Quarters, 1527 A.D.
Highland Peru is as extraordinary as the Inka themselves. It is the only
place on earth, the Cornell anthropologist John Murra wrote, “where
millions [of people] insist, against all apparent logic, on living at 10,000 or
even 14,000 feet above sea level. Nowhere else have people lived for so
many thousands of years in such visibly vulnerable circumstances.” And
nowhere else have people living at such heights—in places where most
crops won’t grow, earthquakes and landslides are frequent, and extremes of
weather are the norm—repeatedly created technically advanced, long-
lasting civilizations. The Inka homeland, uniquely high, was also uniquely
steep, with slopes of more than sixty-five degrees from the horizontal. (The
steepest street in San Francisco, famed for its nearly undrivable hills, is
thirty-one-and-a-half degrees.) And it was uniquely narrow; the distance
from the Pacific shore to the mountaintops is in most places less than
seventy-five miles and in many less than fifty. Ecologists postulate that the
first large-scale human societies tended to arise where, as Jared Diamond of
the University of California at Los Angeles put it, geography provided “a
wide range of altitudes and topographies within a short distance.” One such
place is the Fertile Crescent, where the mountains of western Iran and the
Dead Sea, the lowest place on earth, bracket the Tigris and Euphrates river
systems. Another is Peru. In the short traverse from mountain to ocean,
travelers pass through twenty of the world’s thirty-four principal types of
environment.
Highland Peru, captured in this image of the Inka ruin Wiñay
Wayna by the indigenous Andean photographer Martín Chambi
(1891–1973), is the only place on earth where people living at
such inhospitable altitudes repeatedly created materially
sophisticated societies.
To survive in this steep, narrow hodgepodge of ecosystems, Andean
communities usually sent out representatives and colonies to live up- or
downslope in places with resources unavailable at home. Fish and shellfish
from the ocean; beans, squash, and cotton from coastal river valleys; maize,
potatoes, and the Andean grain quinoa from the foothills; llamas and
alpacas for wool and meat in the heights—each area had something to
contribute. Villagers in the satellite settlements exchanged products with the
center, sending beans uphill and obtaining llama jerky in return, all the
while retaining their citizenship in a homeland they rarely saw. Combining
the fruits of many ecosystems, Andean cultures both enjoyed a better life
than they could have wrested from any single place and spread out the risk
from the area’s frequent natural catastrophes. Murra invented a name for
this mode of existence: “vertical archipelagoes.”
Verticality helped Andean cultures survive but also pushed them to stay
small. Because the mountains impeded north-south communication, it was
much easier to coordinate the flow of goods and services east to west. As a
result the region for most of its history was a jumble of small- and medium-
scale cultures, isolated from all but their neighbors. Three times, though,
cultures rose to dominate the Andes, uniting previously separate groups
under a common banner. The first period of hegemony was that of Chavín,
which from about 700 B.C. to the dawn of the Christian era controlled the
central coast of Peru and the adjacent mountains. The next, beginning after
Chavín’s decline, was the time of two great powers: the technologically
expert empire of Wari, which held sway over the coastline previously under
Chavín; and Tiwanaku, centered on Lake Titicaca, the great alpine lake on
the Peru-Bolivia border. (I briefly discussed Wari and Tiwanaku earlier, and
will return to them—and to the rest of the immense pre-Inka tradition—
later.) After Wari and Tiwanaku collapsed, at the end of the first millennium,
the Andes split into sociopolitical fragments and with one major exception
remained that way for more than three centuries. Then came the Inka.
The Inka empire, the greatest state ever seen in the Andes, was also the
shortest lived. It began in the fifteenth century and lasted barely a hundred
years before being smashed by Spain.
As conquerors, the Inka were unlikely. Even in 1350 they were still an
unimportant part of the political scene in the central Andes, and newcomers
at that. In one of the oral tales recorded by the Spanish Jesuit Bernabé
Cobo, the Inka originated with a family of four brothers and four sisters
who left Lake Titicaca for reasons unknown and wandered until they came
upon what would become the future Inka capital, Qosqo (Cusco, in
Spanish). Cobo, who sighed over the “extreme ignorance and barbarity” of
the Indians, dismissed such stories as “ludicrous.” Nonetheless,
archaeological investigation has generally borne them out: the Inka seem
indeed to have migrated to Qosqo from somewhere else, perhaps Lake
Titicaca, around 1200 A.D.
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.
Based on interviews with his in-laws, Betanzos estimated that when the
Inka showed up in the Qosqo region “more than two hundred” small groups
were already there. Qosqo itself, where they settled, was a hamlet “of about
thirty small, humble straw houses.”
Archaeological evidence suggests that the Inka gradually became more
powerful. The apparent turning point in their fortunes occurred when they
somehow made enemies of another group, the Chanka, who eventually
attacked them. This unremarkable provincial squabble had momentous
consequences.
According to a widely quoted chronology by the sixteenth-century cleric
Miguel Cabello Balboa, the Chanka offensive took place in 1438. The Inka
leader at that time was Wiraqocha Inka. *8 “A valiant prince,” according to
Cobo, Wiraqocha Inka had a “warlike” nature even as a young man and
vowed that after taking the throne “he would conquer half the world.”
Perhaps so, but he fled the Chanka attack with three of his four sons,
including his designated successor, Inka Urqon. A younger son, Inka Cusi
Yupanki, refused to run. Instead he fought the Chanka with such bravery
that (according to the legend) the very stones rose up to join the fray. Inka
Yupanki won the battle, capturing many Chanka leaders. Later he skinned
them in celebration—Pizarro saw the trophies on display. But first Inka
Yupanki presented the captives to his father, so that Wiraqocha Inka could
perform the victory ritual of wiping his feet on their bodies.
Fearing that Inka Yupanki was becoming too big for his britches,
Wiraqocha Inka chose that moment to remind his younger son of his
subordinate status. The foot-wiping honor, he proclaimed, actually belonged
to the next Inka: Inka Urqon. “To this,” Betanzos wrote, “Inka Yupanki
answered that he was begging his father to tread on the prisoners, that he
had not won the victory so that such women as Inka Urqon and the rest of
his brothers could step on them.” A heated argument led to a standoff. In a
Shakespearian move, Wiraqocha Inka decided to settle the issue by
murdering his inconvenient younger son. (It was “a crazy impulse,” one of
Wiraqocha Inka’s generals later explained.) Inka Yupanki was tipped off
and the scheme failed. The humiliated Wiraqocha Inka went into exile while
Inka Yupanki returned in triumph to Qosqo, renamed himself Pachakuti
(“World-shaker”), and proclaimed that the ruling Inka families were
descended from the sun. Then he went about conquering everything in
sight.
Hey, wait a minute! the reader may be saying. This family story makes
such terrific melodrama that it seems reasonable to wonder whether it
actually happened. After all, every known written account of the Inka was
set down after the conquest, a century or more after Pachakuti’s rise. And
these differ from each other, sometimes dramatically, reflecting the authors’
biases and ignorance, and their informants’ manipulation of history to cast a
flattering light on their family lines. For these reasons, some scholars
dismiss the chronicles entirely. Others note that both the Inka and the
Spaniards had long traditions of record-keeping. By and large the
chroniclers seem to have been conscious of their roles as witnesses and tried
to live up to them. Their versions of events broadly agree with each other.
As a result, most scholars judiciously use the colonial accounts, as I try to
do here.
After taking the reins of state, Pachakuti spent the next twenty-five years
expanding the empire from central highland Peru to Lake Titicaca and
beyond. His methods were subtler and more economical with direct force
than one might expect, as exemplified by the slow takeover of the coastal
valley of Chincha. In about 1450 Pachakuti dispatched an army to Chincha
under Qhapaq Yupanki (Ka-pok Yu-panki, meaning roughly “Munificent
Honored One”), a kind of adopted brother. Marching into the valley with
thousands of troops, Qhapaq Yupanki informed the fearful local gentry that
he wanted nothing from Chincha whatsoever. “He said that he was the son
of the Sun,” according to the report of two Spanish priests who investigated
the valley’s history in the 1550s. “And that he had come for their good and
for everyone’s and that he did not want their silver nor their gold nor their
daughters.” Far from taking the land by force, in fact, the Inka general
would give them “all that he was carrying.” And he practically buried the
Chincha leadership under piles of valuables. In return for his generosity, the
general asked only for a little appreciation, preferably in the form of a large
house from which the Inka could operate, and a staff of servants to cook,
clean, and make the things needed by the outpost. And when Qhapaq
Yupanki left, he asked Chincha to keep expressing its gratitude by sending
craftspeople and goods to Qosqo.
A decade later Pachakuti sent out another army to the valley, this one led
by his son and heir, Thupa Inka Yupanki (“Royal Honored Inka”). Thupa
Inka closeted himself with the local leadership and laid out many inspired
ideas for the valley’s betterment, all of which were gratefully endorsed.
Following the Inka template, the local leaders drafted the entire populace
into service, dividing households by sex and age into cohorts, each with its
own leader who reported to the leader of the next larger group. “Everything
was in order for the people to know who was in control,” the Spanish
priests wrote. Thupa Inka delegated tasks to the mobilized population:
hewing roads to link Chincha to other areas controlled by the Inka, building
a new palace for the Inka, and tending the fields set aside for the Inka.
Thupa Inka apparently left the area in charge of his brother, who continued
managing its gratitude.
The next visit came from Pachakuti’s grandson, probably in the 1490s.
With him came escalating demands for land and service—the veneer of
reciprocity was fading. By that point the Chincha had little alternative but to
submit. They were surrounded by Inka satrapies; their economy was
enmeshed with the imperial machinery; they had hundreds or thousands of
people doing the empire’s bidding. The Chincha elite, afraid to take on the
Inka army, always chose compliance over valor, and were rewarded with
plum positions in the colonial government. But their domain had ceased to
exist as an independent entity.
In 1976 Edward N. Luttwak, now at the Center for Strategic and
International Studies, in Washington, D.C., published a short, provocative
book about imperial Rome that distinguished between territorial and
hegemonic empires. 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. Without horses, Indian soldiers unavoidably traveled slower
than European or Asian soldiers. If brigades were tied up as occupiers, they
could not be reassigned quickly. As a result, the Inka were almost forced to
co-opt local rulers instead of displacing them. They did so with a
vengeance.
Pachakuti gave command of the military to his son Thupa Inka in 1463
and turned his attention to totally rebuilding Qosqo in imperial style, in the
process becoming one of history’s great urban planners. Although he drew
on Andean aesthetic traditions, Pachakuti put his own stamp on Inka art and
architecture. Whereas the buildings of Sumer and Assyria were covered
with brilliant mosaics and splendid pictorial murals, the Inka style was
severe, abstract, stripped down to geometric forms—startlingly
contemporary, in fact. (According to the Peruvian critic César Paternosto,
such major twentieth-century painters as Josef Albers, Barnett Newman,
and Mark Rothko were inspired by Inka art.)
Inka masonry amazed the conquistadors, who could not
understand how they put together such enormous stones without
mortar or draft animals. And it was astonishingly durable—the
U.S. explorer Hiram Bingham photographed the citadel of Machu
Piqchu in 1913, and found it in near-perfect condition despite four
centuries of neglect.
At the heart of the new Qosqo was the plaza of Awkaypata, 625 feet by
550 feet, carpeted almost in its entirety with white sand carried in from the
Pacific and raked daily by the city’s army of workers. Monumental villas
and temples surrounded the space on three sides, their walls made from
immense blocks of stone so precisely cut and fit that Pizarro’s younger
cousin Pedro, who accompanied the conqueror as a page, reported “that the
point of a pin could not have been inserted in one of the joints.” Across their
facades ran enormous plates of polished gold. When the alpine sun filled
Awkaypata, with its boldly delineated horizontal plain of white sand and
sloping sheets of gold, the space became an amphitheater for the exaltation
of light.
In Pachakuti’s grand design, Awkaypata was the center of the empire—
and the cosmos. From the great plaza radiated four highways that
demarcated the four asymmetrical sectors into which he divided the empire,
Tawantinsuyu, “Land of the Four Quarters.” To the Inka, the quarters
echoed the heavenly order. The Milky Way, a vast celestial river in Andean
cosmology, crosses the Peruvian sky at an angle of about twenty-eight
degrees to the earth’s orbit. For six months the stream of stars slants across
the sky from, so to speak, northeast to southwest; the other six months it
slants from southeast to northwest. The transition roughly coincides with
the transition between dry and wet seasons—the time when the Milky Way
releases life-giving water to PachaMama, Mother Earth—and divides the
heavens into four quarters. Awkaypata, reflecting this pattern, was the axis
of the universe.
Not only that, Qosqo was the center of a second spiritual pattern.
Radiating out from Awkaypata was a drunken spiderweb of forty-one
crooked, spiritually powerful lines, known as zeq’e, that linked holy
features of the landscape: springs, tombs, caves, shrines, fields, stones.
About four hundred of these wak’a (shrines, more or less) existed around
Qosqo—the landscape around the capital was charged with telluric power.
(The zeq’e also played a role in the Inka calendar, which apparently
consisted of forty-one eight-day weeks.) So complexly interrelated was the
network of wak’a and zeq’e, Columbia University archaeologist Terence
D’Altroy has written, “that many otherwise diligent scholars have been
reduced to scratching their heads and trusting someone else’s judgement.”
Each wak’a had its own meaning, relative status, social affiliation, and set
of ceremonial uses. One big stone outside town was believed to be the
petrified body of one of the original Inka brothers; Inka armies often carried
it with them, dressed in fine togs, as a kind of good-luck talisman. 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.”
Around the Inka capital of Qosqo (modern Cusco) were more
than four hundred wak’a, places in the landscape charged with
spiritual power. Many of these were stones, some carved in
elaborate representations, perhaps of the areas they influenced.
Not only did Pachakuti reconfigure the capital, he laid out the institutions
that characterized Tawantinsuyu itself. For centuries, villagers had spent
part of their time working in teams on community projects. Alternately
bullying and cajoling, Pachakuti expanded the service obligation
unrecognizably. In Tawantinsuyu, he decreed, all land and property
belonged to the state (indeed, to the Inka himself). Peasants thus had to
work periodically for the empire as farmers, herders, weavers, masons,
artisans, miners, or soldiers. Often crews spent months away from home.
While they were on the road, the state fed, clothed, and housed them—all
from goods supplied by other work crews. Conscripts built dams, terraces,
and irrigation canals; they grew crops on state land and raised herds on state
pastures and made pots in state factories and stocked hundreds of state
warehouses; they paved the highways and supplied the runners and llamas
carrying messages and goods along them. Dictatorially extending Andean
verticality, the imperium shuttled people and materiel in and out of every
Andean crevice.
Not the least surprising feature of this economic system was that it
functioned without money. True, the lack of currency did not surprise the
Spanish invaders—much of Europe did without money until the eighteenth
century. But the Inka did not even have markets. Economists would predict
that this nonmarket economy—vertical socialism, it has been called—
should produce gross inefficiencies. These surely occurred, but the errors
were of surplus, not want. The Spanish invaders were stunned to find
warehouses overflowing with untouched cloth and supplies. But to the Inka
the brimming coffers signified prestige and plenty; it was all part of the
plan. Most important, Tawantinsuyu “managed to eradicate hunger,” the
Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa noted. Though no fan of the Inka, he
conceded that “only a very small number of empires throughout the whole
world have succeeded in achieving this feat.”
When Tawantinsuyu swallowed a new area, the Inka forcibly imported
settlers from other, faraway areas, often in large numbers, and gave them
land. The newcomers were encouraged to keep their own dress and customs
rather than integrate into the host population. To communicate, both groups
were forced to use Ruma Suni, the language of their conquerors. In the
short run this practice created political tensions that the Inka manipulated to
control both groups. In the long term it would have (if successful) eroded
the distinctions among cultures and forged a homogeneous new nation in
the imprint of Tawantinsuyu. Five centuries later the wholesale reshuffling
of populations became an infamous trademark of Stalin and Mao. But the
scale on which the Inka moved the pieces around the ethnic checkerboard
would have excited their admiration. Incredibly, foreigners came to
outnumber natives in many places. It is possible that ethnic clashes would
eventually have caused Tawantinsuyu to implode, Yugoslavia-style. But if
Pizarro had not interrupted, the Inka might have created a monolithic
culture as enduring as China.
THE GILDED LITTER OF THE INKA
How did Pizarro do it? Sooner or later, everyone who studies the Inka
confronts this question. Henry Dobyns wondered about it, too. The empire
was as populous, rich, and well organized as any in history. But no other fell
before such a small force: Pizarro had only 168 men and 62 horses.
Researchers have often wondered whether the Inka collapse betokens a
major historical lesson. The answer is yes, but the lesson was not grasped
until recently.
The basic history of the empire was known well enough by the time
Dobyns began reading the old colonial accounts. According to Cabello
Balboa’s chronology, Pachakuti died peacefully in 1471. His son Thupa
Inka, long the military commander, now took the imperial “crown”—a
multicolored braid, twisted around the skull like a headband, from which
hung a red tasseled fringe that fell across the forehead. Carried on a golden
litter—the Inka did not walk in public—Thupa Inka appeared with such
majesty, according to the voyager Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, that
“people left the roads along which he had to pass and, ascending the hills on
either side, worshipped and adored” him by “pulling out their eyebrows and
eyelashes.” Minions collected and stored every object he touched, food
waste included, to ensure that no lesser persons could profane these objects
with their touch. The ground was too dirty to receive the Inka’s saliva so he
always spat into the hand of a courtier. The courtier wiped the spittle with a
special cloth and stored it for safekeeping. Once a year everything touched
by the Inka—clothing, garbage, bedding, saliva—was ceremonially burned.
Thupa Inka inaugurated the Inka custom of marrying his sister. In fact,
Thupa Inka may have married two of his sisters. The practice was
genetically unsound but logically consistent. Only close relatives of the
Inka were seen as of sufficient purity to produce his heir. As Inkas grew in
grandeur, more purity was required. Finally only a sister would do. The
Inka’s sister-wives accompanied him on military forays, along with a few
hundred or thousand of his subordinate wives. The massive scale of these
domestic arrangements seems not to have impeded his imperial progress.
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.
TAWANTINSUYU
Expansion of the Inka Empire, 1438–1527 A.D.
Tawantinsuyu is known to have risen and fallen with breathtaking rapidity,
but the exact chronology of its trajectory is disputed. Most researchers
regard the account of Miguel Cabello Balboa as approximately correct. It is
the source for this map, though the reader is cautioned against regarding it
as either exact or universally accepted.
Thupa Inka’s death set off a fight for the royal fringe. Tawantinsuyu did
not have strict succession rules. Instead the Inka selected the son he thought
most qualified. Thupa Inka had more than sixty sons from all of his wives,
according to Sarmiento de Gamboa, so he had a lot of choice. Alas, Thupa
Inka apparently selected one son but then changed his mind on his deathbed
and selected another. Factions formed around each son, leading to a melée.
The first son was banished or killed and the second took the name Wayna
Qhapaq (Why-na Ka-pok) and became the Inka. Because the new Inka was
still a teenager (his name means “Munificent Youth”), two of his uncles
served as regents. One uncle tried to usurp power but was killed by the
other. Eventually the Inka grew old enough to take the reins. Among his
first official acts was killing two of his own brothers to avoid future family
problems. Then he, like his father, married his sister.
Wayna Qhapaq was not a military adventurer like his father. He initially
seems to have viewed his role mainly as one of consolidation, rather than
conquest, perhaps because Tawantinsuyu was approaching the geographic
limits of governability—communication down the long north-south spine of
the empire was stretched to the limit. Much of Wayna Qhapaq’s time was
devoted to organizing the empire’s public works projects. Often these were
more political than practical. 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.
Consolidation was completed in about 1520. Wayna Qhapaq then
marched to Ecuador at the head of an army, intending to expand the empire
to the north. It was a journey of return: he had been born in southern
Ecuador during one of his father’s campaigns. He himself brought with him
one of his teenage sons, Atawallpa. When Wayna Qhapaq came to his
birthplace, the city now called Cuenca, Cobo reported, “he commanded that
a magnificent palace be constructed for himself.” Wayna Qhapaq liked his
new quarters so much that he stayed on while Atawallpa and his generals
went out to subjugate a few more provinces.
In 1615, the Inka writer Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala presented
his life’s work, a massive history of Inka society with four
hundred drawings, to King Philip II of Spain, hoping that the king
would use it to learn more about his new subjects. Whether Philip
ever saw the manuscript is unknown, but Poma de Ayala’s work—
one of the few non-European accounts of Inka life—is now a
fundamental scholarly source. Although the portraits here are not
taken from life, they hint at how the Inka viewed and remembered
their leaders.
They did not meet with success. The peoples of the wet equatorial forests
did not belong to the Andean culture system and were not interested in
joining. They fought ferociously. Caught by an ambush, Atawallpa was
forced to retreat. Enraged by this failure, Cobo wrote, Wayna Qhapaq
“prepared himself as quickly as possible to go in person and avenge this
disgrace.” He left his pleasure palace and publicly berated Atawallpa at the
front. In a renewed offensive, the army advanced under the Inka’s personal
command. Bearing clubs, spears, bows, lances, slings, and copper axes,
brilliant in cloaks of feathers and silver breastplates, their faces painted in
terrifying designs, the Inka army plunged into the forests of the northern
coast. They sang and shouted in unison as they fought. The battle seesawed
until a sudden counterattack knocked Wayna Qhapaq out of his litter—a
humiliation. Nearly captured by his foes, he was forced to walk like a plebe
back to his new palace. The Inka army regrouped and returned. After
prolonged struggle it subjugated its foes.
Finding the warm Ecuadorian climate more to his liking than that of
chilly Qosqo, Wayna Qhapaq delayed his triumphal return for six years.
Wearing soft, loose clothing of vampire-bat wool, he swanned around his
palaces with a bowl of palm wine or chicha, a sweet, muddy, beer-like drink
usually made from crushed maize. “When his captains and chief Indians
asked him how, though drinking so much, he never got intoxicated,”
reported Pizarro’s younger cousin and page, Pedro, “they say that he replied
that he drank for the poor, of whom he supported many.”
In 1525 Wayna Qhapaq suddenly got sick and expired in his Ecuadorian
retreat. Once again the succession was contested and bloody. Details are
murky, but on his deathbed the Inka seems to have passed over Atawallpa,
who had not distinguished himself, and designated as his heir a son named
Ninan K’uychi. Unluckily, Ninan K’uychi died of the same illness right
before Wayna Qhapaq. The Inka’s next pick was a nineteen-year-old son
who had stayed behind in Qosqo. As was customary, high priests subjected
this choice to a divination. They learned that this son would be dreadfully
unlucky. The priest who reported this unhappy result to Wayna Qhapaq
found him dead. In consequence, the court nobles were left to choose the
emperor. They settled on the teenager who had been the Inka’s final choice.
The teenager’s principal qualification for the post was that his mother
was Wayna Qhapaq’s sister. Nonetheless, he had no doubts about crowning
himself immediately—he didn’t even wait to find out if Wayna Qhapaq had
left any instructions or last wishes. The new Inka took the name Washkar
Inka (“Golden Chain Inka”). Atawallpa remained in Ecuador, ostensibly
because he was unable to show his face after being berated by his father, but
presumably also because he knew that the life expectancy of Inka brothers
tended to be short.
Meanwhile, Wayna Qhapaq’s mummified body was dressed in fine
clothing and taken back to Qosqo on a gold litter bedecked with feathers.
Along the way, the dead emperor’s executors, four high-ranking nobles,
schemed to depose and murder Washkar and install yet another son in his
place. Something aroused Washkar’s suspicions as the party neared Qosqo
—perhaps his discovery that Atawallpa had stayed in Ecuador with most of
the Inka army, perhaps a tipoff from a loyal uncle whom the conspirators
had approached. After staging a grand funeral for his father, Washkar
ordered the executors to meet him one at a time, which provided the
occasion to arrest them. Torture and execution followed.
The plot circumvented, Washkar went to work eliminating any remaining
objections to his accession. 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. Washkar further solidified his credentials as
ruler by marrying his sister. According to the unsympathetic account of
Cabello Balboa, Washkar’s mother, who was apparently willing to marry
her dead brother, objected to her son’s plan to marry her daughter. The
ceremony took place only after “much begging and supplication.”
Civil war was probably unavoidable. Egged on by scheming courtiers
and generals, relations between Atawallpa and Washkar spent several years
swinging through the emotional valence from concealed suspicion to overt
hostility. Washkar, in Qosqo, had the machinery of the state at his disposal;
in addition, his claim to the fringe was generally accepted. Atawallpa, in
Ecuador, had a war-tested army and the best generals but a weaker claim to
the throne (his mother was merely his father’s cousin, not his sister). The
war lasted for more than three years, seesawed across the Andes, and was
spectacularly brutal. Washkar’s forces seized the initial advantage, invading
Ecuador and actually capturing Atawallpa, almost tearing off one of his ears
in the process. In a sequence reminiscent of Hollywood, one of Atawallpa’s
wives supposedly smuggled a crowbar-like tool into his improvised
battlefield prison (his intoxicated guards permitted a conjugal visit).
Atawallpa dug his way out, escaped to Ecuador, reassembled his army, and
drove his foes south. On a plateau near today’s Peru-Ecuador border the
northern forces personally led by Atawallpa shattered Washkar’s army. A
decade later 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.
With the momentum of war turning against him, Washkar left Qosqo to
lead his own army. Atawallpa sent his forces ahead to meet it. After a
horrific battle (Cieza de León estimated the dead at thirty-five thousand),
Washkar was captured in an ambush in the summer of 1532. Atawallpa’s
generals took the Inka as a captive to Qosqo and executed his wives,
children, and relatives in front of him. Meanwhile, Atawallpa’s triumphant
cavalcade, perhaps as many as eighty thousand strong, slowly promenaded
to Qosqo. In October or November 1532, the victors stopped outside the
small city of Cajamarca, where they learned that pale, hairy people who sat
on enormous animals had landed on the coast.
No matter how many times what happened next has been recounted, it
has not lost its power to shock: how the curious Atawallpa decided to wait
for the strangers’ party to arrive; how Pizarro, for it was he, persuaded
Atawallpa to visit the Spaniards in the central square of Cajamarca, which
was surrounded on three sides by long, empty buildings (the town
apparently had been evacuated for the war); how on November 16, 1532,
the emperor-to-be came to Cajamarca in his gilded and feather-decked litter,
preceded by a squadron of liveried men who swept the ground and followed
by five or six thousand troops, almost all of whom bore only ornamental,
parade-type weapons; how Pizarro hid his horses and cannons just within
the buildings lining the town square, where the 168 Spanish awaited the
Inka with such fear, Pedro Pizarro noted, that many “made water without
knowing it out of sheer terror”; how a Spanish priest presented Atawallpa
with a travel-stained Christian breviary, which the Inka, to whom it literally
meant nothing, impatiently threw aside, providing the Spanish with a legal
fig leaf for an attack (desecrating Holy Writ); how the Spanish, firing
cannons, wearing armor, and mounted on horses, none of which the Indians
had ever seen, suddenly charged into the square; how the Indians were so
panicked by the smoke and fire and steel and charging animals that in trying
to flee hundreds trampled each other to death (“they formed mounds and
suffocated one another,” one conquistador wrote); how the Spanish took
advantage of the soldiers’ lack of weaponry to kill almost all the rest; how
the native troops who recovered from their initial surprise desperately
clustered around Atawallpa, supporting his litter with their shoulders even
after Spanish broadswords sliced off their hands; how Pizarro personally
dragged down the emperor-to-be and hustled him through the heaps of
bodies on the square to what would become his prison.
Pizarro exulted less in victory than one might imagine. A self-made man,
the illiterate, illegitimate, neglected son of an army captain, he ached with
dreams of wealth and chivalric glory despite the fortune he had already
acquired in the Spanish colonies. After landing in Peru he realized that his
tiny force was walking into the maw of a powerful empire. Even after his
stunning triumph in Cajamarca he remained torn between fear and
ambition. For his part, Atawallpa observed the power of Inka gold and
silver to cloud European minds. *9 Precious metals were not valuable in the
same way in Tawantinsuyu, because there was no currency. To the Inka
ruler, the foreigners’ fascination with gold apparently represented his best
chance to manipulate the situation to his advantage. He offered to fill a
room twenty-two feet by seventeen feet full of gold objects—and two
equivalent rooms with silver—in exchange for his freedom. Pizarro quickly
agreed to the plan.
Atawallpa, still in command of the empire, ordered his generals to strip
Qosqo of its silver and gold. Not having lived in the city since childhood,
he had little attachment to it. He also told his men to slay Washkar, whom
they still held captive; all of Washkar’s main supporters; and, while they
were at it, all of Atawallpa’s surviving brothers. After his humiliating
captivity ended, Atawallpa seems to have believed, the ground would be
clear for his rule.
Between December 1532 and May 1533, caravans of precious objects—
jewelry, fine sculptures, architectural ornamentation—wended on llama-
back to Cajamarca. As gold and silver slowly filled the rooms, all of
Tawantinsuyu seemed frozen. It was as if someone had slipped into the
Kremlin in 1950 and held Stalin at gunpoint, leaving the nation, accustomed
to obeying a tyrant, utterly rudderless. Meanwhile, the waiting Spanish,
despite their unprecedented success, grew increasingly fearful and
suspicious. When Atawallpa fulfilled his half of the bargain and the ransom
was complete Pizarro melted everything into ingots and shipped them to
Spain. The conquistadors did not follow through on their part of the deal.
Rather than releasing Atawallpa, they garroted him. Then they marched to
Qosqo.
Almost at a stroke, just 168 men had dealt a devastating blow to the
greatest empire on earth. To be sure, their victory was nowhere near
complete: huge, bloody battles still lay ahead. Even after the conquistadors
seized Qosqo, the empire regrouped in the hinterlands, where it fought off
Spanish forces for another forty years. 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.
VIRGIN SOIL
I have just pulled a fast one. The Inka history above is as contemporary
scholars understand it. They disagree on which social factors to emphasize
and on how much weight to assign individual Spanish chronicles, but the
outline seems not in serious dispute. The same is not true of my rendering
of Pizarro’s conquest. I presented what is more or less the account current
when Dobyns arrived in Peru. But in his reading he discovered a hole in this
version of events—a factor so critical that it drastically changed Dobyns’s
view of native America.
Why did the Inka lose? The usual answer is that Pizarro had two
advantages: steel (swords and armor, rifles and cannons) and horses. The
Indians had no steel weapons and no animals to ride (llamas are too small to
carry grown men). They also lacked the wheel and the arch. With such
inferior technology, Tawantinsuyu had no chance. “What could [the Inka]
offer against this armory?” asked John Hemming, the conquest historian.
“They were still fighting in the bronze age.” The Inka kept fighting after
Atawallpa’s death. But even though they outnumbered the Europeans by as
much as a hundred to one, they always lost. “No amount of heroism or
discipline by an Inka army,” Hemming wrote, “could match the military
superiority of the Spaniards.”
But just as guns did not determine the outcome of conflict in New
England, steel was not the decisive factor in Peru. True, anthropologists
have long marveled that Andean societies did not make steel. Iron is
plentiful in the mountains, yet the Inka used metal for almost nothing
useful. In the late 1960s, Heather Lechtman, an archaeologist at the MIT
Center for Materials Research in Archaeology and Ethnology, suggested to
“an eminent scholar of Andean prehistory that we take a serious and careful
look at Andean metallurgy.” He responded, “But there wasn’t any.”
Lechtman went and looked anyway. She discovered that Inka metallurgy
was, in fact, as refined as European metallurgy, but that it had such different
goals that academic experts had not even recognized it.
According to Lechtman, Europeans sought to optimize metals’ “hardness,
strength, toughness, and sharpness.” The Inka, by contrast, valued
“plasticity, malleability, and toughness.” Europeans used metal for tools.
Andean societies primarily used it as a token of wealth, power, and
community affiliation. European metalworkers tended to create metal
objects by pouring molten alloys into shaped molds. Such foundries were
not unknown to the Inka, but Andean societies vastly preferred to hammer
metal into thin sheets, form the sheets around molds, and solder the results.
The results were remarkable by any standard—one delicate bust that
Lechtman analyzed was less than an inch tall but made of twenty-two
separate gold plates painstakingly joined.
If a piece of jewelry or a building ornament was to proclaim its owner’s
status, as the Inka desired, it needed to shine. Luminous gold and silver
were thus preferable to dull iron. Because pure gold and silver are too soft
to hold their shape, Andean metalworkers mixed them with other metals,
usually copper. This strengthened the metal but turned it an ugly pinkish-
copper color. To create a lustrous gold surface, Inka smiths heated the
copper-gold alloy, which increases the rate at which the copper atoms on the
surface combine with oxygen atoms in the air—it makes the metal corrode
faster. Then they pounded the hot metal with mallets, making the corrosion
flake off the outside. By repeating this process many times, they removed
the copper atoms from the surface of the metal, creating a veneer of almost
pure gold. Ultimately the Inka ended up with strong sheets of metal that
glittered in the sun.
Andean cultures did make tools, of course. But rather than making them
out of steel, they preferred fiber. The choice is less odd than it may seem.
Mechanical engineering depends on two main forces: compression and
tension. Both are employed in European technology, but the former is more
common—the arch is a classic example of compression. By contrast,
tension was the Inka way. “Textiles are held together by tension,” William
Conklin, a research associate at the Textile Museum in Washington, D.C.,
told me. “And they exploited that tension with amazing inventiveness and
precision.”
In the technosphere of the Andes, Lechtman explained, “people solved
basic engineering problems through the manipulation of fibers,” not by
creating and joining hard wooden or metal objects. 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
initially terrified Pizarro’s men. Later one conquistador reassured his
countrymen that they could walk across these Inka inventions “without
endangering themselves.”
Andean textiles were woven with great precision—elite garments could
have a thread count of five hundred per inch—and structured in elaborate
layers. Soldiers wore armor made from sculpted, quilted cloth that was
almost as effective at shielding the body as European armor and much
lighter. After trying it, the conquistadors ditched their steel breastplates and
helmets wholesale and dressed like Inka infantry when they fought.
Although Andean troops carried bows, javelins, maces, and clubs, their
most fearsome weapon, the sling, was made of cloth. A sling is a woven
pouch attached to two strings. The slinger puts a stone or slug in the pouch,
picks up the strings by the free ends, spins them around a few times, and
releases one of the strings at the proper moment. Expert users could hurl a
stone, the Spanish adventurer Alonso Enríquez de Guzmán wrote, “with
such force that it will kill a horse…. I have seen a stone, thus hurled from a
sling, break a swordin two pieces when it was held in a man’s hand at a
distance of thirty paces.” (Experimenting with a five-foot-long, Andean-
style sling and an egg-sized rock from my garden, I was able, according to
my rough calculation, to throw the stone at more than one hundred miles
per hour. My aim was terrible, though.)
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.
Unable to step outside, the conquistadors cowered in shelters beneath a
relentless, weeks-long barrage of flaming stone. Rather than evacuate, the
Spanish, as brave as they were greedy, fought to the end. In a desperate,
last-ditch counterattack, the Europeans eked out victory.
More critical than steel to Pizarro’s success was the horse. The biggest
animal in the Andes during Inka times was the llama, which typically
weighs three hundred pounds. Horses, four times as massive, were
profoundly, terribly novel. Add to this the shock of observing humans
somehow astride their backs like half-bestial nightmare figures and it is
possible to imagine the dismay provoked by Pizarro’s cavalry. Not only did
Inka infantrymen have to overcome their initial stupefaction, their leaders
had to reinvent their military tactics while in the midst of an invasion.
Mounted troops were able to move at rates never encountered in
Tawantinsuyu. “Even when the Indians had posted pickets,” Hemming
observed, “the Spanish cavalry could ride past them faster than the sentries
could run back to warn of danger.” In clash after clash, “the dreaded horses
proved invincible.” But horses are not inherently unbeatable; the Inka
simply did not discover quickly enough where they had an advantage: on
their roads.
The conquistadors disparaged steep Inka highways because they
had been designed for sure-footed llamas rather than horses. But
they were beautifully made—this road, photographed in the 1990
s, had lasted more than five hundred years without maintenance.
European-style roads, constructed with horses and cars in mind, view
flatness as a virtue; to go up a steep hill, they use switchbacks to make the
route as horizontal as possible. Inka roads, by contrast, were built for
llamas. Llamas prefer the coolness of high altitudes and, unlike horses,
readily go up and down steps. As a result, Inka roads eschewed valley
bottoms and used long stone stairways to climb up steep hills directly—
brutal on horses’ hooves, as the conquistadors often complained. Traversing
the foothills to Cajamarca, Francisco Pizarro’s younger brother Hernando
lamented that the route, a perfectly good Inka highway, was “so bad” that
the Spanish “could not use horses on the roads, not even with skill.” Instead
the conquistadors had to dismount and lead their reluctant animals through
the steps. At that point they were vulnerable. Late in the day, Inka soldiers
learned to wait above and roll boulders on their foes, killing some of the
animals and frightening others into running away. Men left behind could be
picked off at leisure. Multiple ambushes cost the lives of many Spanish
troops and animals.
To be sure, horses confer an advantage on flat ground. But even on the
plains the Inka could have won. Foot soldiers have often drubbed mounted
troops. At the battle of Marathon in 490 B.C., the outnumbered, outarmored
Athenian infantry destroyed the cavalry of the Persian emperor Darius I.
More than six thousand Persians died; the Greeks lost fewer than two
hundred men. So dire had the situation initially appeared that before the
fight Athens sent a messenger to Sparta, its hated rival, to beg for aid. In the
original marathon, the courier ran more than a hundred miles in two days to
deliver his message. But by the time the Spartan reinforcements arrived,
there was nothing to see but dead Persians.
The Inka losses were not foreordained. Their military was hampered by
the cult of personality around its deified generals, which meant both that
leaders were not easily replaced when they were killed or captured and that
innovation in the lower ranks was not encouraged. And the army never
learned to bunch its troops into tight formations, as the Greeks did at
Marathon, forming human masses that can literally stand up to cavalry.
Nonetheless, by the time of the siege of Qosqo the Inka had developed an
effective anti-cavalry tactic: bolas. The Inka bola consisted of three stones
tied to lengths of llama tendon. Soldiers threw them, stones a-whirl, at
charging horses. The weapons wrapped themselves around the animals’ legs
and brought them down to be killed by volleys of sling missiles. Had the
bolas come in massed, coordinated onslaughts instead of being wielded by
individual soldiers as they thought opportune, Pizarro might well have met
his match.
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. But another,
much larger part of the answer was first stated firmly by Henry Dobyns.
During his extracurricular reading about Peru, he came across a passage by
Pedro Cieza de León, the Spanish traveler who observed three roads
between the same two cities. Entranced by the first exhibition of Inka booty
in Spain, Cieza de León had crossed the Atlantic as a teenager and spent
fifteen years in Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Colombia, traveling, fighting,
and taking notes for what would become a massive, three-volume survey of
the region. Only the first part was printed in his lifetime, but by the
twentieth century historians had found and published most of the rest.
Dobyns learned something from Cieza de León that was not mentioned in
Prescott’s history, in the Smithsonian’s official Handbook of South
American Indians, or in any of the then-standard descriptions of
Tawantinsuyu. 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.”
Smallpox not only killed Wayna Qhapaq, it killed his son and designated
heir—and his brother, uncle, and sister-wife. 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. After the
dying Wayna Qhapaq locked himself away so that nobody could see his
pustulous face, Salcamayhua reported, he was visited by a terrifying
midnight vision. Surrounding him in his dream were “millions upon
millions of men.” The Inka asked who they were. “Souls of the lost,” the
multitude told him. All of them “would die from the pestilence,” each and
every one.
The story is probably apocryphal, but its import isn’t. Smallpox has an
incubation period of about twelve days, during which time sufferers, who
may not know they are sick, can infect anyone they meet. With its fine roads
and great population movements, Tawantinsuyu was perfectly positioned
for a major 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. Unable to number the losses, the Jesuit Martín de
Murúa said only that the toll was “infinite thousands.”
The smallpox virus is thought to have evolved from a cattle virus that
causes cowpox; a now-extinct equine virus responsible for horsepox; or,
perhaps most likely, the camelpox virus, which affects camels, as the name
suggests. People who survive the disease become immune to it. In Europe,
the virus was such a constant presence that most adults were immune.
Because the Western Hemisphere had no cows, horses, or camels, smallpox
had no chance to evolve there. Indians had never been exposed to it—they
were “virgin soil,” in epidemiological jargon.
Virgin-soil death rates for smallpox are hard to establish because for the
last century most potential research subjects have been vaccinated. But a
study in the early 1960s of seven thousand unvaccinated smallpox cases in
southern India found that the disease killed 43 percent of its victims. Noting
the extreme vulnerability of Andean populations—they would not even
have known to quarantine victims, as Europeans had—Dobyns
hypothesized that the empire’s population “may well have been halved
during this epidemic.” In about three years, that is, as many as one out of
two people in Tawantinsuyu died.
The human and social costs are beyond measure. Such overwhelming
traumas tear at the bonds that hold cultures together. The epidemic that
struck Athens in 430 B.C., Thucydides reported, enveloped the city in “a
great degree of lawlessness.” The people “became contemptuous of
everything, both sacred and profane.” They joined ecstatic cults and
allowed sick refugees to desecrate the great temples, where they died
untended. A thousand years later the Black Death shook Europe to its
foundations. Martin Luther’s rebellion against Rome was a grandson of the
plague, as was modern anti-Semitism. Landowners’ fields were emptied by
death, forcing them either to work peasants harder or pay more to attract
new labor. Both choices led to social unrest: the Jacquerie (France, 1358),
the Revolt of Ciompi (Florence, 1378), the Peasants’ Revolt (England,
1381), the Catalonian Rebellion (Spain, 1395), and dozens of flare-ups in
the German states. Is it necessary to spell out that societies mired in
fratricidal chaos are vulnerable to conquest? To borrow a trope from the
historian Alfred Crosby, if Genghis Khan had arrived with the Black Death,
this book would not be written in a European language.
As for Tawantinsuyu, smallpox wiped out Wayna Qhapaq and his court,
which led to civil war as the survivors contested the spoils. The soldiers
who died in the battle between Atawallpa and Washkar were as much
victims of smallpox as those who died from the virus itself.
The ferocity of the civil war was exacerbated by the epidemic’s impact
on a peculiarly Andean institution: royal mummies. People in Andean
societies viewed themselves as belonging to family lineages. (Europeans
did, too, but lineages were more important in the Andes; the pop-cultural
comparison might be The Lord of the Rings, in which characters introduce
themselves as “X, son of Y” or “A, of B’s line.”) Royal lineages, called
panaqa, were special. Each new emperor was born in one panaqa but
created a new one when he took the fringe. To the new panaqa belonged the
Inka and his wives and children, along with his retainers and advisers.
When the Inka died his panaqa mummified his body. Because the Inka was
believed to be an immortal deity, his mummy was treated, logically enough,
as if it were still living. Soon after arriving in Qosqo, Pizarro’s companion
Miguel de Estete saw a parade of defunct emperors. They were brought out
on litters, “seated on their thrones and surrounded by pages and women
with flywhisks in their hands, who ministered to them with as much respect
as if they had been alive.”
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.” The mummies
spoke through female mediums who represented the panaqa’s surviving
courtiers or their descendants. With almost a dozen immortal emperors
jostling for position, high-level Inka society was characterized by ramose
political intrigue of a scale that would have delighted the Medici.
Emblematically, Wayna Qhapaq could not construct his own villa on
Awkaypata—his undead ancestors had used up all the available space. Inka
society had a serious mummy problem.
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.
After Atawallpa’s victory, his panaqa took the mummy of Thupa Inka from
its palace and burned it outside Qosqo—burned it alive, so to speak. And
later Atawallpa instructed his men to seize the gold for his ransom as much
as possible from the possessions of another enemy panaqa, that of
Pachacuti’s mummy.
Washkar’s panaqa kept the civil war going even after his death (or,
rather, nondeath). While Atawallpa was imprisoned, Washkar’s panaqa sent
one of his younger brothers, Thupa Wallpa, to Cajamarca. In a surreptitious
meeting with Pizarro, Thupa Wallpa proclaimed that he was Washkar’s
legitimate heir. Pizarro hid him in his own quarters. Soon afterward, the
lord of Cajamarca, who had backed Washkar in the civil war, told the
Spanish that Atawallpa’s army was on the move, tens of thousands strong.
Its generals planned to attack Pizarro, he said, and free the emperor.
Atawallpa denied the charge, truthfully. Pizarro nonetheless ordered him to
be bound. Some of the Spaniards most sympathetic to Atawallpa asked to
investigate. Soon after they left, two Inka ran to Pizarro, claiming that they
had just fled from the invading army. Pizarro hurriedly convoked a military
tribunal, which quickly sentenced the Inka to execution—the theory
apparently being that the approaching army would not attack if its leader
were dead. Too late the Spanish expedition came back to report that no Inka
army was on the move. Thupa Wallpa emerged from hiding and was
awarded the fringe as the new Inka.
The execution, according to John Rowe, the Berkeley archaeologist, was
the result of a conspiracy among Pizarro, Thupa Wallpa, and the lord of
Cajamarca. By ridding himself of Atawallpa and taking on Thupa Wallpa,
Rowe argued, Pizarro “had exchanged an unwilling hostage for a friend and
ally.” In fact, Thupa Wallpa openly swore allegiance to Spain. To him, the
oath was a small price to pay; by siding with Pizarro, Washkar’s panaqa,
“which had lost everything, had a chance again.” Apparently the new Inka
hoped to return with Pizarro to Qosqo, where he might be able to seize the
wheel of state. After that, perhaps, he could wipe out the Spaniards.
Although Andean societies have been buffeted by disease and
economic exploitation since the arrival of Europeans, indigenous
tradition remained strong enough that this chicha seller in Cuzco,
photographed by Martín Chambi in 1921, might have seemed
unremarkable in the days of the Inka.
On the way to Qosqo, Pizarro met his first important resistance near the
river town of Hatun Xauxa, which had been overrun by Atawallpa’s army
during the civil war. The same force had returned there to battle the
Spanish. But the Inka army’s plan to burn down the town and prevent the
invaders from crossing the river was foiled by the native Xauxa and Wanka
populace, which had long resented the empire. Not only did they fight the
Inka, they followed the old adage about the enemy of my enemy being my
friend and actually furnished supplies to Pizarro.
After the battle Thupa Wallpa suddenly died—so suddenly that many
Spaniards believed he had been poisoned. The leading suspect was
Challcochima, one of Atawallpa’s generals, whom Pizarro had captured at
Cajamarca and brought along on his expedition to Qosqo. Challcochima
may not have murdered Thupa Wallpa, but he certainly used the death to try
to persuade Pizarro that the next Inka should be one of Atawallpa’s sons,
not anyone associated with Washkar. Meanwhile, Washkar’s panaqa sent
out yet another brother, Manqo Inka. He promised that if he were chosen to
succeed Thupa Wallpa he would swear the same oath of allegiance to Spain.
In return, he asked Pizarro to kill Challcochima. Pizarro agreed and the
Spaniards publicly burned Challcochima to death in the main plaza of the
next town they came to. Then they rode toward Qosqo.
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. Had Wayna Qhapaq “been alive when we Spaniards entered
this land,” the conquistador remarked, “it would have been impossible for
us to win it…. And likewise, had the land not been divided by the
[smallpox-induced civil] wars, we would not have been able to enter or win
the land.”
Pizarro’s words, Dobyns realized, applied beyond Tawantinsuyu. He had
studied demographic records in both Peru and southern Arizona. 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.
Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, this pattern occurred
again and again in the Americas. It was a kind of master narrative of
postcontact history. In fact, Europeans routinely lost when they could not
take advantage of disease and political fragmentation. Conquistadors tried
to take Florida half a dozen times between 1510 and 1560—and failed each
time. In 1532 King João III of Portugal divided the coast of Brazil into
fourteen provinces and dispatched colonists to each one. By 1550 only two
settlements survived. The French were barely able to sustain trading posts
in the St. Lawrence and didn’t even try to plant their flag in pre-epidemic
New England. European 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.
All of this was important, the stuff of historians’ arguments and doctoral
dissertations, but Dobyns was thinking of something else. If Pizarro had
been amazed by the size of Tawantinsuyu after the terrible epidemic and
war, how many people had been living there to begin with? Beyond that,
what was the population of the Western Hemisphere in 1491?
AN ARITHMETICAL PROGRESSION
Wayna Qhapaq died in the first smallpox epidemic. The virus struck
Tawantinsuyu again in 1533, 1535, 1558, and 1565. Each time the
consequences were beyond the imagination of our fortunate age. “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.” In addition, Tawantinsuyu was invaded by other
European pestilences, to which the Indians were equally susceptible.
Typhus (probably) in 1546, influenza in 1558 (together with smallpox),
diphtheria in 1614, measles in 1618—all flensed the remains of Inka
culture. Taken as a whole, Dobyns thought, the epidemics must have killed
nine out of ten of the inhabitants of Tawantinsuyu.
Dobyns was not the first to arrive at this horrific conclusion. But he was
the first to put it together with the fact that smallpox visited before anyone
in South America had even seen Europeans. The most likely source of the
virus, Dobyns realized, was the Caribbean. Smallpox was recorded to have
appeared on the island of Hispaniola in November or December 1518. It
killed a third of the native population before jumping to Puerto Rico and
Cuba. Spaniards, exposed in childhood to the virus, were mostly immune.
During Hernán Cortés’s conquest of Mexico, an expedition led by Pánfilo
de Narváez landed on April 23, 1520, near what is today the city of
Veracruz. According to several Spanish accounts, the force included an
African slave named Francisco Eguía or Baguía who had smallpox. Other
reports say that the carriers were Cuban Indians whom Narváez had brought
as auxiliaries. In any case, someone brought the virus—and infected a
hemisphere.
The disease raced to Tenochtitlan, leading city of the Mexica (Aztecs),
where it laid waste to the metropolis and then the rest of the empire. From
there, Dobyns discovered, colonial accounts show smallpox hopscotching
through Central America to Panama. At that point it was only a few hundred
miles from the Inka frontier. The virus seemingly crossed the gap, with
catastrophic consequences.
Then Dobyns went further. When microbes arrived in the Western
Hemisphere, he argued, they must have swept from the coastlines first
visited by Europeans to inland areas populated by Indians who had never
seen a white person. Colonial writers knew that disease tilled the virgin soil
of the Americas countless times in the sixteenth century. But what they did
not, could not, know is that the epidemics shot out like ghastly arrows from
the limited areas they saw to every corner of the hemisphere, wreaking
destruction in places that never appeared in the European historical record.
The first whites to explore many parts of the Americas therefore would have
encountered places that were already depopulated.
As a result, Dobyns said, all colonial population estimates were too low.
Many of them, put together just after epidemics, would have represented
population nadirs, not approximations of precontact numbers. From a few
incidents in which before and after totals are known with relative certainty,
Dobyns calculated that in the first 130 years of contact about 95 percent of
the people in the Americas died. To estimate native numbers before
Columbus, one thus had to multiply census figures from those times by a
factor of twenty or more. The results obtained by this procedure were, by
historical standards, stunningly high.
Historians had long wondered how many Indians lived in the Americas
before contact. “Debated since Columbus attempted a partial census at
Hispaniola in 1496,” Denevan, the Beni geographer, has written, “it remains
one of the great inquiries of history.” Early researchers’ figures were, to put
it mildly, informally ascertained. “Most of them weren’t even ballpark
calculations,” Denevan told me. “No ballpark was involved.” Only in 1928
did the first careful estimate of the indigenous population appear. James
Mooney, a distinguished ethnographer at the Smithsonian Institution,
combed through colonial writings and government documents to conclude
that 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.
Recognizing that his continent-wide estimate did not account for regional
variation, Kroeber encouraged future scholars to seek out and analyze
“sharply localized documentary evidence.” As he knew, some of his
Berkeley colleagues were already making those analyses. Geographer Carl
Sauer published the first modern estimate of northwest Mexico’s pre-
Columbian population in 1935. Meanwhile, physiologist Sherburne F. Cook
investigated the consequences of disease in the same area. Cook joined
forces with Woodrow W. Borah, a Berkeley historian, in the mid-1950s. In a
series of publications that stretched to the 1970s, the two men combed
through colonial financial, census, and land records. Their results made
Kroeber uneasy. 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.
“Historians and anthropologists did not, however, seem to be paying
much attention” to Cook and Borah, Dobyns wrote. Years later, his work,
coupled with that of Denevan, Crosby, and William H. McNeill, finally
made them take notice. 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.
According to a 1999 estimate from the United Nations, the earth’s
population in the beginning of the sixteenth century was about 500 million.
If Dobyns was right, disease claimed the lives of 80 to 100 million Indians
by the first third of the seventeenth century. All these numbers are at best
rough approximations, but their implications are clear: the epidemics killed
about one out of every five people on earth. According to W. George Lovell,
a geographer at Queen’s University in Ontario, it was “the greatest
destruction of lives in human history.”
Dobyns published his conclusions in the journal Current Anthropology in
1966. They spawned rebuttals, conferences, even entire books. (Denevan
assembled one: The Native Population of the Americas in 1492.) “I always
felt guilty about the impact of my Current Anthropology article,” Dobyns
told me, “because I thought and still think that Cook and Borah and Sauer
had all said this in print earlier, but people weren’t listening. I’m still
puzzled by the reaction, to tell you the truth. Maybe it was the time—people
were prepared to listen in the 1960s.”
Listen—and attack. Dobyns’s population projections were quickly seen
by some as politically motivated—self-flagellation by guilty white liberals
or, worse, a push to inflate the toll of imperialism from the hate-America
crowd. “No question about it, some people want those higher numbers,”
Shepard Krech III, an anthropologist at Brown, told me. These people, he
said, were thrilled when Dobyns revisited the subject in a 1983 book, Their
Number Become Thinned, and revised his estimates upward.
Most researchers thought Dobyns’s estimates too high but few critics
were as vehement as David Henige, of the University of Wisconsin, whose
book, Numbers from Nowhere, published in 1998, is a landmark in the
literature of demographic vilification. “Suspect in 1966, it is no less suspect
nowadays,” Henige charged of Dobyns’s work. “If anything, it is worse.”
Henige stumbled across a seminar on Indian demography taught by
Denevan in 1976. An “epiphanic moment” occurred when he read that Cook
and Borah had “uncovered” the existence of eight million people in
Hispaniola. Can you just invent millions of people? he wondered. “We can
make of the historical record that there was depopulation and movement of
people from internecine warfare and diseases,” he said to me. “But as for
how much, who knows? When we start putting numbers to something like
that—applying large figures like 95 percent—we’re saying things we
shouldn’t say. The number implies a level of knowledge that’s impossible.”
Indian activists reject this logic. “You always hear white people trying to
minimize the size of the aboriginal populations their ancestors personally
displaced,” according to Lenore Stiffarm, an ethnologist at the University of
Saskatchewan. Dismissing the impact of disease, in her view, is simply a
way to reduce the original population of the Americas. “Oh, there used to be
a few people there, and disease killed some of them, so by the time we got
here they were almost all gone.” The smaller the numbers of Indians, she
said, the easier it is to regard the continent as empty, and hence up for grabs.
“It’s perfectly acceptable to move into unoccupied land,” Stiffarm told me.
“And land with only a few ‘savages’ is the next best thing.”
When Henige wrote Numbers from Nowhere, the fight about pre-
Columbian population had already consumed forests’ worth of trees—his
bibliography is ninety pages long. Four decades after Dobyns’s article
appeared, his colleagues “are still struggling to get out of the crater that
paper left in anthropology,” according to James Wilson, author of Their
Earth Shall Weep, a history of North America’s indigenous peoples after
conquest. The dispute shows no sign of abating. This is partly because of
the inherent fascination with the subject. But it is also due to the growing
realization of how much is at stake.
Frequently Asked Questions
NOT ENOUGH FOR YANKEE STADIUM
On May 30, 1539, Hernando De Soto landed his private army near Tampa
Bay in Florida. De Soto was a novel figure: half warrior, half venture
capitalist. He grew very rich very young in Spanish America by becoming a
market leader in the nascent slave trade. The profits helped to fund the
conquest of the Inka, which made De Soto wealthier still. He accompanied
Pizarro to Tawantinsuyu, burnishing his reputation for brutality—he
personally tortured Challcochima, Atawallpa’s chief general, before his
execution. Literally looking for new worlds to conquer, De Soto returned to
Spain soon after his exploits in Peru. In Charles V’s court he persuaded the
bored monarch to let him loose in North America with an expedition of his
own. He sailed to Florida with six hundred soldiers, two hundred horses,
and three hundred pigs.
From today’s perspective, it is difficult to imagine the ethical system that
could justify De Soto’s subsequent actions. For four years his force
wandered through what are now Florida, Georgia, North and South
Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Texas, and Louisiana,
looking for gold and wrecking most everything it touched. The inhabitants
often fought back vigorously, but they were baffled by the Spaniards’
motives and astounded by the sight and sound of horses and guns. De Soto
died of fever with his expedition in ruins. Along the way, though, he
managed to rape, torture, enslave, and kill countless Indians. But the worst
thing he did, some researchers say, was entirely without malice—he brought
pigs.
According to Charles Hudson, an anthropologist at the University of
Georgia who spent fifteen years reconstructing De Soto’s path, the
expedition built barges and crossed the Mississippi a few miles downstream
from the present site of Memphis. It was a nervous time: every afternoon,
one of the force later recalled, several thousand Indian soldiers approached
in canoes to within “a stone’s throw” of the Spanish and mocked them as
they labored. The Indians, “painted with ochre,” wore “plumes of many
colors, having feathered shields in their hands, with which they sheltered
the oarsmen on either side, the warriors standing erect from bow to stern,
holding bows and arrows.” Utterly without fear, De Soto ignored the taunts
and occasional volleys of arrows and poled over the river into what is now
eastern Arkansas, a land “thickly set with great towns,” according to the
account, “two or three of them to be seen from one.” Each city protected
itself with earthen walls, sizable moats, and deadeye archers. In his brazen
fashion, De Soto marched right in, demanded food, and marched out.
After De Soto left, no Europeans visited this part of the Mississippi
Valley for more than a century. Early in 1682 white people appeared again,
this time Frenchmen in canoes. In one seat was René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur
de la Salle. La Salle passed through the area where De Soto had found cities
cheek by jowl. It was deserted—the French didn’t see an Indian village for
two hundred miles. About fifty settlements existed in this strip of the
Mississippi when De Soto showed up, according to Anne Ramenofsky, an
archaeologist at the University of New Mexico. By La Salle’s time the
number had shrunk to perhaps ten, some probably inhabited by recent
immigrants. De Soto “had a privileged glimpse” of an Indian world,
Hudson told me. “The window opened and slammed shut. When the French
came in and the record opened up again, it was a transformed reality. A
civilization crumbled. The question is, how did this happen?”
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.
Pigs were as essential to the conquistadors as horses. Spanish armies
traveled in a porcine cloud; drawn by the supper trough, the lean, hungry
animals circled the troops like darting dogs. Neither species regarded the
arrangement as novel; they had lived together in Europe for millennia.
When humans and domesticated animals share quarters, they are constantly
exposed to each other’s microbes. Over time mutation lets animal diseases
jump to people: avian influenza becomes human influenza, bovine
rinderpest becomes human measles, horsepox becomes human smallpox.
Unlike Europeans, Indians did not live in constant contact with many
animals. They domesticated only the dog; the turkey (in Mesoamerica); and
the llama, the alpaca, the Muscovy duck, and the guinea pig (in the Andes).
In some ways this is not surprising: the New World had fewer animal
candidates for taming than the Old. Moreover, few Indians carry the gene
that permits adults to digest lactose, a form of sugar abundant in milk. Non-
milk drinkers, one imagines, would be less likely to work at domesticating
milk-giving animals. But this is guesswork. The fact is that what scientists
call zoonotic disease was little known in the Americas. 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.
The calamity wreaked by the De Soto expedition, Ramenofsky and
Galloway argued, extended across the whole Southeast. The societies of the
Caddo, on the Texas-Arkansas border, and the Coosa, in western Georgia,
both disintegrated soon after. The Caddo had a taste for monumental
architecture: public plazas, ceremonial platforms, mausoleums. After De
Soto’s army left the Caddo stopped erecting community centers and began
digging community cemeteries. 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, not enough to fill Yankee Stadium. “That’s one reason
whites think of Indians as nomadic hunters,” Russell Thornton, an
anthropologist at the University of California at Los Angeles, said to me.
“Everything else—all the heavily populated urbanized societies—was
wiped out.”
Could a few pigs truly wreak this much destruction? Such apocalyptic
scenarios have invited skepticism since Henry Dobyns first drew them to
wide attention. After all, no eyewitness accounts exist of the devastation—
none of the peoples in the Southeast had any form of writing known today.
Spanish and French narratives cannot be taken at face value, and in any case
say nothing substantial about disease. (The belief that epidemics swept
through the Southeast comes less from European accounts of the region
than from the disparities among those accounts.) Although the
archaeological record is suggestive, it is also frustratingly incomplete; soon
after the Spaniards visited, mass graves became more common in the
Southeast, but there is yet no solid proof that a single Indian in them died of
a pig-transmitted disease. Asserting that De Soto’s visit caused the
subsequent collapse of the Caddo and Coosa may be only the old logical
fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc.
Not only do archaeologists like Dobyns, Perttula, and Ramenofsky argue
that unrecorded pandemics swept through the Americas, they claim that the
diseases themselves were of unprecedented deadliness. As a rule, viruses,
microbes, and parasites do not kill the majority of their victims—the pest
that wipes out its host species has a bleak evolutionary future. The influenza
epidemic of 1918, until AIDS the greatest epidemic of modern times,
infected tens of millions around the world but killed fewer than 5 percent of
its victims. Even the Black Death, a symbol of virulence, was not as deadly
as these epidemics are claimed to be. The first European incursion of the
Black Death, in 1347–51, was a classic virgin-soil epidemic; mutation had
just created the pulmonary version of the bacillus Yersinia pestis. But even
then the disease killed perhaps a third of its victims. The Indians in De
Soto’s path, if researchers are correct, endured losses that were anomalously
greater. How could this be true? the skeptics ask.
Consider, too, the Dobynsesque procedure for recovering original
population numbers: applying an assumed death rate, usually 95 percent, to
the observed population nadir. According to Douglas H. Ubelaker, an
anthropologist at the National Museum of Natural History, the population
nadir for Indians north of the Río Grande was around 1900, when their
numbers fell to about half a million. Assuming a 95 percent death rate
(which Ubelaker, a skeptic, does not), the precontact population of North
America would have been 10 million. Go up 1 percent to a 96 percent death
rate and the figure jumps to 12.5 million—creating more than two million
people arithmetically from a tiny increase in mortality rates. At 98 percent,
the number bounds to 25 million. Minute changes in baseline assumptions
produce wildly different results.
Worse, the figures have enormous margins of error. Rudolph
Zambardino, a statistician at North Staffordshire Polytechnic, in England,
has pointed out that the lack of direct data forces researchers into salvos of
extrapolation. To approximate the population of sixteenth-century Mexico,
for example, historians have only the official counts of casados
(householders) in certain areas. To calculate the total population, they must
adjust that number by the estimated average number of people in each
home, the estimated number of homes not headed by a casado (and thus not
counted), the estimated number of casados missed by the census takers, and
so on. Each one of these factors has a margin of error. Unfortunately, as
Zambardino noted, “the errors multiply each other and can escalate rapidly
to an unacceptable magnitude.” If researchers presented their estimates with
the proper error bounds, he said, they would see that the spread is far too
large to constitute “a meaningful quantitative estimate.”
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, scientists say. Other
episodes of mass fatality are abundantly documented: the Black Death in
Europe, the post-collectivization famine in the Soviet Union, even the
traffic in African slaves. Much less data support the notion that Old World
bacteria and viruses turned the New World into an abattoir. *10 Such
evidence as can be found lies scribbled in the margins of European accounts
—it is, as Crosby admitted, “no better than impressionistic.”
“Most of the arguments for the very large numbers have been
theoretical,” Ubelaker told me. “But when you try to marry the theoretical
arguments to the data that are available on individual groups in different
regions, it’s hard to find support for those numbers.” Archaeologists, he
said, keep searching for the settlements in which those millions of people
supposedly lived. “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, of Pennsylvania State, repeatedly examined precontact sites
in eastern New York and found “no support for the notion that ubiquitous
pandemics swept the region.” In the skeptics’ view, Dobyns, and other High
Counters (as proponents of large pre-Columbian numbers have been called)
are like people who discover an empty bank account and claim from its
very emptiness that it once contained millions of dollars. Historians who
project large Indian populations, Low Counter critics say, are committing
the intellectual sin of arguing from silence.
Given these convincing rebuttals, why have the majority of researchers
nonetheless become High Counters? In arguing that Indians died at
anomalously high rates from European diseases, are researchers claiming
that they were somehow uniquely vulnerable? Why hypothesize the
existence of vast, super-deadly pandemics that seem unlike anything else in
the historical record? The speed and scale of the projected losses “boggle
the mind,” observed Colin G. Calloway, a historian at Dartmouth—one
reason, he suggested, that researchers were so long reluctant to accept them.
Indeed, how can one understand losses of such unparalleled scope? And if
the European entrance into the Americas five centuries ago was responsible
for them, what moral reverberations does this have today?
THE GENETICS OF VULNERABILITY
In August 1967 a missionary’s two-year-old daughter came down with
measles in a village on the Toototobi River in Brazil, near the border with
Venezuela. She and her family had just returned from the Amazonian city of
Manaus and had been checked and cleared by Brazilian doctors before
departure. Nonetheless the distinctive spots of measles emerged a few days
after the family’s arrival on the Toototobi. The village, like many others in
the region, was populated mainly by Yanomami Indians, a forest society on
the Brazil-Venezuela border that is among the least Westernized on earth.
They had never before encountered the measles virus. More than 150
Yanomami were in the village at the time. Most or all caught the disease.
Seventeen died despite the horrified missionaries’ best efforts. And the virus
escaped and spread throughout the Yanomami heartland, carried by people
who did not know they had been exposed.
Partly by happenstance, the U.S. geneticist James Neel and the U.S.
anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon flew into Yanomami country in the midst
of the epidemic. Neel, who had long been worried about measles, was
carrying several thousand doses of vaccine. Alas, the disease had preceded
them. They frantically tried to create an epidemiological “firebreak” by
vaccinating ahead of the disease. Despite their efforts, the affected villages
had a mean death rate of 8.8 percent. Almost one out of ten people died
from a sickness that in Western societies was just a childhood annoyance.
Later Neel concluded that the high death rate was in part due to grief and
despair, rather than the virus itself. Still, the huge toll was historically
unprecedented. The implication, implausible at first glance, was that Indians
in their virgin-soil state were more vulnerable to European diseases than
virgin-soil Europeans would have been. Perhaps surprisingly, there is some
scientific evidence that Native Americans were for genetic reasons
unusually susceptible to foreign microbes and viruses—one reason that
researchers believe that pandemics of Dobynsian scale and lethality could
have occurred.
Here I must make a distinction between two types of susceptibility. The
first is the lack of acquired immunity—immunity gained from a previous
exposure to a pathogen. People who have never had chicken pox are readily
infected by the virus. After they come down with the disease, their immune
system trains itself, so to speak, to fight off the virus, and they never catch it
again, no matter how often they are exposed. Most Europeans of the day
had been exposed to smallpox as children, and those who didn’t die were
immune. Smallpox and other European diseases didn’t exist in the
Americas, and so every Indian was susceptible to them in this way.
In addition to having no acquired immunity (the first kind of
vulnerability), the inhabitants of the Americas had immune systems that
some researchers believe were much more restricted than European immune
systems. If these scientists are correct, Indians as a group had less innate
ability to defend themselves against epidemic disease (the second kind of
vulnerability). The combination was devastating.
The second type of vulnerability stems from a quirk of history.
Archaeologists dispute the timing and manner of Indians’ arrival in the
Americas, but almost all researchers believe that the initial number of
newcomers must have been small. Their gene pool was correspondingly
restricted, which meant that Indian biochemistry was and is unusually
homogeneous. More than nine out of ten Native Americans—and almost all
South American Indians—have type O blood, for example, whereas
Europeans are more evenly split between types O and A.
Evolutionarily speaking, genetic homogeneity by itself is neither good
nor bad. It can be beneficial if it means that a population lacks deleterious
genes. In 1491, the Americas were apparently free or almost free of cystic
fibrosis, Huntington’s chorea, newborn anemia, schizophrenia, asthma, and
(possibly) juvenile diabetes, all of which have some genetic component.
Here a limited gene pool may have spared Indians great suffering.
Genetic homogeneity can be problematic, too. In the 1960s and 1970s
Francis L. Black, a virologist at Yale, conducted safety and efficacy tests
among South American Indians of a new, improved measles vaccine.
During the tests he drew blood samples from the people he vaccinated,
which he later examined in the laboratory. When I telephoned Black, he told
me that the results were “thought-provoking.” Every individual person’s
immune system responded robustly to the vaccine. But the native
population as a whole had a “very limited spectrum of responses.” And that,
he said, “could be a real problem in the right circumstances.” For Indians,
those circumstances arrived with Columbus.
Black was speaking of human leukocyte antigens (HLAs), molecules
inside most human cells that are key to one of the body’s two main means
of defense. Cells of all sorts are commonly likened to biochemical factories,
busy ferments in which dozens of mechanisms are working away in
complex sequences that are half Rube Goldberg, half ballet. Like well-run
factories, cells are thrifty; part of the cellular machinery chops up and
reuses anything that is floating around inside, including bits of the cell and
foreign invaders such as viruses. Not all of the cut-up pieces are recycled.
Some are passed on to HLAs, special molecules that transport the snippets
to the surface of the cell.
Outside, prowling, are white blood cells—leukocytes, to researchers.
Like minute scouts inspecting potential battle zones, leukocytes constantly
scan cell walls for the little bits of stuff that HLAs have carried there, trying
to spot anything that doesn’t belong. When a leukocyte spots an anomaly—
a bit of virus, say—it destroys the infected or contaminated cell
immediately. Which means that unless an HLA lugs an invading virus to
where the leukocyte can notice it, that part of the immune system cannot
know it exists, let alone attack it.
HLAs carry their burdens to the surface by fitting them into a kind of
slot. If the snippet doesn’t fit into the slot, the HLA can’t transport it, and
the rest of the immune system won’t be able to “see” it. All people have
multiple types of HLA, which means that they can bring almost every
potential problem to the attention of their leukocytes. Not every problem,
though. No matter what his or her genetic endowment, no one person’s
immune system has enough different HLAs to identify every strain of every
virus. Some things will always escape notice. Imagine someone sneezing in
a crowded elevator, releasing into the air ten variants of a rhinovirus, the
kind of virus that causes the common cold. (Viruses mutate quickly and are
commonly present in the body in multiple forms, each slightly different
from the others.) For simplicity’s sake, suppose that the other elevator
passengers inhale all ten versions of the virus. One man is lucky: he
happens to have HLAs that can lock onto and carry pieces of all ten variants
to the cell surface. Because his white blood cells can identify and destroy
the infected cells, this man doesn’t get sick. Not so lucky is the woman next
to him: she has a different set of HLAs, which are able to pick up and
transport only eight of the ten varieties. The other two varieties escape the
notice of her leukocytes and go on to give her a howling cold (eventually
other immune mechanisms kick in and she recovers). These disparate
outcomes illustrate the importance to a population of having multiple HLA
profiles; one person’s HLAs may miss a particular bug, but another person
may be equipped to combat it, and the population as a whole survives.
Most human groups are a scattershot mix of HLA profiles, which means
that almost always some people in the group will not get sick when exposed
to a particular pathogen. Indeed, if laboratory mice have too much HLA
diversity, Black told me, researchers can’t use them to observe the progress
of an infectious disease. “You get messy results—they don’t all get sick.”
The opposite is true as well, he said. People with similar HLA profiles fall
victim to the same diseases in the same way.
In the 1990s Black reviewed thirty-six studies of South American
Indians. Not to his surprise, he discovered that overall Indians have fewer
HLA types than populations from Europe, Asia, and Africa. 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. About one
third of South American Indians, Black discovered, have identical or near-
identical HLA profiles; for Africans the figure is one in two hundred. In
South America, he estimated, the minimum probability that a pathogen in
one host will next encounter a host with a similar immune spectrum is about
28 percent; in Europe, the chance is less than 2 percent. As a result, Black
argued, “people of the New World are unusually susceptible to diseases of
the Old.” *11
Actually, some Old World populations were just as vulnerable as Native
Americans to those diseases, and likely for the same reason. Indians’ closest
genetic relatives are indigenous Siberians. They did not come into
substantial contact with Europeans until the sixteenth century, when
Russian fur merchants overturned their governments, established military
outposts throughout the region, and demanded furs in tribute. In the train of
the Russian fur market came Russian diseases, notably smallpox.
The parallels with the Indian experience are striking. In 1768 the virus
struck Siberia’s Pacific coast, apparently for the first time. “No one knows
how many have survived,” confessed the governor of Irkutsk, the Russian
base on Lake Baikal, apparently because officials were afraid to travel to
the affected area. A decade later, in 1779, the round-the-globe expedition of
Captain James Cook reached Kamchatka, the long peninsula on the Pacific
coast. The shoreline, the British discovered, was a cemetery. “We every
where met with the Ruins of large Villages with no Traces left of them but
the Foundation of the Houses,” lamented David Samwell, the ship’s
surgeon. “The Russians told us that [the villages] were destroyed by the
small Pox.” The explorer Martin Sauer, who visited Kamchatka five years
after Cook’s expedition, discovered that the Russian government had at last
ventured into the former epidemic zone. Scarcely one thousand natives
remained on the peninsula, according to official figures; the disease had
claimed more than five thousand lives. The tally cannot be taken as exact,
but the fact remains: a single epidemic killed more than three of every four
indigenous Siberians in that area.
After a few such experiences, the natives tried to fight back. “As soon as
[indigenous Siberians] learn that smallpox or other contagious diseases are
in town,” the political exile Heinrich von Füch wrote, “they set up sentries
along all the roads, armed with bows and arrows, and they will not allow
anyone to come into their settlements from town. Likewise, they will not
accept Russian flour or other gifts, lest these be contaminated with
smallpox.” Their efforts were in vain. Despite extreme precautions, disease
cut down native Siberians again and again.
After learning about this sad history I again telephoned Francis Black.
Being genetically determined, Indian HLA homogeneity cannot be changed
(except by intermarriage with non-Indians). Did that mean that the
epidemics were unavoidable? I asked. Suppose that the peoples of the
Americas had, in some parallel world, understood the concept of contagion
and been prepared to act on it. Could the mass death have been averted?
“There have been lots of cases where individual towns kept out
epidemics,” Black said. During plague episodes, “medieval cities would
barricade themselves behind their walls and kill people who tried to come
in. But whole countries—that’s much harder. England has kept out rabies.
That’s the biggest success story that comes to mind, offhand. But rabies is
primarily an animal disease, which helps, because you only have to watch
the ports—you don’t have many undocumented aliens sneaking in with sick
dogs. And rabies is not highly contagious, so even if it slips through it is
unlikely to spread.”
He stopped speaking for long enough that I asked him if he was still on
the line.
“I’m trying to imagine how you would do it,” he said. “If Indians in
Florida let in sick people, the effects could reach all the way up to here in
Connecticut. So all these different groups would have had to coordinate the
blockade together. And they’d have to do it for centuries—four hundred
years—until the invention of vaccines. Naturally they’d want to trade, furs
for knives, that kind of thing. But the trade would have to be conducted in
antiseptic conditions.”
The Abenaki sent goods to Verrazzano on a rope strung from ship to
shore, I said.
“You’d have to have the entire hemisphere doing that. And the Europeans
would presumably have to cooperate, or most of them, anyway. I can’t
imagine that happening, actually. Any of it.”
Did that mean the epidemics were inevitable and there was nothing to be
done?
The authorities, he replied, could “try to maintain isolation, as I was
saying. But that ends up being paternalistic and ineffective. Or they can
endorse marriage and procreation with outsiders, which risks destroying the
society they supposedly are trying to preserve. I’m not sure what I’d
recommend. Except getting these communities some decent health care,
which they almost never have.”
Except for death, he went on, nothing in medicine is inevitable. “But I
don’t see how it [waves of epidemics from European diseases] could have
been prevented for very long. That’s a terrible thought. But I’ve been
working with highly contagious diseases for forty years, and I can tell you
that in the long run it is almost impossible to keep them out.” *12
“OUR EYES WERE APPALLED WITH TERROR”
A second reason historians believe that epidemics tore through Native
American communities before Europeans arrived is that epidemics also did
it after Europeans arrived. In her book Pox Americana (2001), the Duke
University historian Elizabeth Fenn meticulously pieced together evidence
that the Western Hemisphere was visited by two smallpox pandemics
shortly before and during the Revolutionary War. The smaller of the two
apparently began outside Boston in early 1774 and lurked in the area for the
next several years like a sniper, picking off victims at the rate of ten to thirty
a day. In Boston the Declaration of Independence was overshadowed by the
previous day’s proclamation of a citywide campaign of inoculation (an
early, risky form of vaccination in which people deliberately infected
themselves with a mild dose of smallpox to produce immunity).
Even as it besieged Boston, the virus also spread down the eastern
seaboard, laying waste as far as Georgia. It wreaked havoc on the Ani Yun
Wiya (the group often called the Cherokee, which is a mildly insulting
name coined by their enemies, the Creek confederation) and the
Haudenosaunee (the indigenous name for the six nations that made up what
Europeans called the Iroquois League). Both were important allies of the
British, and after the epidemic neither was able to fight the colonists
successfully. Smallpox also ruined the British plan to raise an army of
slaves and indentured servants by promising them freedom after the war—
the disease killed off most of the “Ethiopian regiment” even as it
assembled.
An equal-opportunity killer, smallpox ravaged the rebels, too. The virus
had been endemic in Europe for centuries, which meant that most
Europeans were exposed to it before adulthood. But it was only an
occasional, terrible visitor in the Americas, which meant that most adult
colonists had not acquired childhood immunity. On an individual level, they
were almost as vulnerable as Indians. On a group level, though, they were
less genetically homogeneous, which conferred some relative advantage;
the virus would sweep through them, but not kill quite so many. Still, so
many soldiers in the Continental army fell during the epidemic that
revolutionary leaders feared that the disease would bring an end to their
revolt. “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.
Even as the first outbreak faded, Fenn wrote, a second, apparently
unrelated epidemic burned through Mexico City. The first cases occurred in
August 1779. By year’s end perhaps eighteen thousand had died in the city
area and the disease was racing through the countryside in every direction.
Communications in those days were too poor to permit us to document a
transmission chain, but records show smallpox flaring in separate
explosions to the south like a chain of firecrackers: Guatemala (1780–81),
Colombia (1781–83), Ecuador (1783). Was the virus retracing a journey to
Tawantinsuyu it had taken before? “It seems likely,” decided Calloway, the
Dartmouth historian. Fenn tried to trace the virus as it went north. Like
Dobyns, she examined parish burial records. In 1780 a telltale surge of
mortality traveled north along the heavily traveled road to Santa Fe. From
there, smallpox apparently exploded into most of western North America.
First to suffer, or so the sketchy evidence suggests, were the Hopi.
Already reeling from a drought, they were blasted by smallpox—as many as
nine out of ten may have died. When the Spanish governor tried to recruit
the Hopi to live in missions, their leaders told him not to bother: the
epidemic soon would expunge them from the earth. As if drought and
contagion were not enough, the Hopi were constantly under attack by the
Nermernuh (or Nemene), a fluid collection of hunting bands known today
as the Comanche (the name, awarded by an enemy group, means “people
who fight us all the time”). Originally based north of Santa Fe, the
Nermernuh were on their way to dominating the southern plains; they had
driven away their Apache and Hopi rivals with trip-hammer ambushes and
deadly incursions and were bent on doing the same to any European
colonists who ventured in. In 1781 the raiding abruptly stopped. Silence for
eighteen months. Was the ceasefire due to Mexico City smallpox that had
been transmitted by the Hopi? Four years afterward, a traveler noted in his
diary that the Nermernuh lived in fear of disease because they had been
recently struck by smallpox—tenuous but suggestive evidence.
What is certain is that both Hopi and Nermernuh were part of a network
of exchange that had hummed with vitality since ancient times and had
recently grown more intense with the arrival of horses, which sped up
communication. Smallpox raced along the network through the Great Plains
and the Rocky Mountains, ricocheting among the Mandans, Hidatsas,
Ojibwes, Crows, Blackfoot, and Shoshone, a helter-skelter progress in
which a virus leapfrogged from central Mexico to the shore of Hudson Bay
in less than two years. Indians in the northern Great Plains kept “winter
counts,” oral chronologies of the most important events in each year. Often
the counts were accompanied by a spiraling sequence of drawings on a
hide, with each year summarized by a drawing as an aide-mémoire. In
several Lakota (Sioux) counts 1780–81 was bleakly summed as the year of
Smallpox Used Them Up; and the Lakota were not the only ones affected.
In 1781 a company of Blackfoot stumbled across a Shoshone camp at
dawn near the Red Deer River in Alberta. The Blackfoot were a tightly
organized confederation of groups that inhabited the plains between the
Missouri and Saskatchewan Rivers. Equipped with guns and horses from
French traders, they had pushed their southern neighbors, the Shoshone—
left at a disadvantage because they had no access to the French and their
goods, and the Spanish, whom they did have access to, tried to block Indian
access to weapons—from the plains into the mountains of what are now
Wyoming and Colorado. When the Shoshone finally obtained guns—they
traded with their linguistic cousins, the Nermernuh, who took the weapons
as booty from defeated Spaniards—open warfare broke out. In this bellicose
context, the Blackfoot party knew exactly what to do when it happened
upon a slumbering Shoshone encampment. With “sharp flat daggers and
knives,” one of the raiders later remembered, they silently sliced open the
Shoshone tents “and entered for the fight; but our war whoops instantly
stopt, our eyes were appalled with terror; there was no one to fight with but
the dead and the dying, each a mass of corruption.” The Blackfoot did not
touch the bodies, but were infected anyway. When the company returned
home, the raider lamented, smallpox “spread from one tent to another as if
the Bad Spirit carried it.”
According to Fenn, “the great preponderance of the evidence” indicates
that the Shoshone also transmitted smallpox down the Columbia River into
the Pacific Northwest. Calloway suggests the Crow as a plausible
alternative. Whoever passed on the virus, its effects were still visible a
decade later in 1792, when the British navigator George Vancouver led the
first European expedition to survey Puget Sound. Like Cook’s crew in
Kamchatka, he found a charnel house: deserted villages, abandoned fishing
boats, human remains “promiscuously scattered about the beach, in great
numbers.” Everything they saw suggested “that at no very remote period
this country had been far more populous than at present.” The few suffering
survivors, noted Second Lieutenant Peter Puget, were “most terribly
pitted…indeed many have lost their Eyes.”
Europeans were well versed in the brutal logic of quarantine. When
plague appeared, they boarded up houses and fled to the countryside. By
contrast, the historian Neal Salisbury observed, family and friends in Indian
New England gathered at the sufferer’s bedside to wait out the illness, a
practice that “could only have served to spread the disease more rapidly.”
Even the idea of contagion itself was novel. “We had no belief that one Man
could give [a disease] to another,” the Blackfoot raider remembered, “any
more than a wounded Man could give his wound to another.” Because they
knew of no protective measures, the toll was even higher than it would have
been.
Living in the era of antibiotics, we find it difficult to imagine the
simultaneous deaths of siblings, parents, relatives, and friends. As if by a
flash of grim light, Indian villages became societies of widows, widowers,
and orphans; parents lost their children, and children were suddenly alone.
Rare is the human spirit that remains buoyant in a holocaust. “My people
have been so unhappy for so long they wish to disincrease, rather than to
multiply,” a Paiute woman wrote in 1883. A Lakota winter count
memorialized the year 1784 with a stark image: a pox-scarred man, alone in
a tipi, shooting himself.
Disease not only shattered the family bonds that were the underlying
foundation of Indian societies, it wiped out the political superstructure at the
top. King Liholiho Kamehameha II and Queen Kamamalu of Hawai‘i
visited Great Britain on a diplomatic mission in 1824. While staying in a
posh London hotel and attending the theater in the English king’s own box,
the royal couple and most of the rest of their party came down with
measles. It killed the queen on July 8. The grieving king died six days later,
at the age of twenty-seven. The death of the royal couple ushered in a time
of social chaos. It was as catastrophic for Hawai‘i as the death of Wayna
Qhapaq for Tawantinsuyu.
A particularly poignant loss occurred in the summer of 1701, when the
leaders of forty native nations convened in Montreal to negotiate an end to
decades of war among themselves and the French. Death stalked the
congress in the form of influenza. By then the Indians of the Northeast
knew such diseases all too well: sickness had carried off so many members
of the Haudenosaunee that the alliance was forced to replenish itself by
adopting abductees and prisoners of war. At the time of the conference at
least a quarter of the Haudenosaunee were former captives. At great
personal risk, many Indian leaders attended the conference even after they
knew that influenza was in Montreal. Dozens died. Among them was the
Huron leader Kondiaronk, a famed orator who had, more than any other,
convened the gathering as a last-ditch effort to avoid internecine conflict.
His body was placed on a bed of beaver pelts, covered by a scarlet cloth,
and surrounded by a copper pot, a rifle, and a sword. In their diversity, the
objects symbolized the peaceful mixing of cultures that Kondiaronk hoped
lay in the future.
Nobody knows how many died during the pandemics of the 1770s and
1780s, but even if one had a number it wouldn’t begin to tally the impact.
Disease turned whole societies to ash. Six Cree groups in western Canada
disappeared after 1781; the Blackfoot nation, blasted by smallpox, sent
peace emissaries to Shoshone bands, only to find that all had vanished. “The
country to the south was empty and silent,” Calloway wrote. So broken
were the Omaha by disease that according to tradition they launched a
deliberately suicidal attack against their enemies. Those who did not die
quit their villages and became homeless wanderers.
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 unprecedented calamity that gave rise to the world
we live in? It seems important to try. I would submit that the best way to
come near to encompassing the scale and kind of the loss, and its causes, is
to look at the single case where the intellectual life of a Native American
society is almost as well documented as its destruction.
FLOWERS AND SONG
In 1524, according to colonial accounts, an extraordinary face-off took
place in one of the great buildings of Tenochtitlan, capital of the Triple
Alliance—the Aztec empire, as it is better known—which Hernán Cortés
had conquered three years before. *13 Facing each other across a room, two
delegations of elite clerics battled over the nature of God. On one side were
twelve eminent Franciscan monks, who had traveled from Europe in a
mission authorized by Pope Hadrian VI. On the other were twelve high
priests from the Triple Alliance, men who had wielded immense spiritual
and political power until Cortés shuttered the grand temples and brought
down the clerisy. Although the pope in Rome had authorized the friars’
mission, all twelve were Spanish, because Spain had conquered the empire,
and because Spain, which had spent centuries extracting itself from the rule
of African Muslims, had experience with powerful alien ideologies.
Analogously, the priests of the Triple Alliance were probably all Mexica.
The Mexica were the dominant partner in the Alliance, and they had
founded and populated Tenochtitlan, the empire’s biggest city.
The Franciscans’ mission had begun with a request by Cortés. Cortés
believed that the military conquest of the Alliance had to be accompanied
and justified by an equivalent spiritual conquest. The Indians, he said, must
be led to salvation. And he asked King Charles V of Spain for some priests
to do the job. In turn the king turned to the pope for his blessing and advice.
Cortés did not want “bishops and pampered prelates,” wrote historian
William H. Prescott, “who too often squandered the substance of the
Church in riotous living, but…men of unblemished purity of life, nourished
with the learning of the cloister, [who] counted all personal sacrifices as
little in the cause to which they were devoted.”
Led by the intellectual Martín de Valencia, a man so dedicated to ascetic
faith that he ended his days as a hermit in the Mexican desert, the friars
intended to guide Spain’s new subjects along the exhilarating path to
Christendom. The monks understood that the Mexica already had a church
—a false church intended to snare their souls for the devil, but a church
nonetheless. And they knew that the Indians were too numerous to be
reached by even the most zealous missionaries. Valencia’s plan was
conversion by proxy: he and the rest of the twelve would open the eyes of
the Indian priesthood to the beauties of the true faith, gaining their
adherence by reasoned theological discussion, and then the priests would
fan out and spread the Gospel in their native tongue.
The sole record of the discussions between the monks and the Mexica
was compiled four decades later by another Franciscan, Bernardino de
Sahagún. Sahagún knew ten of the twelve Spaniards at the meeting,
interviewed four of the Mexica priests, and filled in gaps by extrapolating
from similar theological discussions in which he had participated. Written
in dialogue verse, an opera seria exchange of long recitatives, his
reconstruction does not individually identify the speakers—perhaps, some
historians believe, because the great meeting did not actually take place,
Sahagún’s account being a distillation of many smaller encounters. Only
part of the original manuscript survives, written in Nahuatl, the Mexica
language, which Sahagún learned to speak fluently. Still, what remains is
enough to indicate how the Mexica viewed their position vis-à-vis the
Spanish: defeated, but not unequal.
In Sahagún’s reconstruction, the Franciscans speak first, their interpreters
struggling to make European concepts clear in Nahuatl verse, the language
of high discourse. The monks explain that they have been sent by “the one
who on the earth is the greater speaker of divine things,” the pope, to bring
the “venerable word / of the One Sole True God” to New Spain. By
worshipping at false altars, the friars say, “you cause Him an injured heart, /
by which you live in His anger, His ire.” So infuriated was the Christian
God by the Indians’ worship of idols and demons that he sent out “the
Spaniards, /…those who afflicted you with tormenting sorrow, / by which
you were punished / so that you ceased / these not few injuries to His
precious heart.” The Triple Alliance was subjugated, in other words,
because its people had failed to recognize the One True God. By accepting
the Bible, the priests explain, the Mexica “will be able to cool the heart / of
He by Whom All Live, / so He will not completely destroy you.”
The Mexica respond immediately. Not wanting to join Christendom, they
also know that they cannot prevail in a direct confrontation with their
conquerors. Shrewdly, they try to shift the terms of the argument to more
congenial rhetorical ground—an approach that will force the friars to treat
them as equals. “What now, immediately, will we say?” the lead cleric asks.
“We are those who shelter the people, / We are mothers to the people,
fathers to the people.” Translation: We priests are in the same business as
you Franciscans. We are high-ranking clerics, elite intellectuals, just like
you. And just like you we have a function: providing comfort and meaning
to the common folk. To disavow their faith, the Mexica say, would tear
apart their lives. For this reason and others, the priests explain, “we cannot
yet agree to [Christianity] ourselves / We do not yet make it true for
ourselves.” Behind the priests’ refusal is an implied request: You know what
it is like to be in our shoes. You carry the same responsibilities. As one
group of highly placed religious functionaries to another, don’t do this to
us!
Having expected childlike natives, empty vessels waiting to be filled by
the Word, the Franciscans instead found themselves fencing with skilled
rhetoricians, proud of their intellectual traditions. In the end the friars
resorted to a crude but effective argument: the Indians had to pledge fealty
to the Christian god, because their own “gods were not powerful enough to
liberate them from the hands of the Spaniards.” In a sober ceremony, the
Mexica abjured their old religion and embraced Christianity.
For more than a decade, Sahagún and other religious authorities regarded
the conversion as atriumph. He initially began his reconstruction of the
debate to commemorate it. But he never published the manuscript, because
he was slowly coming to believe that the Church’s efforts in New Spain had
been a failure. Despite lip-service devotion to the Gospel, the Mexica
remained outside Christendom, as do some of their descendants to this day.
Sahagún is known as the first American anthropologist, for he labored for
decades to understand the Indians he sought to convert. With other
missionaries, he amassed an archive on the Mexica and their neighbors—
dynastic histories, dictionaries of native languages, descriptions of customs,
collections of poetry and drama, galleries of paintings and sculpture—
unequaled by that on any other Indian group, even the Inka. From it
emerges, in almost full detail, a group portrait of a kind that is usually
obscured by loss.
Masters of power politics, engineers of genius, the Mexica were also
upstarts and pretenders, arrivistes who falsely claimed a brilliant line of
descent. They are best known for assembling the greatest empire ever seen
in Mesoamerica. But their finest accomplishment may have been the
creation of a remarkable intellectual tradition, one that like the Greeks
began with the questions of lyric poets and then went on to distinct schools
of inquiry associated with elite academies.
Mexica histories begin by relating their migration to the Basin of Mexico.
Fringed by mountains, the basin was about a hundred miles long from north
to south and perhaps half that size from east to west. At its center was Lake
Texcoco, a fifty-mile-long volcanic lake with exceptionally clear, clean
water. Around the time of Christ, a small village on its northeast periphery
named Teotihuacan emerged as a military power. During the next four
centuries its realm steadily expanded until it ruled directly over much of
central Mexico and indirectly, through puppet governments, as far south as
Guatemala. Its eponymous capital then may have had 200,000 inhabitants,
enormous at the time; its ruins, an hour by bus from Mexico City, are
among the few remnants of the ancient world that today don’t seem small.
The city was organized around the Avenue of the Dead, a miles-long,
north-south boulevard that cut straight as an ax stroke across the landscape.
From the northern end of the avenue rose the Pyramids of the Sun and
Moon, each as big as the biggest Egyptian pyramids. To their south
sprawled the Temple of the Feathered Serpent, where the empire’s rulers, as
ruthless and preoccupied with national glory as so many Bismarcks,
considered what to do with their soldiers. Despite the empire’s fame and
power, its history is still little known; archaeologists do not know what
language its people spoke, or even its proper name (“Teotihuacan” was
coined centuries later). It had writing of some kind, though it seems not to
have been used much; in any case the script has not been deciphered.
At about 200 feet tall and 700 feet on a side, the Pyramid of the
Sun in Teotihuacan is the world’s third-largest pyramid. It was
built in stages in the second and third centuries A.D. atop a deep,
300-foot cave created by a lava tube that may have represented
the place where humankind emerged onto the earth. The pyramid
and the rest of the city are oriented on a rectilinear grid 15° 25”
from true north, a direction that may have aligned with the cave
mouth.
Teotihuacan fell in the eighth century for reasons yet unknown, but left
an enduring mark in central Mexico. Three hundred years afterward the
rising Toltec styled themselves its heirs. They, too, built an empire, which
fell amid internal dissension in about 1200 A.D. The collapse of the Toltec
created an opening in the warm, fertile basin. Into it moved half a dozen
groups from the northern and western desert, the Mexica among them.
The Mexica were an unlikely choice for heir to the imperial tradition of
Teotihuacan and the Toltecs. Poor and unsophisticated, they probably came
to Lake Texcoco about 1250 A.D. and became vassals of more important
groups. Eventually some enemies drove them away from the fertile shore.
The Mexica fled to a swampy, uninhabited island. According to an account
by Hernando Álvaro Tezozómoc, grandson of the last Mexica ruler, the
refugees stumbled about the island for days, looking for food and a place to
settle, until one of the priests had a vision in a dream. In the dream, the
Mexica’s patron deity instructed his people to look in the swamp for a
cactus. Standing on the cactus, the god promised, “you shall see an eagle…
warming itself in the sun.”
And [the next morning], once more, they went in among the
rushes, in among the reeds, to the edge of the spring.
And when they came out into the reeds,
There at the edge of the spring was the tenochtli [a cactus
fruit],
And they saw an eagle on the tenochtli, perched on it, standing
on it.
It was eating something, it was feeding,
It was pecking at what it was eating.
And when the eagle saw the Mexica, he bowed his head low.
Its nest, its pallet, was of every kind of precious feather—
Of lovely cotinga feathers, roseate spoonbill feathers, quetzal
feathers.
And they also saw strewn about the heads of sundry birds,
The heads of precious birds strung together,
And some birds’ feet and bones.
And the god called out to them, he said to them,
“Oh Mexica, it shall be there!”
(But the Mexica did not see who spoke.)
It was for this reason that they call it Tenochtitlan.
And the Mexica wept, they said,
“Oh happy, oh blessed are we!
We have beheld the city that shall be ours!
Let us go now, let us rest….”
This was in the year…1325.
In this way came into being Tenochtitlan, sole rival, in size and opulence, to
Teotihuacan.
Among the Mexica, a council of clan elders chose the overall ruler. Or,
rather, chose the overall rulers—the Mexica divided authority between a
tlatoani (literally, “speaker”), a diplomatic and military commander who
controlled relations with other groups, and a cihuacoatl (literally, “female
serpent”), who supervised internal affairs. For a century after Tenochtitlan’s
birth, the tlatoani’s position was unenviable. The Mexica were subordinated
by a nearby city-state on the shore, and the tlatoani was forced to send
Mexica men as conscripts for its wars. Only in 1428 did Itzacoatl, a newly
selected tlatoani, ally with two other small vassal states to overthrow their
mutual overlords. In victory, the three groups officially formed the Triple
Alliance, with the Mexica the most powerful leg of the tripod. Like
Tawantinsuyu, the empire grew rapidly. Its presiding genius was not
Itzacoatl, though, but his nephew Tlacaelel (1398–1480).
During his long life Tlacaelel was twice offered the position of tlatoani
but turned it down both times. Preferring the less glorious and supposedly
less influential position of cihuacoatl, head of internal affairs, he ruled from
behind the scenes, dominating the Alliance for more than fifty years and
utterly reengineering Mexica society. Born to an elite family, Tlacaelel first
became known at the age of thirty, when he inspired the Mexica to revolt
against their masters, supervised the gestation of the Alliance, and served as
Itzacoatl’s general during the assault. After the victory he met with Itzacoatl
and the Mexica clan leaders. In addition to taking slaves and booty, wartime
victors in central Mexico often burned their enemies’ codices, the hand-
painted picture-texts in which priests recorded their people’s histories.
Tlacaelel insisted that in addition to destroying the codices of their former
oppressors the Mexica should set fire to their own codices. His explanation
for this idea can only be described as Orwellian: “It is not fitting that our
people / Should know these pictures. / Our people, our subjects, will be lost
/ And our land destroyed, / For these pictures are full of lies.” The “lies”
were the inconvenient fact that the Mexica past was one of poverty and
humiliation. To motivate the people properly, Tlacaelel said, the priesthood
should rewrite Mexica history by creating new codices, adding in the great
deeds whose lack now seemed embarrassing and adorning their ancestry
with ties to the Toltecs and Teotihuacan.
A visionary and patriot, Tlacaelel believed that the Mexica were destined
to rule a vast empire. But because ambition succeeds best when disguised
by virtue, he wanted to furnish the Alliance with an animating ideology—a
manifest destiny, as it were, or mission civilisatrice. He came up with a
corker: a theogony that transformed the Mexica into keepers of the cosmic
order.
At its center was Huitzilopochtli, a martial god who wore a helmet
shaped like a hummingbird’s head and carried a fire-breathing serpent as a
weapon. Huitzilopochtli had long been the Mexica’s patron deity. It was he
who had entered the Mexica priest’s dream to explain where to found
Tenochtitlan. After the formation of the Triple Alliance, Tlacaelel “went
about persuading the people,” as one Mexica historian wrote, that
Huitzilopochtli was not a mere tutelary deity, but a divinity essential to the
fate of humankind.
At the apex of the celestial hierarchy stood Ometeotl, the omnipresent
sustainer of the cosmos, “the Lord of the Close Vicinity” in Nahuatl. In
Tlacaelel’s vision, Ometeotl had four sons, one of whom was
Huitzilopochtli. These four sons had been vying for supremacy since the
beginning of time; the history of the universe was mainly a record of their
endless struggle. At intervals the brothers would wrestle themselves into a
precarious equilibrium, like sumo giants straining motionlessly against each
other in the ring, with one brother on top and the other three in a temporary,
isometric balance below. In these interregnums of order, Tlacaelel
explained, the topmost brother linked himself to the sun, on which all living
creatures depend.
In some versions of the story, the brother became the sun; in others, he
merely supervised its workings. Either way, life could exist only when one
brother held sway and the cosmic battle quieted and the sun was able to
shine. But when the balance came apart, as it always did, the brothers would
resume their strife. The sun would go dark, sinking the cosmos into an
endless, lethal night. Eventually the sons would arrive at a new transitory
order and reignite the sun, letting existence begin anew. This apocalyptic
cycle had occurred four times before. The Mexica lived during the Fifth
Sun, when the sun was identified with Huitzilopochtli.
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
shall be famine, / And that we all shall perish.” But the calamity could be
postponed, at least for a while, if the sun was fortified for its battles with the
stars. To gain strength, the sun needed chalchíhuatl—the mysterious,
ineffable fluid of life-energy. The sacred mission of the Triple Alliance,
Tlacaelel proclaimed, was to furnish this vital substance to Huitzilopochtli,
who would then use it for the sun, postponing the death of everyone on the
planet.
There was but one method for obtaining this life-energy: ritual human
sacrifice. To obtain the victims, Tlacaelel said (according to one of
Sahagún’s contemporaries), the sun needed a “marketplace” where he could
“go with his army [that is, the army of the Triple Alliance] to buy victims,
men for him to eat…. And this will be a good thing, for it will be as if he
had his maize cakes hot from the griddle—tortillas from a nearby place, hot
and ready to eat whenever he wishes them.” Occasionally the victims were
slaves and criminals, but mainly they were prisoners of war. In this way the
sacred mission of the Triple Alliance became translated into a secular
mission: to obtain prisoners to sacrifice for the sun, the Alliance had to take
over the world. In Tlacaelel’s scheme, imperial conquests were key to “the
moral combat against evil,” explained Miguel León-Portilla, a Mexican
historian who has devoted much of his career to analyzing Mexica thought.
“The survival of the universe depended on them.”
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. (Cortés may well have been correct when he estimated
that sacrifice claimed “three or four thousand souls” a year.)
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. London, the historian Fernand
Braudel tells us, held public executions eight times a year at Tyburn, just
north of Hyde Park. (The diplomat Samuel Pepys paid a shilling for a good
view of a Tyburn hanging in 1664; watching the victim beg for mercy, he
wrote, was a crowd of “at least 12 or 14,000 people.”) 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. “They were part of the landscape.”
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. France and Spain were
still more bloodthirsty than England, according to Braudel.
In their penchant for ceremonial public slaughter, the Alliance and
Europe were more alike than either side grasped. 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. 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? 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.
The Nahuatl word tlamatini (literally, “he who knows things”) meant
something akin to “thinker-teacher”—a philosopher, if you will. The
tlamatini, who “himself was writing and wisdom,” was expected to write
and maintain the codices and live in a way that set a moral example. “He
puts a mirror before others,” the Mexica said. 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.
Like Greek philosophy, the teachings of the tlamatinime were only
tenuously connected to the official dogma of Tlacaelel. (To be sure, Plato
does have Socrates subtly “correct” Homer, because the gods supposedly
couldn’t have behaved in the immoral way described by the poet. But by
and large the Greek pantheon on Mount Olympus plays no role in either
Plato or Aristotle.) But the tlamatinime shared the religion’s sense of the
evanescence of existence. “Truly do we live on Earth?” asked a poem or
song attributed to Nezahualcóyotl (1402–72), a founding figure in
Mesoamerican thought and the tlatoani of Texcoco, one of the other two
members of the Triple Alliance. His lyric, among the most famous in the
Nahuatl canon, answers its own question:
Not forever on earth; only a little while here.
Be it jade, it shatters.
Be it gold, it breaks.
Be it a quetzal feather, it tears apart.
Not forever on earth; only a little while here.
In another verse assigned to Nezahualcóyotl this theme emerged even
more baldly:
Like a painting, we will be erased.
Like a flower, we will dry up here on earth.
Like plumed vestments of the precious bird,
That precious bird with the agile neck,
We will come to an end.
Contemplating mortality, thinkers in many cultures have drawn solace
from the prospect of life after death. This consolation was denied to the
Mexica, who were agonizingly uncertain about what happened to the soul.
“Do flowers go to the region of the dead?” Nezahualcóyotl asked. “In the
Beyond, are we still dead or do we live?” 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. Similarly, the poet’s speech would be “his word, his
breath” (itlatol ihiyo). A double-barreled term for “truth” is neltilitztli
tzintliztli, which means something like “fundamental truth, true basic
principle.” In Nahuatl, the words almost shimmer with connotation: what
was true was well grounded, stable and immutable, enduring above all.
Because we human beings are transitory, our lives as ephemeral as
dreams, the tlamatinime suggested that immutable truth is by its nature
beyond human experience. 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.
According to León-Portilla, one exit from this philosophical blind alley
was seen by the fifteenth-century poet Ayocuan Cuetzpaltzin, who described
it metaphorically, as poets will, by invoking the coyolli bird, known for its
bell-like song:
He goes his way singing, offering flowers.
And his words rain down
Like jade and quetzal plumes.
Is this what pleases the Giver of Life?
Is that the only truth on earth?
Ayocuan’s remarks cannot be fully understood out of the Nahuatl context,
León-Portilla argued. “Flowers and song” was a standard double epithet for
poetry, the highest art; “jade and quetzal feathers” was a synecdoche for
great value, in the way that Europeans might refer to “gold and silver.” The
song of the bird, spontaneously produced, stands for aesthetic inspiration.
Ayocuan was suggesting, León-Portilla said, that there is a time when
humankind can touch the enduring truths that underlie our fleeting lives.
That time is at the moment of artistic creation. “From whence come the
flowers [the artistic creations] that enrapture man?” asks the poet. “The
songs that intoxicate, the lovely songs?” And he answers: “Only from His
[that is, Ometeotl’s] home do they come, from the innermost part of
heaven.” Through art alone, the Mexica said, can human beings approach
the real.
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. The stacks of Nahuatl manuscripts in Mexican
archives depict the tlamatinime meeting to exchange ideas and gossip, as
did the Vienna Circle and the French philosophes and the Taisho-period
Kyoto school. The musings of the tlamatinime occurred in intellectual
neighborhoods frequented by philosophers from Brussels to Beijing, but the
mix was entirely the Mexica’s own. Voltaire, Locke, Rousseau, and Hobbes
never had a chance to speak with these men or even know of their existence
—and here, at last, we begin to appreciate the enormity of the calamity, for
the distintegration of native America was a loss not just to those societies
but to the human enterprise as a whole.
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!
Here and there we see clues to what might have been. 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, expanding them
and in the process creating an aesthetic nouvelle vague. European surrealists
came across this colorful new art in the first years of the twentieth century.
As artists will, they stole everything they could, transfiguring the images
further. Their interest helped a new generation of indigenous artists to
explore new themes.
Now envision this kind of fertile back-and-forth happening in a hundred
ways with a hundred cultures—the gifts from four centuries of intellectual
exchange. One can hardly imagine anything more valuable. Think of the
fruitful impact on Europe and its descendants from contacting Asia.
Imagine the effect on these places and people from a second Asia. Along
with the unparalleled loss of life, that is what vanished when smallpox came
ashore.
ASSIGNING BLAME
Weighing loss of such scale, one naturally wants to identify and denounce
the responsible party. In the case of the Mexica, the obvious target is
Hernán Cortés, who landed near what is now the city of Veracruz on April
22, 1519. An astute politician, Cortés studied the Triple Alliance with a
view to dismembering it. The empire, he quickly understood, was anything
but unified. Like Tawantinsuyu, it was a patchwork of satrapies rather than
a unified state; indeed, several large groups within the Alliance had
managed to hang on to their independence despite being surrounded by
hostile forces. Although the empire left the original elites of conquered
lands in place, it humiliated them. The people, forced to disgorge ever-
increasing tribute to Tenochtitlan, were resentful and bitter. Cortés divined
the discontent beneath the Alliance’s martial display and would later benefit
from it.
Marching inland from the sea, the Spanish at first fought repeatedly with
Tlaxcala, a confederation of four small kingdoms that had maintained its
independence despite repeated Alliance incursions. 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. To seal the partnership, one of the four kings—
Tlaxcala’s main military leader—betrothed his daughter to Pedro de
Alvarado, Cortés’s second-in-command. Mounted on their strange,
monstrous beasts, the Spanish rode at the forefront of an army of perhaps
twenty thousand Tlaxcalans. In November 1519, they entered Tenochtitlan,
brushing by the objections of the startled and indecisive tlatoani, the
famous Motecuhzoma (pronounced a bit like Mo-tayk-SZU-ma; he is better
known, inaccurately, as Montezuma).
TRIPLE ALLIANCE, 1519 A.D.
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. Boats flitted like butterflies around the three grand causeways
that linked Tenochtitlan to the mainland. Long aqueducts conveyed water
from the distant mountains across the lake and into the city. 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. (Streets that weren’t ankle-deep in sewage! The conquistadors
had never conceived of such a thing.)
And the whole of this wealth and power, Cortés subsequently explained
to the Spanish king, flowed into the hands of Motecuhzoma.
Can there be anything more magnificent than that this barbarian lord
should have all the things to be found under the heavens in his domain,
fashioned in gold and silver and jewel and feathers? And so realistic in
gold and silver that no smith in the world could have done better? And
in jewels so fine that it is impossible to imagine with what instruments
they were cut so perfectly?…In Spain there is nothing to compare with
it.
Dazzled as he was, Cortés was also aware that with a single command
Motecuhzoma could order his army “to obliterate all memory of us.” The
Spaniards counteracted this threat by inventing a pretext to seize the
tlatoani in his own palace, making him first their captive and then their
puppet.
In both Europe and Mesoamerica kings ruled by the dispensation of the
heavens. 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. Fearing the worst, the debased tlatoani made a
begging public appearance on behalf of the Spanish. He soon died, either
murdered by the Spaniards (according to Mexica accounts) or slain by his
own countrymen (as Spanish chronicles tell it). Soon after came the long-
delayed assault. 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. Although the Alliance destroyed
the causeways in front of the Spaniards, the remnants of the invaders were
able to cross the gaps because they were so choked with the dead that the
men could walk on the bodies of their countrymen. 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.
An enormous, opulent city of canals and (mostly) artificial islands
in the middle of a great mountain lake, the Mexica capital of
Tenochtitlan stunned the conquistadors when they first saw it.
This reconstruction, a mural by the artist Miguel Covarrubias, in
Mexico City’s great archaeology museum, underplays the
busyness of the city; eyewitness accounts report that clouds of
boats darted around its edges and through its canals.
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. And even this enormous force might not
have overcome the empire if while Cortés was building his ships
Tenochtitlan had not been swept by smallpox in the same pandemic that
later wiped out Tawantinsuyu. Without any apparent volition by Cortés, the
great city lost at least a third of its population to the epidemic, including
Cuitlahuac.
Sixteenth-century Mexica drawings of smallpox, the disease that
destroyed the empire by crippling the defenders of Tenochtitlan in
the battle against Cortés and his native allies. “An epidemic broke
out, a sickness of pustules,” begins the account in Bernardino de
Sahagún’s General History of the Things of New Spain (ca. 1575,
in James Lockhart’s translation). “Large bumps spread on people,
some were entirely covered. They spread everywhere, on the face,
the head, the chest, etc…. [Victims] could no longer walk about,
but lay in their dwellings and sleeping places, no longer able to
move or stir. They were unable to change position, to stretch out
on their sides or face down, or raise their heads…. The pustules
that covered people caused great desolation; very many people
died of them, and many just starved to death; starvation reigned,
and no one took care of others any longer.” The drawing at left,
from a sixteenth-century codex, is a winter-count-like depiction
of a year dominated by smallpox; two men lie dying or dead, their
bodies spotted with pustules. The drawing below, from the
General History, shows cries of pain escaping from victims’ lips.
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. The Alliance
capitulated on August 21, 1521. It was the end of an imperial tradition that
dated back to Teotihuacan a millennium before.
Cortés was directly responsible for much of the carnage in Tenochtitlan,
but the war was only a small part of a larger catastrophe for which blame is
harder to assign. 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.
From Bartolomé de Las Casas on, Europeans have known that their
arrival brought about a catastrophe for Native Americans. “We, Christians,
have destroyed so many kingdoms,” reflected Pedro Cieza de León, the
traveler in postconquest Peru. “For wherever the Spaniards have passed,
conquering and discovering, it is as though a fire had gone, destroying
everything in its path.” And since Las Casas historians, clerics, and political
activists have debated whether Europeans and their descendants in the
Americas are morally culpable for the enormous Indian losses. Indeed,
some writers have employed the loaded term “holocaust” to describe the
contact and its aftermath. Following in its train, inevitably, has come an
even more potent label: genocide.
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. For that reason, they fall into a different moral
class than the Jewish Holocaust, which was a state policy of mass murder.
“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. The wave of Indian deaths, in his view, was “a tragedy
that occurred despite the sincere and indisputable desire of the Europeans to
keep the Indian population alive.”
Berkeley researchers Cook and Borah spent decades
reconstructing the population of the former Triple Alliance realm
in the wake of the Spanish conquest. By combining colonial-era
data from many sources, the two men estimated that the number
of people in the region fell from 25.2 million in 1518, just before
Cortés arrived, to about 700,000 in 1623—a 97 percent drop in
little more than a century. (Each marked date is one for which
they presented a population estimate.) Using parish records,
Mexican demographer Elsa Malvido calculated the sequence of
epidemics in the region, portions of which are shown here. Dates
are approximate, because epidemics would last several years. The
identification of some diseases is uncertain as well; for example,
sixteenth-century Spaniards lumped together what today are seen
as distinct maladies under the rubric “plague.” In addition, native
populations were repeatedly struck by “cocoliztli,” a disease the
Spanish did not know but that scientists have suggested might be
a rat-borne hantavirus—spread, in part, by the postconquest
collapse of Indian sanitation measures. Both reconstructions are
tentative, but the combined picture of catastrophic depopulation
has convinced most researchers in the field.
Katz overstates his case. 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. In fact, the Indian deaths were such a severe financial blow to the
colonies that they led, according to Borah, to an “economic depression” that
lasted “more than a century.” To resupply themselves with labor, the
Spaniards began importing slaves from Africa.
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.” To the “problem of his relation to the white race,” Holmes said,
there was one solution: “extermination.” 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. How
can they be morally culpable for it?
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. “And what was their
collective response to this understanding?” asked Ward Churchill, a
professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
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.
But this, too, overstates the case. 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 conquistadors knew the
potential impact of disease, but its actual impact, which they could not
control, was in the hands of God.
The Mexica agreed. 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.”
Famously, the conquistador Bernal Díaz de Castillo ticked off the reasons
he and others joined Cortés: “to serve God and His Majesty [the king of
Spain], to give light to those who were in darkness, and to grow rich, as all
men desire to do.” In Díaz’s list, spiritual and material motivations were
equally important. Cortés was constantly preoccupied by the search for
gold, but he also had to be restrained by the priests accompanying him from
promulgating the Gospel in circumstances sure to anger native leaders.
After the destruction of Tenochtitlan, the Spanish court and intellectual elite
were convulsed with argument for a century about whether the conversions
were worth the suffering inflicted. Many believed that even if Indians died
soon after conversion, good could still occur. “Christianity is not about
getting healthy, it’s about getting saved,” Crease said, summarizing. Today
few Christians would endorse this argument, but that doesn’t make it any
easier to assign the correct degree of blame to their ancestors.
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. “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.
ISN’T THIS ALL JUST REVISIONISM?
Yes, of course—except that it’s more like re-revisionism. 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.”
So far as is known, Las Casas never tried to enumerate the original native
population. But he did try to calculate how many died from Spanish disease
and brutality. In Las Casas’s “sure, truthful estimate,” his countrymen in the
first five decades after Columbus wiped out “more than twelve million
souls, men and women and children; and in truth I believe, without trying to
deceive myself, that it was more than fifteen million.” Twenty years later,
he raised his estimate of Indian deaths—and hence of the initial population
—to forty million.
Las Casas’s successors usually shared his ideas—the eighteenth-century
Jesuit Francisco Javier Clavijero, for example, asserted that the pre-
Columbian population of Mexico alone was thirty million. But gradually a
note of doubt crept in. 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—about the
number that Las Casas believed had died in Mesoamerica alone. Twenty
years after that, the estimates had declined by another factor of five.
Today the picture has reversed. The High Counters seem to be winning
the argument, at least for now. No definitive data exist, but the majority of
the extant evidentiary scraps indicate it. “Most of the arrows point in that
direction,” Denevan said to me. 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.” Even Henige, of Numbers from Nowhere, is no Low Counter. In
Numbers from Nowhere, he argues that “perhaps 40 million throughout the
Western Hemisphere” is a “not unreasonable” figure—putting him at the
low end of the High Counters, but a High Counter nonetheless. Indeed, it is
the same figure provided by Las Casas, patron saint of High Counters,
foremost among the old Spanish sources whose estimates Henige spends
many pages discounting.
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. The Americas were filled
with an enthusiastically diverse assortment of peoples who had knocked
about the continents for millennia. “We are talking about enormous
numbers of people,” she told me. “You have to wonder, Who were all these
people? And what were they doing?”
PART TWO
Very Old Bones
Pleistocene Wars
POSSIBLY A VERY ODD HAPLOGROUP
The last time I spoke with Sérgio D. J. Pena, he was hunting for ancient
Indians in modern blood. The blood was sealed into thin, rodlike vials in
Pena’s laboratory at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, in Belo
Horizonte, Brazil’s third-largest city. To anyone who has seen a molecular
biology lab on the television news, the racks of refrigerating tanks, whirling
DNA extractors, and gene-sequencing machines in Pena’s lab would look
familiar. But what Pena was doing with them would not. One way to
describe Pena’s goal would be to say that he was trying to bring back a
people who vanished thousands of years ago. Another would be to say that
he was wrestling with a scientific puzzle that had resisted resolution since
1840.
In that year Peter Wilhelm Lund, a Danish botanist, found thirty
skeletons in caves twenty miles north of Belo Horizonte. The caves were
named Lagoa Santa, after a nearby village. Inside them were a jumble of
remains from people and big, extinct beasts. If the human and animal bones
were from the same time period, as their proximity suggested, the
implication was that people had been living in the Americas many
thousands of years ago, much longer than most scientists then believed.
Who were these ancient hunters? 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.
Scientists finally examined the Lagoa Santa skeletons in the 1960s.
Laboratory tests showed that the bones could be fifteen thousand years old
—possibly the oldest human remains in the Western Hemisphere. Lund had
noted the skulls’ heavy brows, which are rare in Native Americans. The new
measurements confirmed that oddity and suggested that these people were
in many ways physically quite distinct from modern Indians, which
indicated, at least to some Brazilian archaeologists, that the Lagoa Santa
people could not have been the ancestors of today’s native populations.
Instead the earliest inhabitants of the Americas must have been some other
kind of people.
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. Pena
had studied and worked for twelve years overseas, mainly in Canada and
the United States. He returned in 1982 to Belo Horizonte, a surging,
industrial city in the nation’s east-central highlands. In Brazilian terms, it
was like abandoning a glamorous expatriate life in Paris to come back to
Chicago. Pena had become interested while abroad in using genetics as a
historical tool—studying family trees and migrations by examining DNA.
At Belo Horizonte, he joined the university faculty and founded, on the
side, Brazil’s first DNA-fingerprinting company, providing paternity tests
for families and forensic studies for the police. He taught, researched,
published in prestigious U.S. and European journals, and ran his company.
In time he became intrigued by the Lagoa Santa skeletons.
The most straightforward way to discover whether the Lagoa Santa
people were related to modern Indians, Pena decided, would be to compare
DNA from their skeletons with DNA from living Indians. In 1999 his team
tried to extract DNA from Lagoa Santa bones. When the DNA turned out to
be unusable, Pena came up with a second, more unorthodox approach: he
decided to look for Lagoa Santa DNA in the Botocudo.
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.)
Although apparently never numerous, they resisted conquest so successfully
that in 1801 the Portuguese colonial government formally launched a “just
war against the cannibalistic Botocudo.” There followed a century of
intermittent strife, which slowly drove the Botocudo to extinction.
With their slightly bulging brows, deepset eyes, and square jaws, the
Botocudo were phenotypically different (that is, different in appearance)
from their neighbors—a difference comparable to the difference between
West Africans and Scandinavians. More important, some Brazilian
scientists believe, the Botocudo were phenotypically similar to the Lagoa
Santa people. If the similarity was due to a genetic connection—that is, if
the Botocudo were a remnant of an early non-Indian population at Lagoa
Santa—studying Botocudo DNA should provide clues to the genetic
makeup of the earliest Americans. To discover whether that genetic
connection existed, Pena would first have to obtain some Botocudo DNA.
This requirement would have seemed to doom the enterprise, because the
Botocudo no longer exist. But Pena had an idea—innovative or
preposterous, depending on the point of view—of how one might find some
Botocudo DNA anyway.
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. Mitochondria are minute, bean-shaped objects,
hundreds of which bob about like so much flotsam in the warm, salty
envelope of the cell. The body’s chemical plants, they gulp in oxygen and
release the energy-rich molecules that power life. Mitochondria are widely
believed to descend from bacteria that long ago somehow became
incorporated into one of our evolutionary ancestors. They replicate
themselves independently of the rest of the cell, without using its DNA. To
accomplish this, they have their own genome, a tiny thing with fewer than
fifty genes, left over from their former existence as free-floating bacteria.
Because sperm cells are basically devoid of mitochondria, almost all of an
embryo’s mitochondria come from the egg. Children’s mitochondria are
thus in essence identical to their mother’s. *14
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. Because fathers don’t contribute mitochondrial DNA to the
embryo, the succession occurs only through the female line.
In the late 1970s several scientists realized that an ethnic group’s
mitochondrial DNA could provide clues to its ancestry. Their reasoning was
complex in detail, but simple in principle. 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. In 1990 a team led by Douglas C.
Wallace, now at the University of California at Irvine, discovered that 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.
Wallace’s research gave Pena a target to shoot at. Even as the Brazilian
government was wiping out the Botocudos, some Brazilian men of
European descent were marrying Botocudo women. Generations later, the
female descendants of those unions should still have mitochondria identical
to the mitochondria of their female Botocudo ancestors. In other words,
Pena might be able to find ancient American DNA hidden in Brazil’s
European population.
Pena had blood samples from people who believed their grandparents or
great-grandparents were Indians and who had lived in Botocudo territory.
“I’m looking for, possibly, a very odd haplogroup,” he told me. “One that is
not clearly indigenous or clearly European.” If such a haplogroup turned up
in Pena’s assays, it could write a new chapter in the early history of Native
Americans. He expected to be searching for a while, and anything he found
would need careful confirmation.
Since the sixteenth century, the origins of Native Americans have been an
intellectual puzzle. *15 Countless amateur thinkers took a crack at the
problem, as did anthropologists and archaeologists when those disciplines
were invented. The professionals made no secret of their disdain for the
amateurs, whom they regarded as annoyances, cranks, or frauds.
Unfortunately for the experts, in the 1920s and 1930s their initial theories
about the timing of Indians’ entrance into the Americas were proven wrong,
and in a way that allowed the crackpots to claim vindication. Thirty years
later a new generation of researchers put together a different theory of
Native American origins that gained general agreement. But 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. “It really does seem sometimes that scientific principles are going
out the window,” the archaeologist C. Vance Haynes said to me, unhappily.
“If you listen to [the dissenting researchers], they want to throw away
everything we’ve established.”
Haynes was waxing rhetorical—the critics don’t want to jettison
everything from the past. But I could understand the reason for his dour
tone. Again the experts were said to have been proved wrong, opening a
door that until recently was bolted against the crackpots. A field that had
seemed unified was split into warring camps. And projects like Pena’s,
which not long ago would have seemed marginal, even nutty, now might
have to be taken seriously.
In another sense, though, Haynes’s unhappy view seemed off the mark.
The rekindled dispute over Indian origins has tended to mask a greater
archaeological accomplishment: the enormous recent accumulation of
knowledge about the American past. In almost every case, Indian societies
have been revealed to be older, grander, and more complex than was
thought possible even twenty years ago. Archaeologists not only have
pushed back the date for humanity’s entrance into the Americas, they have
learned that the first large-scale societies grew up earlier than had been
believed—almost two thousand years earlier, and in a different part of the
hemisphere. And even those societies that had seemed best understood, like
the Maya, have been placed in new contexts on the basis of new
information.
At one point I asked Pena what he thought the reaction would be if he
discovered that ancient Indians were, in fact, not genetically related to
modern Indians. He was standing by a computer printer that was spewing
out graphs and charts, the results of another DNA comparison. “It will seem
impossible to believe at first,” he said, flipping through the printout. “But if
it is true—and I am not saying that it is—people will ultimately accept it,
just like all the other impossible ideas they’ve had to accept.”
LOST TRIBES
So various were the peoples of the Americas that continent-wide
generalizations are risky to the point of folly. Nonetheless, one can say that
for the most part the initial Indian-European encounter was less of an
intellectual shock to Indians than to Europeans. Indians were surprised
when strange-looking people appeared on their shores, but unlike
Europeans they were not surprised that such strange people existed.
Many natives, seeking to categorize the newcomers, were open to the
possibility that they might belong to the realm of the supernatural. They
often approached visitors as if they might be deities, possibly calculating, in
the spirit of Pascal’s wager, that the downside of an erroneous attribution of
celestial power was minimal. The Taino Indians, Columbus reported after
his first voyage, “firmly believed that I, with my ships and men, came from
the heavens…. Wherever I went, [they] ran from house to house, and to the
towns around, crying out, ‘Come! come! and see the men from the
heavens!’” On Columbus’s later voyages, his crew happily accepted
godhood—until the Taino began empirically testing their divinity by forcing
their heads underwater for long periods to see if the Spanish were, as gods
should be, immortal.
Motecuhzoma, according to many scholarly texts, believed that Cortés
was the god-hero Quetzalcoatl returning home, in fulfillment of a prophecy.
What historian Barbara Tuchman called the emperor’s “wooden-
headedness, in the special variety of religious mania” is often said to be
why he didn’t order his army to wipe out the Spaniards immediately. But
the anthropologist Matthew Restall has noted that none of the
conquistadors’ writings mention this supposed apotheosis, not even Cortés’s
lengthy memos to the Spanish king, which go into detail about every other
wonderful thing he did. Instead the Quetzalcoatl story first appears decades
later. True, the Mexica apparently did call the Spaniards teteo, a term
referring both to gods and to powerful, privileged people. The ambiguity
captures the indigenous attitude toward the hairy, oddly dressed strangers
on their shores: recognition that their presence was important, plus a
willingness to believe that such unusual people might have qualities unlike
those of ordinary men and women.
Similarly, groups like the Wampanoag, Narragansett, and Haudenosaunee
in eastern North America also thought at first that Europeans might have
supernatural qualities. But this was because Indians north and south
regarded Europeans as human beings exactly like themselves. In their view
of the world, certain men and women, given the right circumstances, could
wield more-than-human powers. If the Wampanoag and Mexica had
shamans who could magically inflict sickness, why couldn’t the British?
(The Europeans, who themselves believed that people could become
witches and magically spread disease, were hardly going to argue.)
As a rule, Indians were theologically prepared for the existence of
Europeans. In Choctaw lore, for example, the Creator breathed life into not
one but many primeval pairs of human beings scattered all over the earth. It
could not have been terribly surprising to Choctaw thinkers that the
descendants of one pair should show up in the territory of another.
Similarly, the Zuni took the existence of Spaniards in stride, though not
their actions. To the Zuni, whose accounts of their origins and early history
are as minutely annotated as those in the Hebrew Bible, all humankind
arose from a small band that faded into existence in a small, dark, womb-
like lower world. The sun took pity on these bewildered souls, gave them
maize to eat, and distributed them across the surface of the earth. The
encounter with Europeans was thus a meeting of long-separated cousins.
Contact with Indians caused Europeans considerably more consternation.
Columbus went to his grave convinced that he had landed on the shores of
Asia, near India. The inhabitants of this previously unseen land were
therefore Asians—hence the unfortunate name “Indians.” As his successors
discovered that the Americas were not part of Asia, Indians became a dire
anthropogonical problem. According to Genesis, all human beings and
animals perished in the Flood except those on Noah’s ark, which landed
“upon the mountains of Ararat,” thought to be in eastern Turkey. How, then,
was it possible for humans and animals to have crossed the immense
Pacific? Did the existence of Indians negate the Bible, and Christianity with
it?
Among the first to grapple directly with this question was the Jesuit
educator José de Acosta, who spent a quarter century in New Spain. Any
explanation of Indians’ origins, he wrote in 1590, “cannot contradict Holy
Writ, which clearly teaches that all men descend from Adam.” Because
Adam had lived in the Middle East, Acosta was “forced” to conclude “that
the men of the Indies traveled there from Europe or Asia.” For this to be
possible, the Americas and Asia “must join somewhere.”
If this is true, as indeed it appears to me to be,…we would have to say
that they crossed not by sailing on the sea, but by walking on land. And
they followed this way quite unthinkingly, changing places and lands
little by little, with some of them settling in the lands already
discovered and others seeking new ones. [Emphasis added]
Acosta’s hypothesis was in basic form widely accepted for centuries. For
his successors, in fact, the main task was not to discover whether Indians’
ancestors had walked over from Eurasia, but which Europeans or Asians
had done the walking. Enthusiasts proposed a dozen groups as the ancestral
stock: Phoenicians, Basques, Chinese, Scythians, Romans, Africans,
“Hindoos,” ancient Greeks, ancient Assyrians, ancient Egyptians, the
inhabitants of Atlantis, even straying bands of Welsh. But the most widely
accepted candidates were the Lost Tribes of Israel.
The story of the Lost Tribes is revealed mainly in the Second Book of
Kings of the Old Testament and the apocryphal Second (or Fourth,
depending on the type of Bible) Book of Esdras. At that time, according to
scripture, the Hebrew tribes had split into two adjacent confederations, the
southern kingdom of Judah, with its capital in Jerusalem, and the northern
kingdom of Israel, with its capital in Samaria. After the southern tribes took
to behaving sinfully, divine retribution came in the form of the Assyrian
king Shalmaneser V, who overran Israel and exiled its ten constituent tribes
to Mesopotamia (today’s Syria and Iraq). Now repenting of their
wickedness, the Bible explains, the tribes resolved to “go to a distant land
never yet inhabited by man, and there at last to be obedient to their laws.”
True to their word, they walked away and were never seen again.
Because the Book of Ezekiel prophesizes that in the final days God “will
take the children of Israel from among the heathen…and bring them into
their own land,” Christian scholars believed that the Israelites’ descendants
—Ezekiel’s “children of Israel”—must still be living in some remote place,
waiting to be taken back to their homeland. Identifying Indians as these
“lost tribes” solved two puzzles at once: where the Israelites had gone, and
the origins of Native Americans.
Acosta weighed the Indians-as-Jews theory but eventually dismissed it
because Indians were not circumcised. Besides, he blithely explained, Jews
were cowardly and greedy, and Indians were not. Others did not find his
refutation convincing. 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. (In a variant, the Book of Mormon
argued that some Indians were descended from Israelites though not
necessarily the Lost Tribes.) In 1650 James Ussher, archbishop of Armagh,
calculated from Old Testament genealogical data that God created the
universe on Sunday, October 23, 4004 B.C. So august was Ussher’s
reputation, wrote historian Andrew Dickson White, that “his dates were
inserted in the margins of the authorized version of the English Bible, and
were soon practically regarded as equally inspired with the sacred text
itself.” According to Ussher’s chronology, the Lost Tribes left Israel in 721
B.C. Presumably they began walking to the Americas soon thereafter. Even
allowing for a slow passage, the Israelites must have arrived by around 500
B.C. When Columbus landed, the Americas therefore had been settled for
barely two thousand years.
The Lost Tribes theory held sway until the nineteenth century, when it
was challenged by events. As Lund had in Brazil, British scientists
discovered some strange-looking human skeletons jumbled up with the
skeletons of extinct Pleistocene mammals. The find, quickly duplicated in
France, caused a sensation. To supporters of Darwin’s recently published
theory of evolution, the find proved that the ancestors of modern humans
had lived during the Ice Ages, tens or hundreds of thousands of years ago.
Others attacked this conclusion, and the skeletons became one of the casus
belli of the evolution wars. Indirectly, the discovery also stimulated
argument about the settlement of the Americas. Evolutionists believed that
the Eastern and Western Hemispheres had developed in concert. If early
humans had inhabited Europe during the Ice Ages, they must also have
lived in the Americas at the same time. Indians must therefore have arrived
before 500 B.C. Ussher’s chronology and the Lost Tribes scenario were
wrong.
The nineteenth century was the heyday of amateur science. In the United
States as in Europe, many of Darwin’s most ardent backers were successful
tradespeople whose hobby was butterfly or beetle collecting. When these
amateurs heard that the ancestors of Indians must have come to the
Americas thousands of years ago, a surprising number of them decided to
hunt for the evidence that would prove it.
“BLIND LEADERS OF THE BLIND”
In 1872 one such seeker—Charles Abbott, a New Jersey physician—found
stone arrowheads, scrapers, and axheads on his farm in the Delaware Valley.
Because the artifacts were crudely made, Abbott believed that they must
have been fashioned not by historical Indians but by some earlier, “ruder”
group, modern Indians’ long-ago ancestors. He consulted a Harvard
geologist, who told him that the gravel around the finds was ten thousand
years old, which Abbott regarded as proof that Pleistocene Man had lived in
New Jersey at least that far in the past. Indeed, he argued, Pleistocene Man
had lived in New Jersey for so many millennia that he had probably evolved
there. If modern Indians had migrated from Asia, Abbott said, they must
have “driven away” these original inhabitants. Egged on by his
proselytizing, other weekend bone hunters soon found similar sites with
similar crude artifacts. By 1890 amateur scientists claimed to have found
traces of Pleistocene Americans in New Jersey, Indiana, Ohio, and the
suburbs of Philadelphia and Washington, D.C.
Unsurprisingly, Christian leaders rejected Abbott’s claims, which (to
repeat) contradicted both Ussher’s chronology and the theologically
convenient Lost Tribes theory. More puzzling, at least to contemporary
eyes, was the equally vehement objections voiced by professional
archaeologists and anthropologists, especially those at the Smithsonian
Institution, which had established a Bureau of American Ethnology in 1879.
According to David J. Meltzer, a Southern Methodist University
archaeologist who has written extensively about the history of his field, the
bureau’s founders were determined to set the new disciplines on a proper
scientific footing. Among other things, this meant rooting out
pseudoscience. The bureau dispatched William Henry Holmes to scrutinize
the case for Pleistocene proto-Indians.
C. C. Abbott
William Henry Holmes
Holmes was a rigorous, orderly man with, Meltzer told me, “no sense of
humor whatsoever.” Although Holmes in no way believed that Indians were
descended from the Lost Tribes, he was also unwilling to believe that
Indians or anyone else had inhabited the Americas as far back as the Ice
Ages. His determined skepticism on this issue is hard to fathom. True, many
of the ancient skeletons in Europe were strikingly different from those of
contemporary humans—in fact, they were Neanderthals, a different
subspecies or species from modern humans—whereas all the Indian
skeletons that archaeologists had seen thus far looked anatomically modern.
But why did this lead Holmes to assume that Indians must have migrated to
the Americas in the recent past, a view springing from biblical chronology?
Underlying his actions may have been bureau researchers’ distaste for “relic
hunters” like Abbott, whom they viewed as publicity-seeking quacks.
Holmes methodically inspected half a dozen purported Ice Age sites,
including Abbott’s farm. In each case, he dismissed the “ancient artifacts”
as much more recent—the broken pieces and cast-asides of Indian
workshops from the colonial era. In Holmes’s sardonic summary, “Two
hundred years of aboriginal misfortune and Quaker inattention and
neglect”—this was a shot at Abbott, a Quaker—had transformed ordinary
refuse that was at most a few centuries old into a “scheme of cultural
evolution that spans ten thousand years.”
The Bureau of American Ethnology worked closely with the United
States Geological Survey, an independent federal agency founded at the
same time. Like Holmes, Geological Survey geologist W. J. McGee
believed it was his duty to protect the temple of Science from profanation
by incompetent and overimaginative amateurs. Anthropology, he lamented,
“is particularly attractive to humankind, and for this reason the untrained
are constantly venturing upon its purlieus; and since each heedless
adventurer leads a rabble of followers, it behooves those who have at heart
the good of the science…to bell the blind leaders of the blind.”
To McGee, one of the worst of these “heedless adventurers” was Abbott,
whose devotion to his purported Pleistocene Indians seemed to McGee to
exemplify the worst kind of fanaticism. Abbott’s medical practice collapsed
because patients disliked his touchy disposition and crackpot sermons about
ancient spear points. Forced to work as a clerk in Trenton, New Jersey, a
town he loathed, he hunted for evidence of Pleistocene Indians during
weekends on his farmstead. (In truth, the Abbott farm had a lot of artifacts;
it is now an official National Historic Landmark.) Bitterly resenting his
marginal position in the research world, he besieged scientific journals with
angry denunciations of Holmes and McGee, explanations of his own
theories, and investigations into the intelligence of fish (“that this class of
animals is more ‘knowing’ than is generally believed is, I hold,
unquestionable”), birds (“a high degree of intelligence”), and snakes
(“neither among the scanty early references to the serpents found in New
Jersey, nor in more recent herpetological literature, are there to be found
statements that bear directly upon the subject of the intelligence of snakes”).
Unsurprisingly, Abbott detested William Henry Holmes, W. J. McGee,
and the “scientific men of Washington” who were conspiring against the
truth. “The stones are inspected,” he wrote in one of the few doggerel
poems ever published in Science,
And Holmes cries, “rejected,
They’re nothing but Indian chips.”
He glanced at the ground,
Truth, fancied he found,
And homeward to Washington skips….
So dear W.J.,
There is no more to say,
Because you’ll never agree
That anything’s truth,
But what issues, forsooth,
From Holmes or the brain of McGee.
Abbott was thrilled when his associate Ernest Volk dug up a human
femur deep in the gravel of the farm. Volk had spent a decade searching for
Ice Age humans in New Jersey. Gloating that his new discovery was “the
key to it all,” Volk sent the bone for examination to a physical
anthropologist named Aleš Hrdli ka. (The name, approximately pronounced
A-lesh Herd-lish-ka, was a legacy of his birth in Bohemia.) Hrdli ka had
seen the Neanderthal skeletons, which did not resemble those of modern
humans. Similarly, he believed, ancient Indian skeletons should also differ
from those of their descendants. Volk’s femur looked anatomically
contemporary. But even if it had looked different, Hrdli ka said, that
wouldn’t be enough to prove that the ancestors of Indians walked New
Jersey thousands of years ago. Volk and Abbott would also have to prove
that the bone was old. Even if a bone looked just like a Neanderthal bone, it
couldn’t be classified as one if it had been found in modern construction
debris. Only if the archaeological context—the dirt and rock around the find
—was established as ancient could the bone be classified as ancient too.
In the next quarter century amateur bone hunters discovered dozens of
what they believed to be ancient skeletons in what they believed to be
ancient sediments. One by one Hrdli ka, who had moved to the Smithsonian
and become the most eminent physical anthropologist of his time, shot them
down. The skeletons are completely modern, he would say. And the
sediments around them were too disturbed to ascertain their age. People dig
graves, he reminded the buffs. You should assume from the outset that if you
find a skeleton six feet deep in the earth that the bones are a lot newer than
the dirt around them.
Aleš Hrdli ka
With his stern gaze, scowling moustache, and long, thick hair that swept
straight back from the forehead, Hrdli ka was the very image of celluloid-
collar Authority. He was an indefatigably industrious man who wrote some
four hundred articles and books; founded the American Journal of Physical
Anthropology; forcefully edited it for twenty-four years; and collected,
inspected, and cataloged more than 32,000 skeletons from around the
world, stuffing them into boxes at the Smithsonian. By temperament, he
was suspicious of anything that smacked of novelty and modishness. Alas,
the list of things that he dismissed as intellectual fads included female
scientists, genetic analysis, and the entire discipline of statistics—even such
simple statistical measures as standard deviations were notably absent from
the American Journal of Physical Anthropology. Hrdli ka regarded himself
as the conscience of physical anthropology and made it his business to set
boundaries. So thoroughly did he discredit all purported findings of ancient
Indians that a later director of the Bureau of American Ethnology admitted
that for decades it was a career-killer for an archaeologist to claim to have
“discovered indications of a respectable antiquity for the Indian.”
In Europe, every “favorable cave” showed evidence “of some ancient
man,” Hrdli ka proclaimed in March 1928. And the evidence they found in
those caves was “not a single implement or whatnot,” but of artifacts in
“such large numbers that already they clog some of the museums in
Europe.” Not in the Americas, though. “Where are any such things in
America?” he taunted the amateurs. “Where are Aleš the implements, the
bones of animals upon which these old men have fed?…Where is the
explanation of all this? What is the matter?”
FOLSOM AND THE GRAYBEARDS
Twenty years before Hrdli ka’s mockery, a flash flood tore a deep gully into
a ranch in the northeast corner of New Mexico, near the hamlet of Folsom.
Afterward ranch foreman George McJunkin checked the fences for damage.
Walking along the new gully, he spotted several huge bones projecting from
its sides. Born a slave before the Civil War, McJunkin had no formal
education—he had only learned to read as an adult. But he was an expert
horseman, a self-taught violinist, and an amateur geologist, astronomer, and
natural historian. He instantly recognized that the bones did not belong to
any extant species and hence must be very old. Believing that his discovery
was important, he tried over the years to show the bones to local
Folsomites. Most spurned his entreaties. Eventually a white blacksmith in a
nearby town came, saw, and got equally excited. McJunkin died in 1922.
Four years later, the blacksmith persuaded Jesse D. Figgins, head of the
Colorado Museum of Natural History, to send someone to Folsom.
Figgins wanted to display a fossil bison in his museum, especially if he
could get one of the big varieties that went extinct during the Pleistocene.
When he received a favorable report from Folsom, he dispatched a work
crew to dig out the bones. Its members quickly stumbled across two
artifacts—not crude, Abbott-style arrowheads, but elegantly crafted spear
points. They also found that a piece from one of the spear points was
pressed into the dirt surrounding a bison bone. Since this type of mammal
had last existed thousands of years ago, the spear point and its owner must
have been of equivalent antiquity.
The spear points both intrigued and dismayed Figgins. His museum had
discovered evidence that the Americas had been inhabited during the
Pleistocene, a major scientific coup. But this also put Figgins, who knew
little about archaeology, in the crosshairs of Aleš Hrdli ka.
Early in 1927 Figgins took the spear points to Washington, D.C. He met
both Hrdli ka and Holmes, who, to Figgins’s relief, treated him courteously.
Hrdli ka told Figgins that if more spear points turned up, he should not
excavate them, because that would make it difficult for others to view them
in their archaeological and geological context. Instead, he should leave
them in the ground and ask the experts to supervise their excavation.
Figgins regarded Hrdli ka’s words as a friendly suggestion. But
according to Meltzer, the Southern Methodist University anthropologist, the
great man’s motives were less charitable. Figgins had sent excavation teams
to several areas in addition to Folsom, and had also found implements in
them. Encouraged by the increasing number of discoveries, Figgins’s
estimation of their import was growing almost daily. Indeed, he was now
claiming that the artifacts were half a million years old. Half a million
years! One can imagine Hrdli ka’s disgust—Homo sapiens itself wasn’t
thought to be half a million years old. By asking Figgins to unearth any new
“discoveries” only in the presence of the scientific elite, Hrdli ka hoped to
eliminate the next round of quackery before it could take hold.
In August 1927 Figgins’s team at Folsom came across a spear point stuck
between two bison ribs. He sent out telegrams. Three renowned scientists
promptly traveled to New Mexico and watched Figgins’s team brush away
the dirt from the point and extract it from the gully. All three agreed, as they
quickly informed Hrdli ka, that the discovery admitted only one possible
explanation: thousands of years ago, a Pleistocene hunter had speared a
bison.
After that, Meltzer told me, “the whole forty-year battle was essentially
over. [One of three experts, A. V.] Kidder said, ‘This site is real,’ and that
was it.” Another of the experts, Barnum Brown of the American Museum of
Natural History in New York City, took over the excavations, shouldering
Figgins aside. After spending the next summer at Folsom, he introduced the
site to the world at a major scientific conference. His speech did not even
mention Figgins.
Hrdli ka issued his caustic “where are any such things” speech months
after learning about Folsom—a disingenuous act. But he never directly
challenged the spear points’ antiquity. Until his death in 1943, in fact, he
avoided the subject of Folsom, except to remark that the site wasn’t
conclusive proof that the Americas were inhabited during the Pleistocene.
“He won every battle but lost the war,” Meltzer said. “Every one of the sites
that he discredited was, in fact, not from the Pleistocene. He was
completely right about them. And he was right to insist that Figgins
excavate the Folsom points in front of experts. But Abbott and the rest of
the ‘nutcases’ were right that people came much earlier to the Americas.”
THE CLOVIS CONSENSUS
Early in 1929, the Smithsonian received a letter from Ridgely Whiteman, a
nineteen-year-old in the village of Clovis, New Mexico, near the state
border with Texas. Whiteman had graduated from high school the previous
summer and planned to make his living as a carpenter and, he hoped, as an
artist. Wandering in the basins south of Clovis, he observed what looked
like immense bones protruding from the dry, blue-gray clay. Whiteman,
who was part Indian, was fascinated by Indian lore and had been following
the archaeological excitement in Folsom, two hundred miles to the north.
He sent a letter to the Smithsonian, informing the staff that he, too, had
found “extinct elephant bones” and that someone there should take a look.
Surprisingly, the museum responded. Paleontologist Charles Gilmore took
the train to Clovis that summer.
Clovis is at the southern end of the Llano Estacado (the “Staked Plain”),
fifty thousand square miles of flat, almost featureless sand and scrub.
Whiteman’s bones were in Blackwater Draw, which during the Pleistocene
served as a wide, shallow regional drainage channel, a kind of long, slow-
moving lake. As the Ice Ages ended, Blackwater Draw slowly dried up. The
continuous flow of water turned into isolated ponds. Game animals
congregated around the water, and hunters followed them there. By the time
of Gilmore’s visit, Blackwater Draw was an arid, almost vegetation-free
jumble of sandy drifts and faces of fractured caliche. In one of
archaeology’s great missed opportunities, Gilmore walked around the area
for an hour, decided that it was of no interest, and took the train back to
Washington.
The thumbs-down response stupefied Whiteman, who had already turned
up dozens of fossils and artifacts there. On and off, he continued his efforts
to attract scholarly interest. In the summer of 1932 a local newspaper
reporter put him into contact with Edgar B. Howard, a graduate student at
the University of Pennsylvania, who had, one of his assistants later wrote, a
“driving mania” to discover a Folsom-like site of his own. Howard had
already spent three years combing the Southwest for ancient bones,
crawling into rattlesnake caves and taking a pickax to rock faces. Intrigued
by Whiteman’s curios, he asked if he could examine them that winter
during his down time. Howard took them back to Philadelphia but had no
chance to inspect them. A few weeks after his return a construction project
near Clovis unearthed more huge bones. Locals gleefully took them away—
one bowling-ball-size mammoth molar ended up as a doorstop. After
hearing the news, Howard raced back to see what he could salvage. He
telegrammed his supervisors on November 16:
EXTENSIVE BONE DEPOSIT AT NEW SITE. MOSTLY BISON,
ALSO HORSE & MAMMOTH. SOME EVIDENCE OF HEARTHS
ALONG EDGES. WILL TIE UP PERMISSIONS FOR FUTURE
WORK.
Howard returned to Clovis in the summer of 1933 and systematically
surveyed Blackwater Draw, looking for areas in which, like Folsom, human
artifacts and extinct species were mixed together. He quickly found several
and set to digging. Once again, the telegrams went out. A parade of
dignitaries from the East trooped out to inspect the excavations. Howard
worked at Clovis for four years, each time staffing the field crews with a
mix of sunburned locals in boots and jeans and well-tailored Ivy League
college students on vacation. “One greenhorn was heard upbraiding his
Massachusetts friend for not having perceived at once, as did he,” Howard’s
chief assistant later recalled, “that the purpose of a [local farmer’s] windmill
was for fanning heat-exhausted cattle.” Windmills were not the only
surprise in store for the students. The temperature in the digging pits
sometimes hit 130°F.
Slowly peeling away the geological layers, Howard’s workers revealed
that Blackwater Draw had hosted not one, but two ancient societies. One
had left relics just like those at Folsom. Below the dirt strata with these
objects, though, was a layer of quite different artifacts: bigger, thicker, and
not as beautifully made. This second, earlier culture became known as the
Clovis culture.
Because Clovis was so dry, its stratigraphy—the sequence of geological
layers—had not been jumbled up by later waterflow, a common
archaeological hazard. Because of this unusual clarity and because Howard
meticulously documented his work there, even the most skeptical
archaeologists quickly accepted the existence and antiquity of the Clovis
culture. To trumpet his findings, Howard arranged for the Academy of
Natural Sciences, in Philadelphia, to sponsor an international symposium on
Early Man. More than four hundred scientists migrated to Philadelphia from
Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia. The symposium featured a full-scale
reproduction, fifteen feet wide and thirty-four feet long, complete with
actual artifacts and bones, of a particularly profitable section of Howard’s
excavation. (Whiteman was not invited; he died in Clovis in 2003 at the age
of ninety-one.)
The most prominent speaker in Philadelphia was Aleš Hrdli ka, then
sixty-eight. Hrdli ka gave Clovis the ultimate accolade: silence. Before one
of the biggest archaeological audiences in history, Hrdli ka chose to discuss
the skeletal evidence for Indians’ early arrival in the Americas. He listed
every new find of old bones in the last two decades, and scoffed at them all.
“So far as human skeletal remains are concerned,” he concluded, “there is
to this moment no evidence that would justify the assumption of any great,
i.e., geological antiquity” for American Indians. Every word Hrdli ka said
was true—but irrelevant. By focusing on skeletons, he was able to avoid
discussing Clovis, the focus of the conference, because Howard had found
no skeletons there. *16
Clovis culture had a distinctive set of tools: scrapers, spear-straighteners,
hatchetlike choppers, crescent-moon-shaped objects whose function
remains unknown. Its hallmark was the “Clovis point,” a four-inch
spearhead with a slightly cut-in, concave tail; in silhouette, the points
somewhat resemble those goldfish-shaped cocktail crackers. Folsom points,
by contrast, are smaller and finer—perhaps two inches long and an eighth of
an inch thick—and usually have a less prominent tail. Both types have
wide, shallow grooves or channels called “flutes” cut into the two faces of
the head. The user apparently laid the tip of the spear shaft in the flute and
twisted hide or sinew repeatedly around the assembly to hold it together.
When the point broke, inevitable with stone tools, the head could be
loosened and slid forward on the shaft, letting the user chip a new point. A
paleo-Indian innovation, this type of fluting exists only in the Americas.
Clovis (left) and Folsom points (shown to scale; fluting at bases)
With Blackwater Draw as a pattern, scientists knew exactly what to look
for. During the next few decades, they discovered more than eighty large
paleo-Indian sites throughout the United States, Mexico, and southern
Canada. All of them had either Folsom or Clovis points, which convinced
many archaeologists that the Clovis people, the earlier of the two, must
have been the original Americans.
Nobody really knew how old the Clovis people were, though, because
geological strata can’t be dated precisely. Figgins surmised that Folsom had
been inhabited fifteen to twenty thousand years ago, which meant that
Clovis must be a little before that. More precise dates did not come in until
the 1950s, when Willard F. Libby, a chemist at the University of Chicago,
invented carbon dating.
Libby’s research began in the global scientific race during the 1930s and
1940s to understand cosmic rays, the mysterious, ultrahigh-velocity
subatomic particles that continually rain onto the earth from outer space.
Like so many bullets, the particles slam into air molecules in the upper
atmosphere, knocking off fragments that in turn strike other air molecules.
Along the way, Libby realized, the cascade of interactions creates a trickle
of carbon-14 (C14), a mildly radioactive form of carbon that over time
disintegrates—decays, as scientists say—back into a form of nitrogen.
Libby determined that the rate at which cosmic rays create C14 is roughly
equal to the rate at which it decays. As a result, a small but steady
percentage of the carbon in air, sea, and land consists of C14. Plants take in
C14 through photosynthesis, herbivores take it in from the plants, and
carnivores take it in from them. In consequence, every living cell has a
consistent, low level of C14—they are all very slightly radioactive, a
phenomenon that Libby first observed empirically.
When people, plants, and animals die, they stop assimilating C14. The
C14 already inside their bodies continues to decay, and as a result the
percentage of C14 in the dead steadily drops. The rate of decline is known
precisely; every 5,730 years, half of the C14 atoms in nonliving substances
become regular carbon atoms. By comparing the C14 level in bones and
wooden implements to the normal level in living tissues, Libby reasoned,
scientists should be able to determine the age of these objects with unheard-
of precision. It was as if every living creature had an invisible radioactive
clock in its cells.
In 1949 Libby and a collaborator ascertained the C14 level in, among
other things, a mummy coffin, a piece of Hittite floor, an Egyptian
pharaoh’s funerary boat, and the tomb of Sneferu of Meydum, the first
Fourth Dynasty pharaoh. Archaeologists already knew their dates of
construction, usually from written records; the scientists wanted to compare
their estimates to the known dates. Even though Libby and his collaborator
were still learning how to measure C14, their estimates were rarely more
than a century off—a level of agreement, they wrote dryly, that was “seen to
be satisfactory.”
Libby won a well-deserved Nobel Prize in 1960. By that time, carbon
dating was already revolutionizing archaeology. “You read books and find
statements that such and such a society or archaeological site is 20,000
years old,” he remarked. “We learned rather abruptly that these numbers,
these ancient ages, are not known.” Archaeologists had been making
inferences from limited, indirect data. With radiocarbon, these numbers,
these ancient ages, could be known, and with ever-increasing accuracy.
One of the first tasks assigned to the new technique was determining the
age of the Clovis culture. Much of the work occurred at the University of
Arizona, in Tucson, which in 1958 established the world’s first major
archaeological carbon-dating laboratory. At the new lab was a doctoral
student named C. Vance Haynes. Haynes was a mining engineer who
became fascinated by archaeology during a stint in the air force. While
serving at a base in the Southwest, he began collecting arrowheads, a hobby
that ultimately led to his abandoning geology and coming to the University
of Arizona as a graduate student in archaeology. As the Clovis-culture dates
crossed his lab bench, Haynes was struck by their consistency. No matter
what the location of a site, carbon dating showed that it was occupied
between 13,500 and 12,900 years ago. *17 To Haynes, with his geologist’s
training, the dates were auspicious. The Clovis culture arose just after the
only time period in which migration from Siberia seemed to have been
possible.
During the Ice Ages so much of the world’s water was frozen into
glaciers that sea levels fell as much as four hundred feet. The strait between
Siberia’s Chukotsky Peninsula and Alaska’s Seward Peninsula is now only
56 miles wide and about 120 feet deep, shallower than many lakes. The
decline in sea levels let the two peninsulas join up. What had been a frigid
expanse of whale habitat became a flat stretch of countryside more than a
thousand miles wide. Beringia, as this land is called, was surprisingly
temperate, sometimes even warmer than it is today; masses of low flowers
covered it every spring. The relative salubriousness of the climate may
seem incredible, given that Beringia is on the Arctic Circle and the world
was still in the throes of the Ice Ages, but many lines of evidence suggest
that it is true. In Siberia and Alaska, for instance, paleoentomologists—
scientists who study ancient insects—have discovered in late-Pleistocene
sediments fossil beetles and weevils of species that live only in places
where summer temperatures reach the fifties.
C. Vance Haynes
Beringia was easily traversable. Western Canada was not, because it was
buried beneath two massive, conjoined ice sheets, each thousands of feet
deep and two thousand miles long. Even today, crossing a vast, splintered
wilderness of ice would be a risky task requiring special vehicles and a big
support staff. For whole bands to walk across it with backpacks full of
supplies would be effectively impossible. (In any case, why would they
want to do it?
There was a short period, though, when the barrier could be avoided—or
at least some scientists so believed. The Ice Ages drew to a close about
fifteen thousand years ago. As the climate warmed, the glaciers slowly
melted and sea levels rose; within three thousand years, Beringia had again
disappeared beneath the waves. In the 1950s some geologists concluded
that between the beginning of the temperature rise and the resubmergence
of the land bridge the inland edges of the two great ice sheets in western
Canada shrank, forming a comparatively hospitable pathway between them.
This ice-free corridor ran down the Yukon River Valley and along the
eastern side of the Canadian Rockies. Even as the Pacific advanced upon
Beringia, these geologists said, plant and animal life recolonized the ice-
free corridor. And it did so just in time to let paleo-Indians through.
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.” Thirteen
thousand to fourteen thousand years ago, he suggested, a window in time
opened. During this interval—and, for all practical purposes, only during
this interval—paleo-Indians could have crossed Beringia, slipped through
the ice-free corridor, and descended into southern Alberta, from where they
would have been able to spread throughout North America. The implication
was that every Indian society in the hemisphere was descended from Clovis.
The people at Blackwater Draw were the ancestral culture of the Americas.
Haynes was the first to put together this picture. The reaction, he told me,
was “pretty gratifying.” The fractious archaeological community embraced
his ideas with rare unanimity; they rapidly became the standard model for
the peopling of the Americas. On the popular level, Haynes’s scenario made
so much intuitive sense that it rapidly leapt from the pages of Science to
high school history textbooks, mine among them. Three years later, in 1967,
the picture was augmented with overkill.
If time travelers from today were to visit North America in the late
Pleistocene, they would see in the forests and plains an impossible bestiary
of lumbering mastodon, armored rhinos, great dire wolves, sabertooth cats,
and ten-foot-long glyptodonts like enormous armadillos. Beavers the size of
armchairs; turtles that weighed almost as much as cars; sloths able to reach
tree branches twenty feet high; huge, flightless, predatory birds like
rapacious ostriches—the tally of Pleistocene monsters is long and alluring.
At about the time of Clovis almost every one of these species vanished.
So complete was the disaster that most of today’s big American mammals,
such as caribou, moose, and brown bear, are immigrants from Asia. The die-
off happened amazingly fast, much of it in the few centuries between
11,500 and 10,900 B.C. And when it was complete, naturalist Alfred
Russell Wallace wrote, the Americas had become “a zoologically
impoverished world, from which all of the hugest, and fiercest, and
strangest forms [had] recently disappeared.”
The extinctions permanently changed American landscapes and
American history. Before the Pleistocene, the Americas had three species of
horse and at least two camels that might have been ridden; other mammals
could have been domesticated for meat and milk. Had they survived, the
consequences would have been huge. Not only would domesticated animals
have changed Indian societies, they might have created new zoonotic
diseases. Absent the extinctions, the encounter between Europe and the
Americas might have been equally deadly for both sides—a world in which
both hemispheres experienced catastrophic depopulation.
PALEO-INDIAN MIGRATION ROUTES
North America, 10,000 B.C.
Researchers had previously noted the temporal coincidence between the
paleo-Indians’ arrival and the mass extinction, but they didn’t believe that
small bands of hunters could wreak such ecological havoc. Paul Martin, a
paleontologist who was one of Haynes’s Arizona colleagues, thought
otherwise. 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.”
Imagine, Martin said, that an original group of a hundred hunters crossed
over Beringia and down the ice-free corridor. Historical records show that
frontier populations can increase at astonishing rates; in the early nineteenth
century, the annual U.S. birthrate climbed as high as 5 percent. If the first
paleo-Indians doubled in number every 20 years (a birthrate of 3.4 percent),
the population would hit 10 million in only 340 years, a blink of an eye in
geological terms. A million paleo-Indians, Martin argued, could easily form
a wave of hunters that would radiate out from the southern end of the ice-
free corridor, turning the continent into an abattoir. Even with conservative
assumptions about the rate of paleo-Indian expansion, the destructive front
would reach the Gulf of Mexico in three to five centuries. Within a thousand
years it would strike Tierra del Fuego. In the archaeological record, Martin
pointed out, this hurricane of slaughter would be visible only as the near-
simultaneous appearance of Clovis artifacts throughout North America—
and “the swift extermination of the more conspicuous native American large
mammals.” Which, in fact, is exactly what one sees.
Not everyone was convinced by Martin’s model. Paleontologists noted
that many non-game species vanished, too, which in their view suggests
that the extinction wave was more likely due to the abrupt climatic changes
at the end of the Pleistocene; Martin pointed out that previous millennia had
experienced equally wild shifts with no extinction spasm. In addition,
similar extinctions occurred when human beings first invaded Madagascar,
Australia, New Zealand, and the Polynesian Islands.
Despite overkill’s failure to enjoy full acceptance, it helped set in stone
what became the paradigmatic image of the first Americans. Highly mobile,
scattered in small bands, carnivorous to a fault, the paleo-Indians conjured
by archaeologists were, above all, “stout-hearted, daring, and voracious big-
game hunters,” in the skeptical summary of Norman Easton, an
anthropologist at Yukon College, in Whitehorse. Clovis people were
thought to have a special yen for mammoth: great ambulatory meat lockers.
Sometimes they herded the hairy creatures en masse into gullies or
entangling bogs, driving the animals to their doom with shouts, dogs,
torches, and, possibly, shamanic incantations. More often, though, hunters
stalked individual beasts until they were close enough to throw a spear in
the gut. “Then you just follow them around for a day or two until they keel
over from blood loss or infection,” Charles Kay, an ecological archaeologist
at Utah State University, told me. “It’s not what we think of as sporting, but
it’s very effective and a hell of a lot safer than hand-to-hand combat with a
mammoth.”
Shifting location to follow game, the Clovis people prowled roughly
circular territories that could have been two hundred miles in diameter (the
size would vary depending on the environmental setting). With any luck,
the territory would contain flint, jasper, or chalcedony, the raw material for
spear points, meat scrapers, and other hunting tools. Bands may have had as
many as fifty members, with girls going outside the group to marry. At
camp, women and girls made clothes, gathered food—wild plums,
blackberries, grapes—and tended babies. Men and boys went hunting,
possibly as a group of fathers and sons, probably for days at a time.
As the extinctions proceeded, the Clovis people switched from
mammoths to the smaller, more numerous bison. The spear points grew
smaller, the hunting more systematic (with prey becoming scarcer, it needed
to be). Bands camped on ridges overlooking ponds—the men wanted to
spot herds when they came to drink. When the animals plunged their
muzzles into the water, hunting parties attacked, forcing the startled bison to
flee into a dead-end gully. The beasts bellowed in confusion and pain as the
paleo-Indians moved in with jabbing spears. Sometimes they slaughtered a
dozen or more at once. Each hunter may have gobbled down as much as ten
pounds of bison flesh a day. They came back staggering under the load of
meat. Life in this vision of early America was hard but pleasant; in most
ways, archaeologists said, it was not that different from life elsewhere on
the planet at the time.
Except that it may not have been like that at all.
CONTINENTAL DIVIDE
In the early 1980s a magazine asked me to report on a long-running legal
battle over Pacific Northwest salmon. A coalition of Indian tribes had taken
Washington State to court over a treaty it had signed with them in 1854,
when the state was still part of the Oregon Territory. In the treaty, the
territory promised to respect the Indians’ “right of taking fish, at all usual
and accustomed grounds and stations,” which the tribes interpreted as
guaranteeing them a share of the annual salmon harvests. Washington State
said that the treaty did not mean what the Indians claimed, and in any case
that circumstances had changed too much for it still to be binding. The
courts repeatedly endorsed the Indian view and the state repeatedly
appealed, twice reaching the U.S. Supreme Court. As the Indians
approached final victory, tension rose in the fishing industry, then almost
entirely controlled by whites. The magazine wanted me to write about the
fight.
To learn more about the dispute, I visited the delta of the Nisqually River,
at the southern tip of Puget Sound. Housing the Nisqually tribe, the sliver of
land that is their reservation, and the riverbank meadow on which the treaty
was signed, the delta is passed through, unnoticed, every day by the
thousands of commuters on the interstate highway that slices through the
reservation. At the time of my visit, the Nisqually had been annoying state
authorities for decades, tenaciously pursuing what they believed to be their
right to fish on their ancestral fishing grounds. I met the Franks, the
stubborn, charismatic father-and-son team who then more or less ran the
tribe, in a cluttered office that in my recollection occupied half of a double-
wide trailer. Both had been arrested many times for “protest fishing”—
fishing when the state said they couldn’t—and were the guiding spirits
behind the litigation. After we spoke, Billy Frank, the son, told me I should
visit Medicine Creek, where the Nisqually and eight other tribes had
negotiated the treaty. And he asked someone who was hanging around to
give me a tour.
That someone introduced himself as Denny. He was slim and stylish with
very long black hair that fell unbound over the shoulders of his Levi jacket.
Sewn on the back of the jacket was a replica of the American eagle on the
dollar bill. A degree in semiotics was not required to see that I was in the
presence of an ironist. He was not a Nisqually, he said, but from another
Northwest group—at this remove, I can’t recall which. We clambered into
an old truck with scraped side panels. As we set off, Denny asked, “Are you
an archaeologist?”
Journalist, I told him.
“Good,” he said, slamming the truck into gear.
Because journalists rarely meet with such enthusiasm, I guessed—
correctly—that his approval referred to my non-archaeological status. In
this way I learned that archaeologists have aroused the ire of some Native
American activists.
We drove to a small boat packed with fishing gear that was tied down on
the edge of the Nisqually. Denny got the motor running and we puttered
downstream, looking for harbor seals, which he said sometimes wandered
up the river. Scrubby trees stood out from gravel banks, and beneath them,
here and there, were the red-flushed, spawned-out bodies of salmon, insects
happy around them. Freeway traffic was clearly audible. After half an hour
we turned up a tributary and made land on a muddy bank. A hundred yards
away was a tall snag, the dead stalk of a Douglas fir, standing over the
meadow like a sentinel. The treaty negotiations had been conducted in its
shelter. From under its branches the territorial governor had triumphantly
emerged with two sheets of paper which he said bore the X marks of sixty-
two Indian leaders, some of whom actively opposed the treaty and
apparently were not at the signing.
Throughout our little excursion Denny talked. He told me that the claw
holding the arrows on the back of the one-dollar bill was copied by
Benjamin Franklin from an incident in Haudenosaunee lore; that the army
base next door sometimes fired shells over the reservation; that Billy Frank
once had been arrested with Marlon Brando; that a story Willie Frank,
Billy’s father, had told me about his grandparents picking up smallpox-
infected blankets on the beach was probably not true, but instead was an
example of Willie’s fondness for spoofing gullible journalists; that Denny
knew a guy who also had an eagle on the back of his jean jacket, but who,
unlike Denny, could make the eagle flex its wings by moving his shoulders
in a certain way that Denny admired; that most Indians hate the Internal
Revenue Service even more than they hate the Bureau of Indian Affairs,
because they believe that they paid taxes for all time when the federal
government forced them to give up two billion acres of land; and that if I
really wanted to see a crime against nature, I should visit the Quinault
reservation, on the Olympic Peninsula, which had been plundered by
loggers in the 1950s (I did, a few weeks afterward; Denny was right). He
also explained to me why he and some other Indians had it in for
archaeologists. The causes were many, in his telling, but two of them
seemed especially pertinent: Aleš Hrdli ka and the overkill hypothesis.
Hrdli ka’s zeal for completeness made him accumulate as many Indian
skeletons as possible. Unfortunately, his fascination with the bones of old
Indians was not matched by an equivalent interest in the sensibilities of
living Native Americans. Both his zeal and his indifference were gaudily on
display on Kodiak Island, Alaska, where he exhumed about a thousand
skeletons between 1932 and 1936 at Larsen Bay, a village of Alutiiq
Indians. Many of the dead were two thousand years old, but some were
ripped from recent Alutiiq graves, and a few were not Alutiiq at all—the
wife of a local salmon-cannery manager, eager to help Science, shipped
Hrdli ka the cadavers of Chinese workers when they died.
Larsen Bay was the single most productive excavation of Hrdli ka’s long
career. Confronted with what he viewed as an intellectual treasure trove,
this precise, meticulous, formal man was to all appearances overcome by
enthusiasm and scholarly greed. In his pop-eyed hurry to pull bones out of
the ground, he tore open the site with a bulldozer and didn’t bother taking
notes, sketching maps, or executing profile drawings. Without
documentation, Hrdli ka was unable afterward to make head or tail of the
houses, storage pits, hearths, and burial wells he uncovered. He pored
through old Russian and American accounts of the area to find answers, but
he never asked the people in Larsen Bay about their own culture. Perhaps
his failure to approach the Alutiiq was a good thing. Hrdli ka’s excavation,
made without their permission, so angered them that they were still
steaming when Denny was there on a salmon boat fifty years later. (In 1991
the Smithsonian gave back the skeletons, which the townspeople reburied.)
Overkill was part of the same mindset, Denny told me. As the
environmental movement gathered steam in the 1960s, he said, white
people had discovered that Indians were better stewards of the land.
Indigenous peoples were superior to them—horrors! The archies—that was
what Denny called archaeologists—had to race in and rescue Caucasian
self-esteem. Which they did with the ridiculous conceit that the Indians had
been the authors of an ecological mega-disaster. 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,” Vine Deloria Jr.,
the Colorado political scientist, told me. The Berkeley geographer Carl
Sauer first brought up overkill in the 1930s, he said. “It was immediately
knocked down, because a lot of shellfish and little mammals also went
extinct, and these mythical Pleistocene hit men wouldn’t have wiped them
out, too. But the supposedly objective scientific establishment likes the
picture of Indians as ecological serial killers too much to let go of it.”
To Deloria’s way of thinking, not only overkill but the entire Clovis-first
theory is a theoretical Rube Goldberg device. “There’s this perfect moment
when the ice-free corridor magically appears just before the land bridge is
covered by water,” he said. “And the paleo-Indians, who are doing fine in
Siberia, suddenly decide to sprint over to Alaska. And then they sprint
through the corridor, which just in time for them has been replenished with
game. And they keep sprinting so fast that they overrun the hemisphere
even faster than the Europeans did—and this even though they didn’t have
horses, because they were so busy killing them all.” He laughed. “And these
are the same people who say traditional origin tales are improbable!”
Activist critiques like those from Denny and Deloria have had relatively
little impact on mainstream archaeologists and anthropologists. In a sense,
they were unnecessary: scientists themselves have launched such a
sustained attack on the primacy of Clovis, the existence of the ice-free
corridor, and the plausibility of overkill that the Clovis consensus has
shattered, probably irrecoverably.
In 1964, the year Haynes announced the Clovis-first model, archaeologist
Alex D. Krieger listed fifty sites said to be older than Clovis. By 1988
Haynes and other authorities had shot them all down with such merciless
dispatch that victims complained of persecution by the “Clovis police.”
Haynes, the dissenters said, was a new Hrdli ka (minus the charge of
insensitivity to living Native Americans). As before, archaeologists became
gun-shy about arguing that Indians arrived in the Americas before the
canonical date. Perhaps as a result, the most persuasive scientific critiques
on Clovis initially came from fields that overlapped archaeology, but were
mainly outside of it: linguistics, molecular biology, and geology.
From today’s vantage, the attack seems to have begun, paradoxically,
with the publication in 1986 of a landmark pro-Clovis paper in Current
Anthropology by a linguist, a physical anthropologist, and a geneticist. The
linguistic section attracted special attention. Students of languages had long
puzzled over the extraordinary variety and fragmentation of Indian
languages. California alone was the home of as many as 86 tongues, which
linguists have classified into between 5 and 15 families (the schemes
disagree with one another). No one family was dominant. Across the
Americas, Indians spoke some 1,200 separate languages that have been
classified into as many as 180 linguistic families. By contrast, all of Europe
has just 4 language families—Indo-European, Finno-Ugric, Basque, and
Turkic—with the great majority of Europeans speaking an Indo-European
tongue. Linguists had long wondered how Indians could have evolved so
many languages in the thirteen thousand years since Clovis when Europeans
had ended up with many fewer in the forty thousand years since the arrival
of humans there.
In the first part of the 1986 article, Joseph H. Greenberg, a linguist at
Stanford, proclaimed that the profusion of idioms was more apparent than
real. After four decades of comparing Native American vocabularies and
grammars, he had concluded that Indian languages belonged to just three
main linguistic families: Aleut, spoken by northern peoples in a broad band
from Alaska to Greenland; NaDené, spoken in western Canada and the U.S.
Southwest; and Amerind, much the biggest family, spoken everywhere else,
including all of Central and South America. “The three linguistic stocks,”
Greenberg said, “represent separate migrations.”
According to Greenberg’s linguistic analysis, paleo-Indians had crossed
over Beringia not once, but thrice. Using glottochronology he estimated that
the ancestors of Aleuts had crossed the strait around 2000 B.C. and that the
ancestors of Na-Dené had made the journey around 7000 B.C. As for
Amerind, Greenberg thought, “we are dealing with a time period probably
greater than eleven thousand years.” But it was not that much greater,
which indicated that the ancestors of Amerind-speaking peoples came over
at just about the time that Clovis showed up in the archaeological record.
Clovis-first, yes, but Clovis the first of three.
In the same article, Christy G. Turner II, a physical anthropologist at
Arizona State, supported the three-migrations scheme with dental evidence.
All humans have the same number and type of teeth, but their
characteristics—incisor shape, canine size, molar root number, the presence
or absence of grooves on tooth faces—differ slightly in ways that are
consistent within ethnic groups. In a fantastically painstaking process,
Turner measured “28 key crown and root traits” in more than 200,000
Indian teeth. He discovered that Indians formed “three New World dental
clusters” corresponding to Greenberg’s Aleut, Na-Dené, and Amerind. By
comparing tooth variation in Asian populations, Turner estimated the
approximate rate at which the secondary characteristics in teeth evolved.
(Because these factors make no difference to dental function,
anthropologists assume that any changes reflect random mutation, which
biologists in turn assume occurs at a roughly constant rate.) Applying his
“worldwide rate of dental microevolution” to the three migrations, Turner
came up with roughly similar dates of emigration. Amerinds, he concluded,
had split off from northeast Asian groups about fourteen thousand years
ago, which fit well “with the widely held view that the first Americans were
the Clovis-culture big-game-hunting paleo-Indians.”
The article provoked vigorous reaction, not all of the sort that its authors
wished. In hindsight, a hint of what was to come lay in its third section, in
which Arizona State geneticist Stephen L. Zegura conceded that the
“tripartite division of modern Native Americans is still without strong
confirmation” from molecular biology. To the authors’ critics, the lack of
confirmation had an obvious cause: the whole three-migrations theory was
wrong. “Neither their linguistic classification nor their dental/genetic
correlation is supported,” complained Lyle Campbell, of the State
University of New York at Buffalo. Greenberg’s three-family division,
Campbell thought, “should be shouted down in order not to confuse
nonspecialists.” The Amerind-language family was so enormous, Berkeley
linguist Johanna Nichols complained, that the likelihood of being able to
prove it actually existed was “somewhere between zero and hopeless.”
Although the three-migrations theory was widely attacked, it spurred
geneticists to pursue research into Native American origins. The main
battleground was mitochondrial DNA, the special DNA with which Pena,
the Brazilian geneticist, hoped to find the Botocudo. 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).
Wallace’s discovery initially seemed to confirm the three-migrations model:
the haplogroups were seen as the legacy of separate waves of migration,
with the most common haplogroup corresponding to the Clovis culture.
Wallace came up with further data when he began working with James
Neel, the geneticist who studied the Yanomami response to measles.
In earlier work, Neel had combined data from multiple sources to
estimate that two related groups of Central American Indians had split off
from each other eight thousand to ten thousand years before. Now Neel and
Wallace scrutinized the two groups’ mitochondrial DNA. Over time, it
should have accumulated mutations, almost all of them tiny alterations in
unused DNA that didn’t affect the mitochondria’s functions. By counting
the number of mutations that appeared in one group and not the other, Neel
and Wallace determined the rate at which the two groups’ mitochondrial
DNA had separately changed in the millennia since their separation: .2 to .3
percent every ten thousand years. In 1994 Neel and Wallace sifted through
mitochondrial DNA from eighteen widely dispersed Indian groups, looking
for mutations that had occurred since their common ancestors left Asia.
Using their previously calculated rate of genetic change as a standard, they
estimated when the original group had migrated to the Americas: 22,414 to
29,545 years ago. Indians had come to the Americas ten thousand years
before Clovis.
Three years later, Sandro L. Bonatto and Francisco M. Bolzano, two
geneticists at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, in the southern
Brazilian city of Pôrto Alegre, analyzed Indian mitochondrial DNA again—
and painted a different picture. Wallace and Neel had focused on the three
haplogroups that are also common in Asia. Instead, the Brazilians looked at
the fourth main haplogroup—Haplogroup A is its unimaginative name—
which is almost completely absent from Siberia but found in every Native
American population. Because of its rarity in Siberia, the multiple-
migrations theory had the implicit and very awkward corollary that the tiny
minority of people with Haplogroup A just happened to be among the small
bands that crossed Beringia—not just once, but several times. The two men
argued it was more probable that a single migration had left Asia, and that
some people in Haplogroup A were in it.
By tallying the accumulated genetic differences in Haplogroup A
members, Bonatto and Bolzano calculated that Indians had left Asia thirty-
three thousand to forty-three thousand years ago, even earlier than
estimated by Wallace and Neel. Not only that, the measurements by Bonatto
and Bolzano suggested that soon after the migrants arrived in Beringia they
split in two. One half set off for Canada and the United States. Meanwhile,
the other half remained in Beringia, which was then comparatively
hospitable. The paleo-Indians who went south would not have had a
difficult journey, because they arrived a little bit before the peak of the last
Ice Age—before, that is, the two glacial sheets in Canada merged together.
When that ice barrier closed, though, the Indians who stayed in Beringia
were stuck there for the duration: almost twenty thousand years. Finally the
temperatures rose, and some of them went south, creating a second wave
and then, possibly, a third. In other words, just one group of paleo-Indians
colonized the Americas, but it did so two or three times.
As other measurements came in, the confusion only increased.
Geneticists disagreed about whether the totality of the data implied one or
more migrations; whether the ancestral population(s) were small (as some
measure of mitochondrial DNA diversity suggested) or large (as others
indicated); whether Indians had migrated from Mongolia, the region around
Lake Baikal in southern Siberia, or coastal east Asia, even possibly Japan.
Everything seemed up for grabs—or, anyway, almost everything. In the
welter of contradictory data, University of Hawaii geneticist Rebecca L.
Cann reported in 2001, “only one thing is certain”: scientists may argue
about everything else, she said, but they all believe that “the ‘Clovis First’
archaeological model of a late entry of migrants into North America is
unsupported by the bulk of new archaeological and genetic evidence.”
COAST TO COAST
The “new archaeological evidence” to which Cann referred was from
Monte Verde, a boggy Chilean riverbank excavated by Tom Dillehay of the
University of Kentucky; Mario Pino of the University of Chile in Valdivia;
and a team of students and specialists. They began work in 1977, finished
excavation in 1985, and published their final reports in two massive
volumes in 1989 and 1997. In the twenty years between the first shovelsful
of dirt and the final errata sheets, the scientists concluded that paleo-Indians
had occupied Monte Verde at least 12,800 years ago. Not only that, they
turned up suggestive indications of human habitation more than 32,000
years ago. Monte Verde, in southern Chile, is ten thousand miles from the
Bering Strait. Archaeologists have tended to believe that paleo-Indians
would have needed millennia to walk from the north end of the Americas to
the south. If Monte Verde was a minimum of 12,800 years old, Indians must
have come to the Americas thousands of years before that. For the most
part, archaeologists had lacked the expertise to address the anti-Clovis
evidence from genetics and linguistics. But Monte Verde was archaeology.
Dillehay had dug up something like a village, complete with tent-like
structures made from animal hides, lashed together by poles and twisted
reeds—a culture that he said had existed centuries before Clovis, and that
may have been more sophisticated. Skepticism was forceful, even
rancorous; arguments lasted for years, with critics charging that Dillehay’s
evidence was too low-quality to accept. “People refused to shake my hand
at meetings,” Dillehay told me. “It was like I was killing their children.”
Tom Dillehay
In 1997 a dozen prominent researchers, Haynes among them, flew to
Chile to examine the site and its artifacts. The hope was to settle the long-
standing dispute by re-creating the graybeards’ visit to Folsom. After
inspecting the site itself—a wet, peaty bank strikingly unlike the sere desert
home of Folsom and Clovis—the archaeologists ended up at a dimly lighted
cantina with the appropriate name of La Caverna. Over a round of beers an
argument erupted, prompted, in part, by Haynes’s persistent skepticism.
Dillehay told Haynes his experience with stone tools in Arizona was useless
in evaluating wooden implements in Peru, and then stomped outside with a
supporter. But despite the heated words, a fragile consensus emerged. The
experts wrote an article making public their unanimous conclusion. “Monte
Verde is real,” Alex W. Barker, now at the Milwaukee Public Museum, told
the New York Times. “It’s a whole new ball game.”
Not everyone wanted to play. Two years later Stuart J. Fiedel, a
consulting archaeologist in Alexandria, Virginia, charged that Dillehay’s
just-published final Monte Verde report was so poorly executed—“bungled”
and “loathsome” were among the descriptors he provided when we spoke—
that verifying the original location “of virtually every ‘compelling,’
unambiguous artifact” on the site was impossible. Stone tools, which many
archaeologists regard as the most important artifacts, have no organic
carbon and therefore cannot be carbon-dated. Researchers must reckon their
ages by ascertaining the age of the ground they are found in, which in turn
requires meticulously documenting their provenance. Because Dillehay’s
team had failed to identify properly the location of the stone tools in Monte
Verde, Fiedel said, their antiquity was up to question; they could have been
in a recent sediment layer. Haynes, who had authenticated Monte Verde in
1997, announced in 1999 that the site needed “further testing.”
The dispute over the Clovis model kept growing. In the 1990s geologists
laid out data indicating that the ice sheets were bigger and longer lasting
than had been thought, and that even when the ice-free corridor existed it
was utterly inhospitable. Worse, archaeologists could find no traces of
paleo-Indians (or the big mammals they supposedly hunted) in the corridor
from the right time. Meanwhile, paleontologists learned that about two-
thirds of the species that vanished did so a little before Clovis appears in the
archaeological record. Finally, Clovis people may not have enjoyed hunting
that much. Of the seventy-six U.S. paleo-Indian camps surveyed by Meltzer
and Donald K. Grayson, an archaeologist at the University of Washington at
Seattle, only fourteen showed evidence of big-game hunting, all of it just
two species, mastodon and bison. “The overkill hypothesis lives on,” the
two men sneered, “not because of [support from] archaeologists and
paleontologists who are expert in the area, but because it keeps getting
repeated by those who are not.”
Clovis defenders remained as adamant as their critics. Regarding Monte
Verde, Haynes told me, “My comment is, where are the photographs of
these ‘artifacts’ when they were in place? If you’re trying to prove that site
to other archaeologists and you find an unequivocal stone artifact in situ in a
site that’s twelve thousand years old, everyone should run over with a
camera. It wasn’t until after we brought this up that they dug up some
photographs. And they were fuzzy! I really became a doubter then.” Such
putative pre-Clovis sites are “background radiation,” he said. “I’m
convinced that a hundred years from now there will still be these ‘pre-
Clovis’ sites, and this will go on ad infinitum.”
“Some of our colleagues seem to have gone seriously wrong,” lamented
Thomas F. Lynch of Texas A&M in the Review of Archaeology in 2001.
Proudly claiming that he had helped “blow the whistle” on other Clovis
challengers, Lynch described the gathering support for pre-Clovis
candidates as a manifestation of “political correctness.” He predicted that
Monte Verde would eventually “fade away.”
For better or worse, most archaeologists with whom I have spoken act as
if the Clovis-first model were wrong, while still accepting that it might be
correct. Truly ardent Clovisites, like Low Counters, are “in a definite
minority now,” according to Michael Crawford, a University of Kansas
anthropologist—a conclusion that Fiedel, Haynes, and other skeptics
ruefully echo. Following Monte Verde, at least three other pre-Clovis sites
gained acceptance, though each continued to have its detractors.
The ultimate demise of the Clovis dogma is inevitable, David Henige,
author of Numbers from Nowhere, told me. “Archaeologists are always
dating something to five thousand years ago and then saying that this must
be the first time it occurred because they haven’t found any earlier
examples. And then, incredibly, they defend this idea to the death. It’s
logically indefensible.” Clovis-first, he said, is “a classic example of
arguing from silence. Even in archaeology, which isn’t exactly rocket
science”—he chuckled—“there’s only so long you can get away with it.”
HUGGING THE SHORE
Since Holmes and Hrdli ka, archaeologists and anthropologists have tried to
separate themselves from Abbott’s modern descendants: the mob of sweaty-
palmed archaeology buffs who consume books about Atlantis and run Web
sites about aliens in Peru and medieval Welsh in Iowa. The consensus
around Clovis helped beat them back, but the confused back-and-forth
ushered in by the genetic studies has provided a new opening. Unable to
repel the quacks with a clear theory of their own, archaeologists and
anthropologists found themselves enveloped in a cloud of speculation.
The most notorious recent example of this phenomenon is surely
Kennewick Man. A 9,400-year-old skeleton that turned up near Kennewick,
Washington, in 1997, Kennewick Man became a center of controversy
when an early reconstruction of the skeleton’s face suggested that it had
Caucasian features (or, more precisely, “Caucasoid” features). The
reconstruction, published in newspapers and magazines around the world,
elicited assertions that Indians had European ancestry. Archaeologists and
Indian activists, for once united, scoffed at this notion. Indian and European
mitochondrial DNA are strikingly different. How could Indians descend
from Europeans if they did not inherit their genetic makeup?
Yet, as Fiedel conceded to me, the collapse of the Clovis consensus
means that archaeologists must consider unorthodox possibilities, including
that some other people preceded the ancestors of today’s Indians into the
Americas. Numerous candidates exist for these prepaleo-Indians, among
them the Lagoa Santa people, whose skulls more resemble the skulls of
Australian aborigines than those of Native Americans. Skull gauging is, at
best, an inexact science, and most archaeologists have dismissed the notion
of an Australian role in American prehistory. But in the fall of 2003 an
article in the journal Nature about ancient skulls in Baja California revived
this possibility. Aborigines, in one scenario, may have traveled from
Australia to Tierra del Fuego via Antarctica. Or else there was a single
ancestral population split, with the ancestors of Australians heading in one
direction and the ancestors of Indians heading in another. In either version
of the scenario the ancestors of today’s Indians crossed the Bering Strait to
find the Americas already settled by Australians. Migration across
Antarctica!—exactly the sort of extravagant notion that the whitecoats
sought to consign to the historical dustbin. Now they may all be back. If
Clovis was not first, the archaeology of the Americas is wide open, a
prospect variously feared and welcomed. “Anything goes now, apparently,”
Fiedel told me. “The lunatics have taken over the asylum.”
Despite such misgivings, one can see, squinting a little, the outlines of an
emerging theory. In the last few years researchers have focused more and
more on a proposal linked to the name of Knut Fladmark, an archaeologist
at Simon Fraser University, in British Columbia. As a graduate student in
the mid-1970s, Fladmark was so surprised to learn of the paucity of
evidence for the ice-free corridor that he wondered if paleo-Indians had
instead gone down the Pacific coast by boat. After all, aborigines had
reached Australia by boat tens of thousands of years ago. Nonetheless, most
archaeologists pooh-poohed the idea, because there was no substantiation
for it.
By examining pollen in the ocean sediments near the Pacific coastline,
researchers have recently learned that even in the depths of the Ice Age
warm southern currents created temperate refuges along the shore—islands
of trees and grass in a landscape of ice. Hopping from refuge to refuge,
paleo-Indians could have made their way down the coast at any time in the
last forty thousand years. “Even primitive boats,” Fladmark has written,
“could traverse the entire Pacific coast of North and South America in less
than 10–15 years.”
Evidence for the coastal route is sparse, not least because archaeologists
have never looked for paleo-Indian settlements on the shoreline. Future
searches will be difficult: thousands of years ago, the melting glaciers raised
the seas, inundating coastal settlements, if they existed. Coastal-route
proponents like to point out that Clovis-firsters believed in the existence of
the ice-free corridor without much supporting data. The coastal route has
equally little empirical backing, but in their view makes more sense. Most
important, the image of a seagoing people fits into a general rethinking of
paleo-Indian life.
Because the first-discovered Clovis site was a hunting camp,
archaeologists have usually assumed that Clovis society was focused on
hunting. Indeed, Clovisites were thought to have entered the ice-free
corridor by pursuing game—“follow the reindeer,” as skeptics refer to this
scheme. In contemporary hunting and gathering societies, anthropologists
have learned, gathering by women usually supplies most of the daily diet.
The meat provided by male hunters is a kind of luxury, a special treat for a
binge and celebration, the Pleistocene equivalent of a giant box of
Toblerone. Compared to its brethren around the world, Clovis society, with
its putative focus on massive, exterminating hunts, would have been an
anomaly. A coastal route helps bring the paleo-Indians back in line.
Then as now, the Northwest Coast, thick with fruit and fruits de mer, was
a gatherer’s paradise: wild strawberries, wild blueberries, soapberries,
huckleberries, thimbleberries, salmonberries; clams, cockles, mussels,
oysters; flounder, hake, salmon. (To get breakfast, the local saying says,
take a walk in the forest; to get dinner, wait for low tide.) Perhaps the smell
of candlefish fat, ubiquitous in later Northwest Coast Indian cookery, even
then hovered over the first visitors’ fires. One can guess that their boats
were not made of wood, because they had long lived on the almost treeless
plains of Beringia. Instead they may have been made from animal skin, a
readily available resource; though soft beneath the foot, fragile-looking hide
vessels have been known to traverse hundreds of miles of open water. A
visitor to the Northwest twenty thousand years ago might have seen such a
craft bobbing over the waves like a long, floating balloon, ten or twenty
men lining its sides, chasing minke whales with stone-tipped spears.
All of this is speculative, to say the least, and may well be wrong. Next
year geologists may decide the ice-free corridor was passable, after all. Or
more hunting sites could turn up. What seems unlikely to be undone is the
awareness that Native Americans may have been in the Americas for twenty
thousand or even thirty thousand years. Given that the Ice Age made Europe
north of the Loire Valley uninhabitable until some eighteen thousand years
ago, the Western Hemisphere should perhaps no longer be described as the
“New World.” Britain, home of my ancestor Billington, was empty until
about 12,500 B.C., because it was still covered by glaciers. If Monte Verde
is correct, as most believe, people were thriving from Alaska to Chile while
much of northern Europe was still empty of mankind and its works.
Cotton (or Anchovies) and Maize
(Tales of Two Civilizations, Part I)
BIG BUILDING
“Would you like to hold a four-thousand-year-old textile?”
Without waiting for my assent, Jonathan Haas slid the fabric into my
hand. It was about two inches on a side, little more than a scrap, and aged to
the color of last season’s straw. To my eye, it seemed carefully made: a
warp of fine cotton threads, ten or fifteen to the inch, crossed at half-inch
intervals by paired weft threads in a basket-like pattern known as “weft-
twining.” Haas, an archaeologist at the Field Museum of Natural History, in
Chicago, had plucked the fabric from the earth minutes before, two
graduate students immortalizing the operation with digital cameras.
Thousands of years ago it had been handled or worn by other people; bits of
their DNA might still adhere to the fibers. (If so, I was contaminating it.) To
be the first person in two hundred generations to see or touch an object—to
reach across time with eye and hand—is one of the reasons why people like
Haas spend their days sifting through ancient soil.
Ordinarily, archaeologists label and store such artifacts immediately. But
just as Haas removed the cloth from the ground, he was distracted by the
excited shouts of a group of workers a hundred feet away. Haas clambered
over the rough ground to take a look. Poking through the earth at the
workers’ feet was something that resembled the edge of a dinner plate. Haas
kneeled to inspect it. When he came back to his feet, his eyebrows had shot
up like a pair of circumflexes. “What’s this doing here?” Haas asked the air.
“It looks like unfired ceramics.” The site was supposed to be very old—well
before the local invention of pottery. “Better have a look at it.” Reaching for
the trowel in his back pocket, he had realized that the textile was still in his
hand, and asked if I would mind hanging on to it.
“Would you like to hold a four-thousand-year-old textile?”
Haas was standing midway up a sixty-foot hummock in a valley along
the central coast of Peru, about 130 miles north of Lima. The valley was
desert, withered and yellow-gray except for the crooked band of green that
marked the course of the Fortaleza River. In the late 1990s Haas and
Winifred Creamer—his wife and co-teamleader, an archaeologist at
Northern Illinois University—assisted a research team led by a Peruvian
archaeologist, Ruth Shady Solis, that had spent years investigating an
ancient ceremonial center fifteen miles to the south. By carbon-dating some
of Shady’s material, they helped establish that the Peruvians had uncovered
the oldest known city in the Americas.
Afterward, Haas, Creamer, and a Peruvian archaeologist, Álvaro Ruiz,
drove a four-by-four through the back roads of the area between that
excavation and the Fortaleza Valley. Called the Norte Chico, the region is
studded with isolated knolls, twenty to fifty feet high and as much as two
hundred feet long. These mounds had been flagged as possible ruins for
nearly a century but never excavated because they seemed to have no
valuable gold or ceramic objects. The Pan-American Highway had been
laid right through them without causing an outcry. Haas, Creamer, and Ruiz
had decided to drive through the area because they suspected that the
mounds might be more interesting and numerous than had been realized.
Ultimately, the three researchers determined that the Norte Chico held the
remains of at least twenty-five cities, all of which they wanted to explore.
On the day I visited, the team was unburying a city they called Huaricanga,
after a nearby hamlet. Here the Pan-American Highway had, as it turned
out, sliced through some of the oldest public architecture anywhere on
earth.
“You mean to tell me there’s no dental picks at all?” Haas was saying.
“All these people and not one has a dental pick? I’d really like a pick for
this thing.”
“Nobody can find one,” Creamer said. She left to supervise the second
part of the dig, two hundred yards away, on the other side of the highway.
Haas sighed, pushed back his wide-brimmed straw hat, and leaned into
the dirt with jackknife and paintbrush. Despite the low clouds—an almost
featureless carpet a thousand feet above our heads—perspiration stippled
his temples. With Ruiz documenting the work with a digital camera, Haas
silently plucked out dead insects, bits of leaf, and lengths of shicra, a kind
of thick twine made from reeds. When he had cleared enough, he sat back
and stared at the now-exposed object. “I have no idea what this is,” he
announced. “Got any tweezers?” Ruiz produced a caliper-sized pair from
his backpack.
“Bravo,” Haas said. “We have tweezers.”
Although the Huaricanga mound resembled an ancient sandhill, the soft,
shifting, slightly gritty surface was not sand but the fine, windblown soil
geologists call “loess.” Fertile stuff, if it can somehow be irrigated, the loess
blanketed the underlying structure like a heavy tarpaulin tossed over a piece
of machinery. Here and there the archaeologists had scooped it away to
reveal granite walls that had once been smoothly plastered. Over time,
weather and earthquakes and perhaps human malice had buckled most of
the walls, but their overall layout had been preserved. Behind them the team
had removed some of the fill: bags of stones, created by knotting shicra into
mesh sacks, filling the sacks with chunks of granite, and laying the results
like fifty-pound bricks in the foundation.
Moving slowly, Haas tweezered out the pieces—they looked like the
remnants of a serving platter—and passed them to Ruiz, who dropped them
into a resealable plastic bag.
“Are all of those from a single object?” I asked.
“I’d guess so, but your guess is good as mine,” Haas said. With his wide
face, gray goatee, and merry smile, he resembled, for the moment, an aging
folk singer. “All I can say is, this is really strange.”
Almost twenty people were working on the Huaricanga mound,
shoveling away the obscuring loess. Half of them were local workers; Peru
has so many ruins from so many cultures that in many small towns
archaeological labor is a flourishing blue-collar trade. The others were
graduate students from Peru and the United States. After two days of labor,
workers and students were halfway through clearing off the top platform
and the staircases leading to it; the layout of the structure was visible
enough to map. The temple, for the mound was surely built for religious
reasons, was laid out in a wide, shallow U about 150 feet long and 60 feet
high, with a sunken plaza between the arms. In its day its grandeur would
have overwhelmed the visitor. Little wonder: at the time of its construction,
the Huaricanga temple was among the world’s biggest buildings.
In college I read a one-volume history of the world by the distinguished
historian William H. McNeill. Called, simply enough, A World History, and
published in 1967, it began with what McNeill and most other historians
then considered the four wellsprings of human civilization: the Tigris-
Euphrates Valley, in modern Iraq, home of Sumer, oldest of all complex
polities; the Nile Delta, in Egypt; the Indus Valley, in Pakistan; and, in east
central China, the valley of the Huang He, more familiar to Westerners as
the Yellow River. If McNeill were writing A World History today,
discoveries like those at Huaricanga would force him to add two more areas
to the book. The first and better known is Mesoamerica, where half a dozen
societies, the Olmec first among them, rose in the centuries before Christ.
The second is the Peruvian littoral, home of a much older civilization that
has come to light only in the twenty-first century. *18
Mesoamerica would deserve its place in the human pantheon if its
inhabitants had only created maize, in terms of harvest weight the world’s
most important crop. But the inhabitants of Mexico and northern Central
America also developed tomatoes, now basic to Italian cuisine; peppers,
essential to Thai and Indian food; all the world’s squashes (except for a few
domesticated in the United States); and many of the beans on dinner plates
around the world. One writer has estimated that Indians developed three-
fifths of the crops now in cultivation, most of them in Mesoamerica. Having
secured their food supply, Mesoamerican societies turned to intellectual
pursuits. In a millennium or less, a comparatively short time, they invented
their own writing, astronomy, and mathematics, including the zero.
A few decades ago, many researchers would have included jump-starting
Andean civilization on the honor roll of Mesoamerican accomplishments.
The Olmec, it was proposed, visited Peru, and the locals, dutiful students,
copied their example. Today we know that technologically sophisticated
societies arose in Peru first—the starting date, to archaeologists’ surprise,
keeps getting pushed back. Between 3200 and 2500 B.C., large-scale public
buildings, the temple at Huaricanga among them, rose up in at least seven
settlements on the Peruvian coast—an extraordinary efflorescence for that
time and place. When the people of the Norte Chico were building these
cities, there was only one other urban complex on earth: Sumer.
In the last chapter, I described how archaeologists have spent the last
century pushing back their estimates of when Indians were first present in
the Americas. Now I turn to a parallel intellectual journey: the growth in
understanding of the antiquity, diversity, complexity, and technological
sophistication of Indian societies. Much as historians of early Eurasia focus
on the Tigris-Euphrates, Nile, Indus, and Huang He Valleys, historians of
the Americas focus on Mesoamerica and the Andes.
Like the Eurasian centers of civilization, Mesoamerica and the Andes
were places where complex, long-lasting cultural traditions began. But there
was a striking difference between the Eastern and Western Hemispheres: the
degree of interaction between their great cultural centers. A constant traffic
in goods and ideas among Eurasian societies allowed them to borrow or
steal each other’s most interesting innovations: algebra from Islam, paper
from China, the spinning wheel (probably) from India, the telescope from
Europe. “In my lectures, I put this very baldly,” Alfred Crosby told me. “I
say that nobody in Europe or Asia ever invented anything—they got it from
somebody else.” He added, “When you think of the dozen most important
things ever invented—the wheel, the alphabet, the stirrup, metallurgy—
none of them were invented in Europe. But they all got used there.”
By contrast, there was very little exchange of people, goods, or ideas
between Mesoamerica and the Andes. Travelers on the Silk Road between
China and the Mediterranean had to cross desert and the Hindu Kush, both
formidable obstacles. But there was no road whatsoever across the two
thousand miles of jagged mountains and thick rainforest between
Mesoamerica and the Andes. In fact, there still isn’t any road. The section
of the Pan-American Highway that runs between them remains unfinished,
because engineers can neither go around nor bulldoze through the swamps
and mountains at the narrow Panama-Colombia border. Almost entirely by
themselves for thousands of years, these two centers of civilization were so
different that researchers today have difficulty finding a conceptual
vocabulary that applies to both. Nonetheless, the tale of their mostly
separate progress through time deserves prominent placement in any history
of the world.
THE COTTON AGE
Peru is the cow-catcher on the train of continental drift. Leading South
America’s slow, grinding march toward Australia, its coastline hits the
ocean floor and crumples up like a carpet shoved into a chair-leg. Just
offshore the impact pushes the plate on the bottom of the Pacific down and
under the advancing coast, creating a trench almost five miles deep. Inland
the impact thrusts up the two parallel mountain ranges that make up the
Peruvian Andes: the high Cordillera Negra, the Black Range, to the west,
and the still higher Cordillera Blanca, the White Range, to the east. (The
White Range has snow; the Black rarely does. Hence the names.) In
northern Peru a third range rises between them; the altiplano, a scoop of
high plains some five hundred miles long, fills the gap in the south. Taken
together, the cordilleras and the altiplano make up the Andes, the second-
biggest chain of mountains in the world.
Sandwiched between the Andes and the Pacific, Peru’s coastland is a
skinny gray-brown ribbon. From a geographer’s point of view, it is a
splendid anomaly, commencing with its extreme aridity. Over most of the
South American landmass, the prevailing winds come from the east, across
Brazil. As the warm, wet Amazonian air hits the towering Andes, it cools
and sheds its moisture in the form of snow. Almost nothing is left for the
Peruvian coast, which sits in the mountains’ rain shadow. Surprisingly, the
coast is also walled off from moisture on the Pacific side, where the trade
winds create a second rain shadow. Blowing from the southwest, the trades
push the warm surface waters northeast, pulling frigid water from the deep
offshore trench to the surface. The upwelling, known as the Humboldt
Current, chills the air above it. Coming from the west, the Pacific trade
winds hit the cold air from the Humboldt Current and are forced upward in
a classic temperature inversion of the sort common in southern California.
In temperature inversions, air movement is inhibited—the cold air can’t rise
and the warm air doesn’t fall—which in turn inhibits rainfall. Walled off
from wet air by both the Andes and the Humboldt Current, the Peruvian
littoral is astonishingly dry: the average annual precipitation is about two
inches. The Atacama Desert, just south of Peru on the Chilean shore, is the
driest place on earth—in some places rain has literally never been recorded.
Space researchers use the Atacama as a model for the sands of Mars.
Pizarro’s pilot once explained how to navigate from Mexico’s Pacific
shore to Peru: Sail south along the coast until you no longer see trees. Then
you are in Peru. Yet the coast is not a classic, Sahara-style desert of sand
dunes and scorching sun. It is punctuated by more than fifty rivers, which
channel Andes snowmelt to the sea. The lines of vegetation along their
banks are like oases, fertile places where people can farm in an otherwise
almost lifeless land. For much of the year the ocean air is cold enough on
winter mornings to make fog roll into the valleys a hundred feet deep.
People wear sweatshirts and futilely wipe at the mist on their windshields.
By noon the fog lifts, having deposited a few hundredths of an inch of
moisture (summed over the year, the fog gives the desert most of its annual
two inches of precipitation).
If the anti-Clovis arguments are correct, paleo-Indians walked or paddled
to Peru fifteen thousand years ago or more. But Peru’s first known
inhabitants appear in the archaeological record sometime before 10,000
B.C. According to two studies in Science in 1998, these people apparently
lived part of the year in the foothills, gathering and hunting (for the latter,
no traces of Clovis points have been found). When winter came, they hiked
to the warmer coast. At Quebrada Jaguay, a dry streambed on the nation’s
southern coast that was one of the two sites described in Science, they dug
up wedge clams and chased schools of six-inch drumfish with nets. They
carried their catch to their base, which was about five miles from the shore.
(Quebrada means “ravine” and often refers to the gullies caused by flash
floods.) Quebrada Tacahuay, the other Science site, was closer to the shore
but even drier: its average annual rainfall is less than a quarter inch. The
site, exposed by the construction of a road, is an avian graveyard. On their
annual travels between the foothills and the shore, paleo-Indians seem to
have visited the area periodically to feast on the cormorants and boobies
that nested on the rocks by the beach.
By 8000 B.C., paleo-Indians had radiated throughout western South
America. Their lives were similar enough to contemporary hunter-gatherers
that perhaps they should now be simply called Indians. Whatever the name,
they were varied enough to have pleased Walt Whitman. Some groups had
settled into mountain caves, skewering deer-size vicuña on spears; others
plucked fish from mangrove swamps; still others stayed on the beach as
their forebears had, weaving nets and setting them into the water. In the
parched Atacama Desert, the Chinchorro created history’s first mummies.
Mummies were first discovered in the Atacama at the beginning of the
twentieth century. But the Chinchorro attracted sustained attention only in
1983, when ninety-six superbly preserved cadavers were discovered
beneath a massif that rises above downtown Arica, Chile. About 90 percent
of their diet was seafood—fish, shellfish, marine mammals, and seaweed—
the Chinchorro ate almost no fruit, vegetables, or land animals. Sometime
before 5000 B.C. they began mummifying bodies—children at first, adults
later on. Nobody knows why. They peeled off the skin from the limbs like
so many socks, covered the result with white clay, painted it to resemble the
deceased, and fitted the head with a wig made from its own hair. Such was
the skill of the Chinchorro at preserving human flesh that scientists have
been able to extract intact DNA from cadavers thousands of years older than
the Egyptian pyramids.
Many of the child mummies exhibit signs of severe anemia, surprising in
people who lived on seafood. In the preserved cadavers paleoparasitologists
(scientists who study ancient parasites) have discovered eggs from
Diphyllobothrium pacificum, a marine tapeworm that usually afflicts fish
and sea lions but can slip into human beings who eat raw seafood. The
parasite clamps onto the intestines and siphons nutrients from the body.
Some grow to lengths of sixteen feet. If the tapeworm attaches to the right
place in the gut, it can leech vitamin B12 from the victim, instigating a
lethal form of anemia. The Chinchorro, it seems, were beset by parasites.
The Chinchorro mummies were often repainted, indicating that they were
not quickly interred but kept on display, perhaps for years. One can
speculate that grieving parents were unable to let go of their children’s
bodies in a society that viewed the spirit as adhering to the flesh. What is
certain is that the Chinchorro mummies are the first known manifestation of
a phenomenon that marked Andean society all the way up to the Inka: the
belief that the venerated, preserved dead could exert a powerful impact on
the living.
Sometime before 3200 B.C., and possibly before 3500 B.C., something
happened in the Norte Chico. On a world level, the eruption at the Norte
Chico was improbable, even aberrant. The Tigris-Euphrates, Nile, Indus,
and Huang He Valleys were fertile, sunny, well-watered breadbaskets with
long stretches of bottomland that practically invited farmers to stick seeds
in the soil. Because intensive agriculture has been regarded a prerequisite
for complex societies, it has long been claimed that civilizations can arise
only in such farm-friendly places. The Peruvian littoral is an agronomical
no-go zone: barren, cloudy, almost devoid of rain, seismically and
climatically unstable. Except along the rivers, nothing grows but lichen. “It
looks like the last place you’d want to start up something major,” Creamer
said to me. “There doesn’t seem to be anything there to build it on.”
Nonetheless, they built it. “The complex of sites in the Norte Chico
region is nothing short of extraordinary,” Haas and Creamer wrote in 2005.
While a very small number of moderate sites with communal
architecture…are found in other parts of the Andes, the concentration
of at least 25 large ceremonial/residential sites in the valleys of the
Norte Chico is unique. Metaphorically, most of the Andes is covered
with granules of sand [between 3000 B.C. and 1800 B.C.]. In a few
spots, there are anthills that clearly stand out from the loose granules.
Then in the Norte Chico, there is a volcano.
The Norte Chico consists of four narrow river valleys: from south to
north, the Huaura, Supe, Pativilca, and Fortaleza. They converge on a slice
of coastline less than thirty miles long. The first full-scale archaeological
investigation of the area took place in 1941, when Gordon R. Willey and
John M. Corbett of Harvard worked at Aspero, a salt marsh at the mouth of
the Supe. They found a big trash heap and a multiroomed building with no
pottery and a few maize cobs under the pounded clay floor. They didn’t
know what to make of it. Why was there no pottery, when all previously
examined large settlements in Peru had pottery? Why only a handful of
maize cobs in the whole site, when maize, at least for the elite, was a staple
food? How did they grow maize in a salt marsh, anyway? How could they
have agriculture but no pottery? Working before the invention of carbon
dating, they had no way to determine Aspero’s age. The puzzled
archaeologists took thirteen years to publish their data.
Indian cities in Peru are some of the most heavily looted
archaeological sites in the world. The looting dates back
millennia, with the Inka having ravaged the centers of their
predecessors, sometimes reusing art and stonework. The Spanish
sack of Tawantinsuyu calamitously expanded on this tradition of
plunder, which has greatly accelerated in modern times, fueled by
the desperate poverty of Peru’s Indian population. Here in the
Fortaleza Valley, graverobbers—almost certainly local farmers—
have ripped apart thousand-year-old tombs in a futile search for
golden artifacts. Others gathered the remains into shrines for
secretive, candlelit prayers to the dead, whose powers are
recognized by alcohol and cigarettes.
Among Aspero’s many curiosities, Willey and Corbett noted, were a half-
dozen mounds, some of them nearly fifteen feet tall. These “knolls, or
hillocks,” the two men wrote, were “natural eminences of sand.” Thirty
years after his initial excavation, Willey revisited Aspero with Michael E.
Moseley, an archaeologist now at the University of Florida. To his chagrin,
Willey quickly recognized that the natural “knolls” were, in truth, human-
made “temple-type platform mounds,” evidence of a more materially
advanced culture than he had imagined possible for the era. Indeed, Aspero
may have had as many as seventeen artificial mounds, all of which Willey
missed the first time round. “It is an excellent, if embarrassing, example,”
he remarked, “of not being able to find what you are not looking for.”
At about the same time, one of Moseley’s graduate students wrote his
doctoral dissertation about Aspero. He had enough grant money to pay for
seven radiocarbon dates. According to one of them, Aspero went back to
3000 B.C. The student also had a smaller, nearby site called As8 tested and
got a date of 4900 B.C. Ridiculous, he in effect thought. These dates are too
old—obviously something went wrong. Maybe the samples were
contaminated. And he tossed the dates out.
That may have been a mistake. In 1994 Ruth Shady Solis, of the National
University of San Marcos in Lima, began working fourteen miles inland
from Aspero, at a site known as Caral. From the sandy soil emerged an
imposing, 150-acre array of earthworks: six large platform mounds, one
sixty feet tall and five hundred feet on a side; two round, sunken ceremonial
plazas; half a dozen complexes of mounds and platforms; big stone
buildings with residential apartments. Haas and Creamer worked with the
project in 2000 and helped establish Caral’s antiquity: it was founded before
2600 B.C. While Shady continued work on Caral, Haas, Creamer, and Ruiz
split off to investigate the Pitivilca, the next river to the north, and the
Fortaleza, just north of the Pitivilca. They found, Haas told me, “major
urban centers on a par with Caral in terms of monumental architecture,
ceremonial structures, and residential architecture. And some of them were
older.”
NORTE CHICO
The Americas’ First Urban Complex, 3000–1800 B.C.
Examination of Huaricanga and the surrounding communities is far from
complete—Haas, Creamer, and Ruiz published their first findings in
December 2004. They found evidence of people living inland from the
coast as early as 9210 B.C. But the oldest date securely associated with a
city is about 3500 B.C., at Huaricanga. (There are hints of earlier dates.)
Other urban sites followed apace: Caballete in 3100 B.C., Porvenir and
Upaca in 2700 B.C. Taken individually, none of the twenty-five Norte
Chico cities rivaled Sumer’s cities in size, but the totality was bigger than
Sumer. Egypt’s pyramids were larger, but they were built centuries later. I
asked Haas and Creamer where a race of alien visitors in, say, 3000 B.C.
would have landed if they were searching for earth’s most sophisticated
society. “I hate questions like that,” Haas said, because they ask scientists to
engage in the dubious enterprise of ranking cultures against each other on a
scale.
“Wouldn’t it depend on what the aliens thought was sophisticated?”
Creamer asked. “I mean, who knows what they would think.”
I asked them to indulge me.
“I know what you’re getting at,” Haas said, reluctantly. “In 3000 B.C.
your aliens would have had a very limited number of options on the menu.
And one of those options would have been the Norte Chico.”
Because human beings rarely volunteer to spend their days loading
baskets with heavy rocks to build public monuments, Haas, Creamer, and
Ruiz argued that these cities must have had a centralized government that
instigated and directed the work. In the Norte Chico, in other words, Homo
sapiens experienced a phenomenon that at that time had occurred only once
before, in Mesopotamia: the emergence, for better or worse, of leaders with
enough prestige, influence, and hierarchical position to induce their subjects
to perform heavy labor. It was humankind’s second experiment with
government.
“Where does government come from?” Haas asked. “What makes people
decide to surrender some of their personal liberty to it? What did they gain
from it? Philosophers have been asking this question for centuries. But
archaeology should have something to contribute. In the Norte Chico, we
may be able to provide some answers. It’s one of only two places on earth
—three, if you count Mesoamerica—where government was an invention.
Everywhere else it was inherited or borrowed. People were born into
societies with governments or saw their neighbors’ governments and copied
the idea. Here, people came up with it themselves.”
Haas’s enthusiasm seems hyperbolic to some of his colleagues. “What
about Amazonian chiefdoms, North American Mississippian societies, and
so on?” James Petersen, an archaeologist at the University of Vermont,
asked me. “Plus Africa. ‘Government’ was independently invented there,
too.” But Haas argues that these peoples knew of the existence of
hierarchical, structured societies with strong central leaders, and could
pattern their societies after them. Only in a very few places, he says, Norte
Chico among them, were cultures proceeding without a map.
In the Norte Chico, Haas told me, government seems not to have arisen
from the need for mutual defense, as philosophers have often speculated.
The twenty-five cities were not sited strategically and did not have
defensive walls; no evidence of warfare, such as burned buildings or
mutilated corpses, has been found. Instead, he said, the basis of the rulers’
power was the collective economic and spiritual good. Norte Chico was the
realm of King Cotton.
To feed Norte Chico’s burgeoning population, Shady discovered, the
valley folk learned how to irrigate the soil. Not given an environment that
favored the development of intensive agriculture, that is, they shaped the
landscape into something more suitable to their purposes. Luckily for their
purposes, the area is geographically suited for irrigation. The peril of
irrigation for farmers is evaporation. Just as water evaporating in a glass
leaves behind a film of salts and minerals, water evaporating from irrigation
channels leaves deposits in the soil. In a surprisingly short time, the salty
deposits can build up to toxic levels, making the land unusable. Because the
Cordillera Negra bulges especially close to the coast in the Norte Chico, the
valleys are short and steeply walled; almost hurled from the heights, the
rivers shoot toward the sea at high velocity. Even after diversion, the water
gushes through irrigation channels so quickly that it can’t evaporate and
build up salts in the soil. To this day, one can only reach many
archaeological sites in the Norte Chico by navigating around surging,
brimfull irrigation ditches, some of them probably laid out originally by the
same farmers who built the mounds.
The most important product of irrigation was cotton. Almost forty species
of cotton exist worldwide, of which four have been domesticated, two in the
Americas, two in the Middle East and South Asia. Cotton was known in
Europe by the thirteenth century but not common until the eighteenth;
Columbus and his men wore sturdy flax and coarse wool. *19 South
American cotton (Gossypium barbadense) once grew wild along the
continent’s Pacific and Atlantic coasts. It may first have been domesticated
in Amazonia, presumably near the river’s mouth. Today it has been
supplanted by Mexican cotton (another species, Gossypium hirsutum),
which provides most of the world’s harvest. But in the Andean past, the
long, puffy bolls of South American cotton, some varieties naturally tinted
pink, blue, or yellow, were the soft underpinning of Andean culture. “In the
Norte Chico we see almost no visual arts,” Ruiz told me after I gave him the
scrap of cloth. “No sculpture, no carving or bas-relief, almost no painting or
drawing—the interiors are completely bare. What we do see are these huge
mounds—and textiles.”
Cotton was a key element in regional trade. People in shoreline
settlements like Aspero could catch vast quantities of anchovies and
sardines; Caral, Huaricanga, and the other inland towns had irrigation-
produced cotton, fruit, and vegetables. The countless fish bones in inland
Caral and Huaricanga and the fruit seeds and cotton nets in shoreline
Aspero are evidence that they swapped one for the other. According to
Haas, the inland centers must have controlled the exchange, because the
fishers needed their cotton for nets. Cotton was both needed and easily
stored, which made it useful as a medium of exchange or status. At Upaca,
on the Pativilca, Haas’s team discovered the ruins of stone warehouses. If
they were for storing cotton, as Haas surmises, they would have been, in
this textile-mad society, an emblem of state power and wealth, the ancient
equivalent of Fort Knox.
By making these claims, Haas and Creamer were staking out a position in
a long-running theoretical dispute. In 1975 Michael Moseley, the Florida
archaeologist, drew together his own work in Aspero and earlier research by
Peruvian and other researchers into what has been called the MFAC
hypothesis: the maritime foundations of Andean civilization. He proposed
that there was little subsistence agriculture around Aspero because it was a
center of fishing, and that the later, highland Peruvian cultures, including
the mighty Inka, all had their origins not in the mountains but in the great
fishery of the Humboldt Current. Rather than being founded on agriculture,
the ancient cities of coastal Peru drew their sustenance from the sea.
The MFAC hypothesis—that societies fed by fishing could have founded
a civilization—was “radical, unwelcome, and critiqued as an economic
impossibility,” Moseley later recalled. Little wonder! The MFAC was like a
brick through the window of archaeological theory. Archaeologists had
always believed that in fundamental respects all human societies
everywhere were alike, no matter how different they might appear on the
surface. If one runs the tape backwards to the beginning, so to speak, the
stories are all the same: foraging societies develop agriculture; the increased
food supply leads to a population boom; the society grows and stratifies,
with powerful clerics at the top and peasant cultivators at the bottom;
massive public works ensue, along with intermittent social strife and war. If
the MFAC hypothesis was true, early civilization in Peru was in one major
respect strikingly unlike early civilization in Mesopotamia, Egypt, India,
and China. Farming, the cornerstone of the complex societies in the rest of
the world, was in Peru an afterthought. (In Chapter 1, I called Peru the site
of an independent Neolithic Revolution, which I defined, following
archaeological practice, as beginning with the invention of agriculture. If
the MFAC is correct, the definition will have to be changed.)
The MFAC hypothesis was radical, its supporters conceded, but the
supporting evidence could not be dismissed. Bone analyses show that late-
Pleistocene coastal foragers “got 90 percent of their protein from the sea—
anchovies, sardines, shellfish, and so on,” said Susan deFrance, an
archaeologist at the University of Florida. And the pattern continued for
thousands of years and archaeological dig after archaeological dig. “Later
sites like Aspero are just full of fish bones and show almost no evidence of
food crops.” The MFAC hypothesis, she told me, can be summarized as the
belief “that these huge numbers of anchovy bones are telling you
something.” That “something” is that, according to Daniel H. Sandweiss of
the University of Maine, “the incredibly rich ocean off this incredibly
impoverished coast was the critical factor.”
Further evidence both for and against the MFAC hypothesis emerged in
the mid-1990s, with Shady’s pathbreaking work on the Supe River.
(Aspero, one recalls, sat at the river’s mouth.) Shady’s team uncovered
seventeen riverside settlements, the second-biggest of which was Caral. In
her view, monumental buildings implied a large resident population, but
again there were plenty of anchovy bones and little evidence that locals
farmed anything but cotton. To Moseley, the fish bones suggested that the
ample protein on the coast allowed people to go inland and build irrigation
networks to produce the cotton needed to expand fishing production. The
need for nets, in Haas’s view, gave the inland cities the whip hand—Norte
Chico was based on farming, like all other complex societies, although not
on farming for food. Besides, he says, so many more people lived along the
four rivers than on the shore that they had to have been dominant. Moseley
believes that Aspero, which has never been fully excavated, is older than the
other cities, and set the template for them. “For archaeology,” deFrance
said, “what may be important” in the end is not the scope of the society “but
where it emerged from and the food supply. You can’t eat cotton.” Evidence
one way or the other may emerge if Moseley and Shady, as planned, return
to Aspero. If they are correct, and Aspero turns out to be substantially older
than now thought, it might win the title of the world’s oldest city—the place
where human civilization began. “Maybe we might actually stop people
calling it the ‘New World,’” Moseley joked.
Norte Chico chiefdoms were almost certainly theocratic, though not
brutally so; leaders induced followers to obey by a combination of ideology,
charisma, and skillfully timed positive reinforcement. Scattered almost
randomly around the top of the mounds are burned, oxidized chunks of rock
—hearth stones—in drifts of fish bones and ash. To Haas and Creamer,
these look like the remains of feasts. The city rulers encouraged and
rewarded the workforce during construction and maintenance of the mound
by staging celebratory roasts of fish and achira root right on the worksite.
Afterward they mixed the garbage into the mound, incorporating the
celebration into the construction. At these feasts, alcohol in some form was
almost certainly featured. So, perhaps, was music, both vocal and
instrumental; excavating Caral, Shady discovered thirty-two flutes made of
pelican wingbones tucked into a recess in the main temple.
What was it like building these first great structures? In June 1790, a year
after the French Revolution swept away a corrupt and ineffectual monarchy,
thousands of Parisians from every social class united to create the enormous
Champ de Mars as a monument to the new society. Working in heavy
rainfall without coercion or pay, they dug out the entire enormous space to a
depth of four feet and then filled it up with enough sand and gravel to make
an outdoor amphitheater suitable for half a million people. The whole huge
effort took only three weeks. Something analogous—an awed, wondering
celebration of a new mode of existence—may have occurred at the Norte
Chico.
Even today, the contrast is startling between the desert and the irrigated
land, with its lush patchwork of maize, sugar, and fruit trees. Beyond the
reach of the water the barrens instantly commence; the line of demarcation
is sharp enough to cross with a step. To people born into a landscape of rock
and fog, the conflagration of green must have been a dazzlement. Of course
they would exalt the priests and rulers who promised to maintain this
miracle. The prospect of a drunken feast afterward would be a bonus.
The only known trace of the Norte Chico deities may be a drawing
etched into the face of a gourd. It depicts a sharp-toothed, hat-wearing
figure who faces the viewer frontally and holds a long stick or rod vertically
in each hand. When Creamer found the gourd in 2002, the image shocked
Andeanists. It looked like an early version of the Staff God, a fanged, staff-
wielding deity who is one of the main characters in the Andean pantheon.
Previously the earliest manifestation of the Staff God had been thought to
be around 500 B.C. According to radiocarbon tests, the Norte Chico gourd
was harvested between 2280 and 2180 B.C. The early date implies, Haas
and Creamer argued, that the principal Andean spiritual tradition originated
in the Norte Chico, and that this tradition endured for at least four thousand
years, millennia longer than had been previously suspected.
A recently discovered etched drawing on a gourd (left) has led
some researchers to posit that the fanged Staff God was a central
figure in an Andean religious tradition that lasted almost four
thousand years. (Right, a Staff God from the first millennium
A.D.)
Many researchers reacted skeptically to the finding. According to
Krzysztof Makowski, an archaeologist at the Pontifical Catholic University
of Peru in Lima, the image is so anomalous—Creamer found it in a strata
dating between 900 and 1300 A.D.—that a more likely explanation is that
the figure was carved onto an ancient gourd that had been preserved by the
extremely arid climate. Such reuse of old materials is not unknown, though
nobody has ever seen it with a gourd three thousand years old. More
important, Makowski says, researchers have little evidence that ancient
Peruvians actually believed in a single overarching deity called the Staff
God. “What we describe as the ‘Staff God’ is a convention,” he explained to
me, a standardized pose reminiscent in its way of the standardized poses in
Byzantine art. The religious tradition of Peru, in his view, was an
overlapping sequence of related faiths that has barely begun to be
unraveled; it is as if archaeologists from the far future were excavating in
Europe, and mulling over the ubiquitous image of the man on the cross.
Was this one man? Many men depicted in a similar fashion? One man
whose meaning changed over time?
What is known is that the tradition evolved, as religions will, with the
circumstances of its believers. As Andean societies grew richer, their
temples and the images in them grew grander and more refined, though the
former stayed true to the U-shape-and-sunken-plaza pattern I saw in the
Norte Chico and the latter, depicted often in the “Staff God” pose, never
lost their erect postures, gnashing fangs, and brandished staffs. Over the
millennia, this god or gods transmuted into Wiraqocha, the Inka creator
deity, whose worship was brutally suppressed by Spain.
Whether on the coast or in the river valleys, Moseley said, the Norte
Chico lighted a cultural fire. During the next three thousand years, Peru
hosted so many diverse cultures that the archaeological timelines in
textbooks, with their multiple arrows and switchbacks, are as impenetrable
as the family trees of European kings. Despite their variousness, Haas says,
all seem to have drawn in their diverse ways from the well of Norte Chico.
Characterizing the similarities is as difficult as nailing down a blob of
mercury, because exceptions abound and human behavior is always
multifaceted. Nonetheless, visitors to Andean history note certain ways of
doing things that recur in ways striking to the outsider, sometimes in one
variant, sometimes in another, like the themes in a jazz improvisation. The
primacy of exchange over a wide area, the penchant for collective, festive
civic work projects, the high valuation of textiles and textile technology—
Norte Chico, it seems possible to say, set the template for all of them.
And only Norte Chico. For the next four thousand years, Andean
civilization was influenced by only one major import from the world
outside: maize. A few other minor crops made the trip later, including
tobacco, domesticated in Amazonia, then exported north to become the
favorite vice of Indians from Mesoamerica to Maine. But it is a mark of
maize’s social, cultural, and even political centrality that it was the first—
and for centuries the only—phenomenon to pass from Mexico to the Andes.
The next major import, alas, was smallpox.
TINY COBS
Although it was just after dawn, several people were already waiting
outside the small store. When the metal grating rolled up, I followed them
inside. The shop was in a middle-class neighborhood of Oaxaca city, in
southern Mexico. Behind the low counter, half a dozen women hovered
over waist-high stoves made of concrete block. Recessed into the dome-
shaped top of each stove were two shallow clay dishes that served as
burners. With expert motions the women slipped tortillas—thin discs of
cream-colored flour perhaps nine inches in diameter—onto the hot burners.
In seconds the tortilla dried and puffed up like a soufflé. And from the
storefront floated the aroma of toasting maize, which has permeated Mexico
and Central America for thousands of years.
Established in 2001, the tortilla store is an innovative attempt to preserve
one of earth’s greatest cultural and biological assets: the many local
varieties of maize in the narrow “waist” of southern Mexico. The isthmus is
a medley of mountains, beaches, wet tropical forests, and dry savannas, and
is the most ecologically diverse area in Mesoamerica. “Some parts of
Oaxaca go up nine thousand feet,” T. Boone Hallberg, a botanist at the
Oaxaca Institute of Technology, told me. “Other parts are at sea level.
Sometimes the soil is very acid, sometimes it’s quite basic—all within a few
hundred feet. You can go on either side of a highway, and the climate will
be different on the east side than on the west side.” The area’s human
geography is equally diverse: it is the home of more than a dozen major
Indian groups, who have a long and fractious history. 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.
I was visiting Amado Ramírez Leyva, the entrepreneur behind the tortilla
store. Born in Oaxaca and trained as an agronomist, Ramírez Leyva had
established a consortium of traditional farmers, Indians like himself
(Ramírez Leyva is Ñudzahui [Mixtec], the second most numerous Indian
group in the region). The farmers supply eight different varieties of dried
maize to his shop, Itanoní, where the kernels are carefully ground, hand-
pressed into tortillas, and cooked fresh for customers. Itanoní means “maize
flower” in Ñudzahui, and refers to a flower that blooms in maize fields. It is
one of the few tortillerías in Mexico—perhaps even the only one—to sell
what might be described as “estate” tortillas: proudly labeled as being made
from maize of one variety, from one area.
“Everyone in Mexico knows the rules for making a true tortilla,” Ramírez
Leyva told me. “But you can’t get them that way now, except maybe in
your grandmother’s kitchen.” First soak the dried maize kernels in a bath of
lime and water to remove their thin, translucent skins (a process with its
own special verb, nixtamalizar). Then stone-grind the kernels into masa, a
light, slightly sticky paste with a distinct maize fragrance. Made without
salt, spices, leavening, or preservatives, masa must be cooked within a few
hours of being ground, and the tortilla should be eaten soon after it is
cooked. Hot is best, perhaps folded over with mushrooms or cheese in a
tlacoyo. Like a glass of wine, he said, a tortilla should carry the flavor of its
native place. “You want to try some?”
A gourmet tortilla shop in Oaxaca, Itanoní is an attempt to
preserve southern Mexico’s hundreds of varieties of maize, a
Mesoamerican tradition that has survived for thousands of years.
I did. The smells in the shop—dry-toasted maize, melting farm cheese,
squash flowers sautéing in home-pressed oil—were causing my stomach to
direct urgent messages to my brain.
Ramírez Leyva gave me a plateful of tlacoyos. “This is exactly what you
would have eaten here ten thousand years ago,” he said.
In his enthusiasm, he was overstating, but not by much. Indians didn’t
have cheese, for one thing. And they didn’t eat tortillas ten thousand years
ago, though tortillas are indeed ancient. It is known that 11,500 years ago
paleo-Indians were hunting from caves in what is now Puebla, the state
northwest of Oaxaca. These were not mastodon and mammoth hunters—
both species were already extinct. Instead they preyed on deer, horse,
antelope, jackrabbit, and, now and then, giant turtle, as well as several
species of rodent. Within the next two thousand years all of these animals
except deer vanished, too, done in either by a local variant of overkill, the
onset of hotter, drier conditions that shrank the available grassland, or both.
Responding to the lack of game, people in Oaxaca and Puebla focused more
on gathering. Shifting among productive locations, individual families,
living on their own, ate seeds and fruit during the spring and fall and hunted
during the winter. During the summer they joined together in bands of
twenty-five to thirty—cactus leaves, a local favorite, were plentiful enough
in that season to support larger groups.
All the while their store of knowledge about the environment increased.
People learned how to make agave plants edible (roast them), how to
remove the tannic acid from acorns (grind them to a powder, then soak),
how to make tongs to pick spiny cactus fruit, how to find wild squash
flowers in the undergrowth, and other useful things. Along the way,
perhaps, they noticed that seeds thrown in the garbage one year would
sprout spontaneously in the next. The sum of these questions led to full-
fledged agriculture—not just in the Tehuacán Valley, but in many places in
southern Mexico. Squashes, gourds, peppers, and chupandilla plums were
among the initial crops. The first cereal was probably millet—not the millet
eaten today, which originated in Africa, but a cousin species, knotweed
bristle-grass, which is no longer farmed. And then came maize.
At the DNA level, all the major cereals—wheat, rice, maize, millet,
barley, and so on—are surprisingly alike. But despite their genetic
similarity, maize looks and acts different from the rest. It is like the one
redheaded early riser in a family of dark-haired night owls. Left untended,
other cereals are capable of propagating themselves. Because maize kernels
are wrapped inside a tough husk, human beings must sow the species—it
essentially cannot reproduce on its own. The uncultivated ancestors of other
cereals resemble their domesticated descendants. People can and do eat
their grain; in the Middle East, for example, the wild barley harvest from a
small piece of land can feed a family. By contrast, no wild maize ancestor
has ever been found, despite decades of search. Maize’s closest relative is a
mountain grass called teosinte that looks nothing like it (teosinte splits into
many thin stems, whereas maize has a single thick stalk). And teosinte,
unlike wild wheat and rice, is not a practical food source; its “ears” are
scarcely an inch long and consist of seven to twelve hard, woody seeds. An
entire ear of teosinte has less nutritional value than a single kernel of
modern maize.
The grain in wild grasses develops near the top of the stem. As it matures,
the stem slowly breaks up—shatters, in the jargon—letting the seed dribble
to the ground. In wild wheat and barley, a common single-gene mutation
blocks shattering. For the plant the change is highly disadvantageous, but it
facilitates harvest by humans—the grain waits on the stem to be collected.
The discovery and planting of nonshattering grain is thought to have
precipitated the Neolithic revolution in the Middle East. Like other grasses,
teosinte shatters, but there is no known nonshattering variant. (At least
sixteen genes control teosinte and maize shattering, a situation so complex
that geneticists have effectively thrown up their hands after trying to
explain how a nonshattering type might have appeared spontaneously.) No
known wild ancestor, no obvious natural way to evolve a nonshattering
variant, no way to propagate itself—little wonder that the Mexican National
Museum of Culture claimed in a 1982 exhibition that maize “was not
domesticated, but created”—almost from scratch.
In the 1960s Richard S. MacNeish, of Phillips Academy, in Andover,
Massachusetts, led an archaeological team that meticulously combed
Puebla’s Tehuacán Valley for signs of early agriculture. Like the Peruvian
littoral, the Tehuacán Valley lies in a double rain shadow, sandwiched
between two mountain ranges. The aridity similarly helps preserve
archaeological evidence. MacNeish’s team sifted through fifty caves before
they found anything. In site No. 50, a rockshelter near the village of
Coxcatlán, the team found maize cobs the size of a cigarette butt.
Ultimately, MacNeish’s team found 23,607 whole or partial maize cobs
in five caves in the Tehuacán Valley. This ancient refuse became
ammunition in a long-running academic battle between Harvard botanist
Paul C. Mangelsdorf and George Beadle, a geneticist who worked at
Stanford, Caltech, and the University of Chicago. In the late 1930s both
men proposed theories about the origin of maize. Mangelsdorf said that it
descended from the mix of a now-vanished wild ancestor of maize and wild
grasses from the genus Tripsacum. Teosinte, he said, played no role in its
development. Beadle had a simpler theory: maize was directly descended
from teosinte. Mangelsdorf treated this idea with disbelieving scorn. By
now the reader will not be surprised to learn that an apparently arcane
debate about the distant past could become vehemently personal. Relations
between the two men became cold, then bitter, then explosive. Botanists
chose sides and wrote caustic letters about each other.
Mangelsdorf worked with MacNeish and classified the 23,607 ancient
maize cobs. The smallest and oldest, he proclaimed, were maize’s true wild
ancestor, which Indians had then crossed with Tripsacum to make modern
maize. So powerful did the evidence of Mangelsdorf’s tiny cobs seem that
in the 1960s it buried the teosinte hypothesis, even though the latter’s
champion, Beadle, had for other research won a Nobel Prize. Beadle’s ideas
were taken up in revamped form by University of Wisconsin botanist Hugh
Iltis in 1970. Maize originated, Iltis postulated, in a strange, wholesale
mutation of teosinte, to which Indians added and subtracted features
through intensive breeding. Mangelsdorf’s side found itself on the
defensive; Iltis had gleefully pointed out that the “wild maize” cobs from
the Tehuacán Valley were identical to those of an unusual, fully
domesticated variety of popcorn from Argentina. By then the dispute over
the origin of maize had filled almost as much paper—and became as
acrimonious—as the battle over Clovis.
In 1997 Mary W. Eubanks, a Duke University biologist, resuscitated the
hybridization theory in a new variant. Maize, she suggested, might have
been created by repeatedly crossing Zea diploperennis, a rare maize
relative, and another cousin species, Eastern gamagrass. When species from
different genera hybridize, the result can be what the biologist Barbara
McClintock called “genomic shock,” a wholesale reordering of DNA in
which “new species can arise quite suddenly.” In Eubanks’s theory, Indians
came upon a chance combination of Zea diploperennis and gamagrass and
realized that by mixing these two species they could shape an entirely new
biological entity. As proof, she announced the creation of a Zea
diploperennis–gamagrass hybrid in the laboratory that displayed the
attributes of ancient maize.
The teosinte faction remained skeptical. A consortium of twelve maize
scientists harshly attacked Eubanks’s work in 2001 for, in their view, failing
to demonstrate that her hybrid was actually a Zea diploperennis–gamagrass
mix and not an accidental blend of Zea diploperennis and modern maize.
(Such errors are a constant threat; in a busy lab, it is all too easy for
biologists to use the wrong pollen, mislabel a tray, or mistake one analysis
for another.) Meanwhile other geneticists pinpointed teosinte mutations that
could have led to modern maize, including sugary 1, a variant gene that
alters maize starch in a way that gives tortillas the light, flaky texture
celebrated at Itanoní.
Because maize is many steps removed from teosinte, these scientists
argued that the modern species had to have been consciously developed by
a small group of breeders who hunted through teosinte stands for plants
with desired traits. Geneticists from Rutgers University, in New Brunswick,
New Jersey, estimated in 1998 that determined, aggressive, knowledgeable
plant breeders—which Indians certainly were—might have been able to
breed maize in as little as a decade by seeking the right teosinte mutations.
From the historian’s point of view, the difference between the two models
is unimportant. In both, Indians took the first steps toward modern maize in
southern Mexico, probably in the highlands, more than six thousand years
ago. Both argue that modern maize was the outcome of a bold act of
conscious biological manipulation—“arguably man’s first, and perhaps his
greatest, feat of genetic engineering,” Nina V. Federoff, a geneticist at
Pennsylvania State University, wrote in 2003. Federoff’s description, which
appeared in Science, intrigued me. It makes twenty-first-century scientists
sound like pikers, I said when I contacted her. “That’s right,” she said. “To
get corn out of teosinte is so—you couldn’t get a grant to do that now,
because it would sound so crazy.” She added, “Somebody who did that
today would get a Nobel Prize! If their lab didn’t get shut down by
Greenpeace, I mean.”
To people accustomed to thinking of maize in terms of dark or light
yellow kernels of corn on the cob, the variety in Mexican maize is startling.
Red, blue, yellow, orange, black, pink, purple, creamy white, multicolored
—the jumble of colors in Mesoamerican maize reflects the region’s jumble
of cultures and ecological zones. One place may have maize with cobs the
size of a baby’s hand and little red kernels no bigger than grains of rice that
turn into tiny puffs when popped; in another valley will be maize with two-
foot-long cobs with great puffy kernels that Mexicans float in soup like
croutons. “Every variety has its own special use,” Ramírez Leyva explained
to me. “This one is for holidays, this one makes tortillas, this one for
niquatole [a kind of maize gelatin], this one for tejate,” a cold drink in
which maize flour, mamey pits, fermented white cacao beans, and other
ingredients are marinated in water overnight and then sweetened and
whipped to a froth. As a rule domesticated plants are less genetically
diverse than wild species, because breeders try to breed out characteristics
they don’t want. Maize is one of the few farm species that is more diverse
than most wild plants.
More than fifty genetically distinguishable maize “landraces” have been
identified in Mexico, of which at least thirty are native to Oaxaca, according
to Flavio Aragón Cuevas, a maize researcher at the Oaxaca office of the
National Institute for Forestry, Agriculture, and Fisheries Research. A
landrace is a family of local varieties, each of which may have scores of
“cultivars,” or cultivated varieties. As many as five thousand cultivars may
exist in Mesoamerica.
Maize is open pollinated—it scatters pollen far and wide. (Wheat and rice
discreetly pollinate themselves.) Because wind frequently blows pollen
from one small maize field onto another, varieties are constantly mixing.
“Maize is terribly promiscuous,” Hugo Perales, an agronomist at the think
tank Ecosur, in Chiapas, told me. Uncontrolled, open pollination would,
over time, turn the species into a single, relatively homogeneous entity. But
it does not, because farmers carefully sort through the seed they will sow in
the next season and generally do not choose obvious hybrids. Thus there is
both a steady flow of genes among maize landraces and a force
counteracting that flow. “The varieties are not like islands, carefully apart,”
Perales explained. “They are more like gentle hills in a landscape—you see
them, they are clearly present, but you cannot specify precisely where they
start.”
San Juan Chamula, a mountain town in central Chiapas, near the border
with Guatemala, is an example. Located outside the colonial city of San
Cristóbal de Las Casas, it has a sixteenth-century church with a brilliant
blue interior that is a popular tourist destination. But beyond the souvenir
kiosks in the cathedral square, most of the 44,000 inhabitants of Chamula
scratch a living from the dry mountain slopes outside town. Almost all are
Tzotzil, a southwestern branch of the Maya; in 1995, the most recent date
for which census data are available, about 28,000 did not speak Spanish.
According to a survey by Perales, 85 percent of the farmers plant the same
maize landraces as their fathers, varieties that have been passed on and
maintained for generations. The crop in the field today is the sum of
thousands of individual choices made by community members in the past.
Landrace maize from Oaxaca
Indian farmers grow maize in what is called a milpa. The term means
“maize field,” but refers to something considerably more complex. A milpa
is a field, usually but not always recently cleared, in which farmers plant a
dozen crops at once, including maize, avocados, multiple varieties of
squash and bean, melon, tomatoes, chilis, sweet potato, jicama (a tuber),
amaranth (a grain-like plant), and mucuna (a tropical legume). In nature,
wild beans and squash often grow in the same field as teosinte, the beans
using the tall teosinte as a ladder to climb toward the sun; below ground, the
beans’ nitrogen-fixing roots provide nutrients needed by teosinte. The milpa
is an elaboration of this natural situation, unlike ordinary farms, which
involve single-crop expanses of a sort rarely observed in unplowed
landscapes.
Milpa crops are nutritionally and environmentally complementary. Maize
lacks digestible niacin, the amino acids lysine and tryptophan, necessary to
make proteins and diets with too much maize can lead to protein deficiency
and pellagra, a disease caused by lack of niacin. Beans have both lysine and
tryptophan, but not the amino acids cysteine and methionine, which are
provided by maize. As a result, beans and maize make a nutritionally
complete meal. Squashes, for their part, provide an array of vitamins;
avocados, fats. The milpa, in the estimation of H. Garrison Wilkes, a maize
researcher at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, “is one of the most
successful human inventions ever created.”
Wilkes was referring to the ecological worries that beset modern
agribusiness. Because agricultural fields are less diverse than natural
ecosystems, they cannot perform all their functions. As a result, farm soils
can rapidly become exhausted. In Europe and Asia, farmers try to avoid
stressing the soil by rotating crops; they may plant wheat one year, legumes
the next, and let the field lie fallow in the year following. But in many
places this only works for a while, or it is economically unfeasible not to
use the land for a year. Then farmers use artificial fertilizer, which at best is
expensive, and at worst may inflict long-term damage on the soil. No one
knows how long the system can continue. The milpa, by contrast, has a long
record of success. “There are places in Mesoamerica that have been
continuously cultivated for four thousand years and are still productive,”
Wilkes told me. “The milpa is the only system that permits that kind of
long-term use.” Likely the milpa cannot be replicated on an industrial scale.
But by studying its essential features, researchers may be able to smooth the
rough ecological edges of conventional agriculture. “Mesoamerica still has
much to teach us,” Wilkes said.
To Wilkes’s way of thinking, ancient Indian farming methods may be the
cure for some of modern agriculture’s ailments. Beginning in the 1950s,
scientists developed hybrid strains of wheat, rice, maize, and other crops
that were vastly more productive than traditional varieties. The combination
of the new crops and the greatly increased use of artificial fertilizer and
irrigation led to the well-known Green Revolution. In many ways, the
Green Revolution was a tremendous boon; harvests in many poor countries
soared so fast that despite burgeoning populations the incidence of hunger
fell dramatically. Unfortunately, though, the new hybrids are almost always
more vulnerable to disease and insects than older varieties. In addition to
being too costly for many small farmers, the fertilizer and irrigation can, if
used improperly, damage the soil. Worst, perhaps, in the long run, the
exuberant spread of the Green Revolution has pushed many traditional
cultivars toward extinction, which in turn reduces the genetic diversity of
crops. Wilkes believes that some or all of these difficulties may be resolved
by reproducing features of the milpa in a contemporary setting. If this
occurs, it will be the second time that the dissemination of Mesoamerican
agricultural techniques will have had an enormous cultural impact—the first
time being, of course, when they originated.
From today’s vantage it is difficult to imagine the impact maize must
have had in southern Mexico at the beginning, but perhaps a comparison
will help. “Almost pure stands” of einkorn wheat covered “dozens of square
kilometers” in Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and other parts of the Middle East,
according to Jack R. Harlan and Daniel Zohary, two agronomists who pored
over the area in the 1960s to determine the distribution of wild cereals.
“Over many thousands of hectares” in those countries, they wrote in
Science, “it would be possible to harvest wild wheat today from natural
stands almost as dense as a cultivated wheat field.” In the Middle East,
therefore, the impact of agriculture was thus less a matter of raising the
productivity of wheat, barley, and other cereals than of extending the range
in which they could be grown, by developing varieties that could flourish in
climates and soils that daunt the wild plant. By contrast, the Americas had
no wild maize, and thus no wild maize harvest. Stands of teosinte have been
seen in the wild, but because the “ears” are tiny and constantly shattering
they are difficult to harvest. Thus before agriculture the people of
Mesoamerica had never experienced what it was like to stand in a field of
grain. Grain fields—landscapes of food!—were part of the mental furniture
of people in Mesopotamia. They were an astounding novelty in
Mesoamerica. Indians not only created a new species, they created a new
environment to put it in. Unsurprisingly, the reverberations sounded for
centuries.
Maize in the milpa, the Yale archaeologist Michael D. Coe has written,
“is the key…to the understanding of Mesoamerican civilization. Where it
flourished, so did high culture.” The statement may be more precise than it
seems. In the 1970s the geographer Anne Kirkby discovered that Indian
farmers in Oaxaca considered it not worth their while to clear and plant a
milpa unless it could produce more than about two hundred pounds of grain
per acre. Using this figure, Kirkby went back to the ancient cobs excavated
from Tehuacán Valley and tried to estimate how much grain per acre they
would have yielded. The cob sizes steadily increased as they approached the
present. In Kirkby’s calculation, the harvest broke the magic two-hundred-
pound line sometime between 2000 and 1500 B.C. At about that time, the
first evidence of large-scale land clearing for milpas appears in the
archaeological record. And with it appeared the Olmec, Mesoamerica’s first
great civilization.
Based on the Gulf Coast side of Mexico’s waist, on the other side of a
range of low mountains from Oaxaca, the Olmec clearly understood the
profound changes wreaked by maize—indeed, they fêted them in their art.
Like the stained-glass windows in European cathedrals, the massive Olmec
sculptures and bas-reliefs were meant both to dazzle and instruct. 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 sculpture after sculpture, ears of maize spring like thoughts
from the skulls of supernatural beings. Olmec portraits of living rulers were
often engraved on stelae (long, flat stones mounted vertically in the ground
and carved on the face with images and writing). In these stela portraits, the
king’s clothes, chosen to represent his critical spiritual role in the society’s
prosperity, generally included a headdress with an ear of maize emblazoned
on the front like a star. So resonant was the symbol, according to Virginia
M. Fields, curator of pre-Columbian art at the Los Angeles County Museum
of Art, that in later Maya hieroglyphics “it became the semantic equivalent
of the highest royal title, ahaw.” In the Maya creation story, the famous
Popul Vuh, humans were literally created from maize.
Maize and the milpa slowly radiated throughout the Americas, stopping
their advance only where the climate grew too cold or dry. By the time of
the Pilgrims, fields of mixed maize, beans, and squash lined the New
England coast and in many places extended for miles into the interior. To
the south, maize reached to Peru and Chile. Maize was a high-status food
there even though Andean cultures had developed their own agricultural
system, with potatoes occupying the central role. (Amazonia seems to have
been an exception; most but not all researchers believe maize there was
eclipsed by manioc.)
Maize had an equivalent impact on much of the rest of the world after
Columbus introduced it to Europe. Central Europeans became especially
hooked on it; by the nineteenth century, maize was the daily bread of
Serbia, Rumania, and Moldavia. So dependent did northern Italy and
southwestern France become on polenta, a type of cornmeal mush, that
pellagra (caused by eating too much maize) became widespread. “I know
little, if anything, pleasing to say about the people,” wrote Goethe, who
visited northern Italy in 1786. The women’s “features indicated misery, and
the children were just as pitiful to behold; the men are little better…. The
cause of this sickly condition is foundin the continued use of Turkish and
heath corn.”
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.” (“Other American Indian crops” included
peanuts and manioc, both now African staples.) Maize swept into Africa as
introduced disease was leveling Indian societies. Faced with a labor
shortage, the Europeans turned their eyes to Africa. The continent’s
quarrelsome societies helped them siphon off millions of people. The
maize-fed population boom, Crosby believes, let the awful trade continue
without pumping the well dry.
THE STUPIDEST QUESTION IN THE WORLD
A few days after I met Ramírez Leyva, the tortilla entrepreneur, we went to
Soledad Aguablanca, a clump of small farms two hours southeast of Oaxaca
City. Waiting for us at the side of the road was Héctor Díaz Castellano, one
of the farmers who supplied Ramírez Leyva’s store. Díaz Castellano had a
pencil moustache and a rakish straw hat. His Spanish was so heavily salted
with Zapotec, the language of Oaxaca’s biggest Indian group, that I could
not make out a word of it; Ramírez Leyva had to translate. The maize field
was at the end of a long, rutted dirt road that led up a rise. Although we had
left just after dawn, the sun was hot enough by our arrival to make me wish
for a hat. Díaz Castellano walked along the rows, his gaze taking in every
stalk as he passed. For an hour he spoke, almost without stopping, about his
maize and the market for his maize. He was not, I suspected, a naturally
loquacious man, but that morning he had a subject that interested him.
Héctor Díaz Castellano
Díaz Castellano’s maize field was one of the 340,000 farms in Oaxaca.
His farm, like about two-thirds of the farms in the state, occupied less than
ten acres—unviably small by the standards of developed nations. Most
landrace maize is grown on these farms, partly because of tradition and
partly because they are usually in areas that are too high, dry, steep, or
exhausted to support high-yield varieties (or owned by farmers too poor to
afford the necessary fertilizer). As if being grown on tiny farms in bad
conditions weren’t enough, landrace maize is usually less productive than
modern hybrids; a typical yield is .4 to .8 tons per acre, whereas Green
Revolution varieties in Oaxaca reap between 1.2 and 2.5 tons per acre when
properly fertilized, a crippling advantage. The meager harvests may be
enough for subsistence but can rarely be brought to market because farm
villages are often hours away on dirt roads from the nearest large town. But
even when farmers try, it is often little use: modern hybrids are so
productive that despite the distances involved U.S. corporations can sell
maize for less in Oaxaca than can Díaz Castellano. Landrace maize, he said,
tastes better, but it is hard to find a way to make the quality pay off. He was
lucky, he said, that Ramírez Leyva was trying to market his crop.
We went to Díaz Castellano’s house for breakfast. His wife, Angelina,
round and short-haired in a tight plaid dress, was cooking tortillas in an
outdoor shed with corrugated aluminum walls. A wood fire burned beneath
a concave clay griddle called a comal. The comal was propped above the
flames on three rocks—a cooking method as old as Mesoamerican culture.
By the fire, in a three-legged stone bowl, was a lump of fresh masa twice
the size of a toaster. The stereotype is that rural Mexicans are generous to
strangers. Piling my plate high, Angelina did nothing to dispel this
impression.
I asked her husband what he was. I had wanted to find out which Indian
group he was born into, but he took the question another way.
“Somos hombres de maíz,” he said, enunciating clearly for my benefit. We
are men of maize.
I wasn’t sure what to make of this gnomic utterance. Was he pulling my
leg?
“Everybody says that,” Ramírez Leyva said, observing my confusion.
“It’s an idiom.” A little while later I visited a Danish anthropologist at the
International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), outside
Mexico City. Watching films of her interviews with Oaxacans, I saw two
old women explain to the young anthropologist that they, too, were hombres
de maíz. So Ramírez Leyva was right, I thought. A day later a CIMMYT
biologist gave me a paperback book, describing it as “the best novel ever
written about Mesoamerica.” It was Hombres de maíz, by Miguel Angel
Asturias. All right already, I thought. I get it.
Meanwhile Angelina had come out from behind the comal and joined her
husband. In the Oaxacan countryside, they explained to me, a house without
maize growing in the backyard is like a house without a roof or walls. You
would never not have maize, they said. They were speaking matter-of-
factly, as if telling me how to take the bus. Even in the city, they said, where
people cannot grow maize, nobody would even think of passing a day
without eating it.
Curious, I asked what they thought would happen if they didn’t have
maize every day. Díaz Castellano looked at me as if I had asked the
stupidest question in the world.
“Why should I want to be somebody else?” he said.
Writing, Wheels, and Bucket Brigades
(Tales of Two Civilizations, Part II)
“LIKE GRAPES THEY FALL OFF”
On January 16, 1939, Matthew W. Stirling took an early-morning walk
through the wet, buggy forest of Veracruz state, on the Gulf Coast side of
Mexico’s southern isthmus. Eighty years before his walk, a villager
traipsing through the same woods had stumbled across a buried, six-foot-
tall stone sculpture of a human head. Although the find was of obvious
archaeological importance, the object was so big and heavy that in the
intervening eight decades it had never been pulled out of the ground.
Stirling, director of the Smithsonian Bureau of American Ethnology, had
gone to Mexico the year before, in early 1938, to see the head for himself.
He found it, sunk to the eyebrows in mud, after an eight-hour horseback
ride from the nearest town. The head was in the midst of about fifty large,
artificial earthen mounds—the ruins, Sterling concluded with excitement, of
a previously unknown Maya civic center. He had decided to assemble a
research team and explore the area in more detail the next year, and
persuaded the National Geographic Society to foot the bill. When he
returned to Veracruz, he and his team cleared the dirt around the great head,
admiring its fine, naturalistic workmanship, so unlike the stiff, stylized
sculpture common elsewhere in Mesoamerica. Nearby, they found a stela,
its wide, flat face covered with bas-relief figures. Hoping to turn up others,
Stirling was walking that January morning to the far end of the mounded
area, where a workman had noticed a large, flat, partly submerged rock: a
second stela.
Accompanying him were twelve workers from the nearby hamlet of Tres
Zapotes. They pried the stela from the ground with wooden poles, but it was
blank. Disappointed, Stirling took the crew to yet a third fallen stela. They
scraped away the covering dirt and found that it, like the first, was covered
with intricate images. Alas, the carvings were now too weathered to be
deciphered. The frustrated Stirling asked the workers to expose the back of
the slab by digging beneath it and levering up the stone with poles. Several
of the men, he later recounted, “were on their knees in the excavation,
cleaning the mud from the stone with their hands, when one of them spoke
up in Spanish: ‘Chief! Here are numbers!’”
Across the back of the stela were clumps of dots and bars, a notation
familiar to Stirling from the Maya. The Maya used a dot to signify one and
a horizontal bar to signify five; the number nineteen would thus be three
bars and four dots. Stirling copied the dots and bars and “hurried back to
camp, where we settled down to decipher them.” The inscription turned out
to be a date: September 3, 32 B.C, in today’s calendar.
Stirling already knew that Tres Zapotes was anomalous—it was at least
150 miles west of any previously discovered Maya settlement. The date
deepened the puzzle. If, as seemed likely, it recorded when the stela was put
on display, this implied that Tres Zapotes had been a going concern in 32
B.C.—centuries before any other known Maya site. The date thus seemed to
imply that the Maya had originated well to the west of what was thought of
as their traditional homeland, and much earlier than had been thought.
Stirling didn’t believe it. Surely the Maya had not sprung up in Tres Zapotes
and then moved en masse hundreds of miles to the east. But the alternative
explanation—that Tres Zapotes was not a Maya community—seemed
equally improbable. The Maya were universally regarded as the oldest
advanced society in Mesoamerica. Whoever had carved the stela had some
knowledge of writing and mathematics. If they were not Maya, the
implication was that someone else had launched the project of civilization
in Mesoamerica.
Learning from local people that Tres Zapotes was only one of many
mound sites in Veracruz, Stirling decided to return in 1940 to survey them
all. The task was daunting even for a cigar-chomping, whisky-drinking,
adventure addict like Stirling. Most of the mound centers were in the
middle of trackless mangrove swamps or up narrow, unmapped rivers
choked with water hyacinth. Ticks and mosquitoes were indefatigable and
present in huge numbers; the ticks were worse than the mosquitoes, Stirling
remarked, because they had to be dug out of the flesh with a knife. At one
point Stirling and a colleague hitched a ride in a pepper truck to one of the
smaller sites. After jolting down a road with deep ruts “designed to test the
very souls of motorcars,” the two men were let off in a nondescript
meadow. Stirling went to talk with the driver.
“The ticks are not bad, are they?” I asked him hopefully, viewing the
tall grass and underbrush between the road and the mounds. “No,” said
the driver, beaming. “When full, like grapes they fall off and no harm
is done. There are millions of them here, however.”
In La Venta, a dry, raised “island” in the coastal swamp, Stirling’s team
discovered four more colossal heads. Like the first, they had no necks or
bodies and wore helmets that vaguely resembled athletic gear. All were at
least six feet tall and fifteen feet round and made from single blocks of
volcanic basalt. How, Stirling wondered, had their makers transported these
ten-ton blocks from the mountains and across the swamp? Whoever these
people were, he eventually concluded, they could not be Maya; their ways
of life seemed too different. Instead they must have belonged to another
culture altogether. La Venta was filled with mounds and terraces, which told
Stirling that many people had lived there. The city, he wrote in 1940, “may
well be the basic civilization out of which developed such high art centers
as those of the Maya, Zapotecs, Toltecs, and Totonacs.” He called its
“mysterious people” the Olmec.
Stirling’s account set the template for decades to follow. Ever since his
day, the Olmec have been known by two Homeric epithets: they were
“mysterious,” and they were the “mother culture” of Mesoamerica.
(Tourists are told by Frommer’s 2005 Mexico guide, for example, to visit
the ruins of the “enigmatic people” who created the “mother culture of
Mesoamerica.”) But in recent years many archaeologists have come to
believe that neither description is correct.
Curious villagers surround the great Olmec head excavated in
1939 by archaeologist Matthew Stirling in the Mexican state of
Veracruz.
The Olmec’s purported mysteriousness is related to their emergence. To
Stirling and many of his successors, the Olmec seemed to have no peers or
ancestors; they appeared fully formed, apparently from nowhere, like
Athena springing from the brow of Zeus. First there was a jungle with a few
indistinguishable villages; then, suddenly, a sophisticated empire with
monumental architecture, carved stelae, earthwork pyramids, hieroglyphic
writing, ball courts, and fine artworks—all of it conjured into existence with
the suddenness of amagician’s trick. The Olmec, wrote Smithsonian
archaeologist Betty Meggers, were a “quantum change.” Their status as
precursors led archaeologists to believe that the subsequent emergence of
other complex societies was due to their example—or their conquest. Even
the mighty Maya did little more than continue down the path set by the
Olmec. “There is now little doubt,” Yale archaeologist Michael Coe wrote
in 1994, “that all later civilizations in Mesoamerica, whether Mexican or
Maya, ultimately rest on an Olmec base.”
Strictly speaking, Coe was mistaken. By the time he wrote, many of his
colleagues strongly doubted that the Olmec either emerged alone or were
the mother culture. They did emerge abruptly, these researchers say, but
they were only the first of the half-dozen complex societies—“sister
cultures”—that sprang up in southern Mexico after the development of
maize agriculture. Focusing on the Olmec’s chronological primacy, they
believe, obscures the more important fact that Mesoamerica was the home
of a remarkable multisociety ferment of social, aesthetic, and technical
innovation.
RUBBER PEOPLE
Nobody knows the right name for the Olmec, but “Olmec” is the wrong
one. They spoke a language in the Mixe-Zoquean language family, some
members of which are still used in isolated pockets of southern Mexico.
“Olmec,” though, is a word in Nahuatl, the language of the Mexica to the
north. It means, more or less, “people of the land of rubber.” The problem
with the name is not so much that the Olmec did not use it for themselves—
nobody knows what that name was, and they have to be called something.
Nor is the problem the rubber, which the Olmec used, and may have
invented (scientists discovered in the 1990s that they made rubber by
chemically treating the latex-containing sap of a tropical tree, Castilla
elastica). The problem is that the Mexica did not actually use the name to
refer to the putative mother culture in Veracruz, but to another, completely
unrelated culture in Puebla to the west, a culture that, unlike the ancient
Olmec, still existed at the time of the Spanish conquest. The confusion
between the Mexica’s Olmec and Stirling’s Olmec led some archaeologists
to propose that the latter should be called the “La Venta Culture,” after the
site he investigated. Almost everyone agreed that the new name was a big
improvement, logically speaking. Unfortunately, nobody used it. Not for the
first time in Native American history, the confusing, incorrect name
prevailed.
The Olmec heartland was the coastal forests of Veracruz. Compared to
the Norte Chico, the area is promising. Like the Peruvian littoral, it is
bracketed by sea and mountains, but it catches, rather than misses, the
prevailing winds, and the rain that comes with them. The shoreline itself is
swampy, but not far from the coast the country rises into a lush, fertile
plateau. Further inland are the Tuxtla Mountains, with many rivers
cascading down their flanks. The rivers flood in the rainy season, enriching
the land, Nile Delta style. During the rest of the year, the climate is drier,
and farmers plant and tend their milpas on the alluvial soil.
The first traces of the people who would become the Olmec date back to
about 1800 B.C. At that time there was little to distinguish them from
groups elsewhere in Mesoamerica. But something happened in Veracruz,
some spark or incitement, a cultural quickening, because within the next
three centuries the Olmec had built and occupied San Lorenzo, the first
large-scale settlement in North America—it covered 2.7 square miles. On a
plateau commanding the Coatzacoalcos river basin, San Lorenzo proper
was inhabited mainly by the elite; everyone else lived in the farm villages
around it. The ceremonial center of the city—a series of courtyards and low
mounds, the latter probably topped with thatch houses—sat on a raised
platform 150 feet high and two-thirds of a mile to a side. The platform was
built of almost three million cubic yards of rock, much of it transported
from mountain quarries fifty miles away.
Scattered around the San Lorenzo platform were stone monuments:
massive thrones for living kings, huge stone heads for dead ones. Rulers
helped to mediate between supernatural forces in the air above and the
watery place below where souls went after life. When kings died, their
thrones were sometimes transformed into memorials for their occupants: the
colossal heads. The features of these enormous portraits are naturalistically
carved and amazingly expressive—thoughtful or fiercely proud, mirthful or
dismayed. It is assumed they were placed like so many stone sentinels for
maximum Orwellian impact: the king is here, the king is watching you. *20
Like the carvings and stained-glass windows in European cathedrals, the
art in San Lorenzo and other Olmec cities consisted mainly of powerful,
recurring images—the crucifixions and virgins, so to speak, of ancient
Mesoamerica. Among these repeated subjects is a crouched, blobby figure
with a monstrously swollen head. Puzzled researchers long described these
sculptures as “dwarves” or “dancers.” In 1997 an archaeologist and a
medical doctor with archaeological leanings identified them as human
fetuses. Their features were portrayed accurately enough to identify their
stage of development. Researchers had not recognized them because artistic
renditions of fetuses are almost unheard of in European cultures (the first
known drawing of one is by Leonardo). Other frequent themes included
lepers, the pathologically obese, and people with thyroid deficiencies, all
portrayed with a cool eye for anatomical detail. Perhaps the best-known
subject is a man or boy gingerly holding a “were-jaguar”: a limp, fat,
sexless baby with a flattened nose and a snarling jaguar mouth. Often the
baby has a deeply cloven skull.
The denizens of San Lorenzo are unlikely to have shared Europeans’
dismay at the physical deformity portrayed in these images. Indeed, by
contemporary standards high-born Olmec were deformed themselves. By
binding small, flat pieces of wood to newborns’ foreheads, they pushed up
the soft infant bones, making the skull longer and higher than normal. To
further proclaim their status, wealthy Olmec carved deep grooves into their
teeth and pierced their nasal septums with bone awls, plugging the holes
with ornamental jade beads. (Because no Olmec skeletons have been found,
no direct proof of these practices exists; instead archaeologists base their
beliefs on the portrayal of Olmec nobles in figurines and sculptures.)
Swanning about the elite precincts, the rich and powerful wore finely
woven clothing, but only below the waist—breechclouts for men, skirts and
belts for women. Veracruz was too hot for anything more. On public
occasions, nobles bedizened themselves with bracelets, anklets, many-
stranded necklaces, bejeweled turbans, and big, hiphop-style pendants.
Some of the last were concave mirrors made from beautifully polished
magnetite. Precisely ground, the mirrors were able to start fires and project
images onto flat surfaces, camera lucida fashion. Presumably they were
used to dazzle hoi polloi. As for the poor, it is likely that they went naked,
except possibly for sandals.
San Lorenzo fell in about 1200 B.C., victim of either revolution or
invasion. Or perhaps it was abandoned and sacked for religious reasons—
archaeologists have advanced several hypotheses for the city’s demise.
What is certain is that the site was vacated and the stelae defaced and the
sculptures decapitated. The colossal heads being, so to speak, pre-
decapitated, they were smashed with hammers and systematically buried in
long lines. Vegetation overran the red-ocher floors and the workshops that
manufactured ceramic figurines and iron beads and rubber ax-head straps.
Olmec society was surprisingly unaffected by the collapse of its greatest
polity. A much bigger city, La Venta, was going up on a swamp island about
forty miles away.
Today La Venta is partly buried by an oil refinery, but in its heyday—
roughly speaking, 1150 B.C. to 500 B.C.—it was a large community with a
ring of housing that surrounded a grand ceremonial center. The city’s focus,
its Eiffel Tower or Tiananmen Square, was a 103-foot-tall clay mound, a
bulging, vertically fluted cone somewhat resembling a head of garlic. The
mound rose at the south end of a rectangular, hundred-yard-long pavilion
that was bordered by two knee-high berms. At the north end of the pavilion
was a sunken rectangular courtyard fenced on three sides by a row of seven-
foot basalt columns atop a low red and yellow adobe wall. The fourth,
northern side opened onto a third mound, larger than the small mound but
nowhere near the size of the big one. The pavilion and courtyard had
painted walls and floors of colored sand and clay; heavy sculptural objects,
including several of the trademark heads, studded the area. This central part
of the city was reserved, archaeologists believe, for clerics and rulers. It was
Buckingham Palace and the Vatican rolled into one.
La Venta, too, was destroyed, perhaps deliberately, around 350 B.C. But
its eight-hundred-year existence spanned one of the most exciting times in
American history. At La Venta’s height, Olmec art and technical innovations
could be found throughout Mesoamerica. So widespread was Olmec
iconography—jaguar babies, carved stelae, distinctively shaped ceramics—
that many archaeologists believed its very ubiquity was evidence that the
Olmec “not only engendered Mesoamerica but also brought forth the first
Mesoamerican empire.” The description is from Ignacio Bernal, once
director of Mexico’s famed National Museum of Anthropology. Bernal,
who died in 1992, envisioned an imperium that spanned much of southern
Mexico, proselytizing its religion and forcing other groups to send their
finest works to its heartland. The Olmec, he thought, were the Romans of
Mesoamerica, a magisterial society that “established the pattern which,
through the centuries, was to be followed by other expansionist
Mesoamerican cultures.”
Since Bernal’s death many researchers have come to view the Olmec
differently. According to the University of Michigan anthropologists Kent
Flannery and Joyce Marcus, the Olmec heartland was but one of four
regional power centers: the Central Basin to the north, where settlements
like Tlatilco and Tlapacoya laid the groundwork for the empires of
Teotihuacan and the Toltecs; in the isthmus, the chiefdoms of Oaxaca; the
Olmec, along the Gulf Coast; and, later, the Maya polities in Yucatán and
northern Guatemala. Some believe that there was a fifth power:
Chalcatzingo, an important chiefdom between the Central Basin and
Oaxaca.
In the first millennium B.C., all four (or five) were making the transition
from individual fortified villages to groups of chiefdoms to states with
centralized authority. Although the Olmec preceded the others, they did not
set the template for them. Instead they all influenced each other, sometimes
by trade, sometimes by violence, each one developing new techniques,
exporting unique goods, and swiping ideas from the others. In this world of
“competitive interaction,” all parties hustled for advantage. Trade in goods
was important, but it was the trade in ideas that mattered.
By making this argument, I am endorsing one side in the long-running
dispute between mother- and sister-culture proponents. In other words, as
one mother-culture advocate put it, I am “swallowing Marcus’s [nonsense]
whole.” He may be right. But I would argue that there is a difference
between inheriting a cultural tradition, as the Norte Chico culture’s
successors apparently did, and copying one, as the Olmec’s proponents
argue. Nobody disputes that Han Chinese society arose long before its
neighbors in Asia, but Asian archaeologists don’t refer to China as Asia’s
“mother culture,” because China’s neighbors used part of its intellectual
legacy to build up their own distinct and different writing systems,
agricultural technologies, imperial practices, and much else. Given the
evidence available now, the same seems to be true for the Olmec and
ancient Mesoamerica. (To me, anyway—many researchers disagree.)
MESOAMERICA, 1000 B.C.–1000 A.D.
For thousands of years Mesoamerica was a wellspring of cultural
innovation and growth. This map does not depict it accurately, because
these societies were not contemporaries—the Olmec vanished centuries
before the Ñudzahui and Zapotec began to reach their height, for example.
Nonetheless, it should give some idea of each society’s heartland.
Emblematic of this rocketing growth were the Olmec’s neighbors in
Oaxaca, the Zapotec, whom Flannery and Marcus have studied for more
than two decades. The Zapotec were based across the mountains from the
Olmec, in Oaxaca’s high Central Valley—three forty-to-sixty-mile-long
bowls that intersect in a ragged Y. By about 1550 B.C., they were
abandoning the life of hunting and gathering to live in villages with
defensive palisades. *21 These early villages had wattle-and-daub houses,
fine pottery, and some public architecture. They were controlled by “big
men,” the social scientist’s term for the alpha male who is able in such
informal settings to enforce his will through persuasion or force. Within a
few hundred years, the big men acquired rank—that is, they began to wield
power not only because of their personal charisma, but also because their
societies had given them an elevated official position. It is the difference
between the leading spirit on a pickup basketball team and the officially
selected captain of a college squad. After this, political consolidation
proceeded apace. Soon the valley was dominated by three main chiefdoms,
one at each endpoint of the Y. They did not get along; a thirty-square-mile
buffer zone in the middle, Flannery and Marcus noted, was “virtually
unoccupied.”
The biggest of the three chiefdoms was located near today’s village of
San José Mogote. Around 750 B.C. it was attacked and its temple razed in a
fire so intense that the clay walls melted. San José Mogote quickly rebuilt
the temple a few yards away.
Across the new threshold artisans laid a carved stone. Splayed across its
face, suitable for stomping on, was a bas-relief of a naked, disemboweled
male corpse, apparently a defeated enemy, blood welling from his side. The
carving, to my taste, is beautifully done, as graphically elegant, despite the
gory subject matter, as a Matisse. What matters most to researchers, though,
is not the design but the two curious marks between the cadaver’s feet. The
two marks are glyphs: the oldest firmly dated writing in the Americas.
Despite their brevity, they are full of information, both because of the nature
of written language, and because of the special way Mesoamerican people
chose their names.
COUNTING AND WRITING
Writing begins with counting. When a culture grows big enough, it acquires
an elite, which needs to monitor things it considers important: money,
stored goods, births and deaths, the progression of time. In the Fertile
Crescent, village accountants began keeping records with clay tokens
around 8000 B.C. As the need for precision grew, they scratched marks on
the tokens as mnemonic devices. For example, they might have
distinguished a count of sheep from one of wheat by drawing a sheep on
one and a wheat stalk on the other. Gradually the information on each
record increased. The bureaucrats were not intending to create writing.
Instead they were simply adding useful features as they became necessary.
By 3200 B.C. Sumerian scribes had progressed to inscribing on clay tablets
with sharpened reeds. A tablet might contain, say, two hash marks, a box, a
circle with a cross in the middle, an asterisk-like shape, and an arrangement
of three triangles. Scribes would know that the hash marks meant “two,” the
box was a “temple,” the circle stood for “cattle,” an asterisk meant
“goddess,” and the triangles were “Inanna”—two cattle owned by the
goddess Inanna’s temple. (Here I am lifting an example from Gary Urton, a
Harvard anthropologist.) They had no way to indicate verbs or adjectives,
no way to distinguish subject from object, and only a limited vocabulary.
Nonetheless, Sumerians were moving toward something like writing.
In Mesoamerica, timekeeping provided the stimulus that accounting gave
to the Middle East. Like contemporary astrologers, the Olmec, Maya, and
Zapotec believed that celestial phenomena like the phases of the moon and
Venus affect daily life. To measure and predict these portents requires
careful sky watching and a calendar. Strikingly, Mesoamerican societies
developed three calendars: a 365-day secular calendar like the
contemporary calendar; a 260-day sacred calendar that was like no other
calendar on earth; and the equally unique Long Count, a one-by-one tally of
the days since a fixed starting point thousands of years ago. Establishing
these three calendars required advances in astronomy; synchronizing them
required ventures into mathematics.
The 260-day ritual calendar may have been linked to the orbit of Venus;
the 365-day calendar, of course, tracked the earth’s orbit around the sun.
Dates were typically given in both notations. For example, October 12,
2004, is 2 Lamat 11 Yax, where 2 Lamat is the date in the ritual calendar
and 11 Yax the date in the secular calendar. Because the two calendars do
not have the same number of days, they are not synchronized; the next time
2 Lamat occurs in the sacred calendar, it will be paired with a different day
in the secular calendar. After October 12, 2004, in fact, 2 Lamat and 11 Yax
will not coincide again for another 18,980 days, about fifty-two years.
Mesoamerican cultures understood all this, and realized that by citing
dates with both calendars they were able to identify every day in this fifty-
two-year period uniquely. What they couldn’t do was distinguish one fifty-
two-year period from another. It was as if the Christian calendar referred to
the year only as, say, ’04—one would then be unable to distinguish between
1904, 2004, and 2104. To prevent confusion, Mesoamerican societies
created the third calendar, the Long Count. The Long Count tracks time
from a starting point, much as the Christian calendar begins with the
purported birth date of Christ. The starting point is generally calculated to
have been August 13, 3114, B.C., though some archaeologists put the
proper date at August 10 or 11, or even September 6. Either way, Long
Count dates consisted of the number of days, 20-day “months,” 360-day
“years,” 7,200-day “decades,” and 144,000-day “millennia” since the
starting point. Archaeologists generally render these as a series of five
numbers separated by dots, in the manner of Internet Protocol addresses.
Using the August 13 starting date, October 12, 2006, would be written in
the Long Count as 12.19.13.12.18. (For a more complete explanation, see
Appendix D.)
Because it runs directly from 1 B.C. to 1 A.D., the Christian calendar was
long a headache for astronomers. Scientists tracking supernovae, cometary
orbits, and other celestial phenomena would still have to add or subtract a
year manually when they crossed the A.D.-B.C. barrier if a sixteenth-
century astronomer named Joseph Scaliger hadn’t got sick of the whole
business and devised a calendar for astronomers that doesn’t skip a year.
The Julian calendar, which Scaliger named after his father, counts the days
since Day 0. Scaliger chose Day 0 as January 1, 4713, B.C.; Day 1 was
January 2. In this system, October 12, 2006, is Julian Day 2,454,021.
The Long Count calendar began with the date 0.0.0.0.0. *22
Mathematically, what is most striking about this date is that the zeroes are
true zeroes. Zero has two functions. It is a number, manipulated like other
numbers, which means that it is differentiated from nothing. And it is a
placeholder in a positional notation system, such as our base-10 system, in
which a number like 1 can signify a single unit if it is in the digits column
or ten units if it is in the adjacent column.
That zero is not the same as nothing is a concept that baffled Europeans
as late as the Renaissance. How can you calculate with nothing? they asked.
Fearing that Hindu-Arabic numerals—the 0 through 9 used today—would
promote confusion and fraud, some European authorities banned them until
the fourteenth century. A classic demonstration of zero’s status as a number,
according to science historian Dick Teresi, is grade point average:
In a four-point system, an A equals 4, B equals 3, and so on, down to
E, which equals 0. If a student takes four courses and gets A’s in two
but fails the other two, he receives a GPA of 2.0, or a C average. The
two zeroes drag down the two A’s. If zero were nothing, the student
could claim that the grades for the courses he failed did not exist, and
demand a 4.0 average. His dean would laugh at such logic.
Without a positional notation system, arithmetic is tedious and hard, as
schoolchildren learn when teachers force them to multiply or subtract with
Roman numerals. In Roman numerals, CLIV is 154, whereas XLII is 42.
Maddeningly, both numbers have L (50) as the second symbol, but the two
L’s aren’t equivalent, because the second is modified by the preceding X,
which subtracts ten from it to make forty. Even though both CLIV and XLII
are four-digit numbers, the left-hand symbol in the first number (C) cannot
be directly compared with the left-hand symbol in the second (X).
Positional notation symbols take the aggravation out of arithmetic.
Stirling’s stela in Tres Zapotes bore a Long Count date of 7.16.6.16.18.
The implication is that by 32 B.C. the Olmec already had all three calendars
and zero to boot. One can’t be sure, because the date does not include a zero
or a reference to the other calendars. But it is hard to imagine how one
could have a Long Count without them. Tentatively, therefore,
archaeologists assign the invention of zero to sometime before 32 B.C.,
centuries ahead of its invention in India.
How long before 32 B.C.? The carved cadaver in San José Mogote may
give a hint. 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. It was as if coming into the world on New Year’s Day were such a
sign of good fortune that children born on that day would be named
“January 1.” This seems to have been the case for the man whose death was
celebrated in the San José Mogote temple. Between his feet are two glyphs,
one resembling a stovepipe hat with a U painted across the front, the other
looking vaguely like a smiling pet monster from a Japanese cartoon.
According to Marcus, the Michigan anthropologist, the glyphs correspond
to 1-Earthquake, the Zapotec name for the seventeenth day of the 260-day
sacred calendar. Because the carving depicts a man instead of an event, the
date is generally thought to be the dead man’s name. If so, 1-Earthquake is
the first named person in the history of the Americas. Even if the date is not
a name, the two glyphs indicate that by 750 B.C., when the slab was carved,
the Zapotec were not only on the way to some form of writing, but had also
assembled some of the astronomical and mathematical knowledge
necessary for a calendar.
Discovered in 1975, this prone, disemboweled man was carved
onto the stone threshold of a temple in San José Mogote, near the
city of Oaxaca. Between the corpse’s feet is the oldest certainly
dated writing in the Americas: two glyphs (shaded in drawing)
that probably represent his name, 1-Earthquake. The ornate scroll
issuing from his side is blood. According to Joyce Marcus, the
first archaeologist to examine this bas-relief, the Zapotec words
for “flower” and “sacrificial object” are similar enough that the
flowery blood may be a visual pun.
To judge by the archaeological record, this development took place in an
astonishingly compressed period; what took the Sumerians six thousand
years apparently occurred in Mesoamerica in fewer than a thousand. Indeed,
Mesoamerican societies during that time created more than a dozen systems
of writing, some of which are known only from a single brief text. The
exact chronology of their evolution remains unknown, but could be
resolved by the next object that a farmer discovers in a field. The earliest
known Olmec writing, for example, is on a potsherd from Chiapas that
dates from about 300 B.C. For a long time nobody could read it. In 1986 a
workcrew building a dock on the Acula River in Veracruz pulled out a
seven-foot stela covered with Olmec symbols. Thought to have been written
in 159 A.D., the twenty-one columns of glyphs were the first Olmec text
long enough to permit linguists to decipher the language. Two linguists did
just that in 1993. The stela recounted the rise of a warrior-king named
Harvest Mountain Lord who celebrated his ascension to the throne by
decapitating his main rival during the coronation. This information in hand,
the linguists went back to the writing on the potsherd. Disappointingly, it
turned out to be some banal utterances about dying and cutting cloth.
FROM 1-EARTHQUAKE TO 8-DEER
The development of writing in Zapotec society went hand-in-hand with
growing urbanization. In about 500 B.C., San José Mogote seems to have
transplanted itself to Monte Albán, in the middle of the buffer zone. About
half an hour by bus from Oaxaca City, Monte Albán is today a decorous
sprawl of walls and pyramids enveloped by a lush lawn (this last is an
import from Europe; lawn grass did not exist in the Americas prior to
Columbus). Arriving tourists are hailed by “guides” with backpacks full of
phony ancient figurines and ethnically incorrect souvenirs of Mexica
drawings. Their ministrations do not diminish the lonely dignity of the
ruins. Monte Albán is atop a steep, 1,500-foot hill that overlooks the valley
of Oaxaca. The Zapotec reconfigured the entire hill to build the city, slicing
out terraces and platforms. By leveling the entire summit, they created a
fifty-five-acre terrace half the size of the Vatican. At its zenith, Monte Albán
housed seventeen thousand people and was by a considerable margin the
biggest and most powerful population center in Mesoamerica.
The rationale for its construction is the subject of yet another lengthy
archaeological dispute. One side proposes that Monte Albán formed
because maize agriculture allowed the Oaxaca Valley’s population to grow
so much that the rural villages naturally clustered into something
resembling cities. For most of its history Monte Albán was thus a huge
village, not a true city, and certainly not a hierarchical state. Others argue
that warfare had grown so devastating, as shown by the destruction of San
José Mogote, that the main valley chiefdoms formed a defensive
confederation headquartered at Monte Albán. Yet a third theory is that the
Zapotec of Monte Albán—not the Olmec of La Venta—consolidated to
form North America’s first imperialist power, an aggressive state that
subjugated dozens of other villages.
Among the strongest evidence for the last view are the nearly three
hundred carved stone slabs at Monte Albán that depict slain, mutilated
enemies: the rulers, Marcus believes, of communities conquered by Monte
Albán. Some of the stones are labeled with enemy names, as with the
unfortunate 1-Earthquake. These may commemorate victories in Monte
Albán’s grinding battle for supremacy with its local rival, San Martín
Tilcajete, in the southern arm of the Central Valley. When San José Mogote
founded Monte Albán, Tilcajete responded by gathering people from its
surrounding villages, doubling in size, and erecting its own ceremonial
buildings. War was the inevitable result. Monte Albán sacked Tilcajete in
about 375 B.C. Undiscouraged, Tilcajete rebuilt itself on a better defensive
position and acquired larger armies. When it again became a threat, Monte
Albán attacked for the second time in 120 B.C. This time its forces finished
the job. They burned the king’s palace to the ground and emptied the rest of
Tilcajete, leaving Monte Albán firmly in control of the entire valley.
With nothing to impede it, Monte Albán swept out and established a
domain of almost ten thousand square miles. For centuries it stood on equal
ground with its neighbors, the rising Maya states to the east and
Teotihuacan to the north. It enjoyed relatively peaceful relations with both
but had continual trouble with the Ñudzahui (pronounced “nu-sa-wi”—
Spaniards called them the Mixtec), a constellation of petty principalities
immediately to the west. By contrast with Monte Albán, these were
minuscule entities; most were clusters of rustic villages covering ten to
twenty square miles. Yet they were amazingly troublesome. Monte Albán
repeatedly overran the Ñudzahui statelets, but never managed to eliminate
them. These tiny, fractious domains endured for more than a thousand
years. Meanwhile the much stronger and more centralized Zapotec empire
collapsed completely in about 800 A.D.
Ñudzahui writing survives in eight codices, the deerskin or bark “books”
whose painted pages could be folded like screens or hung on the wall like a
mural. (The Spaniards destroyed all the rest.) More purely pictorial than
Zapotec or Maya script, the texts were arranged almost randomly on the
page; red lines directed the reader’s eye from image to image. The symbols
included drawings of events, portraits labeled by name (the king 4-Wind,
for example, being shown by symbolic wind and four little bubbles in a
line), and even punning rebuses. Enough writing has survived to give, when
coupled with archaeological studies, a vivid picture of Ñudzahui life.
Like medieval Italian city-states, Ñudzahui principalities were rigidly
stratified, with the king and a small group of kinspeople and noble advisers
gobbling up much of the wealth and land. They constantly shifted
configuration, some expanding by swarming over their neighbors, others
imploding when their constituent villages seceded and joined other polities.
More commonly, two states joined when their rulers married. Alliance
through royal marriage was as common in eleventh-century Mixteca as it
was in seventeenth-century Europe. In both, royal family trees formed an
intricate network across national boundaries, but in Mixteca the queen’s
lands stayed in her line—the king’s heir wasn’t necessarily the queen’s heir.
Another difference: primogeniture was not expected. If the queen did not
think her eldest son was fit for the crown, she could pass it to another child,
or even to a nephew or cousin.
No fewer than four of the codices treat the story of 8-Deer Jaguar Claw, a
wily priest-general-politician with a tragic love for the wife of his greatest
enemy. Born in 1063 A.D., 8-Deer was a shirttail cousin to the ruling family
of Tilantongo, which had been engaged for decades in a dynastic struggle
with the kingdom of Red and White Bundle. (The name, a modern
invention, comes from its name-glyph, which pictures the cloth wrapping
used by the Ñudzahui to wrap holy objects; its exact location is still not
nailed down.) Like his father, a high cleric, 8-Deer was trained for the
priesthood, but political events and his own overweening ambition stopped
him from following that path.
After an unprovoked attack on Red and White Bundle by Tilantongo
raised hostilities to a fever, the warring parties agreed to meet in a sacred
mountain cave with the Priestess of the Dead, a powerful oracle who had
stripped away the flesh from her jaw, giving her a terrifying, skull-like
appearance. Tilantongo’s representative was 8-Deer, who attended the
meeting in place of his recently deceased father. To his dismay, the priestess
sided with Tilantongo’s enemies and ordered 8-Deer, Tilantongo’s
champion, to exile himself a hundred miles away, in a jerkwater town on
the Pacific called Tututepec.
Tucked away in Tututepec, 8-Deer assembled a private army, staffed it
with many relatives, and in a series of swift campaigns seized dozens of
neighboring villages and city-states. In addition to assembling the greatest
empire ever seen in the region, the conquests managed to kill off most of
the siblings and cousins above him in the line of royal succession. After six
years of war he returned home to Tilantongo. During this visit, according to
John M. D. Pohl, the archaeologist whose interpretations I am mostly
following here, 8-Deer accidentally encountered 6-Monkey, the young wife
of the much older king of Red and White Bundle. Despite the long enmity
between the two kingdoms, 8-Deer and 6-Monkey secretly became lovers.
In 1096 Tilantongo’s sovereign died in mysterious circumstances. The
Priestess of the Dead selected 8-Deer’s beloved elder half brother to be the
regent—that is, the half brother became the last person between 8-Deer and
the throne of Tilantongo. Three years later, unknown assailants stabbed the
half brother to death in a sweatbath. The inconsolable 8-Deer took the
throne of Tilantongo and declared war on Red and White Bundle, which he
claimed had orchestrated the murder.
In this fragment from a Ñudzahui codex, the jaguar-cowled Lord
8-Deer (right) captures 4-Wind, son of his former lover, by the
hair. As in other Ñudzahui codices, the characters’ names are
indicated by the accompanying circles-plus-head symbols.
Red and White Bundle’s royal palace was built on a cliff over a bend in
the river. Guarded by sheer walls on three sides, its soldiers had only to
watch the fourth side, across which was an earthen berm. Leading an army
of a thousand, 8-Deer threw up ladders, swarmed over the berm with his
men, and entered the palace. As befit a conqueror, 8-Deer was wearing
elaborate cotton armor, a ceremonial beard wig, and a cowl made from the
head of a jaguar. Gold-and-jade necklaces dangled across his naked chest.
In the palace he found 6-Monkey and her husband, the king of Red and
White Bundle. Both were mortally wounded. In Pohl’s account, 8-Deer held
6-Monkey as she died.
Captured with the royal couple were their two sons, the elder of whom,
4-Wind, was heir to the throne. Seizing him by the hair, 8-Deer forced the
teenager to grovel before him. But he also made what seems to have been a
sentimental decision: he spared the life of his lover’s son. The folly of this
action became apparent when 4-Wind and his brother escaped from
confinement.
Seeking revenge, 4-Wind approached the Zapotec empire for help. With
Zapotec backing, he linked rebels in Red and White Bundle and a host of
other cities defeated by 8-Deer. They besieged Tilantongo in 1115. The
battle lasted six months and ended in total defeat for Tilantongo. In a mirror
image of the past, the captured 8-Deer was forced to bow to 4-Wind. He
was fifty-five years old and had six official kingships and dozens of petty
states under his control. Victorious and vengeful, 4-Wind personally
disemboweled him. Then he married 8-Deer’s daughter.
In 4-Wind’s first exercise of statecraft, he abandoned the Zapotec allies
who had helped him achieve the throne, aligned Tilantongo with the Toltec
empire to the north, and attacked the Zapotec. Ultimately the Ñudzahui
under his lead took over much of Oaxaca, forcing the Zapotec states to pay
tribute. The empire he established, far bigger than 8-Deer’s, lasted until the
fifteenth century, when the Mexica invaded. And then came Cortés.
WHEELED INTERLUDE
As Matthew Stirling and his team were dodging ticks and unearthing stelae
in Tres Zapotes, they found a cache of fifteen upside-down pottery bowls
tucked into the ground six feet below the surface. The bowls protectively
covered thirty-five toy-size, decorated figurines and twelve small, painted
clay discs. Among the figurines were two dogs and a jaguar, each of which
had thin tubes joining its two front feet and its two back feet. The discs lay
beside them. Similar finds have been made further north, near Mexico City.
In the 1980s I saw the Tres Zapotes animals, or ones like them, at a
museum in the Yucatán Peninsula. I was there with an Italian engineer
whom I had met by chance a few hours before. Well before me, the
engineer figured out the significance of the tubes between the figurines’ feet.
“Those are for axles,” he said. “And those”—pointing to the discs—“must
be the wheels.” Looking at the little figures, it seemed obvious that they had
been equipped with wheels in precisely the form he suggested.
The engineer scrunched up his face with incredulity. Tres Zapotes dated
back to at least 1000 B.C. So the Olmec and their successors must have had
the wheel for more than two thousand years. “Why didn’t they use it for
anything other than little toys?” he asked in Italian. “How could they not
have understood that you could make bigger wheels and put them on carts?
Hanno fatto proprio una stupidaggine, quei tipi.”
The word stupidaggine (an absurdity), similar enough in Italian and
Spanish, rang out in the room, drawing stares. The engineer seemed not to
care. He looked positively offended at the Olmec failure to see the world in
the same way as a contemporary European engineer.
I’m giving my acquaintance a hard time, but his bafflement was easy for
me to understand. In Mesopotamia, the wheel dates back to at least the time
of Sumer. It was a basic part of life throughout Eurasia. Chariot wheels,
water wheels, potter’s wheels, millstone wheels—one can’t imagine Europe
or China without them. The only thing more mysterious than failing to
invent the wheel would be inventing the wheel and then failing to use it.
But that is exactly what the Indians did. Presumably countless thousands of
people rolled the toylike figurines back and forth. How could none of them
have thought of making their wheels bigger and more useful?
Some reasons are apparent. Because of the Pleistocene extinctions, the
Americas lacked animals suitable for domestication into beasts of burden;
without animals to haul carts, individuals on rough terrain can use skids
almost as effectively. Even with animals, though, the Olmec would not have
had much use for wheeled vehicles. Their country is so wet and boggy that
Stirling’s horses sank to their chests in mud; boats were a primary means of
transportation until recently. In addition one might note that Mesoamerican
societies were not alone in their wheel-blindness. Although Mesopotamia
had the wheel in about 4000 B.C., nearby Egypt did not use the wheel until
two thousand years later, despite being in close contact. Still, none of this
explains why no Mesoamerican society ever used wheels to make ceramics
and grind maize. After all, every society in Eurasia eventually employed
pottery wheels and mill wheels.
A better answer might be one implicit in Robert Temple’s book, The
Genius of China, a history of Chinese science and technology published in
1998. According to Temple, the Chinese invented the moldboard plow by
the third century B.C. Made of cast iron, the plowshare was shaped like a V,
with the blade carving into the ground and the two arms arcing away like
gull wings. Because the arms were curved, they turned the earth away from
the blade, which both reduced friction and more effectively plowed the soil.
(The “moldboard” is the curved plowshare; the name comes from mold, the
Old German word for soil.)
The design of the moldboard plow is so obvious that it seems incredible
that Europeans never thought of it. Until the Chinese-style plow was
imported in the seventeenth century, farmers in France, Germany, Italy, the
Netherlands, and other states labored to shove what amounted to a narrow
slab of metal through the earth. “The increased friction meant that huge
multiple teams of oxen were required, whereas Chinese plows could make
do with a single ox,” Temple explained. The European failure to think up
the moldboard, according to science historian Teresi, was “as if Henry Ford
designed the car without an accelerator, and you had to put the car in
neutral, brake, and go under the hood to change speed. And then we did this
for 2,000 years.”
European agricultural production exploded after the arrival of the
moldboard plow. The prosperity this engendered was one of the cushions on
which the Enlightenment floated. “So inefficient, so wasteful of effort, and
so utterly exhausting” was the old plow, Temple wrote, “that this deficiency
of plowing may rank as mankind’s single greatest waste of time and
energy.” Millions of Europeans spent centuries behind the plow, staring at
the blade as it ineffectively mired itself in the earth. How could none of
them have thought of changing the design to make the plow more useful?
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. Every society,
big or little, misses out on “obvious” technologies. The lacunae have
enormous impact on people’s lives—imagine Europe with efficient plows or
the Maya with iron tools—but not much effect on the scale of a
civilization’s endeavors, as shown by both European and Maya history. The
corollary is that widespread and open trade in ideas is the best way to make
up for the lacunae. Alas, Mesoamerica was limited in this respect. Like
Europe, it was an extraordinarily diverse place with a shared cultural
foundation. But where Europe had the profoundly different civilizations of
China and Islam to steal from, Mesoamerica was alone in the world.
Or seemed to be, anyway.
A SLICE OF PERU
About a hundred miles north of the Peru-Chile border, the coastal highway
passes by an uninhabited beach ringed by a tall chain-link fence. The fence
has an entrance with a gigantic, stylized statue of a woman with huge
earrings. By the statue hangs a faded banner: Bolivia Mar.
When Bolivia declared its independence it had a territorial pseudopod
that extended southwest from its Andean heartland through the Atacama
Desert to the sea. The land was useless for agriculture but had four plausible
seaports and huge underground deposits of prehistoric guano, which
Chilean companies mined and shipped to Europe for fertilizer. (Bolivia,
then as now impoverished, didn’t have the capital for this industry.) In
1878, Hilarion Daza, the illegitimate son of an Italian acrobat, seized power
in Bolivia. Immediately he raised taxes on the Chilean-owned guano mines,
which the previous Bolivian government had promised not to do. Outraged,
Chile rolled its army into the area. In vain did Bolivia counterattack with its
ally, Peru; Chile simply repelled their incompetently led forces and took
over the entire territory, as well as a chunk of southern Peru. Ejected in an
outburst of popular anger, Daza fled to Europe, taking most of Bolivia’s
treasury with him.
Chile finally returned most of Peru’s territory in 1929 but never gave
back any land to Bolivia—an outcome that nation has never accepted. To
this day, Bolivia’s parliament has a representative from the lost maritime
province. The Miss Bolivia contest always includes a contestant ostensibly
from the coast. Maps are sold in which the conquered land is still part of
Bolivia.
In a gesture to its longtime, long-suffering ally, Peru symbolically gave
two miles of its shoreline to Bolivia in 1992. Bolivia Mar—Bolivia-by-the-
Sea—is a little island of Bolivia entirely surrounded by Peru. It has no
facilities of any kind, so far as I could tell when I passed by. Private
enterprise was supposed to build an industrial duty-free port in Bolivia Mar.
Thus far the free market has not accepted the challenge. Every now and
then parties of Bolivians drive down to Bolivia Mar to swim—a political
gesture.
The main highway from Bolivia Mar to Bolivia itself follows the Osmore
Valley, cutting a perfect sectional slice through Peru on the way. For the
first fifteen miles the road climbs through a desert landscape almost devoid
of settlement and prone to fog. Then the road hits a plateau and the fog
dissipates. The landscape that comes into view is so dry that in most years
the Osmore River simply disappears into the desert.
Around the small city of Moquegua the river hoves back into view and
the highway abruptly pitches into the Cordillera Negra. The windshield fills
with enough canyons, bluffs, mesas, and cliffs for a dozen Road Runner
cartoons. Standing higher than its neighbors, at an altitude of about eight
thousand feet, is a wide pillar of rock with a rounded, convoluted top that
vaguely resembles the rounded, convoluted top of a human brain. The pillar
is called Cerro Baúl. For about two hundred years, it was the sole meeting
ground of two of the Americas’ largest societies—societies similar in scale
to, say, the Maya realm, but much less well known.
The two states, Wari and Tiwanaku, were probably the greatest of the
Inkas’ forerunners, and certainly the predecessors from whom they took the
most. In their separate ways, both were children of Norte Chico. They
worshipped figures in Staff God poses, lived in networks of vertical
exchange, and had public architecture with designs based on templates from
the coast. But in other ways they were as different from each other as Sicily
and Scandinavia. Of the two, Wari was the more conventional, centralized
state. Based east of Lima in the Andes heights, it first became prominent in
the sixth century A.D.—a bad time to be launching a nation on the Pacific
side of South America. At about that time, Andean societies were assailed
by the first of several decades-long droughts, paradoxically interrupted by
El Niño–induced floods. Some polities may have disintegrated beneath the
climatic assault, but Wari thrived. The principal reason for its success was
its innovative techniques of terracing and irrigation, the latter being used to
implement the former. Surprisingly, Peru has more arable land above nine
thousand feet than below. By diverting snowmelt from the ever-present
Andes icecaps to high farm terraces, Wari was able literally to rise above
the drought and flooding of lower elevations.
An anomaly in the southern Andes foothills, the great stone of
Cerro Baúl dominates the neighboring slopes. On its summit are
the remains of a Wari city.
The staple crop of the highlands was the potato, which unlike maize
regularly grows at altitudes of 14,000 feet; the tubers, cultivated in
hundreds of varieties, can be left in the ground for as long as a year (as long
as the soil stays above 27°F), to be dug up and cooked when needed. Even
frozen potatoes could be used. After letting freezing night temperatures
break down the tubers’ cell walls, Andean farmers stomped out the water
content to make dried chuño, a nigh-indestructible foodstuff that could be
stored for years. (The potato’s cold tolerance spurred its embrace by
European peasants. Not only did potatoes grow in places where other crops
could not, the plant was an ally in smallholders’ ceaseless struggle against
the economic and political elite. A farmer’s barnful of wheat, rye, or barley
was a fat target for greedy landlords and marauding armies; buried in the
soil, a crop of potatoes could not be easily seized.) Maize, though, was what
people wanted, the grain of choice for the elite—it was what you made
chicha from. Its prestige was another reason for Wari’s success. Because
terraces soak up more sunlight than steep slopes, maize can be grown at
higher than usual altitudes on them; irrigation similarly increases the area
available for maize farming.
In a process that Michael Moseley has likened to “patenting and
marketing a major invention,” the Wari passed on their reclamation
techniques to their neighbors, bringing a thousand-mile-long swath of the
Peruvian Andes under their cultural sway. A sign of their influence was the
spread of the Wari religion, in which the figure archaeologists call Staff God
was dominant—though the Wari transformed the staff, as if to remind others
of their agricultural beneficence, into a stalk of maize. By the end of the first
millennium A.D., Wari techniques had reclaimed more than a million acres
of cropland from mountainsides that almost anywhere else would have been
regarded as impossibly dry, steep, and cold. Today three-quarters of the
terraces are abandoned, and the alpine landscape has not regained the
productivity it had a thousand years ago. But until the Spanish conquest
Andean valleys were so thoroughly punctuated by Wari-inspired terraces
that to the Jesuit Bernabé Cobo they looked “as if they were covered with
flights of stairs.”
Wari’s capital city, also named Wari, occupied an alpine plateau near the
modern city of Ayacucho. Construction began in the first few centuries A.D.
The city ultimately spread across two square miles, an array of two- and
three-story buildings in compounds behind massive walls. Both peasant
homes and great palaces were built in similar styles, according to William
H. Isbell, an anthropologist at the State University of New York at
Binghamton, and Alexei Vranich, an archaeologist at the University of
Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Everything was
enclosed behind high, white walls, in what the two researchers described in
2004 as a hive of “repetitive, modular cells organized in high-walled
geometric blocks.” There were no standout public buildings, no great public
spaces, no spectacular vistas—only a thicket of walls and narrow streets
strewn with garbage (archaeologists have turned up so few clean floors and
surfaces, Isbell and Vranich wrote, “that it is apparent that Wari people
experienced domestic refuse as benign and unthreatening”). Apparently the
walls ringing and crisscrossing the city were intended for privacy, not
protection; Wari was not located in an easily defended spot. Along the spine
of the Andes the empire set up a string of a dozen administrative centers
that were like smaller versions of the capital. These were not built with
defense in mind, either. Indeed, there is little record of Wari warfare. Its
supremacy was commercial and intellectual; it was based less on infantry
troops than on innovative technology. All of which may explain some of its
behavior in Cerro Baúl.
Wari emissaries arrived in Moquegua around 600 A.D., according to
Patrick Ryan Williams and Donna V. Nash, Field Museum archaeologists
who have been working there since the early 1990s. A simpler culture had
already staked out the best farmland in the area. The Wari neither
aggressively threw them out nor withdrew in dismay. Guided, one imagines,
by instructions from headquarters, they quickly set up living quarters on
Cerro Baúl itself. The big mesa is to this day regarded as an apu, an ancient
spirit transfigured into rock. Thus putting a city directly on top of it was an
arresting statement: Here we are.
On a practical level, living on a five-hundred-yard-long mesa was a
daunting task. To supply water, the Wari carved a fifteen-mile canal through
the mountains from the peaks to the bottom of Cerro Baúl, an engineering
feat that would be a challenge today. “And even that got water only to the
bottom of the hill,” Williams told me. “After that, it was bucket brigades.”
As I huffed and puffed on the wickedly steep, thirty-minute hike to the
summit, he invited me to imagine a continuous line of servants exchanging
ceramic jugs (slopping, brimful ones going up; light, empty ones going
down) along the path, working day in and day out to provide water for the
priests and princes above.
Small, rudely fashioned models of farmhouses and farmyards covered the
top of the butte. Most of the models simply outlined walls, fences, and
doors with loose stones, but some were elaborate constructions complete
with plastic model cars, toy animals, and thatch roofs. People were climbing
Cerro Baúl, building their maquettes, and praying that the heavens would
give them the real-life equivalents. The miniature farms extended for
hundreds of yards in all directions. Here and there, makeshift crosses and
pictures of saints added a veneer of Catholicism to indigenous Andean
belief. Some of the ruined Wari walls were covered with ruined model
walls. “This is getting out of hand,” Williams said. “I don’t want to knock
down somebody’s dream house to get to an archaeological site.”
WARI AND TIWANAKU, 700 A.D.
In about 750 A.D., about a century after Wari came to Cerro Baúl,
Tiwanaku groups infiltrated the region around it. In most places on earth,
this encounter would have been fraught with tension. And perhaps if
Tiwanaku had been more like Wari there would have been immediate war.
But Tiwanaku was so different in so many ways that ordinary expectations
rarely apply to it. The celebrated anthropologist Clifford Geertz has half-
jokingly suggested that all states can be parceled into four types: pluralist,
in which the state is seen by its people as having moral legitimacy; populist,
in which government is viewed as an expression of the people’s will; “great
beast,” in which the rulers’ power depends on using force to keep the
populace cowed; and “great fraud,” in which the elite uses smoke and
mirrors to convince the people of its inherent authority. Every state is a mix
of all of these elements, but in Tiwanaku, the proportion of “great fraud”
may have been especially high. Nonetheless, Tiwanaku endured for many
centuries.
Tiwanaku’s capital, Tiwanaku city, was at the southwest end of Lake
Titicaca. Situated at 12,600 feet, it was the highest city in the ancient world.
Today visitors from lower altitudes are constantly warned that the area is
very cold. “Bring warm clothing,” Williams advised me in Cerro Baúl.
“You’re going to freeze.” The warnings puzzled me, because Lake Titicaca,
which is big enough to stay at a near-constant 51 degrees Fahrenheit,
moderates the local climate (this is one reason why agriculture is possible at
such height). On winter nights the average temperature is a degree below
freezing—cold, but not any colder than New England, and considerably
warmer than one would expect at 12,600 feet. Only when I traveled there
did I realize that this was the temperature indoors. The modern town of
Tiwanaku is a poor place and few of its buildings have any heating. One
night there I attended a performance at a family circus that was touring the
Andes. It was so cold inside the tent that for the first few minutes the
audience was shrouded in a cloud of its own breath. My host that night was
an American archaeologist. When I woke the next morning in her spare
bedroom, my host, in parka, hat, and gloves, was melting water on her
stove. The cold does not detract from the area’s beauty: Tiwanaku sits in the
middle of a plain ringed by ice-capped mountains. From the ruin’s taller
buildings the great lake, almost ten miles to the northwest, is just visible.
The wide expanse of water seems to merge into the sky without a welt.
The first important settlement around Titicaca was likely Chiripa, on a
little peninsula on the lake’s southwest coast. Its ceremonial center, which
may date to 900 B.C., was built around a Norte Chico–style sunken plaza.
Chiripa was one of half a dozen small, competitive centers that emerged
around the lake in that time. Most depended on raised-field agriculture, in
which farmers grow crops on flat, artificially constructed surfaces created
for the same reason that home gardeners grow vegetables on raised beds.
(Similar but even larger expanses of raised fields are found in the Beni, the
Mexican basin, and many other places.) By the time of Christ’s birth, two of
these early polities had become dominant: Pukara on the northern, Peruvian
edge of the lake and Tiwanaku on the opposite, Bolivian side. In the third
century A.D., Pukara rather abruptly disintegrated politically. People still
lived there, but the towns dispersed into the countryside; pottery making,
stela carving, and monument building ceased. No one is certain why.
Although Tiwanaku has been occupied since at least 800 B.C., it did not
become an important center until about 300 B.C. and did not expand out
from southern Titicaca until about two hundred years after Pukara’s decline.
But when it did reach out to its south and west, Tiwanaku transformed itself
to become what Alan Kolata, an archaeologist at the University of Chicago,
has called a “predatory state.” It was not the centrally administered military
power that term conjures. Instead, it was an archipelago of cities that
acknowledged Tiwanaku’s religious preeminence. “State religion and
imperial ideology,” Kolata argued, “performed much the same work as
military conquest, but at significantly lower cost.” Awed by its
magnificence, fearful of the supernatural powers controlled by its
priesthood, local rulers subordinated themselves.
Central to this strategy of intimidation was Tiwanaku city. A past wonder
of the world, it is badly damaged today. In the last two centuries, people
have literally carted away many of its buildings, using the stones for
churches, homes, bridges, public buildings, and even landfill. At one point
the Bolivian government drove a railroad through the site (recently it laid a
road through another part). Hands more enthusiastic than knowledgeable
reconstructed many of the remaining buildings. Still, enough remains to get
a sense of the ancient city.
Dominating its skyline was a seven-tiered pyramid, Akapana, laid out in
a pattern perhaps inspired by the Andean cross. Ubiquitous in highlands art,
the Andean cross is a stepped shape that some claim is inspired by the
Southern Cross constellation and others believe represents the four quarters
of the world. Whatever the case, Akapana’s builders planned with a sense of
drama. They constructed its base walls with sandstone blocks, the array
interrupted every ten feet by rectangular stone pillars that are easily ten feet
tall. So massive are the pillars that the first European to see Tiwanaku,
Pedro Cieza de León, later confessed himself unable to “understand or
fathom what kind of instruments or tools were used to work them.” Rising
from the center of a large moat, Akapana mimicked the surrounding
mountains. A precisely engineered drainage system added to the similarity
by channeling water from a cistern-like well at the summit down and along
the sides, a stylized version of rainwater plashing down the Andes.
The Andean cross
Atop an adjacent, somewhat smaller structure, a large, walled enclosure
called Kalasasaya, is the so-called Gateway of the Sun, cut from a single
block of stone (now broken in two and reassembled). Covered with a
fastidiously elaborate frieze, the twelve-foot gateway focuses the visitor’s
eye on the image of a single deity whose figure projects from the lintel: the
Staff God.
Today the Gateway of the Sun is the postcard emblem of Tiwanaku.
During the winter solstice (June, in South America) hundreds of camera-
toting European and American tourists wait on Kalasasaya through the
entire freezing night for the sunrise, which is supposed to shine through the
Gateway on that date alone. Guides in traditional costume explain that the
reliefs on the lintel form an intricate astronomical calendar that may have
been brought to earth by alien beings. To keep themselves warm during the
inevitable longueurs, visitors sing songs of peace and harmony in several
languages. Invariably the spectators are stunned when the first light of
sunrise appears well to the side of the Gateway. Only afterward do they
discover that the portal is not in its original location, and may have had
nothing to do with astronomy or calendars.
If those tourists had come to Tiwanaku at its height, walking through the
miles of raised fields surrounding it to the city’s carefully fitted stone walls,
they would have been delighted by its splendor. But it might also have
seemed curiously incomplete, with half the city falling down and in need of
repairs and the other half under construction. Modern drawings of ancient
cities tend to show them at an imagined apogee, the great monuments all
splendidly arrayed together, perfect as architectural models. But this is not
what Tiwanaku looked like, nor even what it was meant to look like,
according to Isbell and Vranich. From the very beginning, the two men
wrote in 2004, the city was partly in ruins—intentionally so, because the
fallen walls bequeathed on Tiwanaku the authority of the past. Meanwhile,
other parts of the city were constantly enveloped in construction projects,
which testified to the continued wealth and vitality of the state. Sometimes
these projects acquired construction materials by cannibalizing old
monuments, thereby hastening the process of creating ruins. In the Andean
tradition, labor was probably contributed by visiting work parties.
Periodically ritual feasts that included much smashing of pottery interrupted
the hubbub of construction. But it always continued. “They build their
monuments as if their intent was never to finish them,” the Spanish
academic Polo de Ondegardo marveled in 1571. Exactly right, Isbell and
Vranich said. Completion was not the object. The goal was a constant buzz
of purposeful activity.
As our hypothetical modern visitors wandered through the hurly-burly of
construction and deconstruction, they might have felt that despite the
commotion something was missing. Unlike Western cities, Tiwanaku had
no markets—no bazaars full of shouting, bargaining, conniving
entrepreneurs; no street displays of produce, pottery, and plonk; no jugglers
and mimes trying to attract crowds; no pickpockets. In Africa, Asia, and
Europe, Kolata wrote, “a city was a place of meeting and of melding for
many different kinds of people…. Through trade and exchange, through
buying and selling of every conceivable kind, the city was made and
remade.” Tiwanaku was utterly different. Andean societies were based on
the widespread exchange of goods and services, but kin and government,
not market forces, directed the flow. The citizenry grew its own food and
made its own clothes, or obtained them through their lineages, or picked
them up in government warehouses. And the city, as Kolata put it, was a
place for “symbolically concentrating the political and religious authority of
the elite.” Other Andean cities, Wari among them, shared this quality. But
Tiwanaku carried it to an extreme.
On Lake Titicaca, the reed boats known as totora are still in use,
as they have been for two thousand years. This replica of a large
totora was built in 2001 to prove the vessels could have hauled
the big stones used in Tiwanaku’s walls.
The so-called Gateway of the Sun attracts pilgrims by the
thousands who seek astronomical meaning in its location.
Unfortunately, it was moved to its present site in the twentieth
century.
Tiwanaku has been excavated for a century, and the more archaeologists
delve into it the less there seems to be. To Vranich, the capital’s lack of
resemblance to European imperial cities extends well beyond the absence of
marketplaces. Far from being the powerful administrative center envisioned
by earlier researchers, he says, Tiwanaku was a combination of the Vatican
and Disneyland, a religious show capital with a relatively small population
—almost a staff— that attracted pilgrims by the thousand. Like the tourists
at the solstice today, visitors came to this empire of appearances to be
dazzled and awed. “In the central city, buildings and monuments went up
and down, up and down, at an incredible rate,” Vranich told me at
Tiwanaku, where he had been working since 1996. “Nothing ever got
finished completely, because they were just concerned with the facades.
They had to keep changing the exhibits to keep the crowds coming.”
The encounter between Tiwanaku and Wari at Cerro Baúl seems to have
gone remarkably smoothly. At any rate, a study of more than a thousand
Wari and Tiwanaku graves found no evidence of the trauma associated with
violence. Instead, the two societies split the region between them. Wari
camped atop Cerro Baúl and a neighboring hillock, Cerro Mejía. Between
them was a steep valley with Tiwanaku settlements scattered throughout.
Because Wari and Tiwanaku pottery differed, Williams and Nash have been
able to map which group lived in which neighborhood by the distribution of
ceramic fragments. The Wari canal provided drinking water, but had to pass
through Tiwanaku territory at the base of Cerro Baúl. Tiwanaku let the
water through, but took enough to irrigate more than seven hundred acres of
terraces.
At the same time, Wari and Tiwanaku kept themselves separate. Although
they shared resources, there is little evidence that people from one culture
visited the other often, or had friendships across the political lines. Wari
homes were furnished with Wari goods; Tiwanaku homes, Tiwanaku goods.
Despite living next to each other, people continued to speak their different
languages and wear their different clothing and look for inspiration and
instruction from their different capitals. The social-science word for such
intermingling without intermixing is “interdigitization.” For two centuries
at Cerro Baúl, Wari and Tiwanaku were like people in parallel worlds,
sharing the same time and space but implacably separate from each other. 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.
The end came in about 800 A.D., Williams told me. He was part of a
Peruvian-American team that in 2005 reconstructed Cerro Baúl’s last days.
As many as twenty-eight high-ranking nobles and priests gathered in the
Wari colony’s biggest palace for a final feast at a great reception hall, thirty
feet on a side, each wall lined with a stone-faced bench. The chamber
opened onto what the archaeologists believed “was likely the chief
executive’s office for conducting statecraft,” the Andean equivalent of the
Oval Office in the White House. To judge by the scattered food remains, the
goodbye party was a Rabelaisian affair, with platters of llama, alpaca,
vizcacha (Andean hare), and seven types of fish, all washed down with
fresh chicha, this last being served in huge ceremonial mugs, many
heraldically decorated, that held up to half a gallon apiece of brew. At the
end the drunken crew staggered through the palace, smashing the crockery
and setting the whole place afire. “It looks like they had a really wild time
of it,” Williams said. Last to go was the chicha brewery with its elite female
staff. The lords torched the thatched milling room and then threw their great
mugs into the flames. “Later, when the embers had cooled,” archaeologists
wrote, “six necklaces of shell and stone were placed atop the ashes in a final
act of reverence.”
The retreat was part of a general fall. Tiwanaku may have declined first,
leading Wari to shut down its embassy in Cerro Baúl. Or perhaps Wari was
pulling back for its own internal reasons. Both declines have been laid to
drought, but this is contested. For one thing, Wari had already survived
drought. As for Tiwanaku, Vranich said, “How much would drought matter
to Disneyland?” Its ability to retain its audience would be far more
important.
The successors to both Wari and Tiwanaku combined the former’s
organizational skills and the latter’s sense of design and razzle-dazzle. First
came Chimor, then the greatest empire ever seen in Peru. Spread at its
greatest extent over seven hundred miles of the coastline, Chimor was an
ambitious state that grew maize and cotton by irrigating almost fifty
thousand acres around the Moche River (all of modern Peru only reached
that figure in 1960). A destructive El Niño episode in about 1100 A.D. made
irrigation impossible for a while. In response, the government forced gangs
of captive laborers to build a fifty-three-mile, masonry-lined canal to
channel water from the Chicama River, in the next valley to the north, to
farmland in the Moche Valley. The canal was a flop: some parts ran uphill,
apparently because of incompetent engineering, and the rest lost nine-tenths
of its water to evaporation and seepage. Some archaeologists believe that
the canal was never meant to function. It was a PR exercise, they say, a
Potemkin demonstration by the Chimor government that it was actively
fighting El Niño.
When the bad weather ended, Chimor looked outside its borders. Armies
went out and returned victorious to Chan Chan, the Chimor capital, a
seaside metropolis with a dense center that covered four square miles.
Dominated by nine high-walled imperial palace-tombs and five cathedral-
like ceremonial complexes, the city was both exemplary in its grandeur and
oddly empty, because its streets were restricted to the elite. Commoners
were barred, except for a few specialized technicians and craftworkers.
Each palace was hundreds of feet on a side and many were three stories tall.
They were filled with storage space—living quarters were almost an
afterthought. Their great beams adorned with splendidly worked gold and
silver, the huge structures were jammed together around the center of town
like people huddling in the shelter of an awning.
Chan Chan suffered a palace surfeit because dead rulers were regarded as
divine figures. As with the Inka, the kings’ mummified bodies continued to
live opulently in their own homes and could not be displaced; indeed, the
mummies were necessary presences at important state occasions. As a
result, each new ruler had to build his own palace and acquire the riches
necessary to maintain it till the end of time. The system almost guaranteed
imperial ambitions and exuberant construction plans.
The biggest of Chan Chan’s surviving palaces may have belonged to
Minchaçaman—the eleventh king in the Chimor dynasty, according to one
Spanish account—who reputedly conquered much of the coastline.
Minchaçaman was a powerful figure who could have taken over even more
land than he did. Unfortunately for him, he lived at the same time that a
previously little-known group, the Inka, acquired a new ruler, Pachakuti. In
about 1450 the Inka army, led by Qhapaq Yupanki, Pachakuti’s brother,
besieged the city-state of Cajamarca, in the foothills east of Chimor.
Cajamarca’s leader had allied himself with Minchaçaman, who rushed to
his aid with an army. He does not seem to have known what he was in for,
possibly because he viewed the Inka as a gang of rustic thugs. Qhapaq
Yupanki awaited him in an ambush. Minchaçaman and his army were
forced to flee as Cajamarca fell to the Inka. Qhapaq Yupanki covered
himself with so much glory that when he returned home to Qosqo his
brother, sensing future trouble, promptly executed him.
In this rare aerial photograph—taken in 1931, before modern
looting blasted the site—the ruined Chimor capital of Chan Chan
sprawls across the northern Peruvian coast. One of the wonders of
the fifteenth-century world, Chan Chan abruptly fell to the Inka in
about 1450; eighty years later, Spanish diseases and Spanish
soldiers destroyed much of what had survived the Inka.
A decade or so later—in 1463, if Spanish chronicles are correct—the
emperor sent out another army led by his son and designated successor,
Thupa Inka Yupanki. By that time nobody thought of the Inkas as hicks.
Thupa Inka descended the Moche River and paralyzed Chimor’s defenses
by the simple expedient of threatening to destroy its water supply.
Minchaçaman was captured, taken to Qosqo, and forced to watch Thupa
Inka’s victory celebration. Chimor’s conquerors were quick studies. Liking
the courtly magnificence of Chan Chan, they hauled away what they could
and, more important, forced the city’s gold, silver, and gem workers to
accompany them to Qosqo. They were instructed to transform the city into a
new Chan Chan, only more impressive. Seven decades later, when Pizarro
held his victory celebration in Qosqo, it was equal in grandeur to any city in
Europe.
MAKING THE WAK’A
Jonathan Haas and Winifred Creamer took me to Caballete, a narrow, dusty
bowl, perhaps half a mile long and a quarter mile wide, a few miles up the
Fortaleza River from the Peruvian coast. At the mouth of the bowl were
three mounds in a rough semicircle that faced a fourth mound. In front of
one mound, like a one-eighth scale model of Stonehenge, was a ragged
circle of wak’a: sacred stones. Not far from the wak’a looters had dug up an
ancient graveyard, pulling out the bodies and unwinding them from their
sheets in a search for gold and jewels. When they didn’t find any, they
threw the bones down in disgust. In a square perhaps fifty yards on a side
the ground was carpeted with broken human bones and scraps of thousand-
year-old fabric.
We walked a little further and were greeted by a curious sight: skulls
from the cemetery, gathered into several small piles. Around them were
beer cans, cigarette butts, patent-medicine bottles, half-burned photographs,
and candles shaped like naked women. These last had voodoo pins stuck in
their heads and vaginas. Local people came to these places at night and
either dug for treasure or practiced witchcraft, Haas said. In the harsh
afternoon light they seemed to me tacky and sad. I imagined that the
families of the people who had been buried at Caballete so long ago would
have been outraged if they could have known what would happen to the
bodies of their loved ones.
The history of Andean societies is so rich and complex that it
often leaves archaeologists feeling overwhelmed—there is so
much to learn that they can never keep up. A single example:
scientists did not confirm the existence of the Great Wall of Peru,
a forty-mile stone rampart across the Andes, until the 1930s. And
it still has never been fully excavated.
But then it occurred to me that my views may not have been shared by
either the present or the past inhabitants of Norte Chico. I had no idea what
people in Wari or Chimor would have thought of the scene before me. So
far in this section, I have mainly described the economic and political
history of Andean Indians. But people live also in the realm of the affective
and aesthetic—that’s why they bury bodies and sometimes dig them up and
pour love potions on them. Despite all the knowledge gained by scientists in
the last few decades, this emotional realm remains much harder to reach.
An obvious example on the southern coast is the Nazca, famous for the
huge patterns they set into the ground. Figures of animals and plants, almost
a thousand geometric symbols, arrow-straight lines many miles long—what
were they for? Peruvian anthropologist Toribio Mejía Xesspe first brought
these famous drawings to the attention of the outside world in 1927. Four
decades later, the Swiss writer Erich von Däniken set off an international
furor by claiming that the Nazca Indians could not have made these
symbols, because they were too big for such “primitive” people to
construct, and because they are visible only from the air. Instead, he said,
the giant figures were landing signals for space travelers; the whole plain
was a sort of gigantic extraterrestrial airport. Expanded in a series of
bestselling books, this notion turned the lines into a major tourist attraction.
Exasperated scientists pointed out that a) small groups could have
constructed the images by moving the dark surface stone to expose the
lighter-colored earth beneath, and b) the Nazca did not have to see the
figures to experience them, for they can be understood by walking the lines,
which it is believed the Indians did. The prevailing theory today is that the
straight lines mapped out the area’s many underground faults, which
channel water. But nobody knows why the Nazca made the animal and
plant figures, which seem less likely to have a direct function. What were
the Nazca thinking as they created them? How did they feel when they
walked them? To this day, the answers remain frustratingly far away.
Or consider the Moche, leaders of a military state that overran much of
the northern coast, submerging the identities of its victims in its own. Huaca
del Sol, the Moche capital, contains the largest adobe structure in the
Andes, still hauntingly evocative despite centuries of systematic looting.
(Unwilling to laboriously dig their way through the palace’s tombs, the
Spaniards diverted the Moche River through it, washing out the riches in
orthodox Augean-stable style; contemporary thieves have contented
themselves with picks and shovels.) After about 300 A.D., Moche artists
confined themselves to perhaps half a dozen subjects, painting stories of
supernatural figures on pottery and murals with ever more naturalistic
technique. Actors reenacted the same stories in grand pageants and ritual
celebrations. Individual combat is a common theme; losers were formally
stripped of their garments and forced to parade naked. Another oft-repeated
tale involves the death and burial of a regal figure. Many of the people in
the paintings are sharply individuated. Great effort has gone into studying
the Moche, but as Moseley says, their identities and motives often remain
“elusive.” The Moche polity broke up around 800 A.D., taking with it our
chance to understand.
One of the few moments when I imagined I could encompass something
of the inner lives of these long-ago people occurred in Chavín de Huantar, a
city of several thousand people that existed between about 800 B.C. and
200 A.D. Its most important feature, a ceremonial temple shaped in a Norte
Chico–style U, was a masterpiece of architectural intimidation. Using a
network of concealed vents and channels, priests piped loud, roaring sounds
at those who entered the temple. Visitors walked up three flights of stairs,
growls echoing around them, and into a long, windowless passageway. At
the end of the corridor, in a cross-shaped room that flickered with
torchlight, was a fifteen-foot-high stone figure with a catlike face, taloned
fingers, fierce tusks, and Medusa hair. Nobody today is sure of the god’s
identity. Immediately above it, hidden from visitors’ eyes, sat a priestly
functionary, who provided the god’s voice. After the long, torchlit approach,
walking straight into the gaze of the snarling deity, mysterious bellows
reverberating off the stone, the oracular declamation from above must have
been spine-chilling.
Most of the complex is open to tourists. Many of the sculptures have
been put into museums; others presumably have been looted. Yet walking
into the temple still felt to me like entering a mountain of solid rock. Over
and over again, Andean stories tell of spirits embodied in stones and giants
transformed into natural features. The landscape has an intricate numinous
geography; it is charged with meaning that must be respected and heeded.
The earth, in this view, is not something to be left alone; the wak’a that
litter Peruvian anthropological sites are often partly sculpted, as if they had
needed some human attention to manifest their sacred qualities. Thus the
human-made tunnels into the temple were part of what made it embody the
power of a mountain. As I walked down the dimly lighted corridor toward
where the torchlit deity had stood, my fingers ran along the walls created by
Chavín craftworkers. They were fit beautifully into place and as cold and
hard as the mountains they came from. But they did not gain their power
without my hand to close the circuit. The natural world is incomplete
without the human touch.
PART THREE
Landscape with Figures
Made in America
ENTERING THE WATER
At some point, Chak Tok Ich’aak must have realized that January 14, 378
A.D., would be his last day on earth. The king of Mutal, the biggest and
most cosmopolitan city-state in the Maya world, he lived and worked in a
sprawling castle a few hundred yards away from the great temples at the
city’s heart. (Now known as Tikal, the ruins of Mutal have become an
international tourist attraction.) Audience seekers entered the castle through
a set of three richly carved doors in its eastern wall. Inside was a receiving
room where petitioners waited for the king’s attention. An inner portal led
to a torch-lit chamber, where Chak Tok Ich’aak, flanked by counselors and
minions, reclined on an ornate bench. On that bench is, quite possibly,
where he met his fate. *23
Like most Maya rulers, Chak Tok Ich’aak spent a lot of his time
luxuriating in his court while dwarf servants attended to his whims and
musicians played conch shells and wooden trumpets in the background. But
he also excelled at such regal duties as performing ritual public dances,
sending out trade expeditions in search of luxury goods, and fighting wars
—a celebratory stela has Chak Tok Ich’aak personally stomping a manacled
POW. In another portrait, a bas-relief, the king is depicted as an alert man
with a long breechclout and a jeweled mass of necklaces, bracelets, anklets,
and pendants clicking and clattering about his person. Towering a foot over
his skull was an elaborate headdress in the shape of a bird of prey, complete
with swirling plumage. Like most Maya art, the portrait is too stylized to
regard as a naturalistic rendering. Nonetheless, it effectively makes its
point: Chak Tok Ich’aak was a major historical figure.
Mutal (modern Tikal) and the huge city-empire of Teotihuacan
had trade relations—peaceful, so far as is known—that dated back
to 200 A.D. Matters abruptly changed in January 378, when a
force led by the Teotihuacan general Siyaj K’ak’ arrived in the
court of the Mutal king Chak Tok Ich’aak. As depicted on a
painting wrapped around a Mutal vase, the foreign soldiers,
shown with bundles of spears and atlatls, marched away from a
Teotihuacan-style building (above) and confronted the lightly clad
Mutalking on the steps of his palace (near left). The outcome of
the meeting—Chak Tok Ich’aak’s death—may be hinted at in the
final image (far left), in which longhaired Maya pay their respects
to an empty pyramid.
By combining scraps of data on several inscriptions, archaeologists have
calculated that Chak Tok Ich’aak probably acceded to the throne in 360
A.D. At the time, the Maya realm consisted of sixty or so small, jostling
statelets scattered across what is now northern Belize and Guatemala and
the Yucatán Peninsula. Mutal was older and wealthier than most, but
otherwise not strikingly different. Chak Tok Ich’aak changed that. During
the eighteen years of his reign, the city acquired diplomatic stature and
commercial clout; its population grew to perhaps ten thousand and it
established trade contacts throughout Mesoamerica. As it prospered, Mutal
attracted considerable attention—which, in the end, may have been the
king’s undoing.
Marching toward him that January day was an armed force from
Teotihuacan, 630 miles to the west. Already in control of most of central
Mexico, Teotihuacan was looking for new lands to dominate. Leading the
expedition was one Siyaj K’ak’, apparently a trusted general or counselor to
the ruler of Teotihuacan. Four Maya cities along Siyaj K’ak’’s path recorded
his progress in murals, panel paintings, and stelae. Texts and images depict
the Teotihuacanos as gaudily martial figures with circular mirrors strapped
to their backs and squared-off helmets sweeping protectively in front of the
jaw. They were bare-chested but wore fringed leggings and heavy shell
necklaces and high-strapped sandals. In their hands were atlatls and
obsidian darts to throw with them. Painted panels in one city show Maya
soldiers in jaguar uniforms rushing to attack the visitors, but in fact it seems
unlikely that any of the small settlements between Teotihuacan and Mutal
would have dared to harass them.
No detailed description of the encounter between Siyaj K’ak’ and Chak
Tok Ich’aak exists, but it is known that discussion did not go on for long.
They two men met on January 14, 378 A.D. On that same day Chak Tok
Ich’aak “entered the water,” according to an account carved on a later stela.
The Maya saw the afterworld as a kind of endless, foggy sea. “Entering the
water” was thus a euphemism on the order of “passed on to a better place.”
Readers of the stela would understand that Chak Tok Ich’aak’s old heart had
quietly stopped beating after Siyaj K’ak’ or one of his troops slipped a blade
into it. Likely the rest of his family perished, as well as anyone else who
objected. In any case no one seems to have complained when Siyaj K’ak’
established a new dynasty at Mutal by installing the son of his Teotihuacan
master on the vacant throne.
Chak Tok Ich’aak’s death began a tumultuous period in Mesoamerican
history. The new, Teotihuacan-backed dynasty at Mutal drove the city to
further heights of power and prestige. Inevitably, its expansion was
resented. A northern city-state, Kaan (now known as Calakmul), conscripted
an army from its client states and launched a series of attacks. The ensuing
strife lasted 150 years, spread across the Maya heartland, and resulted in the
pillage of a dozen city-states, among them both Mutal and Kaan. After
suffering repeated losses, Mutal unexpectedly defeated the superior forces
of Kaan, possibly killing its king to boot. The beaten, humiliated Kaan lost
the support of its vassals and was reduced to penury.
Mutal once again reclaimed its heritage from imperial Teotihuacan. But
its triumph, though long sought, was short-lived. In one of archaeology’s
most enduring mysteries, Maya civilization crumbled around it within a
century. After a final flash of imperial splendor, the city joined Kaan and
most central Maya cities in obscurity and ruin. By about 900 A.D., both
Mutal and Kaan stood almost empty, along with dozens of other Maya
cities. And soon even the few people who still lived there had forgotten
their imperial glories.
“GETTING ALONG WITH NATURE”
Why did the Maya abandon all their cities?
“No words are more calculated to strike dismay in the hearts of Maya
archaeologists,” the Maya archaeologist David Webster confessed in 2002.
Webster, a researcher at Pennsylvania State University, admitted that during
his “incautious younger years” he often told fellow airplane passengers that
he was flying to work “at some ancient Maya center. Then, with utter
predictability, [would come] the dreaded question. Nowadays, older and
wiser, I usually mutter something vague about ‘business’ and then bury my
nose in the airline magazine.”
One reason Webster avoided the question is its scope. Asking what
happened to the ancient Maya is like asking what happened in the Cold War
—the subject is so big that one hardly knows where to begin. At the same
time, that very sweep is why the Maya collapse has fascinated
archaeologists since the 1840s, when the outside world first learned of the
abandoned cities in Yucatán. Today we know that the fall was not quite as
rapid, dramatic, and widespread as earlier scholars believed. Nevertheless,
according to Billie Lee Turner, a geographer at Clark University, in
Worcester, Massachusetts, it was unique in world history. Cultures rise and
fall, but there is no other known time when a large-scale society
disintegrated—and was replaced by nothing. “When the Roman Empire fell
apart,” he said, “Italy didn’t empty out—no cities, no major societies—for
more than a thousand years. But the Maya heartland did just that.” What
happened?
In the 1930s, Sylvanus G. Morley of Harvard, probably the most
celebrated Mayanist of his day, espoused what is still the best-known
theory: The Maya collapsed because they overshot the carrying capacity of
their environment. They exhausted their resource base, began to die of
starvation and thirst, and fled their cities en masse, leaving them as silent
warnings of the perils of ecological hubris.
When Morley proposed his theory, it was little more than a hunch. Since
then, though, scientific measurements, mainly of pollen in lake sediments,
have shown that the Maya did cut down much of the region’s forest, using
the wood for fuel and the land for agriculture. The loss of tree cover would
have caused large-scale erosion and floods. With their fields disappearing
beneath their feet and a growing population to feed, Maya farmers were
forced to exploit ever more marginal terrain with ever more intensity. The
tottering system was vulnerable to the first good push, which came in the
form of a century-long dry spell that hit Yucatán between about 800 and 900
A.D. Social disintegration followed soon thereafter.
Recounted in numberless articles and books, the Maya collapse has
become an ecological parable for green activists; along with Pleistocene
overkill, it is a favorite cautionary tale about surpassing the limits of Nature.
The Maya “were able to build a complex society capable of great cultural
and intellectual achievements, but they ended up destroying what they
created,” Clive Ponting wrote in his influential Green History of the World
(1991). Following the implications of the Maya fall, he asked, “Are
contemporary societies any better at controlling the drive toward ever
greater use of resources and heavier pressure on the environment? Is
humanity too confident about its ability to avoid ecological disaster?” The
history of these Indians, Ponting and others have suggested, has much to
teach us today.
Curiously, though, environmentalists also describe Native American
history as embodying precisely the opposite lesson: how to live in a
spiritual balance with Nature. Bookstore shelves groan beneath the weight
of titles like Sacred Ecology, Guardians of the Earth, Mother Earth
Spirituality, and Indigenous Traditions and Ecology: The Interbeing of
Cosmology and Community. So strongly endorsed is this view of Native
Americans that checklists exist to judge whether books correctly depict
their environmental values. The Native Cultures Authenticity Guideline, for
instance, assesses the portrayal of the “Five Great Values” shared by all “the
major Native cultures” (including, one assumes, the Maya), one of which is
“Getting Along with Nature”—“respecting the sacred natural harmony of
and with Nature.” To be historically accurate, according to the guidelines,
major native cultures must be shown displaying “a proper reverence for the
gift of life.”
Indians as poster children for eco-catastrophe, Indians as green role
models: the two images contradict each other less than they seem. Both are
variants of Holmberg’s Mistake, the idea that Indians were suspended in
time, touching nothing and untouched themselves, like ghostly presences on
the landscape. The first two sections of this book were devoted to two
different ways that researchers have recently repudiated this perspective. I
showed that they have raised their estimates of indigenous populations in
1492, and their reasons for it; and then why most researchers now believe
that Indian societies have been here longer than had been imagined, and
grew more complex and technologically accomplished than previously
thought. In this section I treat another facet of Holmberg’s Mistake: the idea
that native cultures did not or could not control their environment. The view
that Indians left no footprint on the land is an obvious example. That they
marched heedlessly to tragedy is a subtler one. Both depict indigenous
people as passively accepting whatever is meted out to them, whether it is
the fruits of undisturbed ecosystems or the punishment for altering them.
Native Americans’ interactions with their environments were as diverse
as Native Americans themselves, but they were always the product of a
specific historical process. Occasionally researchers can detail that process
with some precision, as in the case of the Maya. More often one can see
only the outlines of history, as in the reconfiguration of the eastern half of
the United States. These two paradigmatic examples are the subjects I turn
to now. In both, Indians worked on a very large scale, transforming huge
swathes of the landscape for their own ends. Sifting through the evidence, it
is apparent that many though not all Indians were superbly active land
managers—they did not live lightly on the land. And they do have lessons
to teach us, but they are not what are commonly supposed.
FIRE PLACE
Adriaen van der Donck was a lawyer who in 1641 transplanted himself to
the Hudson River Valley, then part of the Dutch colony of Nieuw
Nederland. He became a kind of prosecutor and bill collector for the Dutch
West India Company, which owned and operated the colony as a private
fiefdom. Whenever possible, van der Donck ignored his duties and tramped
around the forests and valleys upstate. He spent a lot of time with the
Haudenosaunee, whose insistence on personal liberty fascinated him. They
were, he wrote, “all free by nature, and will not bear any domineering or
lording over them.”
When a committee of settlers decided to complain to the government
about the Dutch West India Company’s dictatorial behavior, it asked van der
Donck, the only lawyer in New Amsterdam, to compose a protest letter and
travel with it to The Hague. His letter set down the basic rights that in his
view belonged to everyone on American soil—the first formal call for
liberty in the colonies. It is tempting to speculate that van der Donck drew
inspiration from the attitudes of the Haudenosaunee.
The Dutch government responded to the letter by taking control of New
Amsterdam from the Dutch West India Company and establishing an
independent governing body in Manhattan, thereby setting into motion the
creation of New York City. Angered by their loss of power, the company
directors effectively prevented van der Donck’s return for five years. While
languishing in Europe, he wrote a nostalgic pamphlet extolling the land he
had come to love.
Every fall, he remembered, the Haudenosaunee set fire to “the woods,
plains, and meadows,” to “thin out and clear the woods of all dead
substances and grass, which grow better the ensuing spring.” At first the
wildfire had scared him, but over time van der Donck had come to relish the
spectacle of the yearly burning. “Such a fire is a splendid sight when one
sails on the [Hudson and Mohawk] rivers at night while the forest is ablaze
on both banks,” he recalled. With the forest burning to the right and the left,
the colonists’ boats passed through a channel of fire, their passengers as
goggle-eyed at the blaze as children at a video arcade. “Fire and flames are
seen everywhere and on all sides…a delightful scene to look on from afar.”
Van der Donck believed that North America was only “several hundred
miles” across, and apparently assumed that all its inhabitants were exactly
like the Haudenosaunee. He was wrong about the first belief, but in a sense
correct about the second: from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Hudson’s
Bay to the Río Grande, the Haudenosaunee and almost every other Indian
group shaped their environment, at least in part, by fire.
Early in the last century, ecologists discovered the phenomenon of
“succession,” the more or less well-defined sequence by which ecosystems
fill in open land. A textbook example occurred after the eruption in 1980 of
Mount St. Helens, in southern Washington State, which inundated more
than two hundred square miles with magma, volcanic ash, and mud.
Surviving plants sprang quickly to life, sometimes resprouting within
weeks. Then colonizing species like lupine appeared, preparing the ground
for the return of the grasses. Fifteen years after the eruption, the ravaged
slopes were dotted with trees and woody shrubs: red alder, lodgepole pine,
willow bush. Here and there gleamed the waxy red boles of madrone. Forest
giants like hemlock, Douglas fir, and Sitka spruce waited in the wings. In
the classic successional course, each suite of plants replaces its predecessor,
until the arrival of the final, “climax” ecosystem, usually tall forest.
If ecological succession were unstoppable, the continents would be
covered by climax-stage vegetation: a world of great trees, dark and silent.
Early-succession species would have vanished. Luckily for these species,
succession is often interrupted—Nature does not move in lockstep.
Windstorms, lightning fires, landslides, volcanic eruptions, and other
natural calamities knock down trees and open up the forest, or prevent open
country from turning into forestland. A few years or decades of tranquility
may see grasses replaced by shrubs and trees which are in turn flattened by
a violent thunderstorm, permitting the grass to thrive again. After a while,
the shrubs and trees return, only to be wiped out by a flood. And so on.
Different types of disturbance shape different ecosystems: floods in the
Nile, landslides on the steep pitches of the Andes, hurricanes in the Yucatán
Peninsula. For more than ten thousand years, most North American
ecosystems have been dominated by fire.
In the Greek myth of Prometheus the gift of fire forever severs
humankind from the natural world—the burning torch is the icon of the
constructed and artificial. On the mundane, factual level, though, this
resonant tale is wrong: Nature has always used fire as a mallet to beat
landscapes into other forms. Prometheus only helped human beings to pick
up the handle. “The earth,” wrote the pioneering fire ecologist Edward V.
Komarek, “born in fire, baptized by lightning, since before life’s beginning
has been and is, a fire planet.” Set off by lightning, wildfires reset the
ecological clock, dialing the array of plants and animals back a few
successional stages. Fire benefits plants that need sunlight, while inhibiting
those that love the cool gloaming of the forest floor; it encourages the
animals that need those plants even as it discourages others; in turn,
predator populations rise and fall. In this way fire regulates ecological
character.
Fire is a dominating factor in many if not most terrestrial landscapes. It
has two main sources: lightning and Homo sapiens. In North America,
lightning fire is most common in the western mountains. Elsewhere, though,
Indians controlled it—at least until contact, and in many places long after.
In the Northeast, Indians always carried a deerskin pouch full of flints,
Thomas Morton reported in 1637, which they used “to set fire of the
country in all places where they come.” The flints ignited torches, which
were as important to the hunt as bows and arrows. Deer in the Northeast;
alligators in the Everglades; buffalo in the prairies; grasshoppers in the
Great Basin; rabbits in California; moose in Alaska: all were pursued by
fire. Native Americans made big rings of flame, Thomas Jefferson wrote,
“by firing the leaves fallen on the ground, which, gradually forcing animals
to the center, they there slaughter them with arrows, darts, and other
missiles.” Not that Indians always used fire for strictly utilitarian purposes.
At nightfall tribes in the Rocky Mountains entertained the explorers
Meriwether Lewis and William Clark by applying torches to sap-dripping
fir trees, which then exploded like Roman candles.
Rather than domesticate animals for meat, Indians retooled ecosystems to
encourage elk, deer, and bear. Constant burning of undergrowth increased
the numbers of herbivores, the predators that fed on them, and the people
who ate them both. Rather than the thick, unbroken, monumental snarl of
trees imagined by Thoreau, the great eastern forest was an ecological
kaleidoscope of garden plots, blackberry rambles, pine barrens, and
spacious groves of chestnut, hickory, and oak. The first white settlers in
Ohio found woodlands that resembled English parks—they could drive
carriages through the trees. Fifteen miles from shore in Rhode Island,
Giovanni da Verrazzano found trees so widely spaced that the forest “could
be penetrated even by a large army.” John Smith claimed to have ridden
through the Virginia forest at a gallop.
Incredible to imagine today, bison roamed from New York to Georgia. A
creature of the prairie, Bison bison was imported to the East by Native
Americans along a path of indigenous fire, as they changed enough forest
into fallows for it to survive far outside its original range. When the
Haudenosaunee hunted these animals, the historian William Cronon
observed, they
were harvesting a foodstuff which they had consciously been
instrumental in creating. Few English observers could have realized
this. People accustomed to keeping domesticated animals lacked the
conceptual tools to recognize that the Indians were practicing a more
distant kind of husbandry of their own.
Indian fire had its greatest impact in the middle of the continent, which
Native Americans transformed into a prodigious game farm. Native
Americans burned the Great Plains and Midwest prairies so much and so
often that they increased their extent; in all probability, a substantial portion
of the giant grassland celebrated by cowboys was established and
maintained by the people who arrived there first. “When Lewis and Clark
headed west from [St. Louis],” wrote ethologist Dale Lott, “they were
exploring not a wilderness but a vast pasture managed by and for Native
Americans.”
In 1792 the surveyor Peter Fidler examined the plains of southern Alberta
systematically, the first European to do so. Riding with several groups of
Indians in high fire season, he spent days on end in a scorched land. “Grass
all burnt this day,” he reported on November 12. “Not a single pine to be
seen three days past.” A day later: “All burnt ground this Day.” A day later:
“The grass nearly burnt all along this Day except near the Lake.” A month
later: “The Grass is now burning [with] very great fury.”
Every fall & spring, & even in the winter when there is no snow, these
large plains either in one place or other is constantly on fire, & when
the Grass happens to be long & the wind high, the sight is grand &
awful, & it drives along with amazing swiftness.
Fidler acknowledged that the fires could be “very dangerous” but
understood their purpose. “These fires burning off the old grass,” he
observed, “in the ensuing Spring & Summer makes excellent fine sweet
feed for the Horses & Buffalo, &c.”
When Indian societies disintegrated from disease and mistreatment,
forest invaded savanna in Wisconsin, Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming,
and the Texas hill country. Europeans forgot what the landscape had looked
like before and why. Captain John Palliser, traveling through the same lands
as Fidler six decades later, lamented the Indians’ “disastrous habit of setting
the prairie on fire for the most trivial and worse than useless reasons.”
Afterward even the memory of indigenous fire faded. By the twentieth
century biologists were stoutly denying its existence. The “open, park-like
woods” seen by early settlers, Harvard naturalist Hugh Raup asserted in
1937, were not caused by fire; they “have been, from time immemorial,
characteristic of vast areas in North America.” Raup’s summary description
of the idea that they were due to regular, wide-scale Indian burning?
“Inconceivable.” “It is at least a fair assumption,” a widely used college
forestry textbook remarked in 1973, “that no habitual or systematic burning
was carried out by Indians.” In the western United States, the geographer
Thomas R. Vale wrote in 2002, the “modest” Indian population “modified
only a tiny fraction of the total landscape for their everyday living needs.”
Vale is in the minority now. Spurred in part by historians like Cronon,
most scientists have changed their minds about Indian fire. Using clever
laboratory techniques, they have convinced themselves that in most cases
the tribal lore and old chronicles were right all along: Indian embers were
sparkling in the American night for centuries before the Sumerians climbed
their ziggurats.
Carrying their flints and torches, Native Americans were living in balance
with Nature—but they had their thumbs on the scale. Shaped for their
comfort and convenience, the American landscape had come to fit their
lives like comfortable clothing. It was a highly successful and stable
system, if “stable” is the appropriate word for a regime that involves
routinely enshrouding miles of countryside in smoke and ash. And it was a
system that Indians were abandoning in ever-rising numbers at the time
when Europeans came.
TEN THOUSAND MOUNDS
Anyone who traveled up the Mississippi in 1100 A.D. would have seen it
looming in the distance: a four-level earthen mound bigger than the Great
Pyramid of Giza. Around it like echoes were as many as 120 smaller
mounds, some topped by tall wooden palisades, which were in turn ringed
by a network of irrigation and transportation canals; carefully located fields
of maize; and hundreds of red-and-white-plastered wood homes with high-
peaked, deeply thatched roofs like those on traditional Japanese farms.
Located near the confluence of the Missouri, Illinois, and Mississippi
Rivers, the Indian city of Cahokia was a busy port. Canoes flitted like
hummingbirds across its waterfront: traders bringing copper and mother-of-
pearl from faraway places; hunting parties bringing such rare treats as
buffalo and elk; emissaries and soldiers in long vessels bristling with
weaponry; workers ferrying wood from upstream for the ever hungry
cookfires; the ubiquitous fishers with their nets and clubs. Covering five
square miles and housing at least fifteen thousand people, Cahokia was the
biggest concentration of people north of the Río Grande until the eighteenth
century.
Away from the riverside, Cahokia was hardly less busy and imposing. Its
focal point was the great mound—Monks Mound, it is now called, named
after a group of Trappists who lived nearby in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. Around its sides rushed a flow of men, their body paint and
tattoos obscured by dust from the hardened, brick-like mud that lay
underneath the entire city. Some built new mounds or maintained the old;
others hauled wood for fuel and houses or carried water in leather pouches
or weeded the maize fields with stone hoes. Women carried stacks of woven
mats, baskets of fish and produce, yowling children. Cooksmoke chimneyed
to the sky. Standards made of painted animal skins flapped everywhere.
Anyone who has visited Siena or Venice knows how surprisingly noisy a
city without engines can be. At peak times, given the right wind conditions,
Cahokia must have been audible for miles.
Monks Mound opens onto a plaza a thousand feet long. In its southwest
corner is a pair of mounds, one conical, one square. One day I climbed up
their grassy sides at sunset. Hardly any other visitors were there. The
humped outline of the vast heap of earth emerged from the empty green like
a powerful prairie ship. The sun was low and the great mound was casting a
shadow that looked long enough to reach the Allegheny Mountains. For a
moment I saw no sign of contemporary life; St. Louis, just across the river,
had not yet switched on its lights. Around me was the mound city and
nothing but the mound city. To we moderns the sensation of being in a
constructed environment is so ubiquitous as to be invisible—in the cocoon
of our strip malls and automobiles, we are like the fish that cannot feel the
water through which they swim. In Cahokia’s day it was different. A
thousand years ago it was the only place for a thousand miles in which one
could be completely enveloped in an artificial landscape.
To visitors today it seems obvious that Cahokia and the many other
mound sites in the Midwest and Southeast are the remains of Indian
settlements. It did not seem so clear in the past. Nineteenth-century writers
attributed the mound complexes to, among others, the Chinese, the Welsh,
the Phoenicians, the lost nation of Atlantis, and various biblical personages.
A widely touted theory assigned authorship to Scandinavian émigrés, who
later picked up stakes, moved to Mexico, and became the Toltecs. The
science-fiction writer and archaeology buff Robert Silverberg devoted an
entire entertaining book to the back-and-forth over the origin of the
mounds, which intermittently preoccupied American intellectuals for a
century. Thomas Jefferson removed a slice from a mound on his estate,
examined the stratigraphic layers, and announced that Indians had made it.
George Bancroft, one of the founders of American history, disagreed: the
mounds, he wrote in 1840, were purely natural formations.
Charitably, one could say that Bancroft was correct: Cahokia was a
product of its geography, which in turn was a product of the Ice Age. When
the glaciers melted, water gushed south, creating the Mississippi River and
the Illinois and Missouri Rivers that funnel into it. They met in a roil of
water eighty miles wide. When the rivers receded, they exposed a wide strip
of bottomland. Into this land a group of Indians coalesced sometime before
800 A.D.
Nobody knows what these people called themselves or which language
they spoke. They were not “Cahokians”—that name, itself a linguistic
garble, comes from an unrelated group that migrated to the area almost a
thousand years later. Archaeologists are unlikely to find a better name,
though. According to William Woods, the geographer and archaeologist at
the University of Kansas, Monks Mound completely covers whatever
habitation these people had before they built Cahokia. To see the remaining
traces of this early settlement, scientists would have to jack up the whole
enormous pile and dig underneath. Almost all that can be known with
certainty about this initial group is that it belonged to a diverse, four-
thousand-year-old tradition characterized by the construction of large
earthen mounds.
Based around the Mississippi and its associated rivers, these societies
scattered tens of thousands of mounds from southern Canada and the Great
Plains to the Atlantic coast and the Gulf of Mexico. They were especially
concentrated in the Ohio Valley, but nearly as many are found in the
Southeast. Highways, farms, and housing developments have destroyed
most of them, and scientists have investigated only a small fraction of the
survivors. Most of the earthworks were shaped like big cones and stepped
pyramids, but some were sculpted into enormous birds, lizards, bears, long-
tailed “alligators,” and, in Peebles, Ohio, a 1,330-foot-long serpent.
The earliest known examples appeared in northeastern Lousiana about
5,400 years ago, well before the advent of agriculture. For reasons
unknown, Indians heaved up a ring of eleven irregularly sized mounds,
most of them connected by a ridge, on a hill overlooking the course of the
Ouachita River. The biggest was as tall as a two-story house. About a dozen
similar sites are known, of which the Ouachita ring is the oldest and
biggest. None of the mounds in any of these places cover burials or contain
artifacts or show signs of use. Indeed, they seem to have so little purpose
that archaeologist Joe Saunders of Northeast Louisiana University, whose
team excavated the Ouachita mounds in 1997, half-jokingly speculated to
Science that the motive for building them could have been the act of
construction itself. “I know it sounds awfully Zen-like,” he conceded.
The Ouachita mounds as they may have appeared at their
creation, 5,400 years ago.
Because modern-day hunter-gatherers in Africa live in egalitarian bands
that constantly move from place to place, archaeologists assumed that
Native American hunter-gatherers must also have done so. Discovering the
Louisiana mounds upset this view: they suggest that at least some early
Indians were stay-at-homes. More important, they testify to levels of public
authority and civic organization rarely associated with nomads. Building a
ring of mounds with baskets or deerskins full of dirt is a long-term
enterprise. During construction the workers must eat, which in turn means
that other people must provide their food. Such levels of planning are
ordinarily thought to kick in with the transition to agriculture. When people
till and sow the land, anthropologists say, they set up systems to protect
their investment. Eventually somebody ends up in charge of allocating
goods and services. But the mound builders in Louisiana built these
massive constructions at a time when agriculture was barely under way—it
was like the whiff in the air from a faraway ocean. In the central river
valleys of North America, people had a way of life without known
analogue.
After these first mounds the record is sparse. After the Ouachita mounds,
there is a gap in the record of more than a millennium. The curtain parts
again in about 1500 B.C., when an archipelago of villages, the largest
known as Poverty Point, grew up in the northeast corner of Louisiana.
Located fifty-five miles from the Ouachita site, Poverty Point had as a focus
a structure resembling an amphitheater: six concentric, C-shaped ridges,
each five feet tall, on a bluff facing the river. The jaws of the widest C are
3,950 feet apart, an expanse so big that scientists did not recognize the
ridges as constructions until they took aerial photographs of the site in the
1950s.
Now another gap: seven hundred years. The next major sequence occurs
mainly in the Ohio Valley, hundreds of miles north. Here was a group
known as the Adena—the name is that of a well-known site. Because Adena
mounds served as tombs, researchers know more about their deaths than
their lives. Accompanying the noble few in the tombs to the world of the
deceased were copper beads and bracelets, stone tablets and collars, textiles
and awls, and, sometimes, stone pipes in the shape of surreal animals. The
head of the creature faced the user, who sucked in tobacco smoke from its
mouth. It is widely believed that Adena tobacco was much stronger than
today’s tobacco—it was psychoactive.
Tobacco was only one of the crops grown at Adena villages. The
Mississippi and Ohio Valleys and much of the U.S. Southeast were home to
what is known as the Eastern Agricultural Complex. A full-fledged
agricultural revolution with a multifarious suite of crops, the complex is an
example of a major cultural innovation that has completely disappeared. Its
crops were such unfamiliar plants as marshelder, knotweed, maygrass, and
little barley. All of these species still exist; one could stock a specialty
restaurant with them. (Sample menu: maygrass patties, steamed knotweed
beans, and buffalo tongue.) No one seems to be doing that, though. In fact,
farmers today treat several of these crops as weeds—they routinely blast
little barley with herbicides. Archaeologists have tentative indications of
early domestication in spots from Illinois to Alabama by 1000 B.C. But
agriculture did not begin to flower, so to speak, until the Adena.
Adena influence in customs and artifacts can be spotted in archaeological
sites from Indiana to Kentucky and all the way north to Vermont and even
New Brunswick. For a long time researchers believed this indicated that the
Adena had conquered other groups throughout this area, but many now
believe that the influence was cultural: like European teenagers donning
baggy pants and listening to hip-hop, Adena’s neighbors adopted its
customs. Archaeologists sometimes call the area in which such cultural
flows occur an “interaction sphere.” Both less and more than a nation, an
interaction sphere is a region in which one society disseminates its symbols,
values, and inventions to others; an example is medieval Europe, much of
which fell under the sway of Gothic aesthetics and ideas. The Adena
interaction sphere lasted from about 800 B.C. to about 100 B.C.
MOUNDBUILDERS, 3400 B.C.–1400 A.D.
Textbooks sometimes say that the Adena were succeeded by the
Hopewell, but the relation is unclear; the Hopewell may simply have been a
later stage of the same culture. The Hopewell, too, built mounds, and like
the Adena seem to have spoken an Algonquian language. (“Hopewell”
refers to the farmer on whose property an early site was discovered.) Based
in southern Ohio, the Hopewell interaction sphere lasted until about 400
A.D. and extended across two-thirds of what is now the United States. Into
the Midwest came seashells from the Gulf of Mexico, silver from Ontario,
fossil shark’s teeth from Chesapeake Bay, and obsidian from Yellowstone.
In return the Hopewell exported ideas: the bow and arrow, monumental
earthworks, fired pottery (Adena pots were not put into kilns), and, probably
most important, the Hopewell religion.
The Hopewell apparently sought spiritual ecstasy by putting themselves
into trances, perhaps aided by tobacco. In this enraptured state, the soul
journeys to other worlds. As is usually the case, people with special abilities
emerged to assist travelers through the portal to the numinous. Over time
these shamans became gatekeepers, controlling access to the supernatural
realm. They passed on their control and privileges to their children, creating
a hereditary priesthood: counselors to kings, if not kings themselves. They
acquired healing lore, mastered and invented ceremonies, learned the
numerous divinities in the Hopewell pantheon. We know little of these gods
today, because few of their images have endured to the present. Presumably
shamans recounted their stories to attentive crowds; almost certainly, they
explained when and where the gods wanted to build mounds.
In the context of the village, the mound, visible everywhere, was as much
a beacon as a medieval cathedral. As with Gothic churches, which had
plazas for the outdoor performance of sacred mystery plays, the mounds
had greens before them: ritual spaces for public use. Details of the
performances are lost, but there is every indication that they were exuberant
affairs. “There is a stunning vigor about the Ohio Hopewell…,” Silverberg
wrote,
a flamboyance and fondness for excess that manifests itself not only in
the intricate geometrical enclosures and the massive mounds, but in
these gaudy displays of conspicuous consumption [in the tombs]. To
envelop a corpse from head to feet in pearls, to weigh it down in many
pounds of copper, to surround it with masterpieces of sculpture and
pottery, and then to bury everything under tons of earth—this betokens
a kind of cultural energy that numbs and awes those who follow after.
Vibrant and elaborate, perhaps a little vulgar in its passion for display,
Hopewell religion spread through most of the eastern United States in the
first four centuries A.D. As with the expansion of Christianity, the new
converts are unlikely to have understood the religion in the same way as its
founders. Nonetheless, its impact was profound. In a mutated form, it may
well have given impetus to the rise of Cahokia.
THE RISE AND FALL OF THE AMERICAN BOTTOM
Cahokia was one big piece in the mosaic of chiefdoms that covered the
lower half of the Mississippi and the Southeast at the end of the first
millennium A.D. Known collectively as “Mississippian” cultures, these
societies arose several centuries after the decline of the Hopewell culture,
and probably were its distant descendants. At any one time a few larger
polities dominated the dozens or scores of small chiefdoms. Cahokia,
biggest of all, was preeminent from about 950 to about 1250 A.D. It was an
anomaly: the greatest city north of the Río Grande, it was also the only city
north of the Río Grande. Five times or more bigger than any other
Mississippian chiefdom, Cahokia’s population of at least fifteen thousand
made it comparable in size to London, but on a landmass without Paris,
Córdoba, or Rome.
I call Cahokia a city so as to have a stick to beat it with, but it was not a
city in any modern sense. A city provides goods and services for its
surrounding area, exchanging food from the countryside for the products of
its sophisticated craftspeople. By definition, its inhabitants are urban—they
aren’t farmers. Cahokia, however, was a huge collection of farmers packed
cheek by jowl. It had few specialized craftworkers and no middle-class
merchants. On reflection, Cahokia’s dissimilarity to other cities is not
surprising; having never seen a city, its citizens had to invent every aspect
of urban life for themselves.
Despite the nineteenth-century fascination with the mounds,
archaeologists did not begin to examine Cahokia thoroughly until the
1960s. Since then studies have gushed from the presses. By and large, they
have only confirmed Cahokia’s status as a statistical outlier. Cahokia sat on
the eastern side of the American Bottom. Most of the area has clayey soil
that is hard to till and prone to floods. Cahokia was located next to the
largest stretch of good farmland in the entire American Bottom. At its far
edge, a forest of oak and hickory topped a line of bluffs. The area was little
settled until as late as 600 A.D., when people trickled in and formed small
villages, groups of a few hundred who planted gardens and boated up and
down the Mississippi to other villages. As the millennium approached, the
American Bottom had a resident population of several thousand. Then,
without much apparent warning, there was, according to the archaeologist
Timothy R. Pauketat of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,
what has been called a “Big Bang”—a few decades of tumultuous change.
Cahokia’s mounds emerged from the Big Bang, along with the East St.
Louis mound complex a mile away (the second biggest, after Cahokia,
though now mostly destroyed) and the St. Louis mounds just across the
Mississippi (the fourth biggest). Monks Mound was the first and most
grandiose of the construction projects. Its core is a slab of clay about 900
feet long, 650 feet wide, and more than 20 feet tall. From an engineering
standpoint, clay should never be selected as the bearing material for a big
earthen monument. Clay readily absorbs water, expanding as it does. The
American Bottom clay, known as smectite clay, is especially prone to
swelling: its volume can increase by a factor of eight. Drying, it shrinks
back to its original dimensions. Over time the heaving will destroy
whatever is built on top of it. The Cahokians’ solution to this problem was
discovered mainly by Woods, the University of Kansas archaeologist and
geographer, who has spent two decades excavating Monks Mound.
To minimize instability, he told me, the Cahokians kept the slab at a
constant moisture level: wet but not too wet. Moistening the clay was easy
—capillary action will draw up water from the floodplain, which has a high
water table. The trick is to stop evaporation from drying out the top. In an
impressive display of engineering savvy, the Cahokians encapsulated the
slab, sealing it off from the air by wrapping it in thin, alternating layers of
sand and clay. The sand acts as a shield for the slab. Water rises through the
clay to meet it, but cannot proceed further because the sand is too loose for
further capillary action. Nor can the water evaporate; the clay layers atop
the sand press down and prevent air from coming in. In addition, the sand
lets rainfall drain away from the mound, preventing it from swelling too
much. The final result covered almost fifteen acres and was the largest
earthen structure in the Western Hemisphere; though built out of unsuitable
material in a floodplain, it has stood for a thousand years.
Reconstructions of Cahokia, the greatest city north of the Río
Grande, ca. 1250 A.D.
Because the slab had to stay moist, it must have been built and covered
quickly, a task requiring a big workforce. Evidence suggests that people
moved from miles around to the American Bottom to be part of the project.
If the ideas of Pauketat, the University of Illinois archaeologist, are correct,
the immigrants probably came to regret their decision to move. To his way
of thinking, the Big Bang occurred after a single ambitious person seized
power, perhaps in a coup. Although his reign may have begun idealistically,
Cahokia quickly became an autocracy; in an Ozymandiac extension of his
ego, the supreme leader set in motion the construction projects. Loyalists
forced immigrants to join the labor squads, maintaining control with the
occasional massacre. Burials show the growing power of the elite: in a
small mound half a mile south of Monks Mound, archaeologists in the late
1960s uncovered six high-status people interred with shell beads, copper
ornaments, mica artworks—and the sacrificed bodies of more than a
hundred retainers. Among them were fifty young women who had been
buried alive.
Woods disagrees with what he calls the “proto-Stalinist work camp”
scenario. Nobody was forced to erect Monks Mound, he says. Despite the
intermittent displays of coercion, he says, Cahokians put it up “because they
wanted to.” They “were proud to be part of these symbols of community
identity.” Monks Mound and its fellows were, in part, a shout-out to the
world—Look at us! We’re doing something different! It was also the
construction of a landscape of sacred power, built in an atmosphere of
ecstatic religious celebration. The American Bottom, in this scenario, was
the site of one of the world’s most spectacular tent revivals. Equally
important, Woods says, the mound city was in large part an outgrowth of
the community’s previous adoption of maize.
Before Cahokia’s rise, people were slowly hunting the local deer and
bison populations to extinction. The crops in the Eastern Agricultural
Complex could not readily make up the difference. Among other problems,
most had small seeds—imagine trying to feed a family on sesame seeds,
and you have some idea of what it would have been like to subsist on
maygrass. Maize had been available since the first century B.C. (It would
have arrived sooner, but Indians had to breed landraces that could tolerate
the cooler weather, shorter growing seasons, and longer summer days of the
north.) The Hopewell, however, almost ignored it. Somewhere around 800
A.D. their hungry successors took another look at the crop and liked what
they saw. The American Bottom, with its plenitude of easily cleared, maize-
suitable land, was one of the best places to grow it for a considerable
distance. The newcomers needed to store their harvests for the winter, a task
most efficiently accomplished with a communal granary. The granary
needed to be supervised—an invitation to develop centralized power.
Growth happened fast and may well have been hurried along by a
charismatic leader, Woods said, but something like Cahokia probably would
have happened anyway.
THE AMERICAN BOTTOM, 1300 A.D.
Maize also played a role in the city’s disintegration. Cahokia represented
the first time Indians north of the Río Grande had tried to feed and shelter
fifteen thousand people in one place, and they made beginner’s mistakes. To
obtain fuel and construction material and to grow food, they cleared trees
and vegetation from the bluffs to the east and planted every inch of arable
land. Because the city’s numbers kept increasing, the forest could not
return. Instead people kept moving further out to get timber, which then had
to be carried considerable distances. Having no beasts of burden, the
Cahokians themselves had to do all the carrying. Meanwhile, Woods told
me, the city began outstripping its water supply, a “somewhat wimpy”
tributary called Canteen Creek. To solve both of these problems at once, the
Cahokians apparently changed its course, which had consequences that they
cannot have anticipated.
Nowadays Cahokia Creek, which flows from the north, and Canteen
Creek, which flows from the east, join together at a point about a quarter
mile northeast of Monks Mound. On its way to the Mississippi, the
combined river then wanders, quite conveniently, within two hundred yards
of the central plaza. Originally, though, the smaller Canteen Creek alone
occupied that channel. Cahokia Creek drained into a lake to the northwest,
then went straight to the Mississippi, bypassing Cahokia altogether.
Sometime between 1100 and 1200 A.D., according to Woods’s as-yet
unpublished research, Cahokia Creek split in two. One fork continued as
before, but the second, larger fork dumped into Canteen Creek. The
combined river provided much more water to the city—it was about seventy
feet wide. And it also let woodcutters upstream send logs almost to Monks
Mound. A natural inference, to Woods’s way of thinking, is that the city, in
a major public works project, “intentionally diverted” Cahokia Creek.
In summer, heavy rains lash the Mississippi Valley. With the tree cover
stripped from the uplands, rainfall would have sluiced faster and heavier
into the creeks, increasing the chance of floods and mudslides. Because the
now-combined Cahokia and Canteen Creeks carried much more water than
had Canteen Creek alone, washouts would have spread more widely across
the American Bottom than would have been the case if the rivers had been
left alone. Beginning in about 1200 A.D., according to Woods, Cahokia’s
maize fields repeatedly flooded, destroying the harvests.
The city’s problems were not unique. Cahokia’s rise coincided with the
spread of maize throughout the eastern half of the United States. The
Indians who adopted it were setting aside millennia of tradition in favor of a
new technology. In the past, they had shaped the landscape mainly with fire;
the ax came out only for garden plots of marshelder and little barley. As
maize swept in, Indians burned and cleared thousands of acres of land,
mainly in river valleys. As in Cahokia, floods and mudslides rewarded
them. (How do archaeologists know this? They know it from sudden
increases in river sedimentation coupled with the near disappearance of
pollen from bottomland trees in those sediments.) Between about 1100 and
1300 A.D., cataclysms afflicted Indian settlements from the Hudson Valley
to Florida.
Apparently the majority learned from mistakes; after this time,
archaeologists don’t see this kind of widespread erosion, though they do see
lots and lots of maize. A traveler in 1669 reported that six square miles of
maize typically encircled Haudenosaunee villages. This estimate was very
roughly corroborated two decades later by the Marquis de Denonville,
governor of New France, who destroyed the annual harvest of four adjacent
Haudenosaunee villages to deter future attacks. Denonville reported that he
had burned 1.2 million bushels of maize—42,000 tons. Today, as I
mentioned in Chapter 6, Oaxacan farmers typically plant roughly 1.25–2.5
acres to harvest a ton of landrace maize. If that relation held true in upstate
New York—a big, but not ridiculous assumption—arithmetic suggests that
the four villages, closely packed together, were surrounded by between
eight and sixteen square miles of maize fields.
Between these fields was the forest, which Indians were subjecting to
parallel changes. Sometime in the first millennium A.D., the Indians who
had burned undergrowth to facilitate grazing began systematically
replanting large belts of woodland, transforming them into orchards for fruit
and mast (the general name for hickory nuts, beechnuts, acorns, butternuts,
hazelnuts, pecans, walnuts, and chestnuts). Chestnut was especially popular
—not the imported European chestnut roasted on Manhattan street corners
in the fall, but the smaller, soft-shelled, deeply sweet native American
chestnut, now almost extinguished by chestnut blight. In colonial times, as
many as one out of every four trees in between southeastern Canada and
Georgia was a chestnut—partly the result, it would seem, of Indian burning
and planting.
Hickory was another favorite. Rambling through the Southeast in the
1770s, the naturalist William Bartram observed Creek families storing a
hundred bushels of hickory nuts at a time. “They pound them to pieces, and
then cast them into boiling water, which, after passing through fine
strainers, preserves the most oily part of the liquid” to make a thick milk,
“as sweet and rich as fresh cream, an ingredient in most of their cookery,
especially hominy and corncakes.” Years ago a friend and I were served
hickory milk in rural Georgia by an eccentric backwoods artist named St.
EOM who claimed Creek descent. Despite the unsanitary presentation, the
milk was ambrosial—fragrantly nutty, delightfully heavy on the tongue,
unlike anything I had encountered before.
Within a few centuries, the Indians of the eastern forest reconfigured
much of their landscape from a patchwork game park to a mix of farmland
and orchards. Enough forest was left to allow for hunting, but agriculture
was an increasing presence. The result was a new “balance of nature.”
From today’s perspective, the success of the transition is striking. It was
so sweeping and ubiquitous that early European visitors marveled at the
number of nut and fruit trees and the big clearings with only a dim
apprehension that the two might be due to the same human source. One
reason that Bartram failed to understand the artificiality of what he saw was
that the surgery was almost without scars; the new landscape functioned
smoothly, with few of the overreaches that plagued English land
management. Few of the overreaches, but not none: Cahokia was a glaring
exception.
A friend and I visited Cahokia in 2002. Woods, who lived nearby, kindly
agreed to show us around. The site is now a state park with a small
museum. From Monks Mound we walked halfway across the southern plaza
and then stopped to look back. From the plaza, Woods pointed out, the
priests at the summit could not be seen. “There was smoke and noise and
sacred activity constantly going on up there, but the peasants didn’t know
what they were doing.” Nonetheless, average Cahokians understood the
intent: to assure the city’s continued support by celestial forces. “And that
justification fell apart with the floods,” Woods said.
There is little indication that the Cahokia floods killed anyone, or even
led to widespread hunger. Nonetheless, the string of woes provoked a crisis
of legitimacy. Unable to muster the commanding vitality of their
predecessors, the priestly leadership responded ineffectively, even
counterproductively. Even as the flooding increased, it directed the
construction of a massive, two-mile-long palisade around the central
monuments, complete with bastions, shielded entryways, and (maybe) a
catwalk up top. The wall was built in such a brain-frenzied hurry that it cut
right through some commoners’ houses.
Cahokia being the biggest city around, it seems unlikely that the palisade
was needed to deter enemy attack (in the event, none materialized). Instead
it was probably created to separate elite from hoi polloi, with the goal of
emphasizing the priestly rulers’ separate, superior, socially critical
connection to the divine. At the same time the palisade was also intended to
welcome the citizenry—anyone could freely pass through its dozen or so
wide gates. Constructed at enormous cost, this porous architectural folly
consumed twenty thousand trees.
More consequential, the elite revamped Monks Mound. By extending a
low platform from one side, they created a stage for priests to perform
ceremonies in full view of the public. According to Woods’s acoustic
simulations, every word should have been audible below, lifting the veil of
secrecy. It was the Cahokian equivalent of the Reformation, except that the
Church imposed it on itself. At the same time, the nobles hedged their bets.
Cahokia’s rulers tried to bolster their position by building even bigger
houses and flaunting even more luxury goods like fancy pottery and jewelry
made from exotic semiprecious stones.
It did no good. A catastrophic earthquake razed Cahokia in the beginning
of the thirteenth century, knocking down the entire western side of Monks
Mound. In 1811 and 1812 the largest earthquakes in U.S. history abruptly
lifted or lowered much of the central Mississippi Valley by as much as
twelve feet. The Cahokia earthquake, caused by the same fault, was of
similar magnitude. It must have splintered many of the city’s wood-and-
plaster buildings; fallen torches and scattered cooking fires would have
ignited the debris, burning down most surviving structures. Water from the
rivers, shaken by the quake, would have sloshed onto the land in a mini-
tsunami.
Already reeling from the floods, Cahokia never recovered from the
earthquake. Its rulers rebuilt Monks Mound, but the poorly engineered
patch promptly sagged. Meanwhile the social unrest turned violent; many
houses went up in flames. “There was a civil war,” Woods said. “Fighting in
the streets. The whole polity turned in on itself and tore itself apart.”
For all their energy, Cahokia’s rulers made a terrible mistake: they did not
attempt to fix the problem directly. True, the task would not have been easy.
Trees cannot be replaced with a snap of the fingers. Nor could Cahokia
Creek readily be reinstalled in its original location. “Once the water starts
flowing in the new channel,” Woods said, “it is almost impossible to put it
back in the old as the new channel rapidly downcuts and establishes itself.”
Given Cahokia’s engineering expertise, though, solutions were within
reach: terracing hillsides, diking rivers, even moving Cahokia. Like all too
many dictators, Cahokia’s rulers focused on maintaining their hold over the
people, paying little attention to external reality. By 1350 A.D. the city was
almost empty. Never again would such a large Indian community exist
north of Mexico.
HUNDRED YEARS’ WAR
In the early 1980s I visited Chetumal, a coastal city on the Mexico-Belize
border. A magazine had asked me to cover the intellectual ferment caused
by the decipherment of Maya hieroglyphics. In researching the article, the
photographer Peter Menzel and I became intrigued by the then little-known
site of Calakmul, whose existence had been first reported five decades
before. Although it was the biggest of all Maya ruins, it had never felt an
archaeologist’s trowel. Its temples and villas, enveloped in thick tropical
forest, were as close to a lost city as we would ever be likely to see. Before
visiting Calakmul, though, Peter wanted to photograph it from the air.
Chetumal had the nearest airport, which was why we went there.
ABOVE: As late as the 1980s, the Maya city of Kaan (now
Calakmul) was encased in vegetation (top). Excavations have
now revealed the pyramids beneath the trees (the right-hand
mound in the top photo is the pyramid at bottom), exemplifying
the recent explosion of knowledge about the Maya.
The town was unpromising in those days. We arrived late in the night,
and the only restaurant we could find served a single platter: octopus with
pureed beef liver. I am, as a rule, a member of the Clean Plate Club.
Looking at the rubbery white octopus chunks bobbing in the tarry mass of
liver, I rejected an entire meal for the first time since childhood. Soon
afterward the electricity went out everywhere in town. For that reason we
did not discover until we retired that our hotel beds were full of little hungry
creatures. I was peevish the next morning when we met our pilot.
At first we flew over Highway 186, which arrows west from Chetumal
across the Maya heartland. Every so often the pilot tapped my shoulder and
pointed to an anonymous, tree-covered hummock. “Ruinas,” he said.
Otherwise there was little to report. After a while we turned south, toward
the border with Guatemala. The Yucatán Peninsula grows wetter as one
heads south. The vegetation beneath the plane quickly became thicker,
lusher, higher, more aggressive.
All at once we came upon Calakmul. The city proper, built on a low
ridge, had once housed as many as fifty thousand people and sprawled
across an area as big as twenty-five square miles. (The city-state’s total
population may have been 575,000.) The downtown area alone had six
thousand masonry structures: homes, temples, palaces, and granaries, even
an eighteen-foot-high defensive wall. Scattered through the neighborhoods
was a network of reservoirs, many apparently stocked with fish. Thousands
of acres of farmland extended beyond. Little of this was known then—I am
quoting from later reports—and none of it was visible from the plane. From
our vantage the only visual testament to Calakmul’s past majesty was its
two great central pyramids, each wrapped to the shoulders in vegetation.
Peter asked the pilot to fly low circles around the pyramids while he put
together the perfect match of light, lens, angle, and shutter speed. He
swapped lenses and cameras and window views in a dozen different
combinations. At a certain point, he asked, peering through the shutter,
“¿Cuánta gasolina tenemos?” How much gas do we have?
The pilot squinted at the fuel gauge: three-quarters full. A puzzled look
spread over his face. I leaned over to watch as he tapped the gauge’s foggy
plastic cover with his forefinger. The needle plunged almost to empty—it
had been pinned.
Peter put down his cameras.
Eventually the blood returned to our heads, permitting cerebration. We
had to decide whether to take the shortest path to the airport, straight across
the forest, or turn to the north and then fly east along Highway 186, which
we could try to land on if we ran out of gas. The trade-off was that the
highway route was so much longer that choosing it would greatly increase
our chances of a forced touchdown. Soon we realized the decision boiled
down to one question: How scary was the prospect of landing in the forest?
I recall looking down at the trees. They had engulfed the great buildings
and were slowly ripping apart the soft limestone with their roots. Circling
above the city, I had thought, Nobody will ever find out anything about this
place. The forest is too overpowering. Calakmul’s inhabitants had cut a little
divot into its flanks for their city, but now the vegetation, massive and
indifferent, was smothering every trace of their existence. From the plane
the trees seemed to march to the horizon without interruption.
We flew over the highway. I tried not to stare at the fuel gauge. Still, I
couldn’t help noticing as, one after another, warning lights blinked on. The
plane had so little gas that the engine quit a moment after our wheels hit the
tarmac. When we rolled silently to a stop, the pilot leapt out and kissed the
ground. I sat back and regarded Chetumal with new affection.
In the mid-1990s the Mexican government paved a road to the site, which
is now the center of the 1.7-million-acre Calakmul Biosphere Reserve.
Aerial views of the ruins are now spectacular; archaeologists have cleared
most of the central city. Along the way, contrary to my initial impression,
they have managed to learn a great deal about Calakmul, the landscape it
occupied, and the collapse that led to the forest’s return. To begin with, they
deciphered Calakmul’s proper name: Kaan, the Kingdom of the Snake.
Impressively, they learned it from the best possible source, the ancient
Maya themselves.
Maya scribes wrote in codices made of folded fig-bark paper or deerskin.
Unfortunately for posterity, the Spaniards destroyed all but four of these
books. The rest of what remains are texts on monuments, murals, and
pottery—about fifteen thousand samples of writing, according to one
estimate. Piecing together events from these sources is like trying to
understand the U.S. Civil War from the plaques on park statues: possible,
but tricky. Combining literal interpretation with an understanding of
context, epigraphers (decipherers of ancient writing) have spent the last
thirty years hauling submerged chunks of Maya history to the surface.
David Stuart, a Mayanist at Harvard, decocted the encounter between Chak
Tok Ich’aak and the Teotihuacan expedition in 2000. And Simon Martin and
Nikolai Grube, respectively of University College London and the
University of Bonn, first put the history of the great Mutal-Kaan war
together in 1996.
Most of the stelae at Kaan were made from soft stone that has eroded too
much to be readable. Martin and Grube thus had to rely on inscriptions at
other sites that mention Kaan and its rulers. These are surprisingly
numerous. Too numerous, in a way: archaeologists have turned up at least
eleven versions of Kaan’s early dynastic history painted on big vases.
Exasperatingly, none of the eleven tells exactly the same story. The
chronological list of rulers differs on different lists, some lists do not
include known kings, and some include kings who probably were
mythological—as if a tally of English rulers matter-of-factly included King
Arthur and his father, Uther Pen-dragon. The dates are inconsistent, too.
Kaan’s origins may reach back as far as 400 B.C. But the city-state does not
unambiguously enter the historical record until about 500 A.D., when it had
a king named Yuknoom Ch’een. The city was already dominating its
neighbors; in 546, Yuknoom Ch’een’s apparent successor supervised the
coronation of a five-year-old monarch in nearby Naranjo.
This supervision, recorded on a stela erected seventy years afterward, is
the first known example in Yucatán of a Mesoamerican specialty: the
chaperoned coronation. For much of the last century most Mayanists
believed that at its height—200 to 900 A.D., roughly speaking—the Maya
realm was divided into a hugger-mugger of more or less equivalent city-
states. Critics pointed out that this theory failed to account for an
inconvenient fact: Kaan, Mutal, and a few other cities were much bigger
and more imposing than their neighbors, and therefore, one would usually
assume, more powerful. According to the skeptics, Maya society was
divided into a small number of blocs, each controlled by a dominant city,
each striving to achieve some semblance of empire.
Compelling evidence for this view did not emerge until the mid-1980s,
when several epigraphers figured out that the Maya glyph ahaw, which
means “sovereign” or “lord,” had a possessive form, y-ahaw, “his lord,”
meaning a lord who “belongs” to another lord: that is, a vassal king.
Another glyph, u-kahi, turned out to mean “by the action of.” They were
only two words, but enough to make dozens of texts speak. In the stela, the
five-year-old ahaw in Naranjo was crowned “by the action of” the ahaw of
Kaan. Naranjo’s young king “belonged” to Kaan. (Naranjo is the name
scientists gave to the city; its original name may have been Saal.)
“The political landscape of the Classic Maya resembles many in the Old
World—Classical Greece or Renaissance Italy are worthy comparisons—
where a sophisticated and widely shared culture flourished among perpetual
division and conflict,” Martin and Grube wrote in Chronicles of the Maya
Kings and Queens (2000), their remarkable summary of the epigraphic
discoveries of the last three decades. It was a “world criss-crossed by
numerous patron-client relationships and family ties, in which major centers
vied with one another in enmities that could endure for centuries.” As
Martin put it to me, Maya civilization indeed bore striking similarities to
that of ancient Greece. The Greeks were divided into numerous fractious
communities, some of which were able to dominate others by threats of
force, unequal alliance, or commerce. And just as the conflicted relationship
among Athens and Sparta was a leitmotif of Greek life, so Maya society
resounded for centuries with the echoes of the struggle between Mutal and
Kaan.
Sometime before 561 A.D., a ruler known only as “Sky Witness” took the
throne of Kaan. A major figure despite his obscurity, Sky Witness set out to
destroy Mutal. The motive for his hatred is uncertain, though it may have
been rooted in the invasion from Teotihuacan. The new rulers of Mutal had
aggressively thrown their weight around and by Sky Witness’s time
controlled as much as eight thousand square miles. (Mutal city itself had an
estimated population of sixty thousand, plus many more in its hinterland.)
Particularly important, the Teotihuacan-backed dynasty took over several
outposts on the Usumacinta River system, Yucatán’s most important trade
route. Shipments of luxury goods from faraway regions usually had to
travel up or down the Usumacinta; Mutal’s ability to tax and supervise the
trade must have been terribly vexing, even if it had little practical import.
Sky Witness may have thought that Mutal was becoming a dangerous
neighbor and decided to take preemptive action. Or he may have wanted to
control the Usumacinta and its tributaries himself. A dynastic dispute may
have been involved. Grube told me that he thought the kings of Kaan, never
allied with Teotihuacan, may have wanted to stamp out pernicious foreign
influences—xenophobia is a powerful motive in every culture. No matter
what the motive, Sky Witness’s plan to dismantle Mutal was brilliant—in
the short run, anyway. In the long run, it helped set in motion the Maya
collapse.
Kaan and Mutal had a lot at stake. The Yucatán Peninsula is like a
gigantic limestone wharf projecting into the Caribbean. Roughly speaking,
the northwest-southeast line on which it joins the mainland runs through the
middle of the Maya heartland. Despite receiving three to five feet of
precipitation in an average year, this area is prone to drought. Almost all the
rain falls during the May-to-December rainy season and rapidly sinks
hundreds of feet into the porous limestone, from where it cannot easily be
extracted. Little is available during the five hot, dry months between
January and April. The region does have permanently water-filled swamps,
sinkholes, and lakes, but often these are too salty to drink or use for
irrigation. So toxic is the groundwater, a U.S.-Mexican research team
remarked in 2002, that the Maya realm was “geochemically hostile” to
urban colonization. Its occupation “more resembled settlement on the moon
or Antarctica than most other terrestrial habitats.”
Most of the salt occurred in the sediments on the swamp bottoms. To
make the water potable, the Maya laid a layer of crushed limestone atop the
sediments, effectively paving over the salt. As the researchers noted, the
work had to be done before the Maya could move in and set up their milpas
and gardens. “Permanent, year-round populations could be established only
in the presence of an anticipatory engineering of water supplies.” The Maya
heartland, in other words, was a network of artificially habitable terrestrial
islands.
As Maya numbers grew, so did the islands beneath them. North of Kaan,
half a dozen small cities improved agricultural conditions by lifting up
entire fields and carving out rain-retaining terraces on dry hillsides. Kaan
itself dug out a series of reservoirs, established neighborhoods around each
one, and linked the ensemble with roads and waterways. Central Mutal was
ringed by a chain of seven reservoirs, with another central reservoir
reserved for royalty. And so on.
Revamping the landscape both allowed Maya cities to expand and made
them more vulnerable. Despite constant maintenance, erosion silted up
reservoirs, hurricanes destroyed terraces, and weeds and sediment choked
irrigation networks. Over time the Maya found themselves simultaneously
maintaining existing systems and pushing out to cover past mistakes. If war
damage made it impossible for a city’s inhabitants to keep up, they would
be in trouble; island dwellers who wreck their homes have no place to
move. One can speculate that the losers’ fear of having their backs to the
wall generated the extraordinary tenacity of the Kaan-Mutal conflict.
Sky Witness’s strategy was to ring Mutal with a chain of client states and
allies and then strangle it, boa constrictor–style. In this way Kaan would
both acquire a dominant position in the Maya realm and destroy its enemy.
The first step was to suborn Mutal’s most important vassal, the king of
Oxwitza’ (now known as Caracol). With 115,000 people, Oxwitza’ was
twice as populous as Mutal and controlled almost as much territory. Yet it
had become Mutal’s vassal soon after Teotihuacan installed the new
dynasty. No concrete evidence exists that the first event caused the second,
but the coincidence in timing is hard to dismiss. Sky Witness seems to have
divined or inspired resentment in Oxwitza’. The king of Oxwitza’ took the
throne “by the action of” Mutal in 553 A.D. Within three years Sky Witness
had persuaded the new ruler of Oxwitza’ to betray his masters.
Maya polities were not large enough to maintain standing armies; instead
both Kaan and Oxwitza’ mustered short-term militiamen to fight wars.
Wearing cotton armor and wooden helmets, brandishing lances, hatchets,
and maces, and carrying great painted litters with effigies of their gods, the
two militias marched on Mutal. Kaan is some sixty miles north of Mutal;
Oxwitza’ is fifty miles south of it. The two cities planned to crush Mutal
between them. They carefully chose the day of the attack. Maya priests
tracked the movements of Venus, which they regarded as a powerful
portent. Its day of emergence in the morning sky was considered an
occasion on which warfare and violence was likely to be rewarded—an
optimal day to attack a city. On April 29, 562, in what archaeologists call a
Star Wars assault, the two celestially guided armies overran Mutal, sacked
its precincts, and probably killed its king (the relevant glyphs are too worn
to read).
THE HUNDRED YEARS’ WAR
Kaan and Mutal Battle to Control the Maya Heartland, 526–682 A.D.
The war between Kaan and Mutal lasted more than a century and
consumed much of the Maya heartland. Kaan’s strategy was to
surround Mutal and its subordinate city-states with a ring of
enemies. By conquest, negotiation, and marriage alliance, Kaan
succeeded in encircling its enemy—but not in winning the war.
Kaan did not directly occupy Mutal; victorious Maya cities rarely had the
manpower to rule their rivals directly. Instead, in the by-now familiar
hegemonic pattern, they tried to force the rulers of the vanquished state to
become their vassals. If an enemy sovereign was slain, as apparently
happened in Mutal, the conquerors often didn’t emplace a new one; kings
were divine, and thus by definition irreplaceable. Instead the victorious
force simply quit the scene, hoping that any remaining problems would
disappear in the ensuing chaos. This strategy was partly successful in Mutal
—not a single dated monument was erected in the city for a century.
Because the city’s postattack rulers had (at best) distant connections to the
slain legitimate king, they struggled for decades to get on their feet.
Unhappily for Kaan, they eventually did it.
The agent for Mutal’s return was its king, Nuun Ujol Chaak. Taking the
helm of the city in 620 A.D., he was as determined to reestablish his city’s
former glory as Kaan’s rulers were to prevent it. He suborned Kaan’s
eastern neighbor, Naranjo, which attacked Mutal’s former ally, Oxwitza’.
The ensuing conflict spiraled out to involve the entire center of the Maya
realm. Decades of conflict, including a long civil war in Mutal, led to the
formation of two large blocs, one dominated by Mutal, the other by Kaan.
As cities within the blocs traded attacks with each other, half a dozen cities
ended up in ruins, including Naranjo, Oxwitza’, Mutal, and Kaan. The story
was not revealed in full until 2001, when a storm uprooted a tree in the ruin
of Dos Pilas, a Mutal outpost. In the hole from its root ball archaeologists
discovered a set of steps carved with the biography of B’alaj Chan K’awiil,
a younger brother or half brother to Mutal’s dynasty-restoring king, Nuun
Ujol Chaak. As deciphered by the epigrapher Stanley Guenter, the staircase
and associated monuments reveal the turbulent life of a great scalawag who
spent his life alternately running from the armies of Kaan and Mutal and
trying to set them against each other.
Eventually an army under Nuun Ujol Chaak met the forces of Kaan on
April 30, 679. Maya battles rarely involved massive direct engagements.
This was an exception. In an unusual excursion into the high-flown, the
inscriptions on the stairway apostrophized the gore: “the blood was pooled
and the skulls of the Mutal people were piled into mountains.” B’alaj Chan
K’awiil was carried into battle in the guise of the god Ik’ Sip, a deity with a
black-painted face. In this way he acquired its supernatural power. The
technique worked, according to the stairway: “B’alaj Chan K’awiil brought
down the spears and shields of Nuun Ujol Chaak.” Having killed his
brother, the vindicated B’alaj Chan K’awiil took the throne of Mutal.
In a celebration, B’alaj Chan K’awiil joined the rulers of Kaan in a
joyous ceremonial dance on May 10, 682. But even as he danced with his
master, a counterrevolutionary coup in Mutal placed Nuun Ujol Chaak’s son
onto the throne, from where he quickly became a problem. On August 5,
695, Kaan soldiers once again went into battle against Mutal. Bright with
banners, obsidian blades gleaming in the sun, the army advanced on the
long-term enemy it had routed so many times before—and was utterly
defeated. In a psychological blow, Mutal captured the effigy of a Kaan
patron deity—an enormous supernatural jaguar—that its army carried into
battle. A month later, in a mocking ceremonial pageant, the king of Mutal
paraded around with the effigy strapped to the back of his palanquin.
Maya “books” consisted of painted bark folded accordion-style
into sheaves known as codexes. Time and the Spanish destroyed
all but four codexes, and even those are fragmentary (above, a
detail from the Paris codex, somewhat reconstructed; right, a
piece of the Grolier codex).
Kaan’s loss marks the onset of the Maya collapse. Kaan never recovered
from its defeat; Mutal lasted another century before it, too, sank into
oblivion. Between 800 and 830 A.D., most of the main dynasties fell; cities
winked out throughout the Maya heartland. Mutal’s last carved inscription
dates to 869; soon after, its great public spaces were filled with squatters. In
the next hundred years, the population of most southern areas declined by at
least three-quarters.
The disaster was as much cultural as demographic; the Maya continued
to exist by the million, but their central cities did not. Morley, the Harvard
archaeologist, documented the cultural disintegration when he discovered
that Maya inscriptions with Long Count dates rise steadily in number from
the first known example, at Mutal in 292 A.D.; peak in about 790; and cease
altogether in 909. The decline tracks the Maya priesthood’s steady loss of
the scientific expertise necessary to maintain its complex calendars.
The fall has been laid at the door of overpopulation, overuse of natural
resources, and drought. It is true that the Maya were numerous;
archaeologists agree that more people lived in the heartland in 800 A.D.
than today. And the Maya indeed had stretched the meager productive
capacity of their homeland. The evidence for drought is compelling, too.
Four independent lines of evidence—ethnohistoric data; correlations
between Yucatán rainfall and measured temperatures in western Europe;
measurements of oxygen variants in lake sediments associated with
drought; and studies of titanium levels in the Caribbean floor, which are
linked to rainfall—indicate that the Maya heartland was hit by a severe
drought at about the time of its collapse. Water levels receded so deeply, the
archaeologist Richardson Gill argued in 2000, that “starvation and thirst”
killed millions of Maya. “There was nothing they could do. There was
nowhere they could go. Their whole world, as they knew it, was in the
throes of a burning, searing, brutal drought…. There was nothing to eat.
Their water reservoirs were depleted, and there was nothing to drink.”
The image is searing: a profligate human swarm unable to overcome the
anger of Nature. Yet Gill’s critics dismissed it. Turner, the Clark geographer,
was skeptical about the evidence for the killer drought. But even if it
happened, he told me, “The entire Maya florescence took place during a
prolonged dry period.” Because they had spent centuries managing scarce
water supplies, he thought it unlikely that they would have fallen quick
victim to drought.
Moreover, the collapse did not occur in the pattern one would expect if
drought were the cause: in general, the wetter southern cities fell first and
hardest. Meanwhile, northern cities like Chichén Itzá, Uxmal, and Coba not
only survived the dearth of rain, they prospered. In the north, in fact, the
areas with the poorest natural endowments and the greatest susceptibility to
drought were the most populous and successful. “How and why, then,”
asked Bruce H. Dahlin, an archaeologist at Howard University, “did the
onset of prolonged drought conditions simultaneously produce a disaster in
the southern and central lowlands—where one would least expect it—and
continued growth and development in the north, again where one would
least expect it?”
Dahlin argued in 2002 that Chichén Itzá had adapted to the drought by
instituting “sweeping economic, military, political, and religious changes.”
Previous Maya states had been run by all-powerful monarchs who
embodied the religion and monopolized trade. Almost all public
announcements and ceremonies centered on the figure of the paramount
ruler; in the stelae that recount royal deeds, the only other characters are,
almost always, the king’s family, other kings, and supernatural figures.
Beginning in the late ninth or early tenth century A.D., public monuments
in Chichén Itzá deemphasized the king, changing from official narratives of
regal actions to generalized, nontextual images of religion, commerce, and
war.
In the new regime, economic power passed to a new class of people:
merchants who exchanged salt, chocolate, and cotton from Chichén Itzá for
a host of goods from elsewhere in Mesoamerica. In previous centuries trade
focused on symbolic goods that directly engaged the king, such as jewelry
for the royal family. During the drought, something like markets emerged.
Dahlins calculated that the evaporation pans outside a coastal satellite of
Chichén Itzá would have produced at least three thousand tons of salt for
export every year; in return, the Maya acquired tons of obsidian for blades,
semiprecious stones for jewelry, volcanic ash for tempering pottery, and,
most important, maize. Like Japan, which exports consumer electronics and
imports beef from the United States and wheat from Australia, Chichén Itzá
apparently traded its way through the drought.
The contrast between north and south is striking—and instructive. The
obvious difference between them was the century and a half of large-scale
warfare in the south. Both portions of the Maya realm depended on artificial
landscapes that required constant attention. But only in the south did the
Maya elite, entranced by visions of its own glory, take its hands off the
switch. Drought indeed stressed the system, but the societal disintegration
in the south was due not to surpassing inherent ecological limits but the
political failure to find solutions. In our day the Soviet Union disintegrated
after drought caused a series of bad harvests in the 1970s and 1980s, but
nobody argues that climate ended Communist rule. Similarly, one should
grant the Maya the dignity of assigning them responsibility for their failures
as well as their successes.
Cahokia and the Maya, fire and maize: all exemplify the new view of
indigenous impacts on the environment. When scholars first increased their
estimates of Indians’ ecological management they met with considerable
resistance, especially from ecologists and environmentalists. The
disagreement, which has ramifying political implications, is encapsulated
by Amazonia, the subject to which I will now turn. In recent years a
growing number of researchers has argued that Indian societies there had
enormous environmental impacts. Like the landscapes of Cahokia and the
Maya heartland, some anthropologists say, the great Amazon forest is also a
cultural artifact—that is, an artificial object.
Amazonia
WHAT ORELLANA SAW
The biggest difficulty in reconstructing the pre-Colombian past is the
absence of voices from that past. Mesoamerican peoples left behind texts
that are slowly giving up their secrets, but in other areas the lack of written
languages has left a great silence. 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.
The Bible has much to teach, yet professors must use it judiciously,
supplementing it with other sources, when they teach ancient Middle
Eastern history. In the same way, preserved Indian lore throws a brilliantly
colored but indirect light on the past. To understand long-ago Indian lives,
one cannot avoid the accounts of the first literate people who saw them:
European swashbucklers, fortune hunters, and missionaries.
As historical sources, colonial reports leave much to be desired. Their
authors often were adversaries of the Indians they wrote about, usually did
not speak the necessary languages, and almost always had an agenda other
than empathetic description of indigenous folkways. Some wrote to further
their careers; others, to score political points. Nevertheless these chronicles
cannot be dismissed out of hand for these reasons. Used carefully, they can
corroborate, even illuminate.
Consider Gaspar de Carvajal, author of the first written description of the
Amazon, an account reviled for its inaccuracies and self-serving
descriptions almost since the day it was released. Born in about 1500 in the
Spanish town of Extremadura, Carvajal joined the Dominican order and
went to South America to convert the Inka. He arrived in 1536, four years
after Atawallpa’s fall. Francisco Pizarro, now governor of Peru, was
learning that to avoid outbreaks of feckless violence he needed to keep his
men occupied at all times. One of the worst troublemakers was his own half
brother, Gonzalo Pizarro. At the time, conquistador society was abuzz with
stories of El Dorado, a native king said to possess so much gold that in an
annual ritual he painted his body with gold dust and then rinsed off the
brilliant coating in a special lake. After centuries of these baths, gold dust
carpeted the lake floor. A lake of gold! To twenty-first-century ears the story
sounds preposterous, but it did not to Gonzalo Pizarro, who had already
helped seize an empire laden with jewels and precious metals. When he
decided to search for El Dorado, Francisco encouraged him—he practically
shoved Gonzalo out the door. In 1541 Gonzalo left the high Andean city of
Quito at the head of an expedition of 200 to 280 Spanish soldiers (accounts
differ), 2,000 pigs, and 4,000 highland Indians, the latter slaves in all but
name. Accompanying the troops as chaplain was Gaspar de Carvajal.
Gonzalo’s quest descended rapidly from the quixotic to the calamitous.
Having no idea where to find El Dorado, he blundered randomly for months
about the eastern foothills of the Andes, then as now a country of deep
forest. Because the mountains catch all the moisture from the Amazon
winds, the terrain is as wet as it is steep. It is also pullulatingly alive:
howling with insects, hot and humid as demon’s breath, perpetually shaded
by mats of lianas and branches. Within weeks most of the horses died, their
hooves rotting in the mire. So did most of the Indian laborers, felled by
being worked to exhaustion in a hot, humid land twelve thousand feet
below their cool mountain home. Having lost their beasts of burden, animal
and human, the conquistadors painfully cobbled together a crude boat and
floated their guns and heavy equipment down the Napo River, an upper
tributary of the Amazon. Meanwhile, the soldiers slogged along the banks, a
parallel but more laborious course.
The forest grew yet thicker, the countryside less inhabited. Soon they
were utterly alone. “Not a bark dimpled the waters,” William H. Prescott
wrote in his History of the Conquest of Peru. “No living thing was to be
seen but the wild tenants of the wilderness, the unwieldy boa, and the
loathsome alligator basking on the borders of the stream.” With no Indian
villages to rob for supplies, the expedition ran short of food. The forest
around them had plenty of food, but the Spaniards didn’t know which plants
were edible. Instead they ate all the surviving pigs, then the dogs, and then
turned to spearing lizards. More and more men were sick. Having
previously heard vague tales of a wealthy country further down the Napo,
Francisco de Orellana, Gonzalo Pizarro’s second-in-command and cousin,
suggested that he split off part of the expedition to see if he could obtain
supplies. Pizarro agreed, and Orellana set off in the expedition’s prized boat
on December 26, 1541, with a crew of fifty-nine, Carvajal among them.
Nine days and six hundred miles down the Napo, Orellana found villages
with food—a society he called Omagua. His men gorged themselves and
then considered their options. They did not relish the prospect of ferrying
supplies back up the river to Gonzalo Pizarro and the rest of the expedition;
rowing against the current would be difficult, and, as they knew all too well,
there was nothing to eat along the way. Orellana decided instead to leave
the starving Gonzalo to his fate and take the boat to the mouth of the river,
which he correctly believed emptied into the Atlantic (incorrectly, he
believed that the river was not too long).
Knowing that Gonzalo, in the unlikely event that he survived, would
regard Orellana’s actions as treasonous, Carvajal took upon himself the task
of creating a justificatory paper trail: an account “proving” that the choice to
abandon Gonzalo had been forced on them. To satisfy Spanish legal
requirements, Orellana made a show of resigning his temporary command
rather than leave Gonzalo. The crewmen, Carvajal claimed, then swore “by
God…by the sign of the Cross, [and] by the four sacred Gospels” that they
wanted Orellana to return as leader. Bowing to pressure, Orellana accepted
the post. Then they built a second vessel and set off downstream.
Their worries about Gonzalo’s reaction were well-founded. Half a year
after Orellana’s departure, the surviving members of his expedition
staggered in rags into Quito. Gonzalo was among them. He wasted no time
in demanding Orellana’s arrest and execution. In taking the boat, most of
the canoes, and some of the weapons from his famished troops, Orellana
had displayed, Gonzalo said, “the greatest cruelty that ever faithless men
have shown.”
Meanwhile, Orellana and his men had spent five months floating down
the Amazon, Carvajal recording every moment. It is inconceivable that their
surroundings did not induce awe. Vastly bigger than any river in Europe or
Asia, the Amazon contains a fifth of the earth’s above-ground fresh water. It
has islands the size of countries and masses of floating vegetation the size
of islands. Half a dozen of its tributaries would be world-famous rivers
anywhere else. A thousand miles up from the Atlantic, the river is still so
broad that at high water the other side is only a faint dark line on the
horizon. Ferries take half an hour to make the crossing. Seagoing vessels
travel all the way up to Iquitos, Peru, 2,300 miles from the river’s mouth,
the furthest inland deep-ocean port in the world.
The conventional view of Amazonia: endless untouched forest.
The forest indeed exists, but humankind has long been one of its
essential components.
The prospect of a mutiny trial constantly in mind, Carvajal wrote
relatively little about his extraordinary surroundings. Instead he focused on
creating a case for the value and necessity of Orellana’s journey. To the
contemporary eye, he didn’t have much to work with. His case had three
main elements: (1) the forcing of Orellana’s hand (see above); (2) the
crew’s devotion to the Holy Virgin; and (3) the degree to which they
suffered en route. In truth, the last does not seem feigned. In Carvajal’s
account, pain and sickness alternate with starvation. “We were eating
leather from the seats and bows of saddles,” runs one all-too-typical
reminiscence. “Not to mention the soles and even whole shoes [with] no
sauce other than hunger itself.”
Encounters with the river’s inhabitants were frequent and often hostile.
Passing the native domains strung along the river was like passing a line of
angry hives. Forewarned of the visitors’ arrival by drum and messenger,
Indians awaited them behind trees and in concealed canoes, shot fusillades
of poisoned arrows, then withdrew. A few miles downriver would be the
next group of Indians, and the next attack. Except when demanding food,
the expedition navigated as far as possible from every village. Nonetheless
three Spaniards died in battle. An arrow hit Carvajal in the face, blinding
him in one eye.
Carvajal wrote little about the peoples who spent so much time trying to
kill him. But the small amount he did write depicts a crowded and
prosperous land. Approaching what is now the Peru-Brazil border, he noted
that “the farther we went the more thickly populated and the better did we
find the land.” One 180-mile stretch was “all inhabited, for there was not
from village to village a crossbow shot.” The next Indians down the river
had “numerous and very large settlements and very pretty country and very
fruitful land.” And just beyond them were villages crowded cheek by jowl
—“there was one day when we passed more than twenty.” In another place
Carvajal saw a settlement “that stretched for five leagues without there
intervening any space from house to house.”
Near the mouth of the Tapajós, about four hundred miles from the sea,
Orellana’s ragtag force came across the biggest Indian settlement yet—its
homes and gardens lined the riverbank for more than a hundred miles.
“Inland from the river, at a distance of one or two leagues…there could be
seen some very large cities.” A floating reception force of more than four
thousand Indians—two hundred war canoes, each carrying twenty or thirty
people—greeted the Spanish. Hundreds or thousands more stood atop the
bluffs on the south bank, waving palm leaves in synchrony to create a kind
of football wave that Carvajal clearly found peculiar and unnerving. His
attention riveted to the scene, he for once noted some details. Approaching
in their great canoes, the Indian soldiers wore brilliant feather cloaks.
Behind the canoe armada was a floating orchestra of horns, pipes, and
rebecs like three-stringed lutes. When the music played, the Indians
attacked. Only the tremendous surprise created by the Spaniards’ firearms
provided the opportunity to escape.
Orellana died in 1546 on a second, failed voyage to the Amazon. Carvajal
went on to achieve modest renown as a priest in Lima, dying peacefully at
the age of eighty. Neither Orellana’s journey nor Carvajal’s account of it
received the attention they merited; indeed, Carvajal’s work was not
formally published until 1894. Part of the reason for the lack of attention is
that Orellana didn’t conquer anything—he simply managed to emerge with
his life. But another part is that few people believed Carvajal’s description
of the Amazon.
The main cause for skepticism was his notorious claim that halfway
down the river the Spaniards were attacked by tall, topless women who
fought without quarter and lived without men. When these “Amazons”
wanted to reproduce, Carvajal explained, they captured males. After the
women’s “caprice [had] been suited,” they returned the spent abductees to
their homes. Any bravo who saw the prospect of some caprice-suiting as
inviting enough to visit the Amazons himself, Carvajal solemnly warned,
“would go a boy and return an old man.” This absurd story was viewed as
proof of Carvajal’s untrustworthiness and Orellana’s faithlessness.
“Mentirosa [full of lies],” historian Francisco López de Gómara scoffed
soon after Carvajal finished his manuscript.
Physical scientists were especially unwilling to accept his depiction of
the Amazon. To ecologists, the great tropical forest in South America was
and is the planet’s greatest wilderness, primeval and ancient, an Edenic
zone touched by humankind lightly if at all. Constrained by its punishing
climate, poor soil, and lack of protein, these scientists argue, large-scale
societies have never existed—can never exist—in the river basin. Amazonia
thus could not have been the jostling, crowded place described by Carvajal.
As anthropologists have learned more about the vagaries of fieldwork,
they have treated Carvajal more kindly. “He may not have been making up
the Amazons out of whole cloth,” William Balée, the Tulane anthropologist,
told me. “It is possible that he saw female warriors, or warriors whom he
believed were female. If he asked Indians about them, he could have
misunderstood their answers. Or he could have understood them correctly,
but not understood that his informants were pulling his leg. We now
understand that ethnography is complex, and it’s easy to go wrong.” In
recent years, these blanket dismissals have been challenged.
More important, anthropologists, archaeologists, geographers, and
historians who were reassessing the environmental impact of indigenous
cultures in North and Central America inevitably turned to the tropical
forest. And in growing numbers researchers came to believe that the
Amazon basin, too, bears the fingerprints of its original inhabitants. Far
from being the timeless, million-year-old wilderness portrayed on
calendars, these scientists say, today’s forest is the product of a historical
interaction between the environment and human beings—human beings in
the form of the populous, long-lasting Indian societies described by
Carvajal.
Such claims raise the hackles of many conservationists and ecologists.
Amazonia, activists warn, is sliding toward catastrophe so rapidly that
saving it must become a global priority. With bulldozers poised to destroy
one of the planet’s last great wild places, environmentalists say, claiming
that the basin comfortably housed large numbers of people for millennia is
so irresponsible as to be almost immoral—it is tantamount to giving
developers a green light.
The Amazon is not wild, archaeologists and anthropologists retort. And
claiming that it is will, in its ignorance, worsen the ecological ailments that
activists would like to cure. Like their confreres elsewhere in the Americas,
Indian societies had built up a remarkable body of knowledge about how to
manage and improve their environment. By denying the very possibility of
such practices, these researchers say, environmentalists may hasten, rather
than halt, the demise of the forest.
GREEN PRISON
The nineteenth-century naturalist Thomas Belt may have said it best. In
what Darwin called “the best of all natural history journals,” Belt set down
what has become the classic image of the tropical forest: a gigantic, teeming
expanse, wildly diverse biologically but otherwise undifferentiated. “A
ceaseless round of ever-active life weaves the forest scenery of the tropics
into one monotonous whole,” as he put it. And since Belt’s day, terms like
“Amazonia” and “Amazon basin” are often used as if they referred to a
single, homogeneous entity.
AMAZON BASIN
This practice irritates professional geographers no end. Strictly speaking,
“Amazon basin” refers to the drainage of the Amazon and its tributaries.
“Amazonia,” by contrast, refers to the bigger region bounded by the Andes
to the west, the Guiana Shield to the north, and the Brazilian Shield to the
south. And neither is coterminous with the “Amazonian rainforest.” To
begin with, not all of the “Amazonian rainforest” is rainy—parts of it
receive little more precipitation per year than New York City. On top of
that, about a third of Amazonia is not forest but savanna—the Beni, in
Bolivia, is the biggest chunk. The river’s floodplain and that of its
tributaries take up another 5 to 10 percent of the basin. Only about half of
Amazonia is upland forest—vines overhead in a tangle like sailing ships
rigged by drunks; tree branches in multiple layers; beetles the size of
butterflies and butterflies the size of birds—the ecosystem that people
outside the region usually mean when they say “Amazon.”
To biologists, the apparent fertility of the upland forest is a sham. This
thesis was laid out clearly in Paul Richards’s classic 1952 study, The
Tropical Rain Forest. To be sure, Richards said, the Amazon forest is
uniquely diverse and beautiful. But its exuberant canopy is a mask covering
an impoverished base. The base is the region’s poor soil. No matter what its
original condition, the intense rain and heat of the forest have eroded its
surface, washed out all its minerals, and decomposed vital organic
compounds. As a result, much of the red Amazonian soil is weathered,
harshly acid, and almost bereft of essential nutrients—one reason ecologists
refer to the tropical forest as a “wet desert.”
Correspondingly, most nutrients in tropical forests are stored not in the
soil, as in temperate regions, but in the vegetation that covers it. When
leaves or branches fall, the carbon and nitrogen in the debris are rapidly
reabsorbed by the hyperefficient root systems of tropical plants. If loggers
or farmers clear away the vegetation, they also remove the local supply of
nutrients. Normally the forest quickly fills in bare spots, such as those
created when big trees fall, and damage is kept to a minimum. But if the
opening is too large or the ground is kept clear too long, the sun and rain
decompose whatever organic matter remains and bake the surface into
something resembling brick in both color and impermeability. In short
order, the land becomes almost incapable of sustaining life. Thus the
tropical forest, despite its fabulous vitality, exists on a knife edge.
These views were picked up and amplified in Amazonia: Man and
Culture in a Counterfeit Paradise, by Betty J. Meggers, the Smithsonian
archaeologist. Published in 1971, it may be the most influential book ever
written about the Amazon. Agriculture, Meggers pointed out, depends on
extracting the wealth of the soil. With little soil wealth to extract, she said,
Amazonian farmers face inherent ecological limitations. The only form of
agriculture they can practice for a long time is “slash-and-burn,” or
“swidden,” as it is sometimes known. Farmers clear small fields with axes
and machetes, burn off the chaff and refuse, and plant their seeds. The ash
gives the soil a quick shot of nutrients, giving the crop a chance. As the
crops grow, the jungle rapidly returns—weeds first, then fast-growing
tropical trees. In the few years before forest recovers the plot, farmers can
eke something out of the land.
Slash-and-burn, Meggers told me, is “a superb response to ecological
limits.” Farmers grab a few harvests, but the soil is not bared to rain and sun
long enough to incur permanent damage. Switching from field to field to
field, swidden farmers live in the forest without destroying the ecosystems
they depend on: a supple, balanced harmony. This ancient lifeway survives
today, according to this theory, in the ring-shaped compounds of the
Yanomamo. (Most of the Yanomamo actually live around South America’s
other huge river system, the Orinoco, but they are seen as emblematic of
Amazonia as well.) Gliding nearly nude beneath the trees, cultivating their
temporary gardens, the Yanomamo are often said to be windows into the
past, living much the same lives as their great-great-great-grandparents.
Their long-term existence has not damaged the forest, Meggers told me, a
testament to slash-and-burn’s power to keep human groups sustainably
within the rigid ecological limits of the tropics.
A second reason that slash-and-burn is required, Meggers told me, is the
region’s propensity for suffering “mega-Niño events”—superstrong El Niño
climate swings that occur every three hundred to five hundred years. In the
archaeological record, she said, “We’re able to pick up severe droughts
related to these mega-Niño events. What these did was reduce the food
supply. The 1998 El Niño was a small example—they saw droughts, forest
fires, and reduction of resources from when trees don’t flower.” Forest fires
in the northern state of Roraima that year claimed such a huge area that
Brazil requested aid from the United Nations. In the past, Meggers said,
“the well-established groups that were sitting in one territory for several
hundred years couldn’t survive [the droughts], so they broke up. We see this
repeated at least four times in the last two millennia.” In other words, any
Indians who tried to go beyond slash-and-burn to permanent cultivation
would be knocked back to slash-and-burn by a mega-Niño. Slash-and-burn,
she said, “avoids the risks, including the risk of growth—it’s the smart thing
to do.”
Ethnographic celebrities, the Yanomamo are often portrayed as
windows into the past, inhabitants of a forest wilderness they
have inhabited, almost unchanged, for millennia. Recent studies
have cast doubt on this picture. Indeed, the Yanomamo are
relative newcomers to their homeland, many of them moving
there only in the seventeenth century as they fled European
diseases and cruelty further south. Some scholars believe their
societies were originally so much larger and more materially
complex that what is often pictured as an almost idyllic, “natural”
existence is in fact a life in poor exile.
Swidden, Meggers admitted, has a major drawback: it cannot yield
enough to support a complex society. More intensive farming might
produce the requisite surplus, but cannot be sustained; the plowed land,
exposed to the elements, is destroyed in as little as a decade. Even with
slash-and-burn, ecologists say, the forest can take as much as a hundred
years to return completely to its previous state. European-style agriculture
would not only fall victim to mega-Niños, it would permanently ruin the
forest soils.
Carvajal therefore misunderstood what he saw, Meggers told me. Or else
he had simply made up everything, and not just the Amazons. Caught in a
lush, green trap, Indian villages could not possibly have grown as large as
he reported—indeed, Meggers once proposed an upper limit of a thousand
on their population. And the villages could not have been the sophisticated
places he described, with their chiefly rulers, social classes, and specialized
laborers (those military musicians on the Tapajós, for example). That was
why archaeologists and anthropologists had come across the ruins of
complex societies throughout Mesoamerica and the Andes, but saw only
hunter-gatherers and slash-and-burners in Amazonia.
“The basic thing about the Amazon is that these people had a long-term
period to learn about and experience and benefit from their knowledge of
the environment,” Meggers said. “Any group that over-exploited their
environment was going to be dead. The ones that survived, the knowledge
got built into their ideology and behavior with taboos and other kinds of
things.” Having reached the optimal cultural level for their environment,
she explained, Amazon Indian lives changed little, if at all, for at least two
thousand years.
As proof, Meggers pointed to Marajó, an island more than twice the size
of New Jersey that sits like a gigantic stopper in the mouth of the Amazon.
The island, low and often swampy, is created by the collision of the
Amazon with the sea, which forces the river to disgorge dissolved
sediments. Much of the island is submerged during the rainy season, and
even in the dry summer pieces of the mazy shoreline are constantly calving
off like icebergs and falling into the water. Yet despite the unpromising
setting, the Marajóara created a sophisticated society there from about 800
to 1400 A.D.
The island’s pottery, some of it very large, has long been celebrated for
its painted and incised representations of animals and plants, which are
ornately entangled in a profusion that recalls the forest itself. The skillful
pottery indicated that Marajó was a large-scale society—the only one then
known in all of Amazonia. In the late 1940s Meggers and her husband,
archaeologist Clifford J. Evans, decided to learn more.
The decision was ambitious. 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. (Because the nearest deposits of metal ore were in the Andes,
thousands of miles upstream, Amazonian peoples had no metal.)
At Marajó, Meggers and Evans soon noticed an oddity: the earliest traces
of Marajóara culture were the most elaborate. As the centuries advanced,
the quality of the ceramics inexorably declined. The designs became cruder,
the repertoire of themes reduced, the technical skill diminished. At the
beginning, some grave sites were more elaborate than others, a testament to
social stratification. Later on, all the dead were treated in the same mundane
way. Early in their history, the Marajóara must have sneered at the lowly
cultures on their borders. But as the forest, in a process out of Heart of
Darkness, stripped away the layers of civilization, they became
indistinguishable from their neighbors. A hundred years before Columbus,
Meggers told me, they were blasted by a mega-Niño and then overrun by
one of their erstwhile inferiors. The history of Marajó was all fall and no
rise.
Betty Meggers
In a boldly written article in American Anthropologist in 1954, Meggers
proclaimed the implications:
There is a force at work to which man through his culture must bow.
This determinant operates uniformly regardless of time, place (within
the forest), psychology or race. Its leveling effect appears to be
inescapable. Even modern efforts to implant civilization in the South
American tropical forest have met with defeat, or survive only with
constant assistance from the outside. In short, the environmental
potential of the tropical forest is sufficient to allow the evolution of
culture to proceed only to the level represented by [slash-and-burn
farmers]; further indigenous evolution is impossible, and any more
highly evolved culture attempting to settle and maintain itself in the
tropical forest environment will inevitably decline to the [slash-and-
burn] level.
The impossibility of passing beyond slash-and-burn, Meggers said, was a
consequence of a more general “law of environmental limitation of
culture.” And she stated the law, italicizing its importance: “The level to
which a culture can develop is dependent upon the agricultural potentiality
of the environment it occupies.”
How did Marajó escape, even temporarily, the iron grasp of its
environment? And why was there no sign of its initial climb past ecological
limits, only of its subsequent collapse before them? Meggers and Evans
provided the answers three years later in an influential monograph. Marajó,
they said, was not actually an Amazonian society. In fact, it was a failed
cutting from a more sophisticated culture in the Andes, a cousin of Wari or
Tiwanaku. Stranded in the wet desert of the Amazon, the culture struggled
to gain its footing, tottered a few steps, and died.
Counterfeit Paradise was the product of more than twenty years of
research. But that was not the sole reason for the book’s influence.
Meggers’s message of limitation, published within a year of the first Earth
Day, resonated in the ears of readers newly converted to the ecological
movement. Since then countless campaigns to save the rainforest have
driven home its lesson: development in tropical forests destroys both forests
and their developers. Promulgated in ecology textbooks, Meggers’s
argument became a wellspring of the campaign to save rainforests, one of
the few times in recent history that humankind has actually tried to profit
from the lessons of the past.
Yet even as the themes of Counterfeit Paradise spread to the worlds of
natural science and political activism, Meggers’s ideas exerted ever-
diminishing influence in archaeology itself. From her distinguished post at
the Smithsonian, she battled on behalf of the law of environmental
limitation. But 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.
PAINTED ROCK CAVE
“Rather than admiration or enthusiasm,” the great Brazilian writer Euclides
da Cunha wrote at the end of the nineteenth century, “the feeling that
overtakes one when first encountering the Amazon is foremost one of
disappointment.” Like today’s ecotourism brochures, the accounts of the
great river basin in da Cunha’s time celebrated its immensity but rarely
dwelled on its extreme flatness—in the Amazon’s first 2,900 miles the
vertical drop is only 500 feet. “It is as though the place lacks vertical lines,”
da Cunha complained. “In a few hours the observer gives in to the fatigue
of the unnatural monotony.” Every year the river floods—not a disaster, but
a season. A channel that is one mile wide in the dry season can become
thirty miles wide in the wet. After five months the water recedes, leaving
behind a layer of rich sediment. From the air, the river seems to ooze like
dirty metal through a wash of green utterly devoid of the romantic crags,
arroyos, and heights that signify wildness and natural spectacle to most
people of European descent.
The area around the lower-Amazon city of Santarém is an exception.
West of town, the Tapajós pours into the Amazon from the south, creating
an inland bay that at high water is fifteen miles wide and a hundred miles
long. The flood rises high enough to cover low river islands in knee-deep
water, leaving their trees to stand out like miracles in mid-channel. Fishers
from town ride their bicycles into little boats, parking the bikes while
working by hanging them in the offshore trees. The bay is lined with bluffs
high enough to cast long shadows. Almost five hundred years ago, Indians
lined the edge of the rise, taunting Orellana by waving palm fronds.
On the opposite, northern side of the river are a series of sandstone ridges
that reach down from the Guiana Shield in the north, halting close to the
water’s edge. Five hundred feet high and more, they rise above the canopy
like old tombstones. Many of the caves in the buttes are splattered with
ancient pictographs—rock paintings of hands, stars, frogs, and human
figures, all reminiscent of Joan Miró, in overlapping red and yellow and
brown. In the 1990s one of these caves, Caverna da Pedra Pintada—Painted
Rock Cave—drew considerable attention in archaeological circles.
Wide and shallow and well lighted, Painted Rock Cave is less thronged
with bats than some of the other caves. The arched entrance is twenty feet
high and electric with gaudy imagery. Out front is a sunny natural patio,
suitable for picnicking, that is edged by a few big rocks. During my visit I
ate a sandwich atop a particularly inviting stone and looked through a stand
of peach palms over the treetops to the water seven miles away. The people
who created the petroglyphs, I thought, must have done about the same
thing.
Painted Rock Cave has attracted scientists since the mid-nineteenth
century, when Alfred Russel Wallace visited it. Wallace, a naturalist, was
more interested in the palm trees outside the caves than the people who had
lived inside them. The latter were left to an archaeologist, Anna C.
Roosevelt, then at the Field Museum. To her exasperation, press accounts of
Roosevelt’s work often stress her descent from Theodore Roosevelt (she is
his great-granddaughter), as if her lineage were more noteworthy than her
accomplishments. In truth, though, she has demonstrated something of her
ancestor’s flare for drama and controversy.
Roosevelt first came to public attention when she reexcavated Marajó in
the 1980s. By using a battery of new remote-sensing techniques—including
total-station topographic mapping, ground-penetrating radar, and scanning
for slight variations in magnetic field strength, electrical conductivity, and
electrical resistance—she was able to build up a picture of Marajó far more
detailed than Meggers and Evans could have in the 1940s and 1950s, when
they worked there. Detailed—and different.
Published in 1991, Roosevelt’s initial report on Marajó was like the
antimatter version of Counterfeit Paradise. A few scientists had challenged
Meggers’s ideas; Roosevelt excoriated them from top to bottom. Far from
being a failed offshoot of another, higher culture, she concluded, Marajó
was “one of the outstanding indigenous cultural achievements of the New
World,” a powerhouse that lasted for more than a thousand years, had
“possibly well over 100,000” inhabitants, and covered thousands of square
miles. Rather than damaging the forest, Marajó’s “large population, highly
intensive subsistence, [and] major systems of public works” had improved
it: the places formerly occupied by the Marajóara showed the most
luxuriant and diverse growth. “If you listened to Meggers’s theory, these
places should have been ruined,” Roosevelt told me.
Rather than pressing down on Marajó, she said, the river and forest
opened up possibilities. In highland Mexico, “it wasn’t easy to get away
from other people. With all those rocky hillsides and deserts, you couldn’t
readily start over. But in the Amazon, you could run away—strike off in
your canoe and be gone.”
As in Huckleberry Finn? I asked.
In this reconstruction based on archaeologist Anna Roosevelt’s
view of Marajóara society, houses cluster on artificial platforms
above the wet ground while farm fields stretch into the island’s
interior.
“If you like,” she said. “You could go [along the river] where you wanted
and homestead—the forest gives you all kinds of fruit and animals, the river
gives you fish and plants. That was very important to societies like Marajó.
They had to be much less coercive, much more hang-loose, much more
socially fluid, or people wouldn’t stay there.” Compared with much of the
rest of the world at that time, people in the Amazon “were freer, they were
healthier, they were living in a really wonderful civilization.”
Marajó never had the grand public monuments of a Tenochtitlan or a
Qosqo, Roosevelt noted, because its leaders “couldn’t compel the labor.”
Nonetheless, she said, Marajó society was “just as orderly and beautiful and
complex. The eye-opener was that you didn’t need a huge apparatus of state
control to have all that. And this had been entirely missed by Meggers, who
couldn’t see past her environmental-determinist theories. And I said so
much in my book.”
Meggers reacted to Roosevelt’s critiques by sneering at her “polemical
tone” and “extravagant claims.” In concluding that large areas of Marajó
had been continuously inhabited, Roosevelt had (according to Meggers)
committed the beginner’s error of confusing a site that had been occupied
many times by small, unstable groups for a single, long-lasting society.
Cultural remains, Meggers explained to me, “build up on areas of half a
kilometer or so, because [shifting Indian groups] don’t land exactly on the
same spot. The decorated types of pottery don’t change much over time, so
you can pick up a bunch of chips and say, ‘Oh, look, it was all one big site!’
Unless you know what you’re doing, of course.” From her point of view,
claiming that Amazonian societies could escape their environmental
constraints was little more than a display of scientific ignorance, the
archaeological version of trying to design perpetual-motion machines.
Anna Roosevelt
To Meggers’s critics, the ecological-limits argument was not only wrong,
but familiar—and familiar in an uncomfortable way. From the first days of
contact, Europeans have perceived the Indians of the tropics as living in
timeless stasis. Michel de Montaigne admiringly claimed in 1580 that the
inhabitants of the Amazon had “no knowledge of numbers, no terms for
governor or political superior, no practice of subordination or of riches or
poverty…no clothing, no agriculture, no metals.” They abided, he said,
“without toil or travail” in a “bounteous” forest that “furnishes them
abundantly with all they need…. They are still in that blessed state of
desiring nothing beyond what is ordained by their natural necessities: for
them anything further is merely superfluous.”
Montaigne’s successors quickly turned his views upside-down. Like him,
they viewed Amazonians as existing outside history, but they now regarded
this as a bad thing. The French natural historian Charles Marie de la
Condamine retraced Orellana’s journey in 1743. He emerged with great
regard for the forest—and none for its inhabitants. The peoples of the
Peruvian Amazon were nothing more than “forest animals,” he said.
“Before making them Christians, they must first be made human.” In
softened form, Condamine’s views persisted into the twentieth century.
“Where man has remained in the tropics, with few exceptions, he has
suffered arrested development,” the prominent geographer Ellen Churchill
Semple remarked in 1911. “His nursery has kept him a child.” To be sure,
advocates of environmental limitations today do not endorse the racist
views of the past, but they still regard the original inhabitants of the
Amazon as trapped in their environment like flies in amber. Meggers’s “law
of environmental limitation of culture,” her critics in essence say, is nothing
but a green variant of Holmberg’s Mistake.
Over time, the Meggers-Roosevelt dispute grew bitter and personal;
inevitable in a contemporary academic context, it featured charges of
colonialism, elitism, and membership in the CIA. Particularly vexing to
Meggers was that some of the same people who demanded minutely
detailed proof for pre-Clovis sites had cheerfully accepted Roosevelt’s
revisionism about Marajó. A big, prosperous city rising up on its own in the
stifling Amazon forest? Meggers could not contain her disbelief. “I wish a
psychologist would look into this,” she said to me.
Meanwhile, Roosevelt went on to Painted Rock Cave. On the cave floor
what looked to me like nothing in particular turned out to be an ancient
midden: a refuse heap. Roosevelt’s team slowly scraped away sediment,
traveling backward in time with every inch. Even when the traces of human
occupation ceased, they kept digging down. (“You always go a meter past
sterile,” she told me.) A few inches below what she had thought would be
the last layer of human habitation she hit another—a culture, Roosevelt said
later, that wasn’t supposed to be there. It was as much as thirteen thousand
years old.
Painted Rock Cave was occupied at roughly the same time that the Clovis
culture was thriving to the north. But Amazon paleo-Indians didn’t live in
the same way as their northern counterparts, Roosevelt said. They didn’t
make or use Clovis points. They didn’t hunt big game (almost none exists in
the Amazon). Instead they plucked wild fruits from the forest, painted
handprints on the walls, and ate the Amazon’s 1,500 species of fish,
especially the 500-pound piraruçu, the world’s biggest freshwater fish. And
then, after 1,200 years, these early people left the cave for good.
Painted Rock Cave became inhabited again in about 6000 B.C. Probably
it was no more than temporary shelter, a refuge when floodwaters got too
high. People could have brought in loads of turtles and shellfish, built a fire
in the shelter of the cave, and enjoyed the feel of dry land. In any case these
people—Roosevelt called them the Paituna culture, after a nearby village—
had ceramic bowls, red- to gray-brown. Found at Painted Rock Cave and
other places in the area, it is the oldest known pottery in the Americas.
And so there were two occupations: one very old, with ceramics; the
other even older, without them. To Roosevelt, the first settlement of Painted
Rock Cave demonstrated that the Amazon forest was not settled by a copy
or offshoot of Clovis. This early culture was a separate entity—another nail
in the coffin of the Clovis-as-template theory, to her way of thinking. The
second occupation, with its early and apparently independent development
of ceramics, demonstrated something equally vital: Amazonia was not a
dead end where the environment ineluctably strangled cultures in their
cradles. It was a source of social and technological innovation of
continental importance.
By about four thousand years ago the Indians of the lower Amazon were
growing crops—at least 138 of them, according to a recent tally. The staple
then as now was manioc (or cassava, as it is sometimes called), a hefty root
that Brazilians roast, chop, fry, ferment, and grind into an amazing variety
of foods. To this day, no riverside table is complete without a bowl of
farofa: crunchy, toasted manioc meal, vaguely resembling grated Parmesan
cheese, which Amazonians sprinkle on their food with abandon. To farmers,
manioc has a wonderful advantage: it can grow practically anywhere, in any
conditions. In Santarém I met a woman who told me that the asphalt street
in front of her home had just been ripped up by the municipal authorities.
Underneath the pavement, which had been laid down years before, was a
crop of manioc.
Manioc has always been the Amazonian staple. To this day, it is
ubiquitous in the slash-and-burn plots that surround every riverside hamlet.
These little, shifting farms look like unchanged remnants of the past. But
that idea apparently is mistaken. 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. The main reason is the stone ax.
Living in the world’s thickest forest, the inhabitants of the Amazon basin
had to remove a lot of trees if they wanted to accomplish practically
anything. For this task the stone ax was their basic tool. Unfortunately,
stone axes are truly wretched tools. With a stone ax, one does not so much
cut down a tree as use the ax to beat a section of the trunk to pulp,
weakening the base until the tree can no longer support itself. In the
outskirts of the central Amazonian city of Manaus, a researcher let me
whack at a big Brazil nut tree with a locally made replica of a traditional
stone ax. After repeated blows I had created a tiny dent in the cylindrical
wall of the bole. It was like attacking a continent. “Those things suck,” the
researcher said, shaking his head.
In the 1970s Robert Carneiro, of the American Museum of Natural
History, measured the labor required to clear a field before the advent of
steel. He set people to work with stone axes in thickly forested parts of
Peru, Brazil, and Venezuela. Many of the trees were four feet in diameter or
more. In Carneiro’s experiments, felling a single four-foot tree with an
indigenous stone ax took 115 hours—nearly three weeks of eight-hour days.
With a steel ax, his workers toppled trees of similar size in less than three
hours. Carneiro’s team used stone axes to clear about an acre and a half, a
typical slash-and-burn plot, in the equivalent of 153 eight-hour days. Steel
axes did the job in the equivalent of eight workdays—almost twenty times
faster. According to surveys by Stephen Beckerman, an anthropologist at
Pennsylvania State University, Amazonian slash-and-burners are able to
work their plots for an average of three years before they are overwhelmed.
Given that farmers also must hunt, forage, build houses and trails, maintain
their existing gardens, and perform a hundred other tasks, Carneiro
wondered how they could have been able to spend months on end banging
on trees to clear new fields every three years.
Unsurprisingly, people with stone implements wanted metal tools as soon
as they encountered them—the prospective reduction in workload was
staggering. When Columbus landed, according to William Balée, the
Yanomamo lived in settled villages in the Amazon basin. Battered by
European diseases and slave raiding, many fled to the Orinoco, becoming
wandering foragers. In the seventeenth century they acquired steel tools,
and used them to make the return journey from seminomadic hunter-
gatherers to agriculturalists who lived in more or less permanent villages.
So precious did European axes become during this time, according to Brian
Ferguson, an anthropologist at Rutgers University, that when a source
appeared the Yanomami would relocate whole villages to be near it. Steel
tools, he told me, “had a major, transformative effect on all the trade and
marriage relations in a whole area. They led to new trade networks, they led
to new political alliances, they even led to war.” Researchers have often
described the Yanomamo as “fierce,” aggressive sorts whose small villages
are constantly at violent odds with one another. In Ferguson’s estimation,
one cause of the endemic conflict observed by Western anthropologists and
missionaries was the anthropologists and missionaries themselves, who
gave their subjects “literally boatloads” of steel tools—axes, hatchets,
machetes—to ingratiate themselves. At a stroke, the village hosting the
Westerners would gleam with wealth; its neighbors would seek a share of
the undeserved bounty; conflict would explode. “Steel to the Yanomamo
was like gold for the Spanish,” Ferguson said. “It could push fairly ordinary
people to do things that they wouldn’t consider doing otherwise.” (The
anthropologists and missionaries there vehemently deny Ferguson’s claims.
But so far as I am aware they did not call his scenario impossible. Rather,
they said that to avoid unhappy consequences they had carefully controlled
the amount of gift giving.)
Metal tools largely created slash-and-burn agriculture, William M.
Denevan, the Wisconsin geographer, told me. “This picture of swidden as
this ancient practice by which Indians kept themselves in a timeless balance
with Nature—that is mostly or entirely a myth, I think. At least there’s no
evidence for it, and a fair amount of evidence against it, including the
evidence of simple logic.” Slash-and-burn, supposedly a quintessentially
Amazonian trait, “is a modern intrusion.”
A similar phenomenon seems to have taken place in North America,
where Indians were widely said to have practiced slash-and-burn as part of
their habit of living lightly on the land. Dismissing the data to back up these
claims as “gossamer,” the geographer William E. Doolittle of the University
of Texas noted in 2000 that most colonial accounts showed Indians clearing
their fields permanently, even ripping stumps out to prevent them from
sprouting. “Once fields were cleared, the intent was to cultivate them
permanently, or at least for very long periods of time.” As populations rose,
“farmers cleared new fields from the remaining forests.” 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.
In the Amazon, the turn to swidden was unfortunate. Slash-and-burn
cultivation has become one of the driving forces behind the loss of tropical
forest. Although swidden does permit the forest to regrow, it is wildly
inefficient and environmentally unsound. The burning sends up in smoke
most of the nutrients in the vegetation—almost all of the nitrogen and half
the phosphorus and potassium. At the same time, it pours huge amounts of
carbon dioxide into the air, a factor in global warming. (Large cattle ranches
are the major offenders in the Amazon, but small-scale farmers are
responsible for up to a third of the clearing.) Fortunately, it is a relatively
new practice, which means it has not yet had much time to cause damage.
More important, the very existence of so much healthy forest after twelve
thousand years of use by large populations suggests that whatever Indians
did before swidden must have been ecologically more sustainable.
RAINDROP PHYSICS
The papaya orchard was so robust and healthy that it looked like an
advertisement—the background image behind a celebrity endorser of a new
papaya drink. Sweating in the equatorial sun, some of the researchers
admiringly fingered the plump, pendulous green fruit, each the size of a
baby’s head, wrapped in clusters around the trees’ sturdy trunks. Other
scientists bent down and with equal approbation scooped up handfuls of
dirt. The road to the plantation had been cut into the Amazon’s famously
poor soil—it was the blaring orangered of cheap makeup, almost surreally
bright against the great dark green leaves of the forest. But in the shade of
the papaya trees the soil was dark brown, with the moist, friable feel that
gardeners seek.
At first glance, the soil seemed similar to what one would find in, say, the
grain belts of North America or Europe. After a more careful inspection,
though, it looked entirely different, because it was full of broken ceramics.
The combination of good soil, successful agriculture, and evidence of past
Indian inhabitation was what had brought the scientists to the farm. I had
been invited to tag along.
The orchard was about a thousand miles up the Amazon, two hours by
ferry and bus from Manaus. Manaus, the biggest city on the river, is situated
on the north bank of the Amazon, hard by its junction with the Negro River,
a major tributary. *24 Between the two rivers is a tongue of land that,
depending on your point of view, is either almost destroyed by development
or quite lightly inhabited considering its proximity to a city of a million
people. Near the tip of the tongue is the small village of Iranduba: a bush-
pilot airport, a half-dozen lackadaisical stores, some bars with jukeboxes
loud enough to knock birds from the trees, and docks for loading local
farmers’ produce. A few miles outside Iranduba, on a bluff above the
Amazon, stood the papaya orchard. It was one of the many small riverside
farms operated by the descendants of Japanese immigrants.
In 1994 Michael Heckenberger, now at the University of Florida in
Gainesville, and James B. Petersen, now at the University of Vermont in
Burlington, decided to look for potential archaeological sites in the central
Amazon. With a team of Brazilian scientists, Meggers had surveyed much
of the river and its tributaries in the 1970s and 1980s and concluded there
was little of archaeological relevance—further proof of the inescapability of
ecological constraints. Believing that Meggers’s survey had been too
coarse-grained, Heckenberger and Petersen decided to search a single area
intensively. Joined by Eduardo Goés Neves of the University of São Paulo,
several dozen of Neves’s students, and, later, Robert N. Bartone, of the
University of Maine at Farmington, they found more than thirty sites at the
Amazon-Negro junction, four of which they excavated fully. The papaya
farm was one of the four. Now Neves, Petersen, and Bartone were leading a
score of visiting researchers and a journalist on a tour of the site.
From the shade of a doorway, the father of the family watched us mill
around with a tolerant smile. A teenage girl stood outside, listlessly
sweeping at a cloud of yellow butterflies. Through the loosely placed boards
in the wall floated the bark and jabber of a talk-radio show about the latest
soccer perfidy from Argentina, Brazil’s hated rival. Although it was winter,
the midday sun was hot enough to make sweat start out from the skin.
At the edge of the papaya grove were ten low earthen mounds that the
team had identified as human-made. Carbon dating indicated that they were
constructed in about 1000 A.D. The archaeologists had begun opening up
the largest of the mounds. Already they had discovered nine burials, one
body placed in a big funerary urn, all apparently interred at the same time.
Because the scientists were unlikely to have uncovered the area’s only
concentration of human remains in their first, exploratory test pit, they
believed that the entire mound was likely to be full of burials—hundreds of
them. “That suggests thousands of people lived here,” Neves said. “In 1000
A.D., that’s a big place.”
Shoving back his baseball cap, Neves levered himself into the excavation
site, a six-foot, rectangular hole with the right-angled corners and precisely
vertical walls that are a hallmark of archaeological investigation. One of the
visiting researchers passed down a Munsell soil-color chart. Resembling
strips of paint-color samples, these are used by pedologists (soil scientists)
to classify soils. Neves scraped the wall lightly, exposing fresh earth, and
pinned the chart to the wall with a big-headed nail. From the top of the dig
he dangled a measuring tape—alternating ten-centimeter strips of red,
white, and green—to indicate depth. Digital cameras ratcheted and whined.
It was a vest-pocket version of the inspection of Folsom by the graybeards.
Neves had a little trouble hanging the tape because he couldn’t find a
place where it wouldn’t get snagged on the broken ceramics protruding
from the walls. They bristled from the side of the dig in a profusion that
reminded me of the Beni mounds, hundreds of miles upstream. Some of the
pieces seemed to form horizontal layers. As in the Beni, the ceramics had
apparently been smashed deliberately, perhaps to build up the surface.
I asked Petersen, a ceramics specialist, how many plates and bowls and
cups were in the mounds. He pulled out a scrap of paper and a pen and
scribbled some numbers. In a minute or two he looked up. “This is a rough,
back-of-the-envelope-type estimate,” he warned, showing me the result: the
single mound we were standing on might contain more than forty million
potsherds. “Think of the industry required to produce that much pottery,”
Neves said. “Then they just smash it. Look at the way they piled up this
good soil [to make the burial mound]—it’s all wasteful behavior. I don’t
think scarcity was a problem here.”
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. In uncut forest, the
canopy intercepts precipitation, absorbing the physical impact of its fall
from the clouds. The water eventually spills from the leaves, but it hits the
ground less violently. When farmers or loggers clear the tree cover, droplets
shoot at the ground with more than twice as much force.
Slash-and-burn minimizes the time in which the ground is unprotected.
Intensive agriculture is much more productive but maximizes the land’s
exposure. This painful trade-off is why ecologists argue that any attempt by
tropical forest societies to grow beyond small villages has always been
doomed to fail.
According to Charles R. Clement, an anthropological botanist at the
Brazilian National Institute for Amazon Research (INPA) in Manaus,
though, the first Amazonians did avoid the Dilemma of Rainfall Physics.
Speaking broadly, their solution was not to clear the forest but to replace it
with one adapted to human use. They set up shop on the bluffs that mark the
edge of high water—close enough to the river to fish, far enough to avoid
the flood. And then, rather than centering their agriculture on annual crops,
they focused on the Amazon’s wildly diverse assortment of trees.
In his view, the Amazon’s first inhabitants laboriously cleared small plots
with their stone axes. But rather than simply planting manioc and other
annual crops in their gardens until the forest took them over, they planted
selected tree crops along with the manioc and managed the transition. Of
the 138 known domesticated plant species in the Amazon, more than half
are trees. (Depending on the definition of “domesticated,” the figure could
be as high as 80 percent.) Sapodilla, calabash, and tucumá; babaçu, açai,
and wild pineapple; coco-palm, American-oil palm, and Panama-hat palm—
the Amazon’s wealth of fruits, nuts, and palms is justly celebrated. “Visitors
are always amazed that you can walk in the forest here and constantly pick
fruit from trees,” Clement said. “That’s because people planted them.
They’re walking through old orchards.”
Peach palms—the trees through which I looked at the Amazon from
Painted Rock Cave—are Clement’s favorite example. Giddily tall and
straight, they have up to a dozen stalks, with a protective mat of spikes
wrapped around the bottom of the tree. The protection is little needed;
peach palm wood is hard enough that in the Beni it was used for saw blades.
Bundles of orange or red fruit hang like clusters of bocce balls from the
base of the fronds. The fruit is soaked with oil and rich in beta-carotene,
vitamin C, and, surprisingly, protein. When dried, the white or pink pulp
makes flour for thin, tortilla-like cakes; when boiled and smoked, it
becomes hors d’oeuvres; when cooked and fermented, it makes beer. (The
sap also makes a kind of wine.) Two crops a year are not uncommon; in
terms of yield per acre, peach palms are typically much more productive
than rice, beans, or maize. Trees begin producing fruit after three to five
years and can continue for another seventy years. Like strawberries, peach
palm throws out adventitious shoots. With a little care, these can be
harvested for heart-of-palm—very tasty heart-of-palm, in my experience.
Bactris gasipaes, as scientists call it, has more than two hundred common
names: pupunha, cahipay, tembe, pejibaye, chontaduro, pijuayo. To
Clement, the proliferation of names suggests the plant was used for many
purposes by many cultures.
In the 1980s and early 1990s Clement measured peach palms throughout
the Amazon basin. He learned that several physical characteristics,
including fruit size, lay on a gradient with those apparently closest to the
wild state in western Amazonia, near the Beni; the implication was that the
tree might first have been cultivated there. Using a different method, Jorge
Mora-Urpí, one of Clement’s collaborators, concluded that Indians might
have bred the modern peach palm by hybridizing palms from several areas,
including the Peruvian Amazon. Whatever the origin, people domesticated
the species thousands of years ago and then spread it rapidly, first through
Amazonia and then up into the Caribbean and Central America. Bactris
gasipaes was in Costa Rica 1,700 to 2,300 years ago and probably earlier.
By the time of Columbus, one seventeenth-century observer wrote, Native
Americans valued it so highly “that only their wives and children were held
in higher regard.”
Unlike maize or manioc, peach palm can thrive with no human attention.
Tragically, this quality has proven to be enormously useful. In the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries many Amazonian Indians, the
Yanomamo among them, abandoned their farm villages, which had made
them sitting ducks for European diseases and slave trading. They hid out in
the forest, preserving their freedom by moving from place to place; in what
Balée calls “agricultural regression,” these hunted peoples necessarily gave
up farming and kept body and soul together by foraging. The “Stone Age
tribespeople in the Amazon wilderness” that captured so many European
imaginations were in large part a European creation and a historical
novelty; they survived because the “wilderness” was largely composed of
their ancestors’ orchards. “These old forests, called fallows, have
traditionally been classified as high forest (pristine forest on well-drained
ground) by Western researchers,” Balée wrote in 2003. But they “would not
exist” without “human agricultural activities.” Indeed, Amazonians
typically do not make the distinction between “cultivated” and “wild”
landscapes common in the West; instead they simply classify landscapes
into scores of varieties, depending on the types of species in each.
After we had spoken for a while Clement took me out of his office and
into INPA’s experimental forest. To my untrained eye, it looked much the
same as the forests around the lodges outside Manaus that attract
ecotourists, except that INPA staffers kept down the undergrowth. There
was the same cool green light from the canopy, the same refulgent smell,
the same awe-inspiring sense of variety. The air vibrated with the same
inharmonic racket of squealing, burbling, croaking, and cheeping birds.
Dribbling down some of the tree trunks were little runnels that looked like
dried sap. On a previous visit to the Amazon I had seen runnels just like
these on a rubber tree in an abandoned plantation. Thinking it was a drip of
latex sap, I plucked at one. It was the cover for a termite superhighway.
Termites boiled out of the little tunnel and all over my hand. Termites bite.
Flapping my hand wildly, I leapt back from the tree. My sandaled foot
landed on a ground-wasp nest. In this way I learned why some Amazonians
have a jaundiced view of biodiversity. On Clement’s tour I kept my hands to
myself.
It was July—winter in the Amazon, the worst time of the year for fruit.
Nevertheless, Clement was able to find yellow bacuri and purple açai. He
plucked what looked like a four-foot version of a string bean from a branch,
split it lengthwise, and showed me flattened, shiny seeds arrayed along its
length like teeth in a jaw. Each seed was the size of a thumb bone and
nestled in a fluffy white coating. “Try this,” he said. “It’s the ice-cream
bean.” I put a seed in my mouth and sucked on it. The coating did taste
quite like vanilla ice cream, and was just as refreshing. Three or four more
fruits followed, each equally strange to me. (This is what people like about
biodiversity.) Peach palm was not in season, but he found another member
of the same genus. The fruit, when peeled, was unappetizing—quite like
soggy cardboard in color, texture, and flavor. Clement squeezed some pulp.
Oil dribbled from his fingers to the ground. “This’ll put some calories into
you,” he said.
Planting their orchards for millennia, the first Amazonians slowly
transformed large swaths of the river basin into something more pleasing to
human beings. In the country inhabited by the Ka’apor, on the mainland
southeast of Marajó, centuries of tinkering have profoundly changed the
forest community. In Ka’apor-managed forests, according to Balée’s plant
inventories, almost half of the ecologically important species are those used
by humans for food. In similar forests that have not recently been managed,
the figure is only 20 percent. 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.
Some researchers today regard this figure as conservative. “I basically
think it’s all human created,” Clement told me. So does Erickson, the
University of Pennsylvania archaeologist who told me in Bolivia that the
lowland tropical forests of South America are among the finest works of art
on the planet. “Some of my colleagues would say that’s pretty radical,” he
said. According to Peter Stahl, an anthropologist at the State University of
New York in Binghamton, “lots” of researchers believe that “what the eco-
imagery would like to picture as a pristine, untouched Urwelt [primeval
world] in fact has been managed by people for millennia.” The phrase “built
environment,” Erickson argued, “applies to most, if not all, Neotropical
landscapes.”
GIFT FROM THE PAST
“Landscape,” in this case, is meant exactly—Amazonian Indians literally
created the ground beneath their feet. According to Susanna Hecht, a
geographer at the University of California at Los Angeles, researchers into
upland Amazonia took most of their soil samples along the region’s
highways, which indeed passed through areas with awful soil—some
regions were so saturated with toxic aluminum that they are now being
mined for bauxite. A few scientists, though, found patches of something
better. “In part because of the empty-Amazon model,” Hecht told me, these
were “seen as anomalous and insignificant.” But in the 1990s researchers
began studying these unusual regions of terra preta do Índio—rich, fertile
“Indian dark earth” that anthropologists believe was made by human
beings.
Throughout Amazonia, farmers prize terra preta for its great
productivity; some have worked it for years with minimal fertilization.
Among them are the owners of the papaya orchard I visited, who have
happily grown crops on their terra preta for two decades. More surprising
still, the ceramics in the farm’s terra preta indicate that the soil has retained
its nutrients for as much as a millennium. On a local level, terra preta is
valuable enough for locals to dig it up and sell as potting soil, an activity
that, alas, has already destroyed countless artifacts. To the consternation of
archaeologists, long planters full of ancient terra preta, complete with pre-
Columbian potsherds, greet visitors to the Santarém airport. Because terra
preta is subject to the same punishing conditions as the surrounding bad
soils, “its existence is very surprising,” according to Bruno Glaser, a
chemist at the Institute of Soil Science and Soil Geography at the University
of Bayreuth, Germany. “If you read the textbooks, it shouldn’t be there.”
*25
Because careful surveys of Amazon soils have never been taken, nobody
knows the amount and distribution of terra preta. Woods has guessed that
terra preta might represent as much as 10 percent of the Amazon basin, an
area the size of France. A recent, much more conservative estimate is that it
covers .1 to .3 percent of the basin, a few thousand square miles. The big
difference between these numbers matters less than one might expect: a few
thousand square miles of farmland was enough to feed the millions in the
Maya heartland.
Most big terra preta sites are on low bluffs at the edge of the floodplain.
Typically, they cover five to fifteen acres, but some encompass seven
hundred or more. The layer of black soil is generally one to two feet deep
but can reach more than six feet. According to a recent study led by Dirse
Kern, of the Museu Goeldi in Belém, terra preta is “not associated with a
particular parent soil type or environmental condition,” suggesting that it
was not produced by natural processes. Another clue to its human origin is
the broken ceramics with which it is usually mixed. “They practiced
agriculture here for centuries,” Glaser told me. “But instead of destroying
the soil, they improved it, and that is something we don’t know how to do
today” in tropical soils.
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. The key to terra preta’s
long-term fertility, Glaser says, is charcoal: terra preta contains up to sixty-
four times more of it than surrounding red earth. Organic matter “sticks” to
charcoal, rather than being washed away or attaching to other, nonavailable
compounds. “Over time, it partly oxidizes, which keeps providing sites for
nutrients to bind to.” But simply mixing charcoal into the ground is not
enough to create terra preta. Because charcoal contains few nutrients,
Glaser argued, “high-nutrient inputs—excrement and waste such as turtle,
fish, and animal bones—are necessary.” Special soil microorganisms are
also likely to play a role in its persistent fertility, in the view of Janice
Thies, a soil ecologist who is part of a Cornell University team studying
terra preta. “There are indications that microbial biomass is higher in terra
preta than in other forest soils,” she told me, which raises the possibility
that scientists might be able to create a “package” of charcoal, nutrients, and
microfauna that could be used to transform bad tropical soil into terra preta.
Despite the charcoal, terra preta is not a by-product of slash-and-burn
agriculture. To begin with, slash-and-burn simply does not produce enough
charcoal to make terra preta—the carbon mostly goes into the air in the
form of carbon dioxide. Instead, Indians apparently made terra preta by a
process that Christoph Steiner, a University of Bayreuth soil scientist, has
dubbed “slash-and-char.” Instead of completely burning organic matter to
ash, ancient farmers burned it incompletely to make charcoal, then stirred
the charcoal into the soil. In addition to its benefits to the soil, slash-and-
char releases much less carbon into the air than slash-and-burn, which has
large potential implications for climate change. Trees store vast amounts of
carbon in their trunks, branches, and leaves. When they die or people cut
them down, the carbon is usually released into the atmosphere, driving
global warming. Experiments by Makoto Ogawa of the Kansai
Environmental Engineering Center, near Kyoto, Japan, demonstrated that
charcoal retains its carbon in the soil for up to fifty thousand years. “Slash-
and-char is very clever,” Ogawa told me. “Nobody in Europe or Asia that I
know of ever understood the properties of charcoal in soil.”
Indians are still making terra preta in this way, according to Hecht, the
UCLA geographer. Hecht spent years with the Kayapó, in central
Amazonia, watching them create “low-biomass” fires “cool enough to walk
through” of pulled-up weeds, cooking waste, crop debris, palm fronds, and
termite mounds. Burning, she wrote, is constant: “To live among the
Kayapó is to live in a place where parts of the landscape smolder.” Hecht
regards Indian fire as an essential part of the Amazonian landscape, as it
was in the forests of eastern North America. “We’ve got to get over this
whole Bambi syndrome,” she told me, referring to the movie’s forest-fire
scene, which has taught generations of children that burning wildlands is
evil. “Let the Kayapó burn the rainforest—they know what they’re doing.”
In a preliminary test run at creating terra preta, Steiner, Wenceslau
Teixeira of the Brazilian Agricultural Research Enterprise, and Wolfang
Zech of the University of Bayreuth applied a variety of treatments involving
charcoal and fertilizers for three years to rice and sorghum plots outside
Manaus. In the first year, there was little difference among the treatments
(except for the control plots, in which almost nothing grew). By the second
year, Steiner said, “the charcoal was really making a difference.” Plots with
charcoal alone grew little, but those treated with a combination of charcoal
and fertilizer yielded as much as 880 percent more than plots with fertilizer
alone. His “terra preta” was this productive, Steiner told me, despite
making no attempt to re-create the ancient microbial balance.
Beginning a little more than two thousand years ago, the central and
lower Amazon were rocked by extreme cultural change. Arawak-speaking
groups migrated in from the south and west, sometimes apparently driving
Tupí-speaking groups north and east. Sedentary villages appeared. And so
did terra preta. No one yet knows if or how these events were related. 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. Judging by carbon dating and the sequence of
ceramics, they believe the site was inhabited in two waves, from about 360
B.C., when terra preta formation began, to as late as 1440 A.D. “We
haven’t finished working, but there seems to be a central plaza and some
defensive ditches there,” Petersen told me. The plaza was at least a quarter
mile long; the ditch, more than three hundred feet long and up to eighteen
feet wide and six feet deep: “a big, permanent settlement.”
Terra preta showed up at the papaya plantation between 620 and 720
A.D. By that time it seems to have been underneath villages throughout the
central Amazon. Several hundred years later it reached the upper Xingú, a
long Amazon tributary with its headwaters deep in southern Brazil. People
had lived around the Xingú for a long time, but around 1100 or 1200 A.D.,
Arawak-speaking people appear to have moved in, jostling shoulders with
people who spoke a Tupí-Guaraní language. In 2003 Heckenberger, who
had worked with Petersen and Neves, announced in Science that in this area
he and his colleagues had turned up remains of nineteen large villages
linked by a network of wide roads “in a remarkably elaborate regional
plan.” Around these settlements, which were in place between
approximately 1250 and 1400 A.D., the Xinguanos built “bridges, artificial
river obstructions and ponds, raised causeways, canals, and other
structures…a highly elaborate built environment, rivaling that of many
contemporary complex societies of the Americas and elsewhere.” The
earlier inhabitants left no trace of terra preta; the new villages quickly set
down thick deposits of black earth. “To me,” Woods said, “it looks as if
someone invented it, and the technique spread to the neighbors.”
Because Amazonia lacks stone and metal and its hot, wet climate
rapidly destroys wood and cloth, material traces of past societies
are hard to find. The main exception is pottery, striking examples
of which survive, such as the highly decorative vessels from the
Santarém area (right, this one probably made in the seventeenth
century). Stone, being rare, was reserved for special items such as
the pestles (left) used to grind the hallucinogenic snuff yobo.
One of the biggest patches of terra preta is on the high bluffs at the
mouth of the Tapajós, near Santarém. First mapped in the 1960s by the late
Wim Sombroek, director of the International Soil Reference and
Information Center in Wageningen, the Netherlands, the terra preta zone is
three miles long and half a mile wide, suggesting widespread human
habitation—exactly what Orellana saw. The plateau has never been
carefully excavated, but observations by geographers Woods and Joseph
McCann of the New School in New York City indicate that it is thick with
ceramics. If the agriculture practiced in the lower Tapajós were as intensive
as in the most complex cultures in precontact North America, Woods told
me, “you’d be talking something capable of supporting about 200,000 to
400,000 people”—making it at the time one of the most densely populated
places in the world.
Woods was part of an international consortium of scientists studying
terra preta. If its secrets could be unraveled, he said, it might improve the
expanses of bad soil that cripple agriculture in Africa—a final gift from the
peoples who brought us tomatoes, maize, manioc, and a thousand different
ways of being human.
“Betty Meggers would just die if she heard me saying this,” Woods told
me. “Deep down her fear is that this data will be misused.” In 2001,
Meggers charged in an article in Latin American Antiquity that
archaeologists’ claims that the Amazon could support intensive agriculture
were effectively telling “developers [that they] are entitled to operate
without restraint.” These researchers had thus become unwitting
“accomplices in the accelerating pace of environmental degradation.”
Centuries after the conquistadors, she lamented, “the myth of El Dorado is
being revived by archaeologists.”
Doubtless her political anxieties are not without justification, although—
as some of her sparring partners observed—it is difficult to imagine greedy
plutocrats “perusing the pages of Latin American Antiquity before deciding
to rev up the chainsaws.” But the new picture doesn’t automatically
legitimate burning down the forest. Instead it suggests that for a long time
clever people who knew tricks that we have yet to learn used big chunks of
Amazonia nondestructively. Faced with an ecological problem, the Indians
fixed it. Rather than adapt to Nature, they created it. They were in the midst
of terra-forming the Amazon when Columbus showed up and ruined
everything.
The Artificial Wilderness
A THOUSAND KUDZUS EVERYWHERE
Until about 200 million years ago Eurasia and the Americas were lashed
together in a single landmass that geologists call Pangaea. Pangaea broke
into pieces, sending the continents drifting like barges across the ocean
floor. For millions of years, the separate fragments of Pangaea had almost
no communication. Evolution set their species spinning off on separate
trajectories, and the flora and fauna of each land diverged so far from each
other that the astounded Columbus remarked that “all the trees were as
different from ours as day from night, and so the fruits, the herbage, the
rocks, and all things.”
Columbus was the first to see the yawning biological gap between
Europe and the Americas. He was also one of the last to see it in pure form:
his visit, as Alfred Crosby put it, initiated the process of knitting together
the seams of Pangaea. Ever since 1492, the hemispheres have become more
and more alike, as people mix the world’s organisms into a global stew.
Thus bananas and coffee, two African crops, become the principal
agricultural exports of Central America; maize and manioc, domesticated in
Mesoamerica and Amazonia respectively, return the favor by becoming
staples in tropical Africa. Meanwhile, plantations of rubber trees, an
Amazon native, undulate across Malaysian hillsides; peppers and tomatoes
from Mesoamerica form the culinary backbones of Thailand and Italy;
Andean potatoes lead Ireland to feast and famine; and apples, native to the
Middle East, appear in markets from Manaus to Manila to Manhattan. Back
in 1972 Crosby invented a term for this biological ferment: the Columbian
Exchange.
By knitting together the seams of Pangaea, Columbus set off an
ecological explosion of a magnitude unseen since the Ice Ages. Some
species were shocked into decline (most prominent among them Homo
sapiens, which in the century and a half after Columbus lost a fifth of its
number, mainly to disease). Others stumbled into new ecosystems and were
transformed into environmental overlords: picture-book illustrations of
what scientists call “ecological release.”
In ecological release, an organism escapes its home and parachutes into
an ecosystem that has never encountered it before. The majority of such
escapees die rapidly, unable to thrive or reproduce in novel surroundings.
Most of the survivors find a quiet niche and settle in, blending
inconspicuously with the locals. But a few, finding themselves in places
with few or none of their natural enemies, look around with the hopeful
incredulity of juvenile delinquents who discover the mall’s security cameras
are broken—and wreak havoc. In their home ecosystems these species have,
like all living things, a full complement of parasites, microbes, viruses, and
insect predators to shorten and immiserate their lives. Suddenly free of this
burden, they can burst out and overwhelm the landscape.
The Japanese grind the roots of a low vine called kuzu (Pueraria lobata)
into a white powder that thickens soup and is alleged to have curative
properties; they also plant the species on highway shoulders as erosion-
preventing ground cover. In the 1930s the U.S. Civilian Conservation Corps
planted millions of kuzu seedlings to fight soil loss, a major fear in the era
of the Dust Bowl. Renamed “kudzu,” the vine prevented so much erosion
that villages across the U.S. Southeast celebrated kudzu festivals and
crowned kudzu queens. People harvested it like hay and fed it to cows;
entrepreneurs marketed kudzu cereal, kudzu dog food, and kudzu ketchup.
In the early 1950s rural areas suddenly awoke from their trance and
discovered that kudzu was eating them alive. Without its natural enemies
the plant grew so fast that southerners joked they had to close their
windows at night to keep it out. Worse, the plants themselves grew bigger
than is usual in Japan—nobody knows why. Engulfing fields in dense mats
of root and vine, kudzu swarmed over entire farms, clambered for miles
along telephone lines, wrapped up trees, barns, and houses like a green
Christo. The roots sank so deep that the vine was nearly impossible to
remove. In 1996 the federal government estimated that kudzu had
swallowed seven million acres. The figure is now much larger.
What happened after Columbus was like a thousand kudzus everywhere.
Throughout the hemisphere ecosystems cracked and heaved like winter ice.
Echoes of the biological tumult resound through colonial manuscripts.
Colonists in Jamestown broke off from complaining about their Indian
neighbors to complain about the depredations of the rats they had
accidentally imported. Not all the invaders were such obvious pests, though.
Clover and bluegrass, in Europe as tame and respectable as accountants, in
the Americas transformed themselves into biological Attilas, sweeping
through vast areas so quickly that the first English colonists who pushed
into Kentucky found both species waiting for them. Peaches, not usually
regarded as a weed, proliferated in the southeast with such fervor that by the
eighteenth century farmers feared that the Carolinas would become “a
wilderness of peach trees.”
South America was hit especially hard. Endive and spinach escaped from
colonial gardens and grew into impassable, six-foot thickets on the Peruvian
coast; thousands of feet higher, mint overwhelmed Andean valleys. In the
pampas of Argentina and Uruguay, the voyaging Charles Darwin discovered
hundreds of square miles strangled by feral artichoke. “Over the undulating
plains, where these great beds occur, nothing else can now live,” he
observed. Wild peach was rampant in South America, too. Peachwood,
Darwin discovered, had become “the main supply of firewood to the city of
Buenos Ayres.” Some invasions cancel each other out. Peru’s plague of
endive may have been checked by a simultaneous plague of rats, which the
sixteenth-century writer Garcilaso de la Vega reported “bred in infinite
numbers, overran the land, and destroyed the crops.”
A phenomenon much like ecological release can occur when a species
suddenly loses its burden of predators. The advent of mechanized fishing in
the 1920s drastically reduced the number of cod from the Gulf of Maine to
the Grand Banks. With the cod gone, the sea urchins on which they fed had
no enemies left. Soon a spiny carpet covered the bottom of the gulf. Sea
urchins feed on kelp. As their populations boomed, they destroyed the
area’s kelp beds, creating what icthyologists call a “sea urchin barrens.”
In this region, cod was the species that governed the overall composition
of the ecosystem. The fish was, in ecological jargon, a “keystone” species:
one “that affects the survival and abundance of many other species,” in the
definition of Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson. Keystone species have
disproportionate impact on their ecosystems. Removing them, Wilson
explained, “results in a relatively significant shift in the composition of the
[ecological] community.”
Until Columbus, Indians were a keystone species in most of the
hemisphere. Annually burning undergrowth, clearing and replanting forests,
building canals and raising fields, hunting bison and netting salmon,
growing maize, manioc, and the Eastern Agricultural Complex, Native
Americans had been managing their environment for thousands of years. As
Cahokia shows, they made mistakes. But by and large they modified their
landscapes in stable, supple, resilient ways. Some milpa areas have been
farmed for thousands of years—time in which farmers in Mesopotamia and
North Africa and parts of India ruined their land. Even the wholesale
transformation seen in places like Peru, where irrigated terraces cover huge
areas, were exceptionally well done. But all of these efforts required close,
continual oversight. In the sixteenth century, epidemics removed the boss.
American landscapes after 1492 were emptied—“widowed,” in the
historian Francis Jennings’s term. Suddenly deregulated, ecosystems shook
and sloshed like a cup of tea in an earthquake. Not only did invading endive
and rats beset them, but native species, too, burst and blasted, freed from
constraints by the disappearance of Native Americans. The forest that the
first New England colonists thought was primeval and enduring was
actually in the midst of violent change and demographic collapse. So
catastrophic and irrevocable were the changes that it is tempting to think
that almost nothing survived from the past. This is wrong: landscape and
people remain, though greatly altered. And they have lessons to heed, both
about the earth on which we all live, and about the mental frames we bring
to it.
ONE OUT OF EVERY FOUR BIRDS
When passenger pigeons drank, they stuck their heads beneath the surface
of the water until they were eye deep. When they walked, their heads
bobbed awkwardly and they looked around from side to side. Passenger
pigeons were greedy eaters with terrible manners; if they found some food
they liked just after finishing a meal, they would vomit what they had
previously eaten and dig in. Gobbling their chow, they sometimes twittered
in tones musical enough that people mistook them for little girls. They
gorged on so many beechnuts and acorns that they sometimes fell off their
perches and burst apart when they hit the ground. But in flight they were
angelic: they cut through the air with such speed and grace that they were
called “blue meteors.”
When passenger pigeons found an area with grain or nuts to eat, they
formed a long, linear front that advanced forward, heads peck-peck-pecking
at the ground. Acorns, beechnuts, and chestnuts; strawberries,
huckleberries, and blackberries; wheat, oats, and maize—all went down the
pigeons’ iridescently feathered gullets. To grab their share, the pigeons at
the rear constantly fluttered over the heads of their compatriots and landed
at the leading edge of the front. Then the birds in the back flew over them.
The line of birds advanced in a continuous swirl, the conservationist John
Muir recalled, “revolving something like a wheel with a low buzzing wing
roar that could be heard a long way off.”
Passenger pigeons traveled in massive assemblies, billions strong, that
rained enough excrement to force people indoors. As a boy Muir saw a mob
of birds sweep “thousands of acres perfectly clean of acorns in a few
minutes.” Pigeons destroyed farm fields so often that the bishop of Quebec
formally excommunicated the species in 1703. A hundred and ten years
later the artist and naturalist John J. Audubon saw a flock passing overhead
in a single cloud for three whole days. “The air,” Audubon wrote later, “was
literally filled with Pigeons; the light of noon-day was obscured as by an
eclipse.” When he visited their roost, the “dung lay almost two inches deep”
for miles.
The Pigeons, arriving by thousands, alighted everywhere, one above
another, until solid masses as large as hogsheads were formed on the
branches all round. Here and there the perches gave way under the
weight with a crash, and, falling to the ground, destroyed hundreds of
the birds beneath, forcing down the dense groups with which every
stick was loaded. It was a scene of uproar and confusion. I found it
quite useless to speak [over the roar of wings], or even to shout to
those persons who were nearest to me.
According to Arlie W. Schorger, author of a definitive study on the bird, in
Audubon’s day at least one out of every four birds in North America was a
passenger pigeon.
In colonial times, the Haudenosaunee celebrated pigeon roostings by
gathering around the birds for a massive feast. Horatio Jones, captured as a
teenager by the Seneca (one of the six nations in the alliance), participated
around 1782 in a mass pigeon hunt near the Genesee River. The birds,
roosting on low branches, were too full and too stupid to flee. Men knocked
them down with poles or toppled the trees they were sitting on. Children
wrung the birds’ necks while women stewed them in pots, smoked them
over fires, and dried them to preserve in storehouses. Sometimes the Seneca
ate half a dozen squabs at a time, necks tied together in a carnivorous
sculpture. “It was a festival season,” Jones later recalled. “Even the meanest
dog in camp had his fill of pigeon meat.” In Haudenosaunee lore, the birds
represented nature’s generosity, a species literally selected by the spirit
world to nourish humankind.
Non-Indians, too, saw the pigeon as a symbol of the earth’s richness
—“the living, pulsing, throbbing, and picturesque illustration of the
abundance of food, prepared by bountiful Nature, in all her supreme ecstasy
of redundant production of life and energy,” one businessman/pigeon
enthusiast gushed. Colonists grilled the birds, stewed them with salt pork,
and baked them into pies; they plucked their feathers to stuff mattresses,
pickled them in barrels as a winter treat, and fed them to livestock.
Incredibly, hunters in the countryside captured tens of thousands of pigeons
in nets and sent the living birds to urban hunting clubs for target practice.
Then, suddenly, the passenger pigeon vanished—the last bird, Martha,
named after Martha Washington, died on September 1, 1914. The passenger
pigeon remained an emblem of natural bounty, but now it also represented
the squandering of that bounty. In 1947 the conservationist Aldo Leopold
dedicated a monument to the pigeon near the site of its greatest recorded
nesting, at which hunters slaughtered 1.5 million birds. The plaque read:
“This species became extinct through the avarice and thoughtlessness of
man.”
The pigeon should indeed stand as a rebuke and warning. But if
archaeologists are right it should not be thought of as a symbol of
wilderness abundance.
Passenger pigeons’ diet centered on mast, the collective name for acorns,
beechnuts, hazelnuts, chestnuts, and the like; they also really liked maize.
All were important foods to the Indians of eastern North America. Thus
passenger pigeons and Native Americans were ecological competitors.
What would be the expected outcome of this rivalry? asked Thomas W.
Neumann, a consulting archaeologist in Atlanta. Neumann noted that
Indians had also vied for mast and maize with deer, raccoons, squirrels, and
turkeys. Unsurprisingly, they hunted all of them with enthusiasm, as
documented by the bones found in archaeological sites. Indeed, as
Neumann noted, Indians actually sought out pregnant or nursing does,
which hunters today are instructed to let go. They hunted wild turkey in
spring, just before they laid eggs (if they had waited until the eggs hatched,
the poults could have survived, because they will follow any hen). The
effect was to remove competition for tree nuts. The pattern was so
consistent, Neumann told me, that Indians must have been purposefully
reducing the number of deer, raccoons, and turkeys.
Given passenger pigeons’ Brobdingnagian appetites for mast and maize,
one would expect that Indians would also have hunted them and wanted to
keep down their numbers. Thus their bones should be plentiful at
archaeological sites. Instead, Neumann told me, “they almost aren’t there—
it looks like people just didn’t eat them.” Pigeons, roosting en masse, were
easy to harvest, as the Seneca hunt showed. “If they are so easy to hunt, and
you expect people to minimize labor and maximize return, you should have
archaeological sites just filled with these things. Well, you don’t.” To
Neumann, the conclusion was obvious: passenger pigeons were not as
numerous before Columbus. “What happened was that the impact of
European contact altered the ecological dynamics in such a way that the
passenger pigeon took off.” The avian throngs Audubon saw were
“outbreak populations—always a symptom of an extraordinarily disrupted
ecological system.”
Intrigued by Neumann’s arguments, William I. Woods, the Cahokia
researcher, and Bernd Herrmann, an environmental historian at the
University of Göttingen, surveyed six archaeological studies of diets at
Cahokia and places nearby. All were not far from the site of the huge pigeon
roost that Audubon visited. The studies examined household food trash and
found that traces of passenger pigeon were rare. Given that Cahokians
consumed “almost every other animal protein source,” Herrmann and
Woods wrote, “one must conclude that the passenger pigeon was simply not
available for exploitation in significant numbers.”
Some archaeologists have criticized these conclusions on the grounds
that passenger pigeon bones would not be likely to be preserved. If so, their
absence would reveal nothing about whether Indians ate the species. But all
six Cahokia projects found plenty of bird bones, and even some tiny bones
from fish; one turned up 9,053 bones from 72 bird species. “They found a
few passenger pigeon bones, but only a few,” Woods told me. “Now, these
were hungry people who were very interested in acquiring protein. The
simplest explanation for the lack of passenger pigeon bones is a lack of
passenger pigeons. Prior to 1492, this was a rare species.”
Passenger pigeons were but one example of a larger phenomenon.
According to the naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton, North America at the
time of Columbus was home to sixty million bison, thirty to forty million
pronghorns, ten million elk, ten million mule deer, and as many as two
million mountain sheep. Sixty million bison! The imagination shrinks from
imagining it. Bison can run for hours at thirty miles per hour and use their
massive, horned skulls like battering rams. Mature animals weigh up to a
ton. Sixty million of them would have been more than sixty billion pounds
of grouchy, fast-moving mammal pounding the plains.
Seton made his estimate in 1929, and it is still widely quoted today.
Ecologists have since employed more sophisticated theoretical tools to
produce new, lower population estimates; ethologist Dale Lott put the
number of bison in “primitive America” at twenty-four to twenty-seven
million in 2002. Nonetheless, most continue to accept Seton’s basic thesis:
the Americas seen by the first colonists were a wildland of thundering herds
and forests with sky-high trees and lakes aswarm with fish. Increasingly,
though, archaeologists demand a caveat. The Americas seen by the first
colonists were teeming with game, they say. But the continents had not been
that way for long. Indeed, this Edenic world was largely an inadvertent
European creation.
At the time of Columbus the Western Hemisphere had been thoroughly
painted with the human brush. Agriculture occurred in as much as two-
thirds of what is now the continental United States, with large swathes of
the Southwest terraced and irrigated. Among the maize fields in the
Midwest and Southeast, mounds by the thousand stippled the land. The
forests of the eastern seaboard had been peeled back from the coasts, which
were now lined with farms. Salmon nets stretched across almost every
ocean-bound stream in the Northwest. And almost everywhere there was
Indian fire.
The Indian impact on American ecosystems was transformative,
subtle, and persistent, as suggested by these photographs of
remnant Native American maize hills in the outskirts of
Northampton, Massachusetts, in the 1920 s. Maize had not grown
in these abandoned pastures for centuries, but the handiwork of
the land’s original inhabitants remained for those with eyes to see
it.
Agricultural terraces like these in Peru’s Colca Valley still cover
thousands of square miles in Mesoamerica and the Andes, mute
testimony to Native Americans’ enduring success in managing
their landscapes.
This grand Indian irrigation system near Pisco, a coastal town
south of Lima, fell to developers’ bulldozers—the photograph
dates from 1931.
South of the Río Grande, Indians had converted the Mexican basin and
Yucatán into artificial environments suitable for farming. Terraces and
canals and stony highways lined the western face of the Andes. Raised
fields and causeways covered the Beni. Agriculture reached down into
Argentina and central Chile. Indians had converted perhaps a quarter of the
vast Amazon forest into farms and agricultural forests and the once-forested
Andes to grass and brush (the Inka, worried about fuel supply, were
planting tree farms).
All of this had implications for animal populations. As Cahokia grew,
Woods told me, so did its maize fields. For obvious reasons its farmers did
not relish the prospect of buffalo herds trampling through their fields. Nor
did they want deer, moose, or passenger pigeons eating the maize. They
hunted them until they were scarce around their homes. At the same time,
they tried to encourage these species to grow in number farther away, where
they would be useful. “The net result was to keep that kind of animal at
arm’s length,” Woods told me. “The total number of bison, say, seems to
have gone down quite a bit, but they wanted to have them available for
hunting in the prairie a couple days’ journey away.”
When disease swept Indians from the land, this entire ecological ancien
régime collapsed. Hernando De Soto’s expedition staggered through the
Southeast for four years in the early sixteenth century and saw hordes of
people but apparently didn’t see a single bison. (No account describes them,
and it seems unlikely that chroniclers would have failed to mention sighting
such an extraordinary beast.) More than a century later the French explorer
La Salle canoed down the Mississippi. Where De Soto had found
prosperous cities La Salle encountered “a solitude unrelieved by the faintest
trace of man,” wrote the nineteenth-century historian Francis Parkman.
Everywhere the French encountered bison, “grazing in herds on the great
prairies which then bordered the river.” When Indians died, the shaggy
creatures vastly extended both their range and numbers, according to
Valerius Geist, a bison researcher at the University of Calgary. “The post-
Columbian abundance of bison,” in his view, was largely due to “Eurasian
diseases that decreased [Indian] hunting.” The massive, thundering herds
were pathological, something that the land had not seen before and was
unlikely to see again.
The same may have held true for many other species. “If elk were here in
great numbers all this time, the [archaeological] sites should be chock-full
of elk bones,” Charles Kay, a wildlife ecologist at Utah State, told me. “But
the archaeologists will tell you the elk weren’t there.” In middens around
Yellowstone National Park, he said, they first show up in large numbers
about five hundred years ago, the time of the great epidemics. Until
European contact the warm coastline of California was heavily populated,
according to William S. Preston, a geographer at California State
Polytechnic University in San Luis Obispo. After Columbus everything
changed. The Indian population collapsed. Clams and mussels exploded in
number; they also grew larger. Game overran the land. Sir Francis Drake
sailed into San Francisco’s harbor in 1579 and saw a land of plenty.
“Infinite was the company of very large and fate Deere,” he announced.
How could he have known that just a century before the shoreline had been
thickly settled and the deer much more scarce?
HUMANIZED LANDSCAPES, 1491 A.D.
Complex as it is, this map of Indian effects on the environment is
incomplete; no single map could possibly do justice to the
subject. The most important omission is fire. I have highlighted
some areas where fires deliberately set by Indians effectively
controlled the landscape, but this practice played an important
ecological role throughout the hemisphere as well, except in
wettest Amazonia and northeastern North America. Similarly,
scattered clearing, burning, and earth movement for drainage
occurred in all agricultural areas—the map indicates only where
these factors were especially concentrated. (My depiction of fire-
dominated regions in the southern Amazonian highlands is highly
speculative, unlike the rest of this map. Researchers have not
established where such burning occurred—only where it seems
likely.)
Not all of these claims have been endorsed enthusiastically. Kay’s work
on elk has drawn especially heavy fire. Elk are big and Indians may have
butchered them where they fell, meaning that few elk carcasses would
appear in middens. Nonetheless, ecologists and archaeologists increasingly
agree that the destruction of Native Americans also destroyed the
ecosystems they managed. Throughout the eastern forest the open, park-like
landscapes observed by the first Europeans quickly filled in. Because they
did not burn the land with the same skill and frequency as its previous
occupants, the forests grew thicker. Left untended, maize fields filled in
with weeds, then bushes and trees. My ancestor Billington’s great-
grandchildren may not have realized it, but the impenetrable sweep of dark
forest admired by Thoreau was something that Billington never saw. Later,
of course, Europeans stripped New England almost bare of trees.
When the newcomers moved west, they were preceded by a wave of
disease and then a wave of ecological disturbance. The former crested with
fearsome rapidity; the latter sometimes took more than a century to tamp
down, and it was followed by many aftershocks. “The virgin forest was not
encountered in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,” wrote historian
Stephen Pyne, “it was invented in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries.” Far from destroying pristine wilderness, that is, Europeans
bloodily created it.
By 1800 the hemisphere was thick with artificial wilderness. If “forest
primeval” means woodland unsullied by the human presence, Denevan has
written, there was much more of it in the nineteenth century than in the
seventeenth.
The product of demographic calamity, the newly created wilderness was
indeed beautiful. But it was built on Indian graves and every bit as much a
ruin as the temples of the Maya.
NOVEL SHORES
I once visited Santarém, in the central Amazon, during the river’s annual
flood, when it wells over its banks and creeps inland for miles. Forest paths
become canals and people boat through the trees. Farmers in the floodplain
build houses and barns on stilts. Stir-crazy cattle in the barns stick their
heads out the windows and watch pink dolphins sporting on their doorsteps.
Acre-size patches of bobbing vegetation, the famous “floating islands” of
the Amazon, drift by. Ecotourists are taken in motorboats through the
drowned forest. Kids in dories chase after them, trying to sell sacks of
incredibly good fruit.
In the center of Santarém, telephone poles are made of cement, as is
usual in tropical countries that can afford them. (Wooden ones get eaten.) At
the edge of town, the authorities create poles by cutting down trees and
propping them wherever needed; in a display of lethargy, town workers do
not lop off branches, strip away bark or vines, or even remove termite
mounds. After maybe a mile they stop using logs and just string the lines on
tree branches. A little further the lines stop altogether. Beyond this the river
is occupied only by hamlets on the bluffs at the water’s edge. The biggest
building always seems to be the Pentecostal or Adventist church. After
services whooping kids fill the red-dirt churchyard and fly kites. Sometimes
they attach razor blades to the sides of the kites and in a war of all against
all try to cut each other’s strings. Except for soccer, rural Brazil’s main
sporting event seems to be Attack Kiting.
Between communities water traffic continually darts, hopscotching back
and forth with the speed of gossip even though many boats are still powered
by pushing a long pole against the bottom. At the river’s edge during flood
season are small trees inundated to the tips of their branches. Thirty feet
above them dangles the red fruit of tall kapok trees, each scarlet bulb
reflected perfectly in the still water. People make shortcuts through narrow
tunnels in the vegetation called furos. When I visited an old plantation
called Taperinha, site of an earlier Anna Roosevelt dig, the man at the tiller
abruptly turned the boat straight into the forest. We shot through a furo two
thousand feet long and six feet wide. Some furos have existed for centuries,
I was told. There have been water highways in the forest since before
Columbus.
All of this is described as “wilderness” in the tourist brochures. It’s not, if
the new generation of researchers is correct. Indeed, some believe that
fewer people may be living in rural Amazonia now than in 1491. Yet when
my boat glided into the furo the forest shut out the sky like the closing of an
umbrella. Within a few hundred yards the human presence seemed to
vanish. I felt alone and small, but in a way that was curiously like feeling
exalted. If what was around me was not wilderness, how should one think
of it? Since the fate of the forest is in our hands, what should be our goal for
its future?
European and U.S. environmentalists insist that the forest should never
be cut down or used—it should remain, as far as possible, a land without
people. In an ecological version of therapeutic nihilism, they want to leave
the river basin to its own devices. Brazilians I have encountered are usually
less than enthusiastic about this proposal. Yes, yes, we are in favor of the
environment, they say. But we also have many millions of desperately poor
people here. To develop your economy, you leveled your forests and
carpeted the land with strip malls. Why can’t we do the same? If you now
want more forest, why don’t you tear down some of your strip malls and
plant trees? Yes, yes, we are in favor of helping the poor, environmentalists
respond. But if you cut down the tropical forest, you won’t be creating
wealth. Instead you will only destroy the soil. Turning Amazonia into a
wasteland will help nobody.
These dialogues of the deaf have occurred so often that the participants
can almost recite their lines by rote. In a way, the words are curiously
weightless, for the environmentalists tend to live in, or at least reflect views
from, rich places like London, Berlin, or San Francisco. And the advocates
of development are often from São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, or Brasilia, cities
that are thousands of miles away from the Amazon and culturally almost as
remote as environmentalists’ cities. “You should see people’s faces here [in
Amazonia] when we tell them we’re from São Paulo,” Eduardo Neves told
me. “It’s like New Yorkers coming to southern Illinois, only worse. ‘My
God, aliens have invaded! Kill them before they infect us all!’”
At the same time, the clash between environmentalist and developer
cannot be dismissed. At stake, after all, is the world’s greatest forest. And
similar arguments play out in a hundred or a thousand other places that need
protection. Beneath the entangling personal motives, the debate is one of
the oldest in the Western philosophical tradition, between nomos and physis.
The ancient Greeks saw existence as a contest between nomos
(rationality/order/artifice) and physis (irrationality/chaos/nature). In
environmental terms, Thoreau, who saw the landscape as imbued with an
essential wildness that could be heedlessly destroyed, embodies physis.
Physis says, Let Nature be our guide; step out of the way of the
environment, and it will know how to keep itself healthy. Nomos is the
postmodern philosopher who argues that the entire landscape is constructed
—that it has no essential, innate qualities, but is simply a reflection of
chance and human action. Nomos says that no one ecological state is
inherently preferable to any other, but that all of them are a product of
human choices (even the ones with no people, since we will have made the
choice not to go there).
Accepting the magnitude of the Indian impact on the landscape seems to
push us toward the nomos side. In 1983 Cronon laid out the history of the
New England countryside in his landmark book, Changes in the Land. In it
he observed that wilderness as it was commonly understood simply did not
exist in the eastern United States, and had not existed for thousands of
years. (A few years later, Denevan referred to the belief in widespread
wilderness as “the pristine myth.”) When Cronon publicized this no-
wilderness scenario in an article for the New York Times, environmentalists
and ecologists attacked him as infected by relativism and postmodern
philosophy. A small academic brouhaha ensued, complete with hundreds of
footnotes. It precipitated one of the only books attacking postmodern
philosophy ever written largely by biologists. Another book, The Great New
Wilderness Debate, published in 1998, was edited by two philosophers who
earnestly identified themselves as “Euro-American men…whose cultural
legacy is patriarchal Western civilization in its current postcolonial, globally
hegemonic form.”
It is easy to tweak academics for their earnestly opaque language, as I am
doing. Nonetheless the philosophers’ concerns are understandable. The trees
closing over my head in the Amazon furo made me feel the presence of
something beyond myself, an intuition shared by almost everyone who has
walked in the woods alone. That something seemed to have rules and
resistances of its own, ones that did not stem from me. Yet the claim that the
forest was shaped by people does not seem to leave room for anything else,
anything bigger and deeper than humankind.
Understanding that nature is not normative does not mean that anything
goes. The fears come from the mistaken identification of wildness with the
forest itself. Instead the landscape is an arena for the interaction of natural
and social forces, a kind of display, and one that like all displays is not fully
under the control of its authors.
Native Americans ran the continent as they saw fit. Modern nations must
do the same. If they want to return as much of the landscape as possible to
its state in 1491, they will have to create the world’s largest gardens.
Gardens are fashioned for many purposes with many different tools, but
all are collaborations with natural forces. Rarely do their makers claim to be
restoring or rebuilding anything from the past; and they are never in full
control of the results. Instead, using the best tools they have and all the
knowledge that they can gather, they work to create future environments.
If there is a lesson it is that to think like the original inhabitants of these
lands we should not set our sights on rebuilding an environment from the
past but concentrate on shaping a world to live in for the future.
Coda
The Great Law of Peace
Fleeing the Nazi conquest of Europe, the writer Vladimir Nabokov and his
family took a ship to the United States in the spring of 1940. Although
Nabokov was the scion of a Russian noble family, he detested the class-
bound servility ubiquitous in the land of his birth. He was delighted when
the lowly U.S. customs officers on the Manhattan dock failed to cringe at
his aristocratic bearing and pedigree. Indeed, he reported, “when they
opened my suitcase and saw two pairs of boxing gloves, two officers put
them on and began boxing. The third became interested in my collection of
butterflies and even suggested one kind be called ‘captain.’ When the
boxing and the conversation about butterflies finished, the customs men
suggested I close the case and go.” Their straightforward, even brash
demeanor, with its implicit assumption that everyone was on the same
social level, enchanted him.
Nabokov was hardly the first emigré to be surprised by the difference
between Americans and Europeans—a cultural divide that Henry James,
like many others, attributed to the former’s “democratic spirit.” As has been
widely noted, this spirit has consequences both positive and negative. The
sense that anyone is as good as anyone else fuels entrepreneurial self-
reliance, but also can lead to what outsiders view as political know-
nothingism. For better and worse, though, this spirit is widely identified as
one of the Americas’ great gifts to the world. When rich stockbrokers in
London and Paris proudly retain their working-class accents, when
audiences show up at La Scala in track suits and sneakers, when South
Africans and Thais complain that the police don’t read suspects their rights
as they do on Starsky & Hutch reruns, when anti-government protesters in
Beirut sing “We Shall Overcome” in Lebanese accents—all these
raspberries in the face of social and legal authority have a distinctly
American tone, no matter where they take place. To be sure, apostles of
freedom have risen in many places. But an overwhelming number have
been inspired by the American example—or, as it should perhaps be called,
the Native American example, for among its fonts is Native American
culture, especially that of the Haudenosaunee.
A loose military alliance among the Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida,
Mohawk, and, after about 1720, the Tuscarora, the Haudenosaunee were
probably the greatest indigenous polity north of the Río Grande in the two
centuries before Columbus and definitely the greatest in the two centuries
after. The evidence is unclear, but the ancestors of the Five Nations,
neighboring bands of gatherers and hunters, may have lived in their
homeland since the glaciers retreated from the Finger Lakes—the eleven
deep, narrow lakes that lie like cat scratches across central New York State.
Some time around 1000 A.D., the Indian agricultural trinity of maize, beans,
and squash appeared in the area. Taking up agriculture, the Finger Lakes
people, by now consolidated into five main groups, lined the region’s hills
with farms. Population rose, as has happened time and time again when
human societies make the transition from foraging to farming. The
burgeoning cultures took to fighting with each other. Because the abduction,
injury, or death of a family member had to be revenged, every violent
incident led to a spiral of brutal, tit-for-tat skirmishes. From this brutal
environment a heroic figure emerged: Deganawidah, the Peacemaker.
So little is known about Deganawidah’s life that archaeologists disagree
about whether he actually walked the earth or belongs entirely to the realm
of legend. Various traditions provide different accounts of his background,
but most say that Deganawidah was not a member of the Five Nations. He
was a shamanic outsider who was born to a virgin girl in a village far to the
north. Abjuring his past, he floated from his home village in a canoe made
from white stone and wandered the Adirondack and Allegheny forests, then
a place of constant violence and, apparently, intermittent cannibalism.
Deganawidah had a message of peace. He couldn’t easily promulgate it,
though, because he had a tragic flaw: a severe speech impediment, perhaps
a stutter. Somehow he connected with Ayenwatha, an Onondaga who was a
famous orator. (As “Hiawatha,” this man became the protagonist of the
historically confused epic poem of that name by Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow.) With Ayenwatha as Deganawidah’s spokesman, the two men
confronted Tododaho, the powerful leader of the Onondaga, a shaman in his
own right, and a warrior-leader who was so deeply locked into the logic of
prideful violence that he regarded the thought of peace as a betrayal. In the
ensuing conflict Tododaho killed Ayenwatha’s three daughters, nearly
derailing the quest for peace. Other versions have the girls killed in a raid
by another group. Whatever the circumstances, Ayenwatha vowed that no
parent would ever experience such a loss again and rededicated himself to
spreading Deganawidah’s ideas.
Over the years Deganawidah and Ayenwatha persuaded the Seneca,
Cayuga, Oneida, and Mohawk to form an alliance instead of constantly
fighting. Tododaho and Onondaga continued to refuse. In a parley,
Deganawidah took a single arrow and invited Tododaho to break it, which
he did easily. Then he bundled together five arrows and asked Tododaho to
break the lot. He couldn’t. In the same way, Deganawidah prophesied, the
Five Nations, each weak on its own, would fall into darkness unless they all
banded together.
Soon after Deganawidah’s warning, a solar eclipse occurred. The shaken
Tododaho agreed to add the Onondaga to the nascent alliance. But he drove
a hard bargain, demanding that the main Onondaga village, now buried
under the present-day city of Syracuse, New York, become the headquarters
for the confederacy. Despite all the convulsions of history, the Onondaga
have kept the council fire burning for Haudenosaunee to this day. And
Tododaho has remained the title for the alliance’s main speaker.
Deganawidah laid out the new alliance’s rules of operation in the
Haudenosaunee constitution: the Great Law of Peace. When issues came up
before the alliance, the Tododaho would summon the fifty sachems who
represented the clans of the Five Nations. Different nations had different
numbers of sachems, but the inequality meant little because all decisions
had to be unanimous; the Five Nations regarded consensus as a social ideal.
As in all consensus-driven bodies, though, members felt intense pressure
not to impede progress with frivolous objections. The heads of clans, who
were all female, chose the sachems, all male. As a rule, sachems were
succeeded by their nephews, but the system was not entirely hereditary—
sachems could be impeached if they displeased their clan, and if their
nephews were not deemed fit for office, someone outside the family could
take over.
Striking to the contemporary eye, the 117 codicils of the Great Law were
concerned as much with establishing the limits on the great council’s
powers as on granting them. Its jurisdiction was strictly limited to relations
among the nations and outside groups; internal affairs were the province of
the individual nations. Although the council negotiated peace treaties, it
could not declare war—that was left to the initiative of the leaders of each
of Haudenosaunee’s constituent nations. According to the Great Law, when
the council of sachems was deciding upon “an especially important matter
or a great emergency,” its members had to “submit the matter to the
decision of their people” in a kind of referendum.
In creating such checks on authority, the league was just the most formal
expression of a region-wide tradition. The sachems of Indian groups on the
eastern seaboard were absolute monarchs in theory. In practice, wrote
colonial leader Roger Williams, “they will not conclude of ought…unto
which the people are averse.” The league was predicated, in short, on the
consent of the governed, without which the entire enterprise would collapse.
Compared to the despotic societies that were the norm in Europe and Asia,
Haudenosaunee was a libertarian dream.
In the same sense, it was also a feminist dream: the Five Nations were
largely governed internally by the female clan heads, and the Great Law
explicitly ordered council members to heed “the warnings of your women
relatives.” Failure to do so would lead to their removal. The equality
granted to women was not the kind envisioned by contemporary Western
feminists—men and women were not treated as equivalent. Rather, the
sexes were assigned to two separate social domains, neither subordinate to
the other. No woman could be a war chief; no man could lead a clan.
Anthropologists debate the extent of women’s clout under this “separate-
but-equal” arrangement, but according to University of Toledo historian
Barbara Mann, author of Iroquoian Women: The Gantowisas (2004), the
female-led clan councils set the agenda of the League—“men could not
consider a matter not sent to them by the women.” Women, who held title to
all the land and its produce, could vote down decisions by the male leaders
of the League and demand that an issue be reconsidered. Under this regime
women were so much better off than their counterparts in Europe that
nineteenth-century U.S. feminists like Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady
Stanton, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, all of whom lived in Haudenosaunee
country, drew inspiration from their lot.
According to Haudenosaunee tradition, the alliance was founded
centuries before Europeans arrived. Non-Indian researchers long treated this
claim to antiquity with skepticism. The league, in their view, was inherently
fragile and fissiparous; if it had been founded a thousand years ago, it would
have broken up well before the Pilgrims. And there was little archaeological
evidence that the league had existed for many centuries. But both traditional
lore and contemporary astronomical calculations suggest that
Haudenosaunee dates back to between 1090 and 1150 A.D. The former date
was calculated by Seneca historian Paula Underwood, who based her
estimate on the tally of generations in oral records. The latter came from
historian Mann and her Toledo colleague, astronomer Jerry Fields. The Five
Nations recorded the succession of council members with a combination of
pegs and carved images on long wooden cylinders called Condolence
Canes. (Iroquois pictographs could convey sophisticated ideas, but
functioned more as a mnemonic aid than a true writing system. The
symbols were not conventionalized—that is, one person could not easily
read a document composed by another.) According to Mohawk historian
Jake Swamp, 145 Tododahos spoke for the league between its founding and
1995, when Mann and Fields made their calculation. With this figure in
hand, Mann and Fields calculated the average tenure of more than three
hundred other lifetime appointments, including popes, European kings and
queens, and U.S. Supreme Court justices. Multiplying the average by the
number of Tododahos, the two researchers estimated that the alliance was
probably founded in the middle of the twelfth century. To check this
estimate, Mann and Fields turned to astronomical tables. Before 1600, the
last total solar eclipse observable in upstate New York occurred on August
31, 1142. If Mann and Fields are correct, this was the date on which
Tododaho accepted the alliance. The Haudenosaunee thus would have the
second oldest continuously existing representative parliaments on earth.
Only Iceland’s Althing, founded in 930 A.D., is older.
Scholars debate these estimates, but nobody disputes that the
Haudenosaunee exemplified the formidable tradition of limited government
and personal autonomy shared by many cultures north of the Río Grande.
To some extent, this freedom simply reflected North American Indians’
relatively recent adoption of agriculture. Early farming villages worldwide
were much less authoritarian places than later societies. But the Indians of
the eastern seaboard institutionalized their liberty to an unusual extent—the
Haudenosaunee especially, but many others, too. (“Their whole constitution
breathes nothing but liberty,” said colonist James Adair of the Ani Yun Wiya
[Cherokee].) Important historically, these were the free people encountered
by France and Britain—personifications of democratic self-government so
vivid that some historians and activists have argued that the Great Law of
Peace directly inspired the U.S. Constitution.
Taken literally, this assertion seems implausible. With its grant of
authority to the federal government to supersede state law, its dependence
on rule by the majority rather than consensus, its bicameral legislature
(members of one branch being simultaneously elected), and its denial of
suffrage to women, slaves, and the unpropertied, the Constitution as
originally enacted was sharply different from the Great Law. In addition, the
Constitution’s emphasis on protecting private property runs contrary to
Haudenosaunee traditions of communal ownership. But in a larger sense,
the claim is correct. The framers of the Constitution, like most colonists in
what would become the United States, were pervaded by Indian ideals and
images of liberty.
In the first two centuries of colonization, the border between natives and
newcomers was porous, almost nonexistent. The two societies mingled in a
way that is difficult to imagine now; Europeans had close-up views of their
indigenous neighbors. In a letter to Thomas Jefferson, the aging John
Adams recalled the Massachusetts of his youth as a multiracial society.
“Aaron Pomham the Priest and Moses Pomham the King of the Punkapaug
and Neponsit Tribes were frequent Visitors at my Father’s House,” he wrote
nostalgically. “There was a numerous Family in this Town [Quincy,
Massachusetts, where Adams grew up], whose Wigwam was within a Mile
of this House.” They frequently visited Adams, “and I in my boyish
Rambles used to call at their Wigwam, where I never failed to be treated
with Whortle Berries, Blackberries, Strawberries or Apples, Plumbs,
Peaches, etc.” Benjamin Franklin was equally familiar with Native
American life; as a diplomat, he negotiated with the Haudenosaunee in
1753. Among his closest friends was Conrad Weiser, an adopted Mohawk,
and the Indians’ unofficial host at the talks. And one of the mainstays of
Franklin’s printing business was the publication of Indian treaties, then
viewed as critical state documents.
As Franklin and many others noted, Indian life—not only among the
Haudenosaunee, but throughout the Northeast—was characterized by a
level of personal autonomy unknown in Europe. Franklin’s ancestors may
have emigrated from Europe to escape oppressive rules, but colonial
societies were still vastly more coercive and class-ridden than indigenous
villages. “Every man is free,” the frontiersman Robert Rogers told a
disbelieving British audience, referring to Indian villages. In these places,
he said, no other person, white or Indian, sachem or slave, “has any right to
deprive [anyone] of his freedom.” As for the Haudenosaunee, colonial
administrator Cadwallader Colden declared in 1749, they had “such
absolute Notions of Liberty, that they allow of no Kind of Superiority of
one over another, and banish all Servitude from their Territories.” (Colden,
who later became vice governor of New York, was an adoptee of the
Mohawks.)
Rogers and Colden admired these Indians, but not every European did.
“The Savage does not know what it is to obey,” complained the French
explorer Nicolas Perrot in the 1670s. Indians “think every one ought to be
left to his own Opinion, without being thwarted,” the Jesuit Louis Hennepin
wrote twenty years later. The Indians, he grumbled, “believe what they
please and no more”—a practice dangerous, in Hennepin’s view, to a well-
ordered society. “There is nothing so difficult to control as the tribes of
America,” another Jesuit unhappily observed. “All these barbarians have
the law of wild asses—they are born, live, and die in a liberty without
restraint; they do not know what is meant by bridle and bit.”
Indian insistence on personal liberty was accompanied by an equal
insistence on social equality. Northeastern Indians were appalled by the
European propensity to divide themselves into social classes, with those on
the lower rungs of the hierarchy compelled to defer to those on the upper.
The French adventurer Louis Armand de Lom d’Arce, Baron of Lahontan,
lived in French Canada between 1683 and 1694 and frequently visited the
Huron. When the baron expatiated upon the superior practices of Europe,
the Indians were baffled. The Huron, he reported in an account of his
American years, could not understand why
one Man should have more than another, and that the Rich should have
more Respect than the Poor…. They brand us for Slaves, and call us
miserable Souls, whose Life is not worth having, alleging, That we
degrade ourselves in subjecting our selves to one Man [a king] who
possesses the whole Power, and is bound by no Law but his own
Will…. [Individual Indians] value themselves above anything that you
can imagine, and this is the reason they always give for’t, That one’s as
much Master as another, and since Men are all made of the same Clay
there should be no Distinction or Superiority among them. [Emphasis
in original.]
The essayist Montaigne had noted the same antiauthoritarian attitudes a
century earlier. Indians who visited France, he wrote, “noticed among us
some men gorged to the full with things of every sort while their other
halves were beggars at their doors, emaciated with hunger and poverty.
They found it strange that these poverty-stricken halves should suffer [that
is, tolerate] such injustice, and that they did not take the others by the throat
or set fire to their houses.”
I asked seven anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians if they
would rather have been a typical citizen of Europe or the Haudenosaunee in
1491. None was delighted by the question, because it asked them to judge
the past by the standards of today—a fallacy disparaged as “presentism” by
social scientists. But every one of the seven chose the Indians. Some early
colonists gave the same answer. The leaders of Jamestown tried to persuade
Indians to transform themselves into Europeans. Embarrassingly, almost all
of the traffic was the other way—scores of English joined the locals despite
promises of dire punishment. The same thing happened in New England.
Puritan leaders were horrified when some members of a rival English
settlement began living with the Massachusett Indians. My ancestor’s desire
to join them led to trumped-up murder charges for which he was executed
—or, anyway, that’s what my grandfather told me.
When an Indian Child has been brought up among us [Franklin
lamented in 1753], taught our language and habituated to our Customs,
yet if he goes to see his relations and makes one Indian Ramble with
them, there is no perswading him ever to return. [But] when white
persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians,
and lived a while among them, tho’ ransomed by their Friends, and
treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay
among the English, yet in a Short time they become disgusted with our
manner of life…and take the first good Opportunity of escaping again
into the Woods, when there is no reclaiming them.
Influenced by their proximity to Indians—by being around living,
breathing role models of human liberty—European colonists adopted their
insubordinate attitudes, which “troubled the power elite of France,” the
historian Cornelius J. Jaenen observed. Baron d’Arce was an example,
despite his noble title; as the passage he italicized suggests, his account
highlighted Indian freedoms as an incitement toward rebellion. In Voltaire’s
Candide, the eponymous hero is saved from death at the hands of an
imaginary group of Indians only when they discover that he is not, as they
think, a priest; the author’s sympathy with the anticlerical, antiauthoritarian
views of Indians he called “Oreillons” is obvious. Both the clergy and Louis
XIV, the king whom Baron d’Arce was goading, tried to suppress these
dangerous ideas by instructing French officials to force a French education
upon the Indians, complete with lessons in deferring to their social betters.
The attempts, Jaenen reported, were “everywhere unsuccessful.”
In the most direct way, Indian liberty made indigenous villages into
competitors for colonists’ allegiance. Colonial societies could not become
too oppressive, because their members—surrounded by examples of free
life—always had the option to vote with their feet. It is likely that the first
British villages in North America, thousands of miles from the House of
Lords, would have lost some of the brutally graded social hierarchy that
characterized European life. But it is also clear that they were infused by the
democratic, informal brashness of Native American culture. That spirit
alarmed and discomfited many Europeans, toff and peasant alike. But it is
also clear that many others found it a deeply attractive vision of human
possibility.
Historians have been puzzlingly reluctant to acknowledge this
contribution to the end of tyranny worldwide. Think of I. Bernard Cohen
claiming that Enlightenment philosophers derived their ideas of freedom
from Newtonian physics, when a plain reading of their texts shows that
Locke, Hume, Rousseau, and Thomas Paine took many of their illustrations
of liberty from native examples. So did the Boston colonists who held their
anti-British Tea Party dressed as “Mohawks.” When others took up
European intellectuals’ books and histories, images of Indian freedom
exerted an impact far removed in time and space from the sixteenth-century
Northeast. For much the same reason as their confreres in Boston, protesters
in South Korea, China, and Ukraine wore “Native American” makeup in,
respectively, the 1980s, 1990s, and the first years of this century.
So accepted now around the world is the idea of the implicit equality and
liberty of all people that it is hard to grasp what a profound change in
human society it represented. But it is only a little exaggeration to claim
that everywhere that liberty is cherished—Britain to Bangladesh, Sweden to
Soweto—people are children of the Haudenosaunee and their neighbors.
Imagine—here let me now address non-Indian readers—somehow meeting
a member of the Haudenosaunee from 1491. Is it too much to speculate that
beneath the swirling tattoos, asymmetrically trimmed hair, and bedizened
robes, you would recognize someone much closer to yourself, at least in
certain respects, than your own ancestors?
When I set out to write 1491, my hope was that it would introduce readers
to a subject that I found fascinating. For this reason I wanted to have a fuller
bibliography than is usual in popular works—I wished to point people to
the original sources, so that readers who were interested could find out
more.
Most of the researchers whose work I covered have been very kind about
1491, but I knew from the beginning that few would be completely
satisfied. Any book so broad in scope risks getting the details wrong;
besides, it was written by a journalist, and journalists and scholars
notoriously have different interests and styles.
As it turned out, the section that drew the greatest criticism was the coda.
If I could write the book over again, I would go in more detail there, both to
explain my point better and because the section exemplifies, to my mind,
why the book’s subtitle is justified, even though (as some archaeologically
sophisticated readers have complained) some of the “new revelations”
chronicled in 1491 occurred fifty years ago. More than fifty, in fact—some
of the demographic estimates I describe in the first section date to the
1940s.
The reason for the subtitle is that for the most part these revelations—the
great antiquity, size, and sophistication of Indian societies—are new to the
public. The question, implicit in the previous, is the cause of the gap. Why
don’t intelligent non-specialists, the sort of people who know a bit about
stem cells and read contemporary literature, already know something about
how researchers think of the Americas before Columbus? Another way of
putting the question would be to ask: Why isn’t this material already in
high-school textbooks?
In the past one could have simply pointed to institutional racism. Today,
though, when textbooks are routinely criticized for overemphasizing the
stories of minorities and women, it seems hard to imagine that
ethnocentrism accounts for the relative lack of attention paid to the
indigenous world. To my mind, the culprit nowadays is more likely to be
disciplinary boundaries. Except possibly for China and Japan, non-Western
societies have generally been regarded as the province of anthropology and
archaeology. As a result, the historians who write school textbooks have all
too often waved their hands at the first fifteen or twenty thousand years of
American history in an obligatory first chapter and then moved quickly into
fields they find more congenial. Even today, a surprising number of
historians remain unaware of the discoveries and methodologies of their
colleagues in anthropology, archaeology, geography, and cultural studies.
Similarly, many anthropologists know little of what has been called
“ethnohistory.” While I was giving a presentation about this book at a large
U.S. university, a man in the audience, identifying himself as an American
historian, asked me how he could learn more about this material. I am not
mocking him for asking—I was delighted that he wanted to know the
answer. But at the same time I was amazed: He was in an audience full of
professors and graduate students who could have answered his every
question. Repeated incidents of this sort have convinced me that his lack of
knowledge was not exceptional.
Change is occurring, but there is still no account, to cite but one example,
of the conquest of Mexico that masters the evidence in both Spanish and
Nahuatl to portray the two sides in equal depth. The lack is amazing, given
that the conquest is one of the most pivotal moments in recent history—it
delivered the vast wealth of the Americas to Europe, and that newly
acquired wealth played a principal role in Europe’s rise to dominance.
To be sure, a number of historians have worked to portray the indigenous
side in post-contact history. (One U.S. example is Alan Gallay’s The Indian
Slave Trade, a remarkable history of the pre-Revolutionary Southeast that
appeared in 2003; another is Alan Taylor’s The Divided Ground, a study of
British-Haudenosaunee relations in the Revolutionary era, from 2006.) But
even many of these writers have shied away from awarding Indians the
status of full participants—by asking, for example, how native societies
influenced the colonial societies that mingled with them.
This criticism applies primarily to historians of North America. South of
the Rio Grande, the indigenous influence on colonial and post-colonial
society has been celebrated for decades. (This celebration, which has been
convenient for nationalistic reasons, has not always led to teaching Latin
American children accurately about those native societies, or to treating
contemporary indigenous people fairly.) The native imprint is obvious in the
arts; the art and architecture produced by the synthesis of Indian and
European styles in colonial Mesoamerica, the Clark University art historian
Gauvin Alexander Bailey argued in a 2005 monograph, is “one of
humanity’s greatest and most pluralistic achievements.” But this synthesis
is apparent in many other aspects of the culture, too, as would be expected
in a place where three-quarters of the population claims some Indian
descent.
North of the Rio Grande the possibility of such influences are often
ignored when not denied. To some extent this is understandable. After all,
Indians were and are less numerous in the North. And most native societies
in what is now the United States and Canada did not have written
languages, monumental public architecture, or the wide-ranging aesthetic
traditions of their neighbors to the south. Yet European colonists mingled
with intact native cultures for some three centuries. Colonist Susanna
Johnson described eighteenth-century New Hampshire, for example, as
“such a mix…of savages and settlers, without established laws to govern
them, that the state of society cannot easily be described.” During those
centuries, Indians were greatly influenced—culturally, technologically,
intellectually—by colonists. It seems implausible that the exchange could
have been entirely one-way—that the natives have had little or no long-
lasting impact on the newcomers. At the least the claim is something to be
demonstrated rather than assumed.
Scholars have acknowledged such borrowings as moccasins, maize, and
military tactics, such as the Indian-style guerrilla skirmishes with which the
rebellious colonists bedeviled British soldiers. (“In this country,” Gen. John
Forbes argued in 1758, “wee must comply and learn the Art of Warr, from
Enemy Indians.”) With such adaptive changes, as the historian James Axtell
has called them, Europeans employed Indian technology and tactics to
achieve their goals. But they did not change how they viewed themselves or
the world. According to an influential essay Axtell published in 1981, the
most important role Indians played in the evolution of the United States was
as “military foes and cultural foes”—to be the “otherness” that colonists
reacted against. “The whole colonial experience of trying to solve a related
series of ‘Indian problems’ had much to do with giving the colonists an
identity indissolubly linked to America,” he wrote. Collectively recoiling
from the native population of the Americas, Europeans learned how to
become a new version of themselves.
Here, though, most historians have stopped. They have seen the
Algonkian- and Iroquoian-speaking societies they encountered in the
Northeast as too different from British societies to have exerted lasting
changes on them. How could these hierarchical, acquisitive, market-
oriented, monotheistic, ethnocentric newcomers have absorbed ideas and
customs from the egalitarian, reciprocal, noncapitalistic, pantheistic,
ethnocentric natives? My suggestion that the Haudenosaunee could have
had an impact on the American character is “naïve,” according to Alan
Taylor, because it “minimizes the cultural divide separating consensual
natives from coercive colonists.” Perhaps so, but then skeptics must explain
how the cultural divide between Indians and Spaniards, who did deeply
influence each other, could have been so much smaller.
(The historian Francis Jennings has wondered how “Iroquois
propagandists,” as he calls them, can cite Benjamin Franklin’s words about
Indians, as I did, given his oft-expressed “contempt for ‘ignorant
Savages.’…But people believe what they want to believe in the face of
logic and evidence.” The argument is baffling; it is like claiming that
African-Americans had no impact on European-American culture, because
the latter was racist and systematically oppressed the former.)
To Europeans, Indians were living demonstrations of wholly novel ways
of being human—exemplary cases that were mulled over, though rarely
understood completely, by countless Europeans. Colonists and stay-at-
homes, intellectuals and commoners, all struggled to understand, according
to the sociologist-historian Denys Delâge, of Laval University, in Québec,
“the very existence of these relatively egalitarian societies, so different in
their structure and social relationships than those of Europe.” Montaigne,
Rousseau, Locke, Voltaire, Jefferson, Franklin, and Thomas Paine were
among the writers who mulled over the differences between native and
European ways of life; some pondered Indian criticism of European
societies. The result, Delâge explained, was to promote a new attitude of
“cultural relativism” that in turn fed Enlightenment era debates “about the
republican form of government, the rearing of children, and the ideals of
freedom, equality, brotherhood, and the right to happiness.”
Cultural influence is difficult to pin down in documents and concrete
actions. Nevertheless it exists. In 1630 John Winthrop led what was then the
largest party of would-be colonists from Britain—some seven hundred
people—to Massachusetts, where they founded the city of Boston. As the
expedition was under way, the deeply religious Winthrop explained his
vision of what the new colony should become: “a citty upon a hill.” The
city would be ruled by the principles of the Pilgrim’s God. Among these
principles: the Supreme Deity loves each person equally, but He did not
intend them to play equal roles in society:
GOD ALMIGHTY in his most holy and wise providence, hath soe
disposed of the condition of mankind, as in all times some must be
rich, some poore, some high and eminent in power and dignitie; others
mean and in submission.
Winthrop’s ideal community, that is, was not a place of equal opportunity,
nor a place where social distinctions were erased; the “mean” circumstances
of the poor were “in all times” part of God’s plan, and could not be greatly
changed (if poor people got too far behind, the rich were supposed to help
them). The social ideal was responsible adherence to religiously inspired
authority, not democratic self-rule.
The reality turned out to be different. Instead of creating Winthrop’s
vision of an ordered society, the Pilgrims actually invented the raucous,
ultra-democratic New England town meeting—a system of governance, the
Dartmouth historian Colin Calloway observes, that “displays more
attributes of Algonkian government by consensus than of Puritan
government by the divinely ordained.” To me, it seems unlikely that the
surrounding Indian example had nothing to do with the change.
Accepting that indigenous societies influenced American culture opens
up fascinating new questions. To begin with, it is possible that native
societies could also have exercised a malign influence (this is why the
subject is not necessarily “pious” or “romantic primitivism,” as the Oxford
historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto has complained). Look to the
Southeast, where, as Taylor has noted, “colonial societies sustained a slave
system more oppressive than anything practiced in Europe” and “the slave-
owners relied on Indians to catch runaways.” There, too, the native groups,
descended from Mississippian societies, were far more hierarchical and
autocratically ruled than the Algonkian- and Iroquoian-speaking groups in
the Northeast. As Gallay has documented, indigenous societies cooperated
fully with the slave-trading system, sending war captives to colonists for
sale overseas. In the Northeast, by contrast, the Wendat (Huron) and
Haudenosaunee either killed or, more common, adopted captives;
involuntary servitude, though it occurred, was strikingly rarer.
On the map, the division line between slave and non-slave societies
occurs in Virginia, broadly anticipating the Mason-Dixon line that later split
slave states from free. The repeated pattern doubtless has to do with
geography—southeastern climate and soil favor plantation crops like
tobacco and cotton. And southern colonists’ preference for slavery
presumably reflected their different ethnic, class, and religious
backgrounds. But can one readily dismiss the different Indian societies who
lived in these places? And if not, to what extent are contemporary American
conflicts over race the playing out, at least in part, of a cultural divide that
came into being hundreds of years before Columbus?
A few personal remarks: After the first publication of this book, a number of
readers and researchers contacted me with observations and criticisms,
many of which made their way into this updated and corrected edition.
Some book reviewers, too, drew my attention to errors, which I have tried
to fix. For this help, I thank T. Chad Amos, David B. Bieler, Alfred W.
Crosby, Todd Follansbee, Daniel W. Gade, Berl Golomb, Bob Hart, Bruce
Johansen, Jeff Kellem, Elias Levy, Barbara Mann, William H. McNeill,
Daniel N. Paul, Victor Sanchez, Jeffrey Shallit, Ted Slusarczyk, Michael M.
Smith, Rev. Steve Thom, Rick Uyesugi, and Ronald Wright. I am sure I
have left out some names—not until relatively late in the process did I
begin keeping records. A couple of people read all or part of the published
book a second time after having read it a first time in manuscript. One of
these gluttons for punishment, Frances Karttunen, gave my Nahuatl
orthography a second critique (it is still imperfect, but I hope improved); I
also profited from her other insights. William Denevan, too, went through
everything again with blue pencil in hand. I am indebted to both. A number
of bloggers weighed in, for which my especial thanks to James Hannam
(Venerable Bede), Chris Price (Layman) and Laura Gjovaag (Tegan).
My gratitude to the Conference of Latin Americanist Geographers,
which, under the direction of Antoinette WinklerPrins and Narciso Barrera
Bassols, organized a special panel on 1491 at their annual congress in
Michoacán, Mexico. On the panel were William Doolittle, Suzanna Hecht,
George Lovell, Billie Lee Turner, William I. Woods, and again William
Denevan. Through the auspices of Jerry Dobson (to whom my thanks) the
proceedings will be published in the Geographical Review. Finally, I am
saddened to note that just before this book appeared the archaeologist Jim
Petersen, whom I had come to consider a friend, was murdered during a
stupid robbery in the Amazon. I hope that in a small way this book reflects
the infectious delight he took in unveiling the human story, and in
explaining his discoveries—and those of his colleagues—to anyone who
wanted to learn.
Loaded Words
Anyone who attempts to write or even speak about the original inhabitants
of the Americas quickly runs into terminological quicksand. And the
attempt to extricate writer and reader by being logical and sensitive often
ends with both parties sucked deeper into the mire. The difficulties fall into
two broad categories: names for individual groups of Indians, and names for
social categories used to classify those groups. Most well known among the
former is “Indian,” a term so long recognized as absurd that in the 1960s
and 1970s social scientists moved to change it to “Native American” or,
sometimes, “Amerindian.”
The change was well meaning, but not entirely successful. On a literal
level, the replacement name is as problematic as the original. “Native
American” is intended to refer to the peoples who inhabited the Americas
before Columbus arrived and their descendants today. Literally, though, it
means something else: as the activist Russell Means has complained,
“Anyone born in the western hemisphere is a Native American.” Worse, the
term introduces an entirely new set of confusions. “Indian” does not refer to
the Inuit, Aleut, and other peoples of the far north, whose cultures,
languages, and even physical appearance are so different from their
neighbors to the south that researchers generally argue they must have come
to the Americas in a separate, much later wave of migration (though still
many centuries ahead of Columbus). But all of them are Native Americans,
which eliminates a distinction found useful by both scholars and indigenous
peoples themselves.
In conversation, every native person whom I have met (I think without
exception) has used “Indian” rather than “Native American.” One day I said
“Native American” when speaking to a Bolivian graduate student of
indigenous descent. She shook her head dismissively at the phrase. “Aquí
somos indios,” she explained. “Los ‘americanos nativos’ viven solamente
en los Estados Unidos.” We are Indians here. “Native Americans” live only
in the United States. “I abhor the term Native American,” Means declared in
- Matching his actions to his words, Means had joined and become
prominent in an indigenous-rights group called the American Indian
Movement. “We were enslaved as American Indians,” he wrote, “we were
colonized as American Indians, and we will gain our freedom as American
Indians, and then we will call ourselves any damn thing we choose.” (At the
same time, the common British usage of “Red Indian” to distinguish
American natives from “East Indians” is unwelcome.)
Historically speaking, both “Indian” and “Native American” are remote
from the way America’s first peoples thought about themselves. Much as
the inhabitants of the tenth-century Carolingian Empire did not describe
themselves as “Europeans,” a name coined in the seventeenth century, the
inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere in that same era did not think in
terms of “Indians,” “Native Americans,” or any other collective
hemispheric entity. Instead they regarded themselves as belonging to their
immediate group—the Patuxet village in the Wampanoag confederation, for
instance.
To a considerable extent, the same holds true today. When Russell
Thornton, the UCLA anthropologist, kindly sent me some copies of his
work, he enclosed his curriculum vitae, which identified him as a
“registered member of the Cherokee Nation,” not as an Indian, Native
American, Amerindian, or indigenous person. When I mentioned this to
Thornton, he responded that only one experience united the diverse peoples
of the Americas: being flattened by European incursions. “‘Indians’ or
‘Native Americans’ as a category both owe their existence to Europe,” he
said.
For all these reasons, this book uses “Indian” and “Native American”
interchangeably, with the latter serving mainly to avoid repetition.
Note, though, that I use these terms as cultural and geographical
categories, not racial ones. “Indian” is the Western Hemisphere’s equivalent
to “European,” not to “white” or “Caucasian.” Racial categories are
inevitably problematic, because they are ostensibly biological—that is, they
are supposed to be based on heritable physical characteristics like skin color
—but in fact are heavily cultural, as demonstrated by the infamous “one
drop” rule in the nineteenth-century southern United States, which
proclaimed that men and women were Negroes, even when they could not
be distinguished by whites from appearance, if any of their ancestors, no
matter how remote, were African. Avoiding such inconsistency and
ambiguity is easier if one eschews categorizing by race, which I have tried
to do, except for the occasional rhetorical flourish.
In referring to particular groups of Indians—the Wampanoag or the Maya
—I use a simple rule of thumb: I try to call groups by the name preferred by
their members. This approach, which seems only courteous, is sometimes
attacked as condescending. After all, the argument runs, people in the
United States use the English labels “French” and “German” rather than
français and Deutsch. To insist on using “proper” names for Indians is thus
to place them in a special category of fragility. But this objection is not well
thought out. Although English-speakers do speak of “Germans” rather than
Deutscher, “French people” rather than les français, they tend to avoid
insulting terms like “Kraut” and “Frog.” Many common names for Indian
groups are equally insulting, or descended from such insults.
Unsurprisingly, they are slowly being changed.
My “simple” rule of thumb to call people by the name they prefer is more
complex than it may seem. The far north, for example, is home to a
constellation of related societies generally known as “Eskimo,” but in the
1980s this term was replaced by “Inuit” in Canada, where most of these
groups live, after complaints that “Eskimo” came from a pejorative term in
Algonquian language that meant “eater of raw flesh.” Why this would be
bothersome seems unclear, because raw meat is a preferred part of
northerners’ diet, much as sushi is favored by the Japanese. In any case,
linguists believe that “Eskimo” actually stems from the Algonquian terms
for “snowshoe netter” or “people who speak a different language,” neither
of which seems especially derogatory. Worse for contemporary purposes,
“Inuit” is also the name of a specific subgroup of Arctic societies, to which
such northern indigenous peoples as the Aleutiiq in the Aleutian Islands and
Innu in Labrador do not belong. If that weren’t enough, the Inupiat in
Alaska, who belong to the Inuit subgroup but speak a different language
than their cousins in Canada, have generally resisted the term “Inuit” in
favor of “Alaska Native” or, sometimes, “Eskimo.”
An additional source of confusion occurs when indigenous languages
have different romanization schemes. Runa Simi (Quechua), the group of
languages spoken in the former Inka empire, has several; I have tried to
follow the one promulgated by the Peruvian Academia Mayor de la Lengua
Quechua in 1995, which seems to be slowly gaining popularity. The choice
is more difficult for the three dozen languages grouped as “Maya.” As an
example, the name of the ruler slain at the beginning of Chapter 8 has been
rendered as, among other things, Toh-Chak-Ich’ak, Chak Toh Ich’ak, and
Chak Tok Ich’aak; his title, “lord,” has been romanized as ahau, ahaw, ajau,
ajaw, and even axaw. In 1989 the Ministry of Culture and Sports in
Guatemala published a standardized orthography for Maya. Unfortunately,
Mexico has a different one. Indeed, it has several. Various Mexican
agencies have issued putatively official orthographies, most based on
Alfredo Barrera Vásquez’s classic Diccionario Maya Cordemex, all
intended to “help save these languages from extinction.” In this book, I
throw up my hands and spell Maya names as they appear in the most
authoritative recent source I have come across: Chronicle of the Maya
Kings and Queens, by the epigraphers Simon Martin and Nikolai Grube.
(None of this is to say that I have not made mistakes or sometimes failed to
follow my own rules. I’m sure I have done exactly that, though I tried not
to.)
The second type of problem, that of categorization, is equally knotty.
Take the word “civilization”—“a saltpeter of a word, often triggering
explosive arguments,” Alfred Crosby has written. The arguments occur
when cultures are deemed not to be civilizations; are they therefore
“uncivilized”? Archaeologists and anthropologists have proposed dozens of
definitions and argue about whether the existence of a written language is
essential. If it is, there may have been no Indian civilizations outside
Mesoamerica. Yet other parts of the Americas are filled with ruins
(Tiwanaku, Marajó, Cahokia) that would be described as the product of a
civilization if they were anywhere else in the world. The distinction seems
to me unhelpful. Like Crosby, I use the word “not in moral comment, but
simply in reference to peoples settled in cities, villages, hamlets, and to the
kinds of political, economic, social, and military structures associated with
such populations.”
Sometimes researchers attempt to avoid the whole debate by substituting
the term “complex society.” Not much is gained thereby, because it implies
that hunters and gatherers have simple lives. A century ago, anthropologist
Franz Boas demonstrated the contrary as he struggled to fathom the mind-
bogglingly elaborate patterns of Northwest Coast Indian life. Still, the term
has some resonance. As societies grow larger, their members become more
encrusted by manufactured goods, both standardized for the mass consumer
and custom-made for the elite. Along with this growth comes a growth in
the size and variety of the technological infrastructure. It is in this material
sense that I use the words “complex” and “sophisticated.”
In this book I tend to marshal terms like “king” and “nation” rather than
“chief” and “tribe.” Supposedly the latter refer mainly to kin-based societies
whereas the former are for bigger societies based on a shared group identity.
In practice, though, “chief” and “tribe” have historically been used to refer
disparagingly to frontier cultures conquered by larger societies. In textbooks
the Roman emperors, heroic custodians of Greco-Roman civilization, are
always fighting off the “barbarian chiefs” of the “Germanic tribes.” But
these “tribes” had rulers who lived in big palaces, held sway over sizable
domains, and had to abide by written codes of law. The Burgundian “tribe”
even conquered Rome and set up its own puppet Roman emperor in the fifth
century. (He was killed by another “tribe,” which installed its own
emperor.)
Maps of fifth- and sixth-century Europe usually depict the “Celtic
kingdoms,” “Kingdom of the Lombards,” and so on, their borders marked
by the solid lines we associate with national frontiers. But entities of equal
or greater size and technological sophistication in the Western Hemisphere
are routinely called “chiefdoms” and “tribes,” implying they are somehow
different and of smaller scale. And fuzzy lines mark their borders, as if to
indicate the looseness with which they were organized and defined. “‘Tribe’
and ‘chiefdom’ are not neutral scientific terms,” archaeologist Alice Beck
Kehoe has declared. “They are politically loaded.” I have mostly avoided
them.
In general, I have tried to use the terms that historians of Europe or Asia
would use to describe social and political entities of similar size and
complexity. This approach risks obliterating the real differences between, to
cite one example, the court in Qosqo and the court in Madrid. But it
supports one of the larger aims of this book: to explain in lay terms
researchers’ increasing recognition that the Western Hemisphere played a
role in the human story just as interesting and important as that of the
Eastern Hemisphere.
A final note: throughout the text, I use the European terminology of B.C.
and A.D. Many researchers object to them as ethnically bound. In truth, it is
a little odd to be talking about “years before Christ” in reference to people
whose cultural traditions have nothing to do with Christianity. But no
plausible substitutes are available. Some historians use B.C.E. to mean
“before the Common era,” but because the Common Era calendar is just a
renamed Christian calendar that still places past events in reference to
Christianity, the main objection. One could switch to a neutral calendar, like
the Julian calendar used by astronomers (the latter at least doesn’t get
tripped up by zero—it is the first European calendar as sophisticated as the
Mesoamerican Long Count). This doesn’t seem useful; to discharge their
informational content, readers will have to translate Julian dates back into
what they know, the familiar A.D. and B.C. It seems only kind to save them
the bother.
Talking Knots
All known written accounts of the Inka were set down after the conquest,
most by Spaniards who had, of course, never experienced the empire in its
heyday. Because many of the chroniclers tried to do their job
conscientiously, most scholars use their reports, despite their deficiencies, as
I do in this book. For obvious reasons historians of the Inka have never
liked being forced to rely exclusively on post-conquest, non-native written
sources, but there seemed to be no avoiding it.
Recently, though, some researchers have come to believe that the Inka
did have a written language—indeed, that Inka texts are displayed in
museums around the world, but that they have generally not been
recognized as such. Here I am referring to the bunches of knotted strings
known as khipu (or quipu, as the term is often spelled). Among the most
fascinating artifacts of Tawantinsuyu, they consist of a primary cord,
usually a third to a half an inch in diameter, from which dangle thinner
“pendant” strings—typically more than a hundred, but on occasion as many
as 1,500. The pendant strings, which sometimes have subsidiary strings
attached, bear clusters of knots, each tied in one of three ways. The result,
in the dry summary of George Gheverghese Joseph, a University of
Manchester mathematics historian, “resembles a mop that has seen better
days.”
According to colonial accounts, khipukamayuq—“knot keepers,” in
Ruma Suni—parsed the knots both by inspecting them visually and by
running their fingers along them, Braille-style, sometimes accompanying
this by manipulating black and white stones. For example, to assemble a
history of the Inka empire the Spanish governor Cristóbal Vaca de Castro
summoned khipukamayuq to “read” the strings in 1542. Spanish scribes
recorded their testimony but did not preserve the khipu; indeed, they may
have destroyed them. Later the Spanish became so infuriated when khipu
records contradicted their version of events that in 1583 they ordered that
all the knotted strings in Peru be burned as idolatrous objects. Only about
six hundred escaped the flames.
All known writing systems employ instruments to paint or inscribe on flat
surfaces. Khipu, by contrast, are three-dimensional arrays of knots.
Although Spanish chronicles repeatedly describe khipukamayuq consulting
their khipu, most researchers could not imagine that such strange-looking
devices could actually be written records. Instead they speculated that khipu
must be mnemonic devices—personalized memorization aids, like rosaries
—or, at most, textile abacuses. The latter view gained support in 1923,
when science historian L. Leland Locke proved that the pattern of knots in
most khipu recorded the results of numerical calculations—the knotted
strings were accounting devices. Khipu were hierarchical, decimal arrays,
Locke said, with the knots used to record 1s on the lowest level of each
string, those for the 10s on the next, and so on. “The mystery has been
dispelled,” archaeologist Charles W. Mead exulted, “and we now know the
quipu for just what it was in prehistoric times…simply an instrument for
recording numbers.”
Based on such evaluations, most Andeanists viewed the Inka as the only
major civilization ever to come into existence without a written language.
“The Inka had no writing,” Brian Fagan, an archaeologist at the University
of California in Santa Barbara, wrote in Kingdoms of Gold, Kingdoms of
Jade, his 1991 survey of Native American cultures. “The quipu was purely
a way of storing precise information, a pre-Columbian computer memory, if
you will.”
But even as Fagan was writing, researchers were coming to doubt this
conclusion. The problem was that Locke’s rules only decoded about 80
percent of khipu—the remainder were incomprehensible. According to
Cornell archaeologist Robert Ascher, those khipu are “clearly non-
numerical.” In 1981, Ascher and his mathematician wife, Marcia, published
a book that jolted the field by intimating that these “anomalous” khipu may
have been an early form of writing—one that Ascher told me was “rapidly
developing into something extremely interesting” just at the time when Inka
culture was demolished.
The Aschers slowly gained converts. “Most serious scholars of khipu
today believe that they were more than mnemonic devices, and probably
much more,” Galen Brokaw, an expert in ancient Andean texts at the State
University of New York in Buffalo, said to me. This view of khipu can seem
absurd, Brokaw admitted, because the scientists who propose that
Tawantinsuyu was a literate empire also freely admit that no one can read
its documents. “Not a single narrative khipu has been convincingly
deciphered,” the Harvard anthropologist Gary Urton conceded, a situation
he described as “more than frustrating.”
Spurred in part by recent insights from textile scholars, Urton has been
mounting the most sustained, intensive attack on the khipu code ever
performed. In Signs of the Inka Khipu (2003), Urton for the first time
systematically broke down khipu into their grammatical constituents, and
began using this catalog to create a relational khipu database to help identify
patterns in the arrangement of knots. Like cuneiform marks, Urton told me,
khipu probably did begin as the kind of accounting tools envisioned by
Locke. But by the time Pizarro arrived they had evolved into a kind of
three-dimensional binary code, unlike any other form of writing on earth.
The Aschers worked mainly with khipu knots. But at a 1997 conference,
William J. Conklin, a researcher at the Textile Museum, in Washington,
D.C., pointed out that the knots might be just one part of the khipu system.
In an interview, Conklin, perhaps the first textile specialist to investigate
khipu, explained, “When I started looking at khipu…I saw this complex
spinning and plying and color coding, in which every thread was made in a
complex way. I realized that 90 percent of the information was put into the
string before the knot was made.”
Building on this insight, Urton argued that khipu makers were forced by
the very nature of spinning and weaving into making a series of binary
choices, including the type of material (cotton or wool), the spin and ply
direction of the string (which he described as “S” or “Z,” after the “slant” of
the threads), the direction (recto or verso) of the knot attaching the pendant
string to the primary, and the direction of the main axis of each knot itself
(S or Z). As a result, each knot is what he called a “seven-bit binary array,”
although the term is inexact because khipu had at least twenty-four possible
string colors. Each array encoded one of 26 × 24 possible “distinct
information units”—a total of 1,536, somewhat more than the estimated
1,000 to 1,500 Sumerian cuneiform signs, and more than twice the
approximately 600 to 800 Egyptian and Maya hieroglyphic symbols.
If Urton is right, khipu were unique. They were the world’s sole
intrinsically three-dimensional written documents (Braille is a translation of
writing on paper) and the only ones to use a “system of coding information”
that “like the coding systems used in present-day computer language, was
structured primarily as a binary code.” In addition, they may have been
among the few examples of “semasiographic” writing—texts that, unlike
written English, Chinese, and Maya, are not representations of spoken
language. “A system of symbols does not have to replicate speech to
communicate narrative,” Catherine Julien, a historian of Andean cultures at
Western Michigan University, explained to me. “What will eventually be
found in khipu is uncertain, but the idea that they have to be a
representation of speech has to be thrown out.”
Not all researchers embrace Urton’s binary theory. In an interview,
Brokaw argued that “there is no way to reconcile it with the decimal code in
which the khipu [also] clearly participate.” In addition, he said, Urton’s
ideas have little support in ethnographic data. But Brokaw was much more
enthusiastic about other Urton khipu work. Working with Harvard
mathematician-weaver Carrie J. Brezine, Urton used the new khipu
database in 2005 to identify seven khipu that seem to represent a hierarchy
of accounting records. Found half a century ago in the home of a
khipukaymayuq in Puruchuco, an Inka administrative center near modern-
day Lima, the khipu seemed to be created in levels, with the numerical
values on lower-level khipu adding up to those on higher-level khipu.
Fascinatingly, some of the knots in the top-level khipu seem not to be
numbers. Urton and Brezine argued that these anomalous introductory knots
most likely served to indicate the origin of the seven khipu, Puruchuco. The
knots, if Urton and Brezine are correct, would be the first-ever precisely
deciphered “words” in khipu “writing.”
Writing and reading are among the most basic methods of transmitting
information from one person to another. In cultures throughout the world,
this procedure is fundamentally similar. One reads a parade of symbols,
taking up information with the eyes; emphasis and context is provided
visually, by changing the size and form of the symbols (printing in italics or
boldface, increasing or diminishing the font size, scattering words or
characters around the page). All European and Asian cultures share the
common experience of reading—sitting in a chair, the book in one’s lap,
wagging the head from side to side (Europe) or up and down (Asia).
Because Tawantinsuyu existed only for a few centuries, it is widely
assumed that the Inka khipu built on other, earlier forms of writing that had
been developed in the region. And these cultures were unique, if Urton is
right. Their books were loose bundles of string—more practical, in some
ways, than paper scrolls or books, because less susceptible to water damage
and physical pressure. They were read both tactilely, by running the
fingertips along the knots, and visually, by looking at the colors of the
strings. And whereas the choice of letters and words at the beginning of a
sentence or paragraph exercise little constraint on physical connection to
those at the end, the choices made by the khipu maker at the beginning of a
string could not be undone halfway through. As a result, each khipu pendant
provided a burst of information at the beginning that was refined further
down the string.
However anomalous to European eyes, this form of writing has deep
roots in Andean culture. Knotted-string communication was but one aspect
of these societies’ exploration of textile technology (see Chapter 3). In these
cultures, Heather Lechtman, of MIT, has argued, cloth “was the most
important carrier of status, the material of choice for the communication of
message, whether religious, political, or scientific.” Similarly, Urton told
me, binary oppositions were a hallmark of the region’s peoples, who lived
in societies “typified to an extraordinary degree by dual organization,” from
the division of town populations into complementary “upper” and “lower”
halves (moieties, in the jargon) to the arrangement of poetry into dyadic
units. In this environment, he said, “khipu would be familiar.”
At the same time, Urton and other khipu specialists have been searching
for an Inka Rosetta stone—a colonial translation of an extant khipu. One
candidate exists—maybe. In 1996, Clara Miccinelli, an amateur historian
from the Neapolitan nobility, caused a stir by announcing that she had
unearthed in her family archives both a khipu and its Spanish translation (it
encoded a folk song). But because the putative khipu isn’t made the same
way as other surviving khipus and the same documents also claim that
Pizarro conquered the Inka empire by poisoning its generals with arsenic-
adulterated wine, many U.S. scholars have questioned their authenticity.
Angered by the doubts, Miccinelli has thus far refused to let non-Italian
researchers examine the documents, although she did allow an Australian
laboratory to evaluate their age with a mass spectrometer. (The results,
published in 2000, suggest that they are from the fifteenth century.) Because
of the controversy, most researchers have been, according to Brokaw,
“strategically ignoring” the Italian documents, at least for the present.
More widely accepted are the thirty-two khipu found in a tomb in the
Peruvian Amazon in 1996, one of which Urton tentatively deciphered as a
census record for the area in late pre-Hispanic times. With the help of a
MacArthur fellowship he received in 2001, he has been searching Peruvian
archives for something with more narrative content to match against the
other khipu—a quest, according to Julien, that “has a chance of bearing
fruit.” If Urton’s quest or others like it are successful, she told me, “We may
be able to hear the Inkas for the first time in their own voice.”
I asked what she thought that voice might sound like—the voice of
people attuned to tension and cloth, people who saw the stones of the world
charged with spirit, people who had never seen animals larger than a llama,
people who broke the world into complementary halves and thought more
in terms of up and down than north and south, people who took in
information about the world through their fingers.
“Foreign,” she said.
The Syphilis Exception
No one doubts today that European bacteria and viruses had a ruinous effect
on the Americas. So, too, did African diseases like malaria and yellow fever
when they arrived. The question inevitably arises as to whether there were
any correspondingly lethal infections from the Americas, payback to the
conquistadors. One candidate was long ago nominated: syphilis.
Syphilis is caused by Treponema pallidum, a wormlike bacterium that
writhes in corkscrew spirals on microscope slides. The disease occurs in
four different forms, and syphilis researchers disagree about whether the
various forms are caused by different subspecies of Treponema pallidum or
whether Treponema pallidum is not actually a single species but a brace of
slightly different species, each responsible for a different set of symptoms.
One form of infection is bejel, which creates small, coldsore-like lesions
inside and around the mouth; it mainly afflicts the Middle East. The second,
yaws, found in tropical places worldwide, infects cuts and abrasions and
causes long-lasting sores. Neither disease spreads to bone or nerves, and
they rarely kill their victims. Syphilis, the third form, is another matter.
Passed on mainly by sexual contact, it inflicts genital rashes and sores
before it apparently disappears, relieving sufferers but silently—and often
fatally—infecting their hearts, bones, and brains. (The fourth form, which
exists mainly in Mesoamerica, is pinta, a mild skin infection.)
The first recorded European epidemic of syphilis erupted in late 1494 or
early 1495. In the former year, Charles VIII of France led fifty thousand
vagabond mercenaries from every alley of Europe to attack Naples, which
he desired to rule. (He used mercenaries because even at the dawn of the
sixteenth century most European states did not have the resources to
support a standing military.) Charles conquered the city only to learn after
he had occupied it for a few months that the various Italian statelets were
massing against him, aided by a big contingent of Spanish troops. Struck
with fear, the king ignominiously fled with his men in the spring of 1495.
Both entry and exit were accompanied by sack, pillage, wanton slaughter,
and mass rape. Somewhere along the way Treponema pallidum wriggled
into the bloodstream of Charles’s retreating mercenaries. The most widely
suggested source is their Spanish attackers, with transmission occurring via
the women violated by both sides. Whatever the case, Charles’s army
disintegrated as it fled, shedding companies of venereal soldiers along the
way. A more effective means for spreading syphilis over a large area is hard
to imagine. Within a year cities throughout Europe were banishing people
afflicted with the disease.
Did Columbus bring the disease from the Americas, as the timing of the
first epidemic suggests? There are three main arguments to support an
affirmative answer to this question and an equal number against it. The first
on the pro side is the sheer deadliness of the disease—early records indicate
that syphilis then was even more ghastly than it is now. Green, acorn-size
boils filled with stinking liquid bubbled everywhere on the body. Victims’
pain, one sixteenth-century observer noted, “were as thoughe they hadde
lyen in fire.” The fatality rate was high. Such deadliness fits in with the
notion that Treponema pallidum was new to Europe. Orthodox Darwinian
theory predicts that over time the effect of most transmissible diseases
should moderate—the most lethal strains kill their hosts so fast they cannot
be passed on to other hosts. Thus syphilis, then wildly virulent and lethal,
acted like a new disease.
A second argument is that Europeans at the time believed that the disease
had “its origin and its birth from always in the island which is now named
Española [Hispaniola],” as the prominent Spanish doctor Ruy Díaz de Isla
put it in 1539. Díaz claimed that he had observed and tried to treat syphilis
in the crew from Columbus’s first voyage, including, it seems, the captain
of the Pinta. Apparently the man picked up the parasite in Hispaniola,
brought it back to Europe, and died within months—but not before passing
it on to some luckless bedmate. Díaz de Isla’s testimony was backed by the
pro-Indian cleric Bartolomé de Las Casas, who was in Seville when
Columbus returned.
Syphilis seems to have existed in the Americas before 1492—the third
argument. In the mid-1990s Bruce and Christine Rothschild, researchers at
the Arthritis Center of Northeast Ohio, in Youngstown, inspected 687
ancient Indian skeletons from the United States and Ecuador for signs of
syphilitic disease. Up to 40 percent of the skeletons from some areas
showed its presence. To nail down the chain of transmission, they
subsequently discovered—working in concert with researchers from the
Dominican Republic and Italy—that syphilis was equally common in
Hispaniola when Columbus arrived. Indeed, the disease seemed to date
back about two thousand years—it may have originated as a mutated form
of yaws on the Colorado plateau.
The three main counterarguments against the America-as-origin theory
are, first, that Treponema pallidum may have existed in Europe before
Columbus. Archaeologists have turned up a few medieval skeletons, most
of them in Britain, carrying what look like the marks of syphilis. Although
pre-1492 syphilitic skeletons exist in the Americas, even a few European
exemplars would undermine the Columbus-as-Typhoid-Mary case. Indeed,
some medical researchers propose that syphilis has always existed
worldwide, but manifested itself differently in different places. Second, the
1495 outbreak may not have been the introduction of a new disease but the
recognition of an old one, which until then had been confused with
Hansen’s disease (or, as it was known, leprosy). Descriptions of syphilis
during and after the 1494–95 epidemic and Hansen’s before it are
surprisingly similar; both were “treated” with mercury. In 1490 the pope
abolished all of the leprosaria in Europe, allowing hordes of sick people to
return home. Could that humanitarian gesture also have unleashed a storm
of syphilis? At least some researchers think it likely.
The third counterargument is psychological. In part, as Alfred Crosby
admitted, he initially devoted attention to the possible American origin of
syphilis “because I was uneasy about so many diseases crossing west over
the Atlantic and none going east.” He thought there must be some sort of
“epidemiological-geographical symmetry.” Other historians followed suit.
Later Crosby realized that examining the evidence in the hope of redressing
the infectious balance was a mistake. “They want pox in Europe to balance
the scales for smallpox in Mexico,” Vine Deloria Jr. told me. “They’re all
hoping to find there’s a real Montezuma’s Revenge.”
Yet even if syphilis did originate in the New World, the scales would not
be balanced. Syphilis is fascinating, “like all things venereal,” Crosby wrote
in 2003, “but it was not a history-maker” like smallpox. Treponema
pallidum, awful as it was and is, did not help topple empires or push whole
peoples to extinction. “There was little symmetry in the exchange of
diseases between the Old and the New Worlds,” Crosby said, “and there are
few factors as influential in the history of the last half millennium as that.”
Calendar Math
Dictionaries define the calendar almost as if it were a machine: “a system
for fixing the beginning, length, and divisions of the civil year.” But in
every society calendars are much more than that. People experience time as
both linear and circular. On the one hand, it marches remorselessly from
birth to death, a vector with fixed endpoints and a constant velocity. On the
other hand, time is cyclical, with the wheel of the seasons endlessly
spinning, and no clear end or beginning. Calendars are records of a culture’s
attempt to weight and reconcile these different visions.
In early European societies, the end of the year was regarded as
dangerous: a period when the calendar literally runs out of days, the
landscape is blanketed by night and cold, and nobody can be truly certain
that the heavens would usher in a new year. Embodying that mysterious
time when the end of the calendar somehow looped round and rejoined
itself at the beginning, Romans celebrated Saturnalia, an upside-down week
when masters served their servants and slaves held the great offices of state.
The Christian calendar bracketed the strange, perilous final days of the year
on one end with the birth of Christ, symbol of renewal, on December 25,
and on the other with Epiphany, the day when the three kings recognized
the infant Jesus as the Savior, another symbol of renewal, on January 6.
Christmas and Epiphany bridge the dangerous gap between the end of one
year and the beginning of the next.
The Mesoamerican calendar also tied together linear and cyclical time,
but more elaborately. In its most fully developed form, at the height of
Maya power, it consisted of three separate but interrelated calendars: a
sacred tally known as the tzolk’in; the haab, a secular calendar based, like
the Western calendar, on the rotation of the sun; and the Long Count, a
system that, among other things, linked the other two.
The sacred calendar is both the calendar most dissimilar to Western
calendars and the most important culturally. Each day in the tzolk’in had a
name and a number, in somewhat the same way that one might refer to, say,
“Wednesday the 15th.” In the Western calendar, the day names (e.g.,
Wednesday) run through cycles of seven, making weeks, and the day
numbers (e.g., the 15th) run through cycles of 28, 30, or 31, making
months. The tzolk’in used the same principle, but with less variation in the
lengths of the cycles; it had a twenty-day “week” of named days and a
thirteen-day “month” of numbered days. The analogy I am drawing is
imprecise; what I am describing as the tzolk’in “week” was longer than the
“month.” But just as Thursday the 16th follows Wednesday the 15th in the
Christian calendar, 10 Akbal would follow 9 Ik in the tzolk’in. (The Maya
had a twenty-day “week” in part because their number system was base-20,
instead of the base-10 in European societies.)
Because the tzolk’in was not intended to track the earth’s orbit around the
sun, its inventors didn’t have to worry about fitting their “weeks” and
“months” into the 365 days of the solar year. Instead they simply set the
first day of the year to be the first day of the twenty-day “week” and the
thirteen-day “month,” and let the cycle spin. In the language of elementary
school mathematics, the least common multiple (the smallest number that
two numbers will divide into evenly) of 13 and 20 is 260. Hence, the
tzolk’in had a length of 260 days.
In the Western calendar, a given combination of named and numbered
days, such as Wednesday the 15th, will occur a few times in a calendar year.
For instance, in 2006 the 15th of the month falls on Wednesday three times,
in February, March, and November; in 2007 Wednesday the 15th occurs just
once, in August. The irregular intervals are due to the differing lengths of
the months, which throw off the cycle. In the tzolk’in, every “month” and
every “week” are the same length. As a result, “Wednesday the 15th”—or 1
Imix, to give a real example—in the tzolk’in recurs at precise intervals; each
is exactly 13 × 20 or 260 days apart.
Many researchers believe the movements of Venus, which Mesoamerican
astronomers tracked carefully, originally inspired the tzolk’in. Venus is
visible for about 263 consecutive days as the morning star, then goes behind
the sun for 50 days, then reappears for another 263 days as the evening star.
It was a powerful presence in the heavens, as I noted in Chapter 8, and a
calendar based on its celestial trajectory would have shared some of that
power. Within the sacred year, every day was thought to have particular
characteristics, so much so that people were often named after their birth
dates: 12 Eb, 2 Ik, and so on. In some places men and women apparently
could not marry if they had the same name day. Days in the tzolk’in had
import for larger occasions, too. Events from ceremonies to declarations of
war were thought to be more likely to succeed if they occurred on a
propitious day.
The Mesoamerican calendar was both more complex and more
accurate than the European calendars of the same period. It
consisted of a 365-day secular calendar, the haab (right), much
like contemporary European calendars. The haab was tied to the
second, sacred calendar, the tzolk’in (left), which was unlike any
Western calendar. With a “week” of twenty named days and a
“month” of thirteen numbered days, the tzolk’in produced a 260-
day “year.” Mesoamerican societies used both simultaneously, so
that every date was labeled with two names (1 Ix 0 Xul in the
drawing). I have not rendered the haab as a wheel-within-wheel
like the tzolk’in, even though it, too, had perfectly regular
“weeks” and “months.” This is because the haab had to fit the
365-day solar year, which forced Maya calendar designers to
spoil their system by tacking on an irregular, extra-short month at
the end.
Because people also needed a civil calendar for mundane purposes like
knowing when to sow and harvest, Mesoamerican societies had a second,
secular calendar, the haab: eighteen “months,” each of twenty days. (Unlike
the tzolk’in, which counted off the days from 1, the haab months began
with 0; nobody knows why the system was different.) Simple arithmetic
shows that eighteen twenty-day months generates a 360-day year, five days
short of the requisite 365 days. Indians knew it, too. Rather than sprinkling
the extra five days throughout the year as we do, though, they tacked them
onto the end in a special “month” of their own. These days were thought to
be unlucky—it was as if the year ended with five straight days of Friday the
13th. Although the ancient Maya knew (unlike their contemporaries in
Europe) that the solar year is actually 365¼ days, they did not bother to
account for the extra quarter day; there were no leap years in Mesoamerica.
The failure to do so seems surprising, given that their astronomers’ mania
for precision had led them to measure the length of the lunar month to
within about ten seconds.
With two calendars, every day thus had two names, a sacred tzolk’in
name and a civil haab name. Usually the Maya referred to them by both at
once: 1 Ix 0 Xul. The two different calendars, each perfectly regular (but
one more regular than the other), marched in lockstep, forming what is now
called the Calendar Round. After one 1 Ix 0 Xul, there would not be another
1 Ix 0 Xul for 18,980 days, about fifty-two years.
By describing dates with both calendars Mesoamerican societies were
able to give every day in this fifty-two-year period a unique name. But they
couldn’t distinguish one fifty-two-year period from its predecessors and
successors—as if the Christian calendar couldn’t distinguish 1810, 1910,
and 2010. To avoid confusion and acknowledge time’s linear dimension,
Mesoamerican societies invented the Long Count, which counts off the
days from a starting point that is believed to have been in mid-August, 3114
B.C. Long Count dates consisted of the number of days, 20-day “months,”
360-day “years,” 7,200-day “decades,” and 144,000-day “centuries” since
the beginning. Archaeologists generally render these as a set of five
numbers separated by dots. When Columbus landed, on Tuesday, October
11, 1492, the Maya would have marked the day as 11.13.12.4.3, with the
“centuries” first and the days last. In the tzolk’in and haab, the day was 2
Akbal 6 Zotz.
Although extant Long Count dates have only five positions for numbers,
the Maya knew that eventually that time would pass and they would have to
add more positions. Indeed, their priestly mathematicians had calculated
nineteen further positions, culminating in what is now called the alautun, a
period of 23,040,000,000 days, which is about 63 million years. Probably
the longest named interval of time in any calendar, the alautun is a
testament to the grandiosity of Mesoamerican calendries. Just as the tzolk’in
is one of the most impeccably circular time cycles ever invented, the Long
Count is among the most purely linear, an arrow pointing straight ahead for
millions of years into the future.
1 According to Joseph Conrad, the violence was of culinary origin. “The
Noble Red Man was a mighty hunter,” explained the great novelist, “but his
wives had not mastered the art of conscientious cookery—and the
consequences were deplorable. The Seven Nations around the Great Lakes
and the Horse tribes of the plains were but one vast prey to raging
dyspepsia.” Because their lives were blighted by “the morose irritability
which follows the consumption of ill-cooked food,” they were continually
prone to quarrels.
Return to text.
2 In the United States and parts of Europe the name is “corn.” I use
“maize” because Indian maize—multicolored and mainly eaten after drying
and grinding—is strikingly unlike the sweet, yellow, uniform kernels
usually evoked in North America by the name “corn.” In Britain, “corn” can
mean the principal cereal crop in a region—oats in Scotland, for example,
are sometimes referred to by the term.
Return to text.
3 The Mayflower passengers are often called “Puritans,” but they disliked
the name. Instead they used terms like “separatists,” because they separated
themselves from the Church of England, or “saints,” because their church,
patterned on the early Christian church, was the “church of saints.”
“Pilgrims” is the title preferred by the Society of Mayflower Descendants.
Return to text.
4 The first Europeans known to have reached the Americas were the
Vikings, who appeared off eastern Canada in the tenth century. Their short-
lived venture had no known effect on native life. Other European groups
may also have arrived before Columbus, but they, too, had no well-
substantiated impact on the people they visited.
Return to text.
*5 These preposterous tales may actually be true; other amazing Smith
stories certainly are. While Smith was establishing a colony at Jamestown,
for instance, Pocahontas likely did save his life, although little of the rest of
the legend embodied in the Disney cartoon is true. The girl’s name, for
instance, was actually Mataoka—pocahontas, a teasing nickname, meant
something like “little hellion.” Mataoka was a priestess-in-training—a kind
of pniese- to-be—in the central town of the Powhatan alliance, a powerful
confederacy in tidewater Virginia. Aged about twelve, she may have
protected Smith, but not, as he wrote, by interceding when he was a captive
and about to be executed in 1607. In fact, the “execution” was probably a
ritual staged by Wahunsenacawh, head of the Powhatan alliance, to
establish his authority over Smith by making him a member of the group; if
Mataoka interceded, she was simply playing her assigned role in the ritual.
The incident in which she may have saved Smith’s life occurred a year later,
when she warned the English that Wahunsenacawh, who had tired of them,
was about to attack. In the Disney version, Smith returns to England after a
bad colonist shoots him in the shoulder. In truth, he did leave Virginia in
1609 for medical treatment, but only because he somehow blew up a bag of
gunpowder while wearing it around his neck.
Return to text.
6 Gorges may have met Tisquantum before. In 1605 the adventurer George
Weymouth abducted five Indians, conning three into boarding his ship
voluntarily and seizing the other two by the hair. According to Gorges’s
memoirs, Tisquantum was one of the five. He stayed with Gorges for nine
years, after which he went to New England with John Smith. If this is
correct, Tisquantum had barely come home before being kidnapped again.
Historians tend to discount Gorges’s tale, partly because his memoirs,
dictated late in life, mix up details, and partly because the notion that
Tisquantum was abducted twice just seems incredible.
Return to text.
7 Runa Simi (Quechua, to the Spanish) is the language of all Inka names,
including “Inka.” I use the standard Runa Simi romanization, which means
that I do not use the Spanish “Inca.”
Return to text.
8 The Inka sovereign had the title of “Inka”—he was the Inka—but he
could also include “Inka” in his name. In addition, Inka elites changed their
names as they went through their lives. Each Inka was thus known by
several names, any of which might include “Inka.”
Return to text.
9 Because of their obsession with gold, the conquistadors are often
dismissed as “gold crazy.” In fact they were not so much gold crazy as
status crazy. Like Hernán Cortés, who conquered Mexico, Pizarro was born
into the lower fringes of the nobility and hoped by his exploits to earn titles,
offices, and pensions from the Spanish crown. To obtain these royal favors,
their expeditions had to bring something back for the king. Given the
difficulty and expense of transportation, precious metals—“nonperishable,
divisible, and compact,” as historian Matthew Restall notes—were almost
the only goods that they could plausibly ship to Europe. Inka gold and
silver thus represented to the Spaniards the intoxicating prospect of social
betterment.
Return to text.
10 Just one major disease, syphilis, is believed to have spread the other
way, from the Americas to Europe, though this has long been controversial.
See Appendix C, “The Syphilis Exception.”
Return to text.
11 Because the point is persistently misunderstood, it bears repeating that
Indians’ relative genetic homogeneity does not imply genetic inferiority.
Even a champion of Indians like historian Francis Jennings got this wrong:
“The Europeans’ capacity to resist certain diseases,” he wrote in his
polemical Invasion of America, “made them superior, in the pure Darwinian
sense, to the Indians.” No: 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.
Return to text.
12 In 2004 two U.S. anthropologists and a Venezuelan medical researcher
proposed that Native American susceptibility to infectious disease might
have a second cause: helper-T cells, which like HLAs help the immune
system recognize foreign objects. 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. Conversely, Europeans would be
comparatively more vulnerable to parasites. If further research supports this
hypothesis, preventing childhood parasite infections might allow Indian
immune systems to orientate themselves toward bacteria and viruses,
possibly reducing future deaths.
Return to text.
13 Historians increasingly shy away from the term “Aztec,” because the
nineteenth-century naturalist Alexander von Humboldt coined it in a
misapprehension. Humboldt’s “Aztecs” were actually the people of three
nations, the members of the Triple Alliance.
Return to text.
*14 I use the hedge words “basically,” “almost,” and “in essence” because
sperm actually have 50 to 100 mitochondria, just enough to power them
through their short lives. By contrast, the egg has as many as 100,000
mitochondria. When the sperm joins the egg, the egg eliminates sperm
mitochondria. Every now and then, though, a few escape destruction and
end up in the embryo’s cells.
Return to text.
15 A puzzle to Europeans, anyway—Indians seem to have been, as a rule,
satisfied with traditional explanations of their origins.
Return to text.
16 Hrdli ka’s complaint about the lack of skeletal evidence was unfair for
another reason: paleo-Indian skeletons are extremely rare. In Europe,
archaeologists have discovered scores of skeletons ten thousand years old or
more. By contrast, only nine reasonably complete skeletons of similar age
have been found in North America (a few more exist in South America,
although, as with the Lagoa Santa skeletons, their provenance is often
unclear). “It’s a big mystery why we don’t find the burials,” the University
of Vermont archaeologist James Petersen told me. “Some Indians will tell
you that their dead all moved to a spiritual plane, and that’s about as good
as any answer that we’ve got.”
Return to text.
*17 Here and throughout I give the currently accepted dates, which are
made with better techniques and more grasp of the vagaries of carbon
dating than were then available to Haynes. Scientists discovered in the 1960
s that the rate of C14 formation and intake varied more than Libby had
thought. As a result, raw C14 dates must be corrected (“calibrated,” in the
jargon) to obtain calendar dates, something archaeologists do not always
make clear. In addition, they often write dates not as years A.D. or B.C. but
as years B.P. (Before Present), with the present set by convention at 1950
A.D. Thus 2000 B.P. is 50 B.C. In an attempt to reduce confusion, all dates
in this book are ordinary calendar dates—that is, radiocarbon dates
corrected by the most recent calibration. Scientists usually report C14 dates
with their potential error, as in 3000 ± 150 B.P. (1050 ± 150 B.C.). To avoid
typographical clutter, I do not include the error spread, believing that
readers understand the unavoidable uncertainties in measuring minute levels
of residual radioactivity.
Return to text.
18 I am not criticizing McNeill for failing to include the Americas on his
list of civilizations; he was simply reflecting the beliefs of his time. I would
criticize World History: Patterns of Change and Continuity, a high school
text published two decades later, in time for my son to encounter it.
Referring exclusively to the “four initial centers” of civilization, this “world
history” allocated just nine pages to the pre-Columbian Americas. The
thesis of the book in your hands is that Native American history merits
more than nine pages.
Return to text.
19 Given the choice between their own scratchy wool and the Indians’
smooth cotton, the conquistadors threw away their clothes and donned
native clothing. Later this preference was mirrored in Europe. When cotton
became readily available there in the eighteenth century, it grabbed so much
of the textile market that French woolmakers persuaded the government to
ban the new fiber. The law failed to stem the cotton tide. As the historian
Fernand Braudel noted, some woolmakers then thought outside the box:
they proposed sending prostitutes in cotton clothing to wander Paris streets,
where police would publicly strip them naked. In theory, bourgeois women
would then avoid cotton for fear of being mistaken for prostitutes and
forcibly disrobed. This novel form of protectionism was never put into
place.
Return to text.
*20 The statues’ broad lips and flat noses have led “Africanist” historians
like Clyde Winters and Ivan Van Sertima to claim that the Olmecs either
were visited by Africans or had actually migrated from Africa. The African
knowledge gained thereby explains the Olmec’s rapid rise. These views are
not widely endorsed. Surprisingly, several noted archaeologists, including
Betty Meggers and Gordon Ekholm, have suggested the geographical
opposite: that Olmec society was inspired by China. Visitors from the
Shang Dynasty are said to have crossed the Pacific to teach the ancient
Olmec how to write, build monuments, and worship a feline god. This
hypothesis, too, has failed to stir enthusiasm.
Return to text.
21 Here, as elsewhere in this book, I am being chronologically inexact.
The oldest Zapotec palisade Flannery and Marcus excavated yielded
calibrated radiocarbon dates in the range between 1680 and 1410 B.C.,
which for brevity’s sake I render as “about 1550 B.C.”
Return to text.
22 Actually, it didn’t. Inexplicably, the biggest unit, the 144,000-day
“millennium,” began with 13, rather than 0. The first day in the calendar
was thus 13.0.0.0.0. When I remarked on the peculiarity of this exception to
a mathematician, he pointed out societies whose timekeeping systems are so
irregular that children have to learn rhymes to remember the number of
days in the months (“Thirty days hath September…”) are in no position to
scoff at the calendrical eccentricities of other cultures. At least all the
“months” in the Mesoamerican calendar had the same number of days, he
said.
Return to text.
23 Chak Tok Ich’aak’s name, like most Maya names, is easier to
pronounce than it looks. In most transliterations, all letters are pronounced
much as they are in English, except that x is “sh.” Thus the small ruin of
Xpuhil is “Shpoo-heel.” The only difficulty is the glottal stop, the
constriction of the throat that occurs when someone with a classic Brooklyn
accent pronounces “bottle.” In Maya, the glottal stop is indicated by an
apostrophe, as in Ich’aak. Chak Tok Ich’aak, incidentally, meant something
like “Great True Jaguar Claw.”
Return to text.
24 The river’s main channel is in this area called the Solimões. English-
language maps usually put Manaus at the meeting of the Negro and the
Solimões, with the latter changing its name back to Amazon upstream.
Brazilian maps say that the Amazon begins at the conjunction of the Negro
and Solimões.
Return to text.
*25Terra preta exists in two forms: terra preta itself, a black soil thick with
pottery, and terra mulata, a lighter dark brown soil with much less pottery.
A number of researchers believe that although Indians made both, they
deliberately created only the terra mulata. Terra preta was the soil created
directly around homes by charcoal kitchen fires and organic refuse of
various types. I use terra preta loosely to cover both.
Return to text.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In putting together this book I worked under the shadow of great travelers,
scientists, and historians ranging from William H. Prescott, Francis
Parkman, and John Lloyd Stephens in the nineteenth century to (I cite only
a sampler) William Cronon, Alfred W. Crosby, William M. Denevan,
Francis Jennings, John Hemming, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roderick Nash, and
Carl Sauer in the twentieth and twenty-first. The comparison is daunting.
Luckily, I have been able to benefit from the advice, encouragement, and
criticism of many scholars, beginning with Crosby and Denevan
themselves. A number of researchers read the draft manuscript in part or
whole, a great kindness for which I thank Crosby, Denevan, William Balée,
Clark Erickson, Susanna Hecht, Frances Karttunen, George Lovell, Michael
Moseley, James Petersen, and William I. Woods. Although they helped me
enormously, the book is mine in the end, as are its remaining errors of fact
and balance.
I am grateful to all the researchers who were kind enough to put aside
their doubts long enough to help a journalist, but in addition to those
mentioned above I would especially like to thank—for favors, insights, or
just the gift of time—Helcio Amiral, Flavio Aragon Cuevas, Charles
Clement, Michael Crawford, Winifred Creamer, Vine Deloria Jr., Henry F.
Dobyns, Elizabeth Fenn, Stuart Fiedel, Susan deFrance, Jonathan Haas,
Susanna Hecht, Charles Kay, Patricia Lyon, Beata Madari, David Meltzer,
Len Morse-Fortier, Michael Moseley, Eduardo Neves, Hugo Perales,
Amado Ramírez Leyva, Anna C. Roosevelt, Nelsi N. Sadeck, the late Wim
Sombroek, Russell Thornton, Alexei Vranich, Patrick Ryan Williams, and a
host of Bolivian, Brazilian, Canadian, Mexican, and U.S. graduate students.
My gratitude to the editors of the magazines in which bits of 1491 first
appeared: Corby Kummer, Cullen Murphy, Sue Parilla, Bill Whitworth, and
the late Mike Kelly at The Atlantic Monthly; Tim Appenzeller, Elizabeth
Culotta, Colin Norman, and Leslie Roberts at Science; David Shipley and
Carmel McCoubrey at the New York Times; Nancy Franklin at Harvard
Design Magazine; and George Lovell at Journal of the Southwest.
For library access, travel tips, withering critiques, friendly
encouragement at psychologically critical times, and a daunting list of other
favors I owe debts to Bob Crease, Josh D’Aluisio-Guerreri, Dan Farmer
(and all the folks on the fish.com listservs), Dave Freedman, Judy Hooper,
Pam Hunter (and Carl, too, of course), Toichiro and Masa Kinoshita, Steve
Mann, Cassie Phillips, Ellen Shell, Neal Stephenson, Gary Taubes, Dick
Teresi, and Zev Trachtenberg. Newell Blair Mann was a boon traveling
companion in Bolivia and Brazil; Bruce Bergethon indulged me by coming
to Cahokia; Peter Menzel went with me to Mexico four times. Jim Boyce
helped get me to Oaxaca and CIMMYT. Nick Springer provided a design
for the rough maps that Tim Gibson and I put together. Stephen S. Hall was
really, really patient and really, really helpful about the immune system. Ify
and Ekene Nwokoye tried at various times to keep me organized. Brooke
Childs worked on photo permissions. Mark Plummer provided me with far
too many favors to list. The same for Rick Balkin (the fifth book for which
he has done so). June Kinoshita and Tod Machover allowed me to finish
Chapter 4 in their carriage house in Waltham. My deepest gratitude to Faith
D’Aluisio and Peter Menzel, who let my family and me stay in their
guesthouse in Napa, where Chapters 6 through 8 emerged into the world.
Caroline Mann read an early draft and provided many useful comments.
Last-minute help from Dennis Normile and the Foreign Correspondents
Club of Tokyo is hereby recognized and thanked.
I am lucky in my publishers, Knopf in the United States and Granta in the
United Kingdom. In this, our third book together, Jon Segal at Knopf
demonstrated his mastery of not only the traditional pencil skills of the
classic editor but also the new techniques the times require to send a book
on its way. In addition, I must doff my beret in Borzoi land to Kevin
Bourke, Roméo Enriquez, Ida Giragossian, Andy Hughes, and Virginia Tan.
At Granta, Sara Holloway gave excellent advice and tolerated repeated
auctorial meddling and procrastination. So many other people in so many
places pulled strings on my behalf, tolerated repeated phone calls, arranged
site visits, edited or checked manuscripts, and sent me hard-to-find articles
and books that I could not possibly list them all. I hope that in the end this
book seems to them worth the trouble.
NOTES
Every book is built on other books, the adage says, and this one is an
exemplary case. Think of the list of texts below as the architect’s
specifications for 1491. Except that this list is more selective, consisting as
it does only of the works consulted necessary to make a particular point, not
everything used in the construction of the book. If at all possible, I have
cited printed, English-language versions of each source; many texts can be
found online, too, but URLs change so fast that I have avoided listing them
whenever possible. Texts available on the Web as of early 2005 are
indicated by a star ( ); most can be found through search engines or in such
collections as Early English Books Online, Project Gutenberg, the
Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, the University
of Virginia’s Electronic Text Center, the University of Maryland’s Early
American Digital Archive, and the Virtual Cervantes Library.
Perhaps paradoxically, some works were so important to this book that
my notes give short shrift to them; they are in the background everywhere,
but rarely summoned to make a specific point. For the first section, these
would include Terence d’Altroy’s The Incas; William Cronon’s Changes in
the Land; Alfred W. Crosby’s Columbian Exchange and Ecological
Imperialism; John Hemming’s Conquest of the Incas; Karen Ordahl
Kuppermann’s Indians and English; María Rostworowski de Diez
Canseco’s History of the Inca Realm; and Neal Salisbury’s Manitou and
Providence.
As I stitched together the second section, books that kept my keyboard
constant company included Ignacio Bernal’s The Olmec World; Jared
Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel; Brian Fagan’s Ancient North America;
Stuart Fiedel’s Prehistory of the Americas; Nina Jablonski’s edited
collection, The First Americans; the special issue of the Boletín de
Arqueología PUCP edited by Peter Kaulicke and William Isbell; Alan
Kolata’s The Tiwanaku; Mike Moseley’s marvelous Incas and Their
Ancestors; and the historical writings of David Meltzer, which I hope he
will someday combine into a book, so that people like me won’t have to
keep piles of photocopies.
The third section sometimes seems like an extended riff on the three
Cultural Landscapes books assembled by William Denevan and written by
Denevan; Thomas M. Whitmore and B. L. Turner II; and William E.
Doolittle. But I depended also on the special September 1992 issue of the
Annals of the Association of American Geographers edited by Karl Butzer;
the essays in The Great New Wilderness Debate, edited by J. Baird Callicott
and Michael P. Nelson; Michael Coe’s sturdy sourcebook, The Maya;
Melvin Fowler’s Cahokia Atlas; Shepard Krech’s Ecological Indian; the
amazing Chronicles of the Maya Kings and Queens, by Simon Martin and
Nikolai Grube; and two books on terra preta (and much else besides),
Amazonian Dark Earths: Explorations in Space and Time, edited by Bruno
Glaser and William Woods, and Amazonian Dark Earths: Origin,
Properties, Management, edited by Johannes Lehmann et al. (Full citations
are in the Bibliography.)
Even a book of this length must leave out many things, given the
magnitude of the subject matter. Thus I ignored the inhabitants of the
Americas’ northern and southern extremes and barely touched on the
Northwest Coast. The most painful decision, though, was to omit, after it
had been written, a section on the North American West. My qualms were
soothed by the recent appearance of Colin Calloway’s One Vast Winter
Count, a magnificent synthesis of practically everything known about the
subject.
1 / A View from Above
Erickson and scope of Beni earthworks: Erickson 2005, 2001, 2000b,
1995; see also Denevan 2001: chap. 12.
Old view of Indians: Ward Churchill, a professor of ethnic studies at
the University of Colorado in Boulder, mockingly summed the
paradigm: “How many Indians were there?—One million; Where did
they come from?—Across the Bering Strait land bridge; When did
they come?—15,000 years ago (plus or minus 15 minutes); How did
they live?—They were squalid Stone Age hunter-gatherers wandering
nomadically about the landscape at the bare margins of subsistence,
waiting hopefully, millennium after millennium, for Europeans to
show up and improve their quality of life” (Churchill 2003:44).
Smithsonian-backed archaeologists: Dougherty and Calandra 1984
(small numbers needed for causeways, 180; natural origins of mounds,
182–85). Their discussion has been dismissed as “improbably
interpreted” (Myers et al. 1992:87). Roughly similar conclusions
appear in Langstroth 1996.
Snow’s critiques: Interviews, Snow.
Pristine myth: Denevan 1992a, 1996b.
Wilderness Act: P.L. 88–577, 3 Sept. 1964 (“untrammeled,” section
2c); Callicott 1998:349–50 (act embodies “the conventional
understanding of wilderness”).
Obligation to restore natural state: Cronon 1995a:36.
Fish weirs: Erickson 2000a.
Future options for Beni: Interviews, Erickson, Balée, CIDDEBENI. By
leasing their land to loggers and miners, the Kayapó in the southeast
Amazon basin demonstrated how Indians can disappoint
environmentalists (Epstein 1993; the article is reproduced and
discussed in Slater 1995:121–24). Some environmentalists propose
tucking the eastern Beni into a nearby UNESCO biopre-serve, one of
the 350 such preserves the agency sponsors worldwide.
Devil tree: Interviews and email, Balée. I found no published work on
this specific form of obligate mutualism, but see, generally, Huxley
and Cutler eds. 1991.
Ibibate and pottery: Interviews, Balée, Erickson; Erickson and Balée
2005; Balée 2000; Erickson 1995; Langstroth 1996.
Holmberg’s view of Sirionó: Holmberg 1969:17 (“brand,” “culturally
backward”), 37 (“sleepless night”), 38–39 (clothing), 110 (lack of
musical instruments), 116 (“universe,” “uncrystallized”), 121 (count to
three), 261 (“quintessence,” “raw state”). After Holmberg’s death,
Lauriston Sharp introduced Nomads as a study of “lowly but
instructive” “survivors” who “retained a variety of man’s earliest
culture.” The book, he said, “discovered, described, and thus
introduced into history a new and in many respects extraordinary
Paleolithic experience” (Sharp 1969: xii–xiii). Nomads was a widely
used undergraduate text for decades (Erickson, pers. comm.).
Holmberg’s work and career: Interviews, Henry Dobyns; Doughty
1987; Stearman 1987 (account of his blind walk, Chap. 4).
Lack of study of Beni and Langstroth: Interviews, Erickson,
Langstroth; Langstroth 1996.
Sirionó epidemics: The chronology is uncertain. Holmberg (1969:12)
describes smallpox and influenza epidemics that forced the
“decimated” Sirionó into mission life in 1927. Citing other sources,
Swedish anthropologist Stig Rydén, who visited the Sirionó briefly ten
years after Holmberg, reports epidemics in 1920 and 1925, which he
interprets as episodes in a single big flu epidemic (Rydén 1941:25).
But such heavy casualties are less likely from a single source.
Sirionó population: Holmberg 1969:12 (fewer than 150 during his
fieldwork). Rydén (1941:21) estimated 6,000–10,000 in the late 1920s,
presumably a pre-epidemic count. Today there are 600–2,000 (Balée
1999; Townsend 1996:22). Stearman (1986:8) estimated 3,000–6,000.
Stearman returns, bottleneck, abuse by army and ranchers, Holmberg’s
failure to grasp: Stearman 1984; Stearman 1987; author’s interviews,
Balée, Erickson, Langstroth. Holmberg (1969:8–9) noted the incidence
of clubfoot and ear marks, but made little of it.
Migration of Sirionó: Interviews, Balée; Barry 1977; Priest 1980;
Pärssinen 2003. A Spanish account from 1636 suggests that they had
arrived only a few decades before (Métraux 1942:97), but this is not
widely accepted.
First Beni research and Denevan thesis: Nordenskiöld 1979a; Denevan
1966.
Bauré culture and Erickson’s perspective: Interviews, Erickson;
Erickson 1995, 2000b, 2005; Anon. 1743.
Las Casas ethnography: Casas 1992a; Wagner 1967:287–89
(publication history).
“lyve in that goulden”: Arber ed. 1885:71 (letter, Martire, P., to Charles
V, 30 Sept. 1516).
“Indian wisdom”: “[W]e cannot know truth by contrivance and
method; the Baconian is as false as any other, and with all the helps of
machinery and the arts, the most scientific will still be the healthiest
and friendliest man, and possess a more perfect Indian wisdom”
(Thoreau 1906 [vol. 5]:131).
Crying Indian campaign: Krech 1999:14–16.
Indians without history: “In North America, whites are the bearers of
environmental original sin, because whites alone are recognized as
laboring. But whites are thus also, by the same token, the only real
bearers of history. This is why our flattery…of ‘simpler’ peoples is an
act of such immense condescension. For in a modern world defined by
change, whites are portrayed as the only beings who make a
difference” (White 1995:175). The phrase “people without history”
was popularized in an ironic sense in Wolf 1997.
“unproductive waste”: Bancroft 1834–76 [vol. 1]:3–4.
Kroeber on warfare and agriculture: Kroeber 1934:10–12 (all quotes).
Conrad on Indian dyspepsia: Conrad 1923:vi.
“pagans expecting”: Morison 1974:737.
“chief function”: Trevor-Roper 1965:9. To be fair, the baron was
dismissing all indigenous peoples around the world, not singling out
Indians.
Fitzgerald survey: Fitzgerald 1980:89–93 (“resolutely backward,” 90;
“lazy,” 91; “few paragraphs,” 93). See also, Axtell 1992.
Views have continued to appear: Examples, listed alphabetically by
author, include Bailey et al. 1983:9 (the “vast and virgin continent…
was so sparsely populated by Indians that they could be eliminated or
shouldered aside. Such a magnificent opportunity for a great
democratic experiment would never come again”), quoted in Axtell
1992:203; Bailyn et al. 1977:34 (“But the Indians’ hold upon the land
was light…. No where was more than one percent of the land available
for horticulture actually under cultivation”; editions of this textbook
appeared, essentially unaltered, into the 1990s); Berliner 2003 (“Prior
to 1492, what is now the United States was sparsely inhabited, unused,
and undeveloped…. There was virtually no change, no growth for
thousands of years”); Billard 1975:20 (“To a virgin continent where
prairie grass waved tall as a man and vast forests perfumed the air for
miles offshore came Spanish adventurer, French trapper, Dutch sailor,
and doughty Englishman”); Fernández-Armesto 2001:154 (many
Amazonian Indians’ lives were “unchanged for millennia” and the
rainforest was “still a laboratory of specimen peoples apparently
suspended by nature in a state of so-called underdevelopment”—the
key word here being “suspended,” as in fixed in place, motionless);
McKibben 1989:53 (Wilderness Society founder Robert Marshall
concluding a currently unpopulated part of the United States was “as it
existed outside human history”); Sale 1990:315–16 (“the land of North
America was still by every account a lush and fertile wilderness…
[which] gave off the aspect of an untouched world”); Shabecoff
1993:23 (Lewis and Clark traveling through land “unchanged by
humans”); Shetler 1991:226 (“Pre-Columbian America was still the
First Eden, a pristine natural kingdom. The native people were
transparent in the landscape, living as natural elements of the
ecosphere. Their world, the New World of Columbus, was a world of
barely perceptible human disturbance”).
“For thousands”: Current, Williams, and Brinkley 1987:1. Such
statements are often due less to prejudice than to European and
American historians’ continuing uncertainty about how to think about
non-European and non-American societies. Thus on the next page
Current et al. describe Indians both as establishing some of “the
world’s most dazzling cultures” and “lack[ing] some of mankind’s
most basic tools and technologies” (2)—the latter state assuming,
ethnocentrically, that European technologies are “basic” whereas
indigenous technologies are inessential. See Chaps. 2 and 3.
New perspectives and techniques: Crosby ed. 1994 (“faint smudges,”
7).
“replaced”: Vale 1998:231.
Growth of Bering Strait theory and fight over Chilean site: See Chap.
5.
Deloria index entries: Deloria 1995:284.
Invention of agriculture: See, e.g., Lev-Yadun, Gopher, and Abbo
2000.
Neolithic Revolution: I am simplifying here. Sumerian villages were
growing wheat and barley by about 6000 B.C. Around 4000 B.C. the
villages became hierarchically organized towns or cities. Early forms
of writing date to at least 3000 B.C. Five centuries later, the writing
had become a unified system and the city of Uruk had a population of
forty thousand.
“The human career”: Wright 2005:45. Sumer was the first to develop
agriculture, laying the foundation for later civilizations in Egypt,
Greece, India, and Mesopotamia. China apparently invented farming
on its own, but borrowed mathematics, writing, art, and much else
from Sumer. This last claim is fiercely debated, though, and some
believe China to have been as independent of Sumer as Peru and
Mesoamerica.
Maize and early American domestications, Olmec accomplishments:
See Chaps. 6, 7.
“one of the greatest”: Dantzig 1967:35. I am grateful to Dick Teresi for
introducing me to this terrific book.
History of zero: Kaplan 1999:11–57; Teresi 2002:22–25, 86–87, 379–
82.
“bleak, frigid land”: von Hagen, V., commentary, in Cieza de León
1959:272.
Tiwanaku: See chap. 7.
Populations of Tiwanaku and Paris: Kolata 1993:204–05; Bairoch,
Batou, and Chévre 1988:28. Metropolitan Paris reached a quarter
million in about 1400.
Wari: See chap. 7.
Glacial evidence of dust storms: Thompson, Davis, and Mosley-
Thompson 1994. More than a few archaeologists are skeptical of this
evidence (Erickson, pers. comm.).
Mega-Niños: Schimmelmann, Lange, and Meggers 2003; Meggers
1994.
Climate and Tiwanaku, Wari decline: Kolata 2000; Binford et al. 1997;
Thompson, Davis, and Mosley-Thompson 1994.
Little Ice Age: Lamb 1995:Chaps. 12, 13; Fagan 2001.
Maya: See Chap. 8.
Toltecs and Yucatán: Diehl 1983 (basic history); Coe 1999:165–80
(favoring invasion scenario); Schele and Mathews 1998:198–201, esp.
fn. 13 (arguing against). The Schele-Mathews arguments center on
disputed radiocarbon dates and interpretations of artworks’ styles that
to my mind seem all but to ignore their content.
Mississippians: See Chap. 8.
Plains Indians rock rings: Teresi 2002:107–09.
Lake Superior copper: S. R. Martin 1999.
Newly discovered Acre sites: Pärssinen et al. 2003. See also Erickson
2002.
Amazon: See Chap. 9.
Early world histories: E.g., Otto I 1966; Dinawari 1986.
2 / Why Billington Survived
Massasoit, Samoset, and Tisquantum: Bradford 1981:87–88; Winslow
1963b:37, 43–59 (“tall proper men,” 53); Deetz and Deetz 2000:61–
62. In quotations I have modernized the use of “f” and “v.”
Negotiations: Bradford 1981:87–89; Winslow 1963b:50–59 (“very
lusty,” 57); Deetz and Deetz 2000:61–62; Kuppermann 2000:7.
“A friendly Indian”: Wood et al. 1971:73.
Tisquantum’s life: I have relied greatly on Salisbury 1989. See also
Adams 1892–93 (vol. 1): 22–44; Foreman 1943:20–21; Humins 1987;
Kinnicutt 1914; Shuffelton 1976.
Tisquantum, and fish fertilizer: Accounts of Squanto and fish fertilizer
include Winslow 1963a:81–82 (“increase,” 82); Bradford 1981:94–95;
Morton 1632:89. Skepticism about the aboriginality of fish fertilization
dates back to 1939, but the question was first raised forcefully in
Rostlund 1957a and then still more strongly in Ceci 1975a, 1975b,
1990b. Ceci’s conclusions were disputed (Nanepashemet 1991; Russell
1975, 1980:166–67; Warden 1975), but much of the critique boiled
down to refuting the charge that the Indians were too stupid to figure
out the use of fertilizer, an argument Ceci did not make. Instead Ceci
suggested that the added productivity would not have been worth the
added trouble, given the alternative of fallowing. Because Europeans
had much less land per person and less mobility, they had to resort to
fertilization. In the early 1990s Stephen A. Mrozowski, an
archaeologist at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, unearthed
evidence on Cape Cod suggesting that fish were used there as fertilizer
a few decades before the Mayflower, but he has not yet published it
(interview, Mrozowski). The fish may have been ordinary household
waste, though. Incidentally, fish fertilizer was common in Peru
(Denevan 2001:35–36).
Pilgrims’ lack of curiosity about Indian motives: The early chroniclers
did explore Tisquantum’s motives, especially when they accused him
of scheming to better his station. But they did not, in modern terms, try
to put themselves in his place, which is what is at issue here. Nor did
the colonists puzzle over why they never suffered a sustained attack, to
judge by the lack of discussion by Bradford, Winslow et al. Here one
cannot charge the colonists with special insensitivity. Compared to
later historians, Pilgrim writers were more likely to see Indians as
independent actors with their own beliefs and goals (Kuppermann
2000:2–4).
“Divine providence”: Gookin 1792:148.
Dissatisfied historians: For a survey of ethnohistory’s origins, see
Axtell 1978.
Explosion of research: Author’s interviews, Axtell, Neal Salisbury;
Chaplin 2003:esp. 1445–55 (“No other field,” 1431).
Squanto as devil: Shuffelton 1976. Tisquantum, according to a
Massachusett dictionary, is a variant of musquantum, “he is angry.”
When Indians had accidents, according to Roger Williams, the minister
and linguist who founded Rhode Island, “they will say, God was angry
and did it; musquantum manit, God is angry” (cited in Shuffelton
1976:110).
Norumbega: D’Abate 1994; Parkman 1983 (vol. 1):155. The term
referred vaguely to a mythical city, the river that supposedly reached it,
and the region around the river, all somewhere in the Northeast.
Patuxet population: A vexing question. Tisquantum is said to have
claimed it had two thousand souls (James ed. 1963:29). According to
the most widely cited colonial observer, Daniel Gookin, the
Wampanoag federation, of which Patuxet was a member, “could raise,
as the most credible and ancient Indians affirm, about three thousand
men” (Gookin 1792:148). If the federation were able to muster three
thousand adult males, then typical population estimates for the whole
would be on the order of twelve to fifteen thousand. The Wampanoag
had about a dozen settlements, which would suggest that Patuxet may
have had a thousand inhabitants, or maybe a few more. Countering
this, anthropologist Kathleen Bragdon argues the available
archaeological evidence suggests that individual coastal settlements
like Patuxet held “probably no more than two hundred people”
(Bragdon 1996:58). I have accepted Gookin’s figure because it was
apparently derived from contemporaneous Indians themselves, and
because the archaeological traces, as Bragdon herself notes, are
difficult to interpret.
Names and distribution of Indian groups: Most historical accounts rely
on Gookin (1792:147–49), including the standard reference, Salwen
(1978:160–76). See also Bragdon 1996:20–25; Russell 1980:19–29;
Salisbury 1982:13–30 passim; Vaughan 1995:50–58.
Dawnland: Stewart-Smith 1998:49.
Slow movement into New England: Bragdon 1996:57–58 (salt
marshes, 1000 B.C.); Wilkie and Tager eds. 1991:10–11 (maps of
distribution through time of known paleo-Indian archaeological sites);
Fagan 2000:101–04 (low carrying capacity of postglacial areas);
Petersen 2004. On a continental scale, the New England indigenous
groups were so small that one conscientious continental survey doesn’t
even mention them (Fagan 1991).
Patchwork environment: Cronon 1983:19–33 (“tremendous variety,”
31).
Glottochronology: Glottochronology was invented in the 1960s by
U.S. linguist Morris Swadesh, a controversial figure who spent much
of his career in Mexico after his colorful political views cost him his
passport during the McCarthy period. The technique was the subject of
his posthumously printed magnum opus, The Origin and
Diversification of Language (Swadesh ed. 1971). Glottochronology
tries to ascertain how long ago two languages diverged from a
common ancestor language, as French and Italian did from Latin. To
accomplish this, Swadesh drew up a list of one hundred basic terms,
such as “ear,” “mother,” and “vomit.” When two languages are closely
related, Swadesh argued, their words for these terms will resemble
each other. For example, the French and Italian for “ear” are oreille
and orecchio, terms similar enough to suggest that these languages
split off from each other relatively recently. On average, Swadesh
claimed, the words on the Swadesh list change at a rate of 14 percent
every one thousand years. Thus if two languages have similar entries
for seventy-nine of the hundred words on the Swadesh list, they broke
off from a common ancestor about 1,500 years ago. Unsurprisingly,
Swadesh’s ideas have been criticized. Especially implausible is the
notion that linguistic change occurs at a constant, universal rate.
Nonetheless researchers use glottochronology, partly because of the
lack of alternatives, and partly because the basic idea intuitively seems
correct (Swadesh 1971, 1952; Hymes 1971, 1960:5–6).
Glottochronological analysis of Algonquian languages: Fiedel 1987;
Goddard 1978; Mulholland 1985.
Diverse New England communities: This description relies on the
surveys of evidence in Petersen and Cowrie 2002; Bragdon 1996:55–
79 (“no name,” 58–59). Bragdon (1996:39) adopts the term
“conditional sedentism” for the coastal communities (coined in
Dunford 1992). For the growth of coastal communities, see Robinson
1994. In the past, some have argued that coastal Indians practiced little
agriculture (Ceci 1990a), but Petersen and Cowrie assemble evidence
to refute this.
Coastal diet: Little and Schoeninger 1995; Kavasch 1994.
Description of Patuxet: Author’s visit; James ed. 1963:7 (“Pleasant for
air,” alewives), 75–76; Winslow 1963b:8–43; Anon. ed. 1963:xx–xxi
(map of area in 1613 by Champlain). In these years big areas along the
coastline had neatly planted maize fields, traces of which survived
even into the twentieth century (Delabarre and Wilder 1920:210–14).
Wetus, meals, and domestic style: Morton 1637:24–26; Wood
1977:86–88, 112 (“warmer,” 112); Bragdon 1996:104–07; Gookin
1792:149–51 (“so sweet,” 150–51). “The best sort” of wetus, Gookin
said, were “covered very neatly, tight, and warm, with barks of
trees”—“warm as the best English houses” (150). Clearly, the homes
of the wealthy in England were not leaky or drafty, but in that
deforested land even the rich could not afford the plentiful fires that
kept Indians warm (Higginson 1792:121–22).
2,500 calories/day: Bennett 1955:table 1; Braudel 1981–84 (vol.
1):129–45 (European calorie levels).
Indian and European views on children: Kuppermann 2000:153–56;
Williams 1936:29 (spoiling); Denys 1908:404; Ariés 1962 (European
views).
Games: Wood 1977:103–06.
Character, training, and pniese: Salisbury 1989:229–31; Wood
1977:91–94 (“He that speaks,” 91; “Beat them,” 93 [I have
modernized “winch,” an obsolete form of “flinch”]); Winslow
1624:55–56; James ed. 1963:77; Kittredge ed. 1913:151, quoted in
Axtell 1981:44.
Sachems: Wood 1977:97–99; Winslow 1624:56–60; Gookin
1792:154–55; Salisbury 1982:42–43; Dunford 2001:32–37; Johnson
1993:chap. 3. To the north, sachems were called sagamores, a
distinction I am ignoring.
Population increase, attendant social change, and rise of political
tensions: On the one hand, there is surprisingly little archaeological
evidence for coastal agriculture (Ceci 1990a); on the other, there are
multiple colonial reports that the seacoast was thick with farms. This
scenario is an attempt to reconcile the apparently contradictory
evidence (Bragdon 1996:146–53). See also Johnson 1993:chap. 3;
Thomas 1979:24–44 (“The political scene,” 30); Metcalf 1974; and
esp. Petersen and Cowrie 2002.
Indigenous warfare as less bloody: Hariot 1588:36–37; Williams
1936:188 (“farre less”); Hirsch 1988; Kuppermann 2000:106–09;
Russell 1980:187–94; Vaughan 1995:37–41. One reason for the low
casualties, Williams observed, was that Indians fought “with [so much]
leaping and dancing, that seldome an Arrow hits.” (Evidently, the
games of archery dodgem paid off.) Some activists have claimed that
scalping was actually invented by white colonists. But European
visitors witnessed the practice in the 1530s and 1540s, before any
colonies existed north of Florida. “Hanging, disemboweling,
beheading, and drawing and quartering were commonplace” in Europe,
James Axtell observed, but not scalping. Each continent had its own
forms of mutilation, and “it hardly seems worth arguing” which was
worse (Axtell 1980:463).
Early European exploration: Some of the vast literature includes
Kuppermann 1997a; Bourque and Whitehead 1994; Quinn 1974: chap.
1; Salisbury 1982:51–54; Axtell 1994:154–55 (Corte-Real).
Verrazzano as first visitor: In his popular book, 1421: The Year the
Chinese Discovered America, Gavin Menzies, a British ex–naval
officer, argues that in that year a huge fleet led by warrior eunuchs
sailed from China to the Americas. After the fleet lost many ships to
Caribbean reefs, it had to leave off “several thousand men and
concubines” in Rhode Island. They were supposed to be picked up by
subsequent expeditions, but the emperor who sponsored the expedition
died, and his successor was not interested in globetrotting. The
stranded Chinese melted into the local population. Verrazzano noted
that the peoples of Rhode Island were more “beautiful” than other
Indians, which to Menzies is evidence that they were not Indians. So
enchanting is the image of 500-foot-long Chinese junks in New
England that I am sorry to report that few researchers other than
Menzies believe it (Menzies 2003:281–96 [“several thousand,” 291]).
Verrazzano’s account: Wroth ed. 1970:71–90, 133–43 (“densely
populated,” 137; “little bells,” 138; “irksome clamor,” 139; “showing,”
“barbarous,” 140); Axtell 1992:156–57.
Indians’ physical appearance: Gookin 1792:152–53 (“one part,” 153);
Higginson 1792:123; Morton 1632:32 (“as proper”); Wood 1977:82–
83 (“more amiable,” 82, “torture,” 83); Russell 1980:30–32. See also
the drawings of Algonquians further south by John White (Hulton
1984). Differences between colonial and native ways of treating the
body are explored in Kuppermann 2000:chap. 2 (bow string, 55–56),
and Axtell 2000:154–58.
Popularity of Indian hairstyles: Kuppermann 1997b:225 (“lovelocks”);
Higginson 1792:123.
Indian views of Europeans: Jaenen 2000 (weak, 76; ugly, 77; sexually
untrustworthy, 83; Micmac, 85; dirty, handkerchiefs, 87); Axtell 1988;
Stannard 1992:5 (Indian cleanliness). As a rule, only wealthy
Europeans bathed—commoners wiped themselves with rags when they
could.
Two hundred British ships: Cell 1965.
Champlain’s exploration: Biggar ed. 1922–36 (vol. 1):349–55, 397–
401. See also, Salisbury 1982:62–66, and the enjoyable Parkman 1983
(vol. 1):191–93, 199.
Gorges and Maine: Gorges 1890a:204–07; Salisbury 1982:92–94. I
have followed Salisbury rather than wholly accept Gorges’s account,
which is confused and confusing. Unlike Plymouth colony, the Maine
expedition did not land in winter with no food. It lost only two
members the first winter, whereas death and illness so beset the
Pilgrims that in their first few months ashore they usually had only a
few functioning people.
Pring: Pring 1905:51–63.
Smith and Pocahontas: The best retelling of the Pocahontas story I
have come across is Gunn Allen 2003. A similar, briefer account is
Richter 2001:70–78. An enjoyable nonscholarly account of Smith and
Virginia is Milton 2000.
Smith in New England, Hunt kidnaps Tisquantum: Arber and Bradley
eds. 1910 (vol. 1):192–205, 256–57 (“great troupes,” “fortie,” 205);
(vol. 2):697–99; Bradford 1981:89–90; Winslow 1963b:52; 1963c:70;
Gorges 1890a:209–11 (“worthlesse,” 209; “warre,” 211).
French sailors killed or enslaved: Winship 1905:252 (shipwreck);
Winslow 1963c:27–28 (finding body); Bradford 1981:92; Hubbard
1848:54–55; Adams 1892–93:6–10.
Billington: Bradford 1981:259–60 (hanging, “profanest”), 97
(runaway), 173–74; Bradford 1906:13 (“knave”); Winslow 1963b:31
(shooting gun in ship); Winslow 1963d:69–72 (runaway); Prince
1855:291 (contempt charge); A. C. Mann 1976; Dillon 1975:203
(“troublesome”).
Framing my ancestor: My grandfather told me that Billington was an
excellent hunter and trapper. With this independent source of food, he
could ignore colonial edicts. To take him down a peg, my grandfather
claimed, the powers that be sent men to rob his traps. Billington caught
on. He lay in wait and discovered a thief in the act. The thief shot at
him. My ancestor, a much better shot, returned fire, with predictably
lethal consequences. This story is unlikely but not impossible. The
Billingtons were among the few families to survive the first winter
intact, suggesting that John may indeed have been a fine hunter. And
the Pilgrims’ contemporary reputation for ridding themselves of
religiously unsympathetic people was so widespread that in 1664 the
poet Samuel Butler mocked the practice in his popular satire Hudibras:
“Our brethren of NEW ENGLAND use / Choice malefactors to
excuse, / And hang the guiltless in their stead, / Of whom the Churches
have less need” (Canto II, lines 409–12).
Actual first executions: During the catastrophic “starving time” (winter
1609–10) in Jamestown, according to colony governor George Percy,
“one of our Colline murdered his [pregnant] wyfe Ripped the childe
outt of her woambe and threw itt into the River and after chopped the
Mother in pieces and salted her for his foode.” Percy had the man
tortured and executed (Percy 1922:267). In March 1623 a man at
Wessagusset, a rival Massachusetts colony, was hanged for stealing
maize from an Indian family (Morton 1632:108–10; Bradford
1981:129). Bradford calls Billington’s execution “the first” in
Plymouth (259), so my family can claim that our ancestor was the first
person of European descent hanged in the Cape Cod area. I am
arbitrarily not including the French and Spaniards in Florida who
executed each other by the score in the 1560s.
No idea where they were heading: According to Bradford, their
intended destination was “some place about Hudson’s River”
(Bradford 1981:68), an assertion backed up by the diplomat John Cory,
who surveyed Plymouth in 1622 on behalf of British investors (James
ed. 1963:5–6). But they had earlier tried to obtain permission to settle
in what is now New England, so some historians have argued that it is
possible that they were going there. One theory is that the Dutch, who
then had possession of the Hudson, bribed the Mayflower’s captain to
steer them away (Morton 1669:11–12). In any case, they gave little
evidence of knowing where they were going (Rutman 1960). Smith’s
claims, which seem to be true, are reported in Arber and Bradley eds.
1910 (vol. 2):891–92.
Pilgrim incompetence: Most of this catalog of error is lifted from Bates
1940:112–13.
Half the Pilgrims died: Accompanied by about 30 crew members, 102
people set sail. One died en route, but a child was born before landfall,
the wonderfully named Oceanus Hopkins, making the party 102 again.
Of these, 44 died before spring. Among them was Bradford’s wife,
Dorothy, thought to have drowned herself by leaping off the Mayflower
rather than face the unknown continent (Deetz and Deetz 2000:39, 59–
60).
Robbing Indian graves and houses: Bradford 1981:73–75; Winslow
1963b:19–29 (“providence,” 26). Later the Pilgrims did try to
compensate the Indians for the theft (Winslow 1963c:61–62).
English vs. continental financing for colonies, British colonists’
flakiness and helplessness: Kuppermann 2000:3–4, 11–15, 148
(“utterly,” 13); Cell 1965.
Inability to understand climate: The confusion is especially surprising
given that a number of British visitors had kept careful track of the
weather (e.g., Anon. 1979).
Time of drought: Stahle et al. 1998.
Thoreau’s disdain: Thoreau 1906 (vol. 4):295–300 (“A party,” 300).
Tisquantum’s travels in New England: Baxter 1890:103–10 (“appears
to,” 106); Gorges 1890a:212–25; 1890b:26–30; Dermer 1619 (“void,”
131). The line from The Tempest is in act 2, scene 2.
“Indians themselves”: Panzer 1995:118–19 (text of Sublimis Deus,
Paul III).
Slany: Cell 1965:615.
Epidemic: Morton 1637:22–24 (“died,” 23; “Golgotha,” 23); Hubbard
1848:54–55 (French sailor’s curse); Spiess and Spiess 1987; Snow
1980:31–42; Snow and Lanphear 1988. Salisbury (1982:103–05)
suggests that the disease was the plague, but Snow and Lanphear point
out that this requires a chain of transmission that would have trouble
getting established. According to John Smith, “where I had seene 100
or 200 Salvages [in 1614], there is scarce ten to be found [in 1620]”
(Arber and Bradley eds. 1910 [vol. 2]:259). The Pilgrims may have
seen evidence of the original disease carrier. One of the corpses they
exhumed on Cape Cod had blond hair and was buried in a wrap of
sailor’s canvas (Winslow 1963b:27–28).
“The idea”: Gunn Allen 2003:30.
Mather’s experiment: Mather 1820 (vol. 1):507.
Wampanoag spiritual and political crises: Salisbury 1989:235–38
(“their deities,” 236).
Plymouth and more than fifty villages: Pyne 1982:45–48; Cronon
1983:90.
Bradford and Gorges quotes: Anon. 1792:246 (attrib. to Bradford);
Gorges, 1890b:77. From today’s point of view, these opinions were
both unfortunately sanguine and unfortunately common. Viz., John
Winthrop, first governor of the rival colony in Massachusetts Bay,
describing in May 1634 the legal implications of the loss of many
natives to smallpox: “The Lord hathe cleared our title to what we
possess” (Winthrop 1976:116); or Cotton Mather calmly explaining
that the land had been swept free “of those pernicious creatures
[Indians], to make room for better growth [Europeans]” (quoted in C.
F. Adams 1892–93 [vol. 1]:12).
“Could make [the] English”: Pratt 1858:485.
“He thinks we may”: Winslow 1963b:58.
Indians and guns: Chaplin 2001:111–12; Percy 1905–07:414 (all
Jamestown quotes).
Indian technology: Rosier 1605:21 (canoes); Kuppermann 2000:166–
68 (shoes); Bourque and Whitehead 1994:136–42 (Indian shallops). To
some readers, the notion that European technology did not determine
the outcome of the culture clash may seem absurd. Compare, though,
the difference between the colonial histories of the Americas and
Africa. The indigenous inhabitants of both places had technology that
is often described as wildly inferior. And both places were the target of
sustained colonial enterprises by the same nations. In the Americas,
though, the Indians were rapidly defeated. “The Indians die so easily
that the bare look and smell of a Spaniard causes them to give up the
ghost,” a missionary commented in 1699 (quoted in Crosby 2003b:37).
Yet the majority of Africa—which had, if anything, an even more
“inferior” technological base—did not fall until the late nineteenth
century. Technology was not a dominant factor.
Massasoit’s negotiations: Winslow 1963b:43–59; Deetz and Deetz
2000:61–62.
Tisquantum’s machinations, death: Bradford 1981:108–09 (“came
running,” “and he thought,” “all was quiet”), 125–26 (Tisquantum’s
death); Morton 1637:103–05; Winslow 1963a:82 (thanksgiving);
Humins 1987; Salisbury 1989; Shuffelton 1976.
Massasoit’s son and war in 1675: The best short account I have
encountered is the first section of Schultz and Tougias 1999. See also
Richter 2001:90–109; Vaughan 1995:308–22; Salisbury 1982:Chap. 7.
1633 epidemic: Snow and Lanphear 1998.
3 / In the Land of Four Quarters
Pizarro’s body: Maples and Browning 1994:213–19.
Ezell thesis: Ezell 1961.
Dobyns in Peru and Mexico: Interviews, Dobyns; Dobyns 2004.
Prescott as first full history: As opposed to colonial-era accounts.
Politicization of Andean studies: Beyers 2001. Among the better
known examples (and actually a pretty good book) is Baudin 1961.
Dobyns’s 1963 article: Dobyns 1963.
Comparison of Inka realm to other states in 1491: Fernández-Armesto
2001:390–402 (“imperial potential,” 395).
Inka realm as empire: Peruvian historian María Rostworowski de Diez
Canseco has argued that because the term “empire” has “Old World
connotations”—it implies a sophisticated center that dominates
“barbarians” on the periphery, as was the case for Rome—it should not
be applied to the Inka, who overran societies bigger and more
cosmopolitan than themselves (Rostworowski de Diez Canseco
1999:x). Although one can see what she means, the word is now used
loosely to describe a situation in which “a core polity gains control
over a range of other societies” (D’Altroy 2002:6). And the Inka did
exactly that.
Inka goals, methods: “The Inkas were coolly pragmatic, efficient, and
totalitarian in their policies toward conquered nations, [attempting to
impose] a restrictive area wide standardization of politics, religion,
customs, and language…. They maintained order by instilling fear and
using force rather than by encouraging knowledgeable participation”
(Dobyns and Doughty 1976:48–49).
Inka road system: Hyslop 1984:esp. 215–24, 342–43. The network
appears to have been planned carefully (Jenkins 2001:655–87).
“not with the Wars”: Rowe 1946:329.
“where millions”: Quoted in Lechtman 1996a:15. My next sentence is
a revamped version of Lechtman’s sentence following the quotation.
Steepest street: Filbert Street. I am grateful to Wade Roush for
checking this comparison.
“a wide range”: Diamond 1997:140.
20 of 34 life zones: Burger 1992:12. Only 2 percent of Peru is today
considered suitable for agriculture (ibid.).
“vertical archipelagoes”: Murra 1967.
Inka origin accounts: Cobo 1979:103–07 (“extreme ignorance,” 20;
“ridiculous,” 103).
Betanzos: Betanzos 1996 (“thirty small,” 13; “two hundred,” 19). For a
discussion of his value as a source, see Fossa 2000.
Inkas vs. Chankas, Wiraqocha Inka vs. Inka Yupanki: Betanzos
1996:19–43 (“To this,” 33; “crazy impulse,” 36); Cieza de León
1998:317 (Pizarro sees skins); Cobo 1979:130–33 (“valiant prince,”
130); Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamayhua 1879:270–73; D’Altroy
2002:62–65; Rostworowski de Diez Canseco 2001:78–119; Santa
1963. Three of the fifteen Spanish accounts of Inka history claim that
Wiraqocha Inka, not Inka Yupanki, fought the Chankas and then his
father. Among them is Cobo, who confusingly attributes what seem to
be the same events to both. Rostworowski de Diez Canseco (1999:28–
34) convincingly argues against Wiraqocha. Pachakuti literally means
“he who remakes the world” or “he who turns over time and space,”
but I have followed Michael Moseley in an attempt to suggest how the
name might have struck Inka ears (Moseley 2001:14).
Inka chronology: John H. Rowe laid out the timeline of the empire in
an influential article (Rowe 1946:203). Rowe relied on the calculation
in a manuscript from 1586, still not published in its entirety, by Father
Miguel Cabello Balboa (Cabello Balboa 1920). A Swedish historian,
Åke Wedin, fiercely criticized Rowe’s use of this and other sources
(Wedin 1963, 1966). An insurmountable problem with the accounts,
Wedin insisted, was that they were not drawn from interviews with the
elite record keepers who actually kept track of events. The implication
was that most other Indians were as reliably informed about their
society’s history as, say, average U.S. citizens are about their society’s
history. Since Wedin’s work historians have come to place a little more
trust in Spanish chronicles, which although not taken from record
keepers tended to be drawn from interviews with the educated elite. In
addition, radiocarbon dating seems generally to support the chronology
(Michczynski and Adamska 1997). Rowe’s chronology is now
typically viewed as roughly correct, though subject to debate.
Fall of Chincha: Castro and Ortega Morejón 1974:91–104 (“son of the
Sun,” 93; “Everything,” 95). My thanks to Robert Crease for obtaining
this article for me. See also Santillán 1879:14; Sarmiento de Gamboa
2000:113–14, 135 (brother left in command). As Sarmiento de
Gamboa notes, Chincha was a minor incident in a much larger
campaign against the bigger polity of Chimor (see Chap. 6). The rising
claim on local labor both reflected a deliberate strategy by the Inka
state of gradually increasing control and a rise in labor demand in the
Inka state itself (Morris 1993:36–50).
Luttwak’s book: Luttwak 1976.
Inka as hegemonic empire: D’Altroy 1987; Hassig 1985.
Austere, contemporary feel of Inka art and architecture: Paternosto
1996:219–22 (influence on twentieth-century art); Thomson 2003:60–
62, 86–87, 246–49.
Qosqo and Awkaypata: Rowe 1991, 1990. I thank Patricia Lyon for
sending me a copy of these articles. Descriptions of the structures are
in Sarmiento de Gamboa 2000:85–91.
“point of a pin”: Pizarro 1969:272–73. He was describing Saqsawaman
fortress, at the edge of town, but the same is true of the structures in
central Qosqo. Sancho was similarly impressed (Sancho 1917:156–
57). One viceroy wrote in 1571 that an Inka fortress was “the work of
the devil…for it does not seem possible that the strength and skill of
men could have made it” (quoted in Wright 2005:57).
Zeq’e and Wak’a: D’Altroy 2002:155–67 (“otherwise diligent,” 156
[D’Altroy closed his remark by wryly noting “(see below)”]). He
relied on Bauer 1998, which I have also done. The classic colonial
account is from Cobo 1990:51–84 (“more than a thousand,” 9). But as
a Booknews reviewer dryly noted, Cobo “based his account of [Inka]
religion almost entirely on previous literature (his employer having
eradicated his subject).”
Calendar: The Inka calendar and their means of reckoning time were
so complex that I have basically ducked and avoided them. See instead
Aveni 1995:278–304.
Inka economics and labor system: Cobo 1979:189–93, 211–34; La
Lone 1982:312–36; Murra 1980; Rostworowski de Diez Canseco
2001:182–201; D’Altroy 2002:263–86.
Absence of money in Europe: Braudel 1981–84 (vol. 1):467–68.
“managed to eradicate”: Vargas Llosa 1992:26.
Population reshuffling: Cieza de León 1959:59–63; Cobo 1979:189–
93; D’Altroy 2002:248–49; Rowe 1946:269–70.
Disproportionate size of conquest: The contrast between the tiny
Spanish force and the vast Inka empire was noted as early as 1534, in
the first narrative of the conquest, Verdadera relación de la conquista
del Perú, by Francisco de Xerez. “When in ancient times have such
few [triumphed] against so many?” he crowed. “And who has equaled
those of Spain? Certainly not the Jews nor the Greeks nor Romans,
about whom most is told.” Although the Romans subjugated many
lands, Jerez said, “it was with equal or greater numbers of people, in
known territories, provided with the usual sustenance, and with paid
captains and armies. But our Spaniards…were never more than two or
three hundred, sometimes a hundred or even less…. And the many
times they traveled, they were neither paid nor forced but went of their
own will and at their own cost” (Xerez 1938:16–17).
Inka “crown” and clothes, saving of waste: Pizarro 1969:222–26
(clothing and headband); Cobo 1979:244–47; Ruiz de Arce 1933:361
(spittle), cited in Hemming 2004:51; Rowe 1946:258–59.
Thupa Inka’s grandeur, military career: Sarmiento de Gamboa
2000:112–19, 122–23 (“worshiped and adored,” 112); D’Altroy
2002:67–74. The description of the litter is from Thupa Inka’s
successor, but seems to apply in general (Pachacuti Yamqui
Salcamayhua 1879:79).
Thupa Inka’s marriage(s): Betanzos 1996:119–20; Cobo 1979:142;
D’Altroy 2002:103–06. As Rowe notes, multiple sister-marriages were
embedded in Inka culture—the leader of the four brothers who arrived
in Qosqo married his four sisters (Rowe 1946:317–18). In addition,
Andean societies traditionally recognized that a man owed obligations
to his sister’s son. By ensuring that his nephew was also his son, the
Inka tried to reduce the potential for intrafamilial conflict
(Rostworowski de Diez Canseco 2001:103–04).
Troubled accession of Wayna Qhapaq: Sarmiento de Gamboa
2000:133–38; Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamayhua 1879:293–97;
Rostworowski de Diez Canseco 2001:104–05. According to one report,
Wayna Qhapaq was sixteen (Anello Oliva 1998:77). See also,
Peñaherrera de Costales and Costales Samienego 1964.
Makework projects: Cieza de León 1959:77 (“mountain”), 137–38.
Ecuador campaign: Cobo 1979:155–60 (“commanded,” 155, “prepared
himself,” 156); Betanzos 1996:182–83; Cieza de León 1959:46–50,
77–78; Cabello Balboa 1920:84–108; Niles 1999:97–105. Betanzos,
but not Cobo, mentions Atawallpa’s disgrace; Cobo, but not Betanzos,
describes Wayna Qhapaq’s discomfiture; omissions are consonant with
the chroniclers’ biases.
“When his captains”: Pizarro 1969:198–99, 228 (vampire-bat wool).
Wayna Qhapaq’s death, succession battle: Cieza de León 1959:78–87;
1998:187–93; Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamayhua 1879:309–24;
Sarmiento de Gamboa 2000:144–60; Cabello Balboa 1920:113–21,
128–72; Anello Oliva 1998:87–92. A clear summary is D’Altroy
2002:76–83; see also, Rostworowski de Diez Canseco 2001:110–25.
Betanzos’s narrative, though useful, is understandably biased; his wife
was Atawallpa’s sister (Betanzos 1996:183–234). Pedro Pizarro’s
version of events interestingly highlights the internal politics of Qosqo
(Pizarro 1969:198–206). Garcilaso de la Vega says that Wayna
Qhapaq’s death followed omens and prophecies of the collapse of the
empire, which seems unlikely. If true, though, it may account for a
certain fatalism toward the Spanish among the Inka elite (Gheerbrant
ed. 1962:284–89). He also suggests that the war occurred after Wayna
Qhapaq split up Tawantinsuyu in a Lear-like fashion, giving Atawallpa
a rump kingdom to the north. Most ethnographers and historians
disagree. Garcilaso’s description of the war itself as consisting in
essence of a single big engagement outside Qosqo is at variance with
other accounts.
Washkar’s marriage and his mother’s marriage: Pachacuti Yamqui
Salcamayhua 1879:308; Cabello Balboa 1920:120–21 (“begging,”
121).
Cieza de León casualty estimates: Cieza de León 1959:84 (16,000), 87
(35,000).
Skull cup: “I saw the head with the skin, the dried flesh, and its hair,
and it had the teeth closed, and between them was a silver straw, and
attached to the top of the head was a gold cup [with a hole in the
bottom that entered the skull], from which he drank when memories of
[Atawallpa’s] war against his brother came to mind; he put chicha in
the cup, from which it came out through the mouth, and he drank
through the straw” (Mena 1930:250–53). The cup is also mentioned in
Cieza de León 1959:84.
Pizarro and Atawallpa at Cajamarca: I draw mainly on Hemming
2004:30–85. See also, Sancho 1917:9–19; Mena 1930:231–81; Pizarro
1969:171–221 (“made water,” 179–80); Ruiz de Arce 1933:363
(“mounds”), cited in Hemming 2004:42.
Spaniards and gold: Restall 2003:22–23 (“nonperishable,” 23), 34–37,
65–67.
“What could,” “No amount”: Hemming 2004:115, 158. See also the
vigorously argued Guilmartin 1991.
Marveling at failure to develop steel: “It is worthy of remark, that…the
Peruvians, in their progress towards civilization, should never have
detected the use of iron, which lay around them in abundance”
(Prescott 2000:810).
Andean metallurgy: Burger and Gordon 1998; Lechtman 1996b
(“hardness,” 35; “plasticity,” 37); 1993 (“eminent scholar,” 253); 1984.
Different contexts of technology: Interviews, Lechtman (“people
solved”), Conklin, Leonard Morse-Fortier (force of sling projectiles);
Ihde 2000.
Inka ships: Cieza de León 1998: 75–76; Heyerdahl 1996; Hemming
2004:25; Prescott 2000:854–55; interview, Vranich (replica boat
created for documentary). See the account of the new ship at
http://www.reedboat.org.
“without endangering themselves”: Sancho 1917:62.
Importance and fineness of textiles in Tawantinsuyu: Murra 1964
(stripping soldiers, 718); Lechtman 1993:254–59 (five hundred threads
per inch, 257). “The [cotton] clothes they made were so fine that we
[Spaniards] thought they were made of silk, worked with figures of
beaten gold, beautifully made” (Mena 1930:225).
Cloth armor: Lechtman 1993:256; Murra 1964:718 (stripping of
soldiers); Rowe 1946:274–75; Montell 1929:Fig. 21.
“with such force”: Enríquez de Guzmán 1862:99.
Inka rebellion with flaming missiles: Hemming 2004:193–94; Prescott
2000:1021–23.
Inka armies and horses: Hemming 2004 (“Even when,” 111–12;
“dreaded,” 158).
Inka roads and horses: Letter, Pizarro, H., to Oidores of Santo
Domingo, 23 Nov. 1533, quoted in Hemming 2004:31 (“so bad”);
Prescott 2000:954. On one steep road “all made of steps of very small
stones,” Pedro Sancho wrote, Pizarro’s “horses toiled so much that,
when they had finished going up, the greater part of them had lost their
shoes and worn down the hoofs of all four feet” (Sancho 1917:63).
Inka military techniques: Sancho 1917:67; Hemming 2004:195
(bolas); Prescott 2000:922, 984.
Historians ignore disease: Interviews, Crosby, Denevan, Dobyns.
According to Dobyns, “the published works focused on New World
historic epidemiology could be counted on the fingers of one hand” at
that time (Dobyns 1995). Actually, Dobyns’s own count is eighteen
articles prior to 1964. Still, most researchers in the field did not “seem
to be paying much attention” (ibid.), e.g., the claim that “not until 1720
did any great losses through pestilence occur in Peru” (Kubler
1946:336). Peruvian researchers noted the epidemics (Patrón 1894
[proposing that Wayna Qhapaq died of bartonellosis, not smallpox]),
but others were like U.S. researchers in failing to grasp the impact of
disease (Vellard 1956). I am grateful to Robert Crease for helping me
obtain a copy of this last article.
Cieza de León: Cook and Cook 1998 (bio); Cieza de León 1959:52
(“great plague”).
Elite losses to smallpox: Sarmiento de Gamboa 2000:144–45;
Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamayhua 1879:307 (“scabs,” “millions”);
Murúa 1962–64 (vol. 1):136 (“infinite”), quoted in Crosby 2003b:53;
Pizarro 1969:196–97; Cobo 1979:160; Poma de Ayala 2001:114, 141,
288; Hopkins 1983:208–11. For a dissenting view, see McCaa, Nimlos,
and Hampe-Martínez 2004.
Evolution of smallpox: Baxby 1981; Gubser and Smith 2002.
“virgin soil”: Crosby 1976.
India smallpox study: Rao 1972:37, cited in Fenn 2001:21.
“may well have been halved”: Dobyns 1963:497.
Thucydides’ account of epidemic: Thucydides 1934:109–14.
Not in a European language: Crosby 2003b:xxii.
Royal mummies: Pizarro 1969:202–04, 251–54 (“the greater part,”
203); Estete, M.d., untitled narrative of journey to Pachacamac, quoted
in Hemming 2004:127 (“seated”); Sancho 1917:159, 170, 195, 200;
Rowe 1946:308; D’Altroy 2002:96–99, 141–42. Sarmiento de Gamboa
matter-of-factly describes Inka methods of storing bodies after death,
though he only uses the word “mummy” once (Sarmiento de Gamboa
2000:120–23, 135–36, 145–46).
Burning of Thupa Inka: Sarmiento de Gamboa 2000:121, 159;
Betanzos 1996:74–79; D’Altroy 2002:108.
Atawallpa execution: Rowe 1997. I thank Patricia Lyon for sending me
this article.
“win the land”: Pizarro 1969:199. See also, Sancho 1917:171–72;
Wright 1992:72–75.
European failures without epidemics, factions: Restall 2003:70–72
(Mexico, Florida); Hemming 1978:69–84 (Brazil); White 1991: esp.
Chap. 4 (France).
Additional smallpox epidemics: Hopkins 1983:212–13 (“They died by
scores,” quoted on 213).
Typhus, flu, etc., 90 percent death toll: Dobyns 1963. Dobyns’s
argument was supported almost two decades later in Noble David
Cook’s book-length survey, which argued that six main epidemics hit
Tawantinsuyu between 1524 and 1614, reducing the population by an
estimated 93 percent (N. D. Cook 1981).
Smallpox in Hispaniola: The first evidence of smallpox’s arrival is in a
letter of 10 January 1519 by the Hieronymite Fathers, then entrusted
with ruling Hispaniola. At the time, the disease had killed a third of the
island’s inhabitants and spread to Puerto Rico (Henige 1986:17–19).
Smallpox may not have been the first Caribbean epidemic. Francisco
Guerra, a medical historian at the Universidad de Alcalá de Henares, in
Spain, makes a strong case for a swine influenza epidemic in 1493 that
“was responsible for the disappearance of the American Indians in the
Antilles” (Guerra 1988:305). Noble David Cook suggests the epidemic
was smallpox (N. D. Cook 2003).
Smallpox hits Mexico: The evidence is examined carefully in McCaa
1995. See also, Hopkins 1983:204–08 and the sources in Chap. 4.
“Debated since”: Denevan ed. 1976:xvii. Denevan was far from alone
in his interest. At about the same time, for instance, Wilbur Jacobs, a
historian at the University of California in Santa Barbara, described the
puzzle of native numbers as “truly one of the most fascinating number
games in history” (Jacobs 1974:123).
Mooney: Mooney 1928; Ubelaker 1976, 1988. Mooney’s article was
posthumous.
Kroeber’s estimates: Kroeber 1934 (“sharply localized,” 25); 1939:31,
134, 166. Greenland is included in Kroeber’s population density figure,
lowering it somewhat.
Sauer, Cook, and Borah: Among their many works are Sauer 1935;
Cook and Simpson 1948; Borah and Cook 1964; Cook and Borah
1963, 1979. See also, Denevan 1996c.
“Historians and anthropologists”: Dobyns 1995.
World population in 1500: United Nations Population Division 1999:5.
“greatest destruction”: Lovell 1992:426. See also, Crosby 1986:208–
09; Porter 1998:163; Jacobs 1974:128.
Dobyns’s 1966 article, Denevan’s book: Dobyns 1966; Denevan 1976.
Dobyns’s ideas attacked: Author’s interviews, Dobyns, Russell
Thornton, Shepard Krech. See also Thornton 1987:34–36; Krech
1999:83–84; Henige 1998, 1990, 1978b.
Dobyns revises figures: Dobyns 1983:42. The new figure was for
North America only.
Henige bio, critiques: Interview, Henige; Henige 1998 (bio, 4–5;
“Suspect,” 314); 1978b (Hispaniola); Osborne 1998.
“You always hear”: Interview and email, Stiffarm. The unconscious
persistence of the view that before Columbus the Americas were
uninhabited, or almost so, is amazing. As late as 1986 Bernard Bailyn,
past president of the American Historical Society, published a book
called The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction (Bailyn
1986). The book is about British immigration. But the title also
suggests that before Europeans the land was not peopled. Indeed,
Indians are almost not to be found in the text.
“crater”: Interview, Wilson; Wilson 1999.
4 / Frequently Asked Questions
De Soto: Duncan 1995; Mena 1930:264–66 (Challcochima). De Soto,
Hemming observed, was “as brutal as any other conquistador. He [led]
the force that raped the mamaconas [nuns, more or less] of Cajas
during the march toward Cajamarca. His reputation among some
modern writers of being more humane than his companions is
undeserved” (Hemming 2004:555).
De Soto expedition: The numbers of men and animals differ somewhat
in different accounts. I use Ramenofsky 1987:59. The basic sources are
“Gentleman of Elvas” 1922 and its apparent predecessor, Fernández de
Biedma 1922. These and other documents are collected in Clayton,
Knight, and Moore eds. 1993. The state of scholarly knowledge is
assayed in Galloway ed. 1997. Popular accounts include Wilson
1999:134–37; Morgan 1993:72–75; Parkman 1983 (vol. 1):28–31.
Hudson’s reconstruction of route: Interview, Hudson; Hudson 1993.
For a fierce debate on the reliability of these reconstructions, see
Henige 1993; Hudson, DePratter, and Smith 1993; Hudson et al. 1994.
De Soto’s passage over Mississippi: “Gentleman of Elvas” 1922 (vol.
1):112–17 (all quotes, 113); Fernández de Biedma 1922 (vol. 2):25–28.
See also Rollings 1995:39–40.
La Salle expedition: Parkman 1983 (vol. 1):920–30.
Contrast between De Soto and La Salle’s experiences: Author’s
interviews, Galloway, Hudson, Ramenofsky; Ramenofsky 1987:55–63;
Burnett and Murray 1993:228.
Pigs as source for epidemic: Ramenofsky and Galloway 1997:271–73;
Crosby 1986:172–76, 212–13 (suggesting epidemic disease may also
have come before De Soto), 273; Crosby 2003b:77 (importance of pigs
to Spanish).
Indian lack of domesticated animals, lactose intolerance: Crosby
1986:19, 27; Ridley 2000:192–94. Francisco Guerra notes that the
Philippines did not experience epidemics from colonization, though its
inhabitants were as isolated as Indians. The critical difference, he
suggests, was the existence of domesticated animals, especially pigs, in
the Philippines (Guerra 1988:323).
Caddo and Coosa: Perttula 1993, 1991:512–14; M. T. Smith
1994:264–65; M. T. Smith 1987.
Mass graves in the Southeast: M. T. Smith 1987:60–68.
1918 flu epidemic: Crosby 2003a.
Plague origin, losses: Epidemiologists increasingly question whether
the Black Death was bubonic plague. Rats and fleas carry bubonic
plague, but the Black Death spread faster—and over colder land—than
these animals usually travel. And Y. pestis has never been shown to be
as contagious as the Black Death. The epidemic may instead have been
of a hemorrhagic fever like Ebola (Scott and Duncan 2001). I am
grateful to David Henige for drawing this discussion to my attention.
For losses, see, e.g., Wrigley 1969:63.
Population nadir: Ubelaker 1992:169–76, table 3. The 1890 U.S.
census listed the Native American population as 237,000 (United
States Bureau of the Census 1937:3, table 2). But it is widely believed
that the Census Bureau undercounted, both because it did not
accurately survey many native areas and because its definition of
“Indian” was too restrictive. Most demographers double the reported
number.
Zambardino critique: Zambardino 1980 (“the errors multiply,” 8;
“meaningful,” 18).
“no better than”: Crosby 1992:175.
Skepticism: Interviews, Ubelaker, Snow; Snow 1995 (“no support,”
1604); 1992; Snow and Lanphear 1988. I believe David Henige coined
“Low Counter” and “High Counter.”
Historians’ reluctance: Calloway 2003:415–16 (“boggle,” 415);
McNeill 1998:19–23.
1967 measles epidemic: Interviews, Napoleon Chagnon, Thomas
Headland, Francis Black, Patrick Tierney; Neel et al. 1970; Neel
1977:155–68. The epidemic became the subject of controversy when
U.S. journalist Patrick Tierney accused Neel and his anthropologist
coauthor, Chagnon, of exacerbating and perhaps even causing it in the
course of an unethical experiment on the effects of vaccination
(Tierney 2000). After a furor, researchers generally agreed that the
likelihood that Neel and Chagnon had spread measles was negligible
(Mann 2000a, 2001; Neel et al. 2001); as the main text indicates, the
epidemic apparently originated with the Tootobi missionaries
(Headland 2000). The Yanomamo are also known as Yanomami,
Yanoama, and Yanomamö, the different terms coming from different
dialects.
Distribution of blood types: Crosby 2003b:22–30. For a more
complete explanation, see Crawford 1998:95–101.
Relative lack of genetic disease: Author’s interviews, Black, Crosby,
Dobyns (cystic fibrosis, Huntington’s chorea); Black 2004:155 (asthma
and autoimmune diseases); Hurtado, Hurtado, and Hill 2004:185
(diabetes). Dobyns stressed that the evidence is weak. Because
Europeans recorded “things like the lack of beggars and madmen in
city streets,” he told me, “you can assemble a sketchy picture” of
societies with little genetic disease. “But as Henige would say,”
Dobyns remarked of his fiercest critic, “it’s an argument from silence.”
Black and HLA types: Author’s interviews, Black, Stephen S. Hall;
Black 1992, 1994, 2004; Crawford 1998:131–34. HLA classes are
succinctly explained in Hall 1997:368–69. My thanks to Steve Hall for
walking me through this material.
“Europeans’ capacity”: Jennings 1975:22.
Russian fur trade: Standard histories include Fisher 1943; Lincoln
1994.
1768–69 epidemic: Bril 1988:238 (“No one knows”); Samwell
1967:1252–59 (“Ruins,” 1252); Sauer 1802:306–08. Sauer’s death
tally of 5,368 is identical to that of the writer William Coxe (Coxe
1780:5) and reasonably congruent with the estimate that “three
fourths” of the populace died by French consul Jean Baptiste
Barthelemy Lesseps, who was traveling in Kamchatka at the time
(Lesseps 1790:128–29 [“three fourths,” 128]). I am grateful to
Elizabeth Fenn for providing me with her notes on these references,
from which I have taken the material from Lessep and Sauer.
“As soon as”: Füch 1988:169–70. Again I thank Prof. Fenn.
Helper-T cell hypothesis: Hurtado, Hurtado and Hill 2004.
Revolutionary War epidemic: Interviews, Fenn; Fenn 2001 (start of
Boston epidemic, 46; ten to thirty a day, 47; one day before the
Declaration, 53–54; “Ethiopian regiment,” 57–61; Quebec, 62–71;
Adams, 79).
Mexico City epidemic: Calloway 2003:417–19 (“It seems likely,”
561); Fenn 2001:138–40 (Fenn suggests that a third epidemic, which
moved west from New Orleans, may have “collided” with the Mexico
City epidemic in the Southwest).
Hopi-Nermernuh-Shoshone-Blackfoot connection: Thompson
1916:318–25, 336–38 (“with our sharp,” 336–37); Calloway
2003:419–21 (Sioux, 421); Fenn 2001:211–22. See also, Ewers 1973.
“Blackfoot” usually refers to groups in Canada; “Blackfeet,” to those
in the United States.
“winter counts”: Sundstrom 1997; Calloway 2003:424. In Sundstrom’s
survey of winter counts, all but one of the fifteen that cover 1780–82
characterized at least one of the years with the symbol for an epidemic,
though some called it measles instead of smallpox (many groups
initially did not distinguish them). Plains Indians defined a year as the
period between the first snowfall of one winter and the first snowfall of
the next, so it was not the same as a European year.
Pox in Northwest: Calloway 2003:421–23; Fenn 2001:224–32 (“great
preponderance,” 227), 250–58; Harris 1994; Boyd 1999:esp. 21–39.
Vancouver expedition: Vancouver 1984 (vol. 2):516–40 and passim
(“promiscuously scattered,” 516); Puget 1939:198 (“pitted”).
Quarantine: Braudel 1981–84 (vol. 1):86–87; Salisbury 1982:106
(“could only”); Cronon 1983:88.
Wider impact of epidemics: Crosby 1992; Calloway 2003:419–26;
Stannard 1991:532–33; Thornton 1987; Hopkins 1994:48 (“my
people”); Salisbury 1982: 105–06.
Death of Hawaiian king and queen: Kuykendall 1947:76–81.
Montreal peace negotiations: Havard 2001:49, 65 (Haudenosaunee
losses), 130–02 (epidemic and Kondiaronk’s death).
Former captives: Haudenosaunee Brandão 1997:72–81.
Fates of Cree, Shoshone, Omaha: Calloway 2003:422–26 (“The
country,” 422). See also, Campbell 2003.
1524 meeting: Sahagún 1980; Klor de Alva 1990. See also, Motolinía
1950:37–38, 174–86 (de Valencia’s life).
“bishops and pampered prelates”: Prescott 2000:637.
Franciscan-Mexica debate: Sahagún 1980:lines 109, 115, 117, 217–18,
223–29, 235–37, 759–63, 1054 (“gods were not powerful,” 54
[summary]). See also, León-Portilla 1963:62–70.
Teotihuacan and its influence: Often-cited works include Cowgill
1997; Carrasco, Jones, and Sessions eds. 2000; Berlo ed. 1993.
Mexica arrival date: Smith 1984.
Tezozómoc’s account: Quoted in Sullivan and Knab eds., trans.
1994:98–100.
Tlacaelel: Chimalpahin Quauhtlehuanitzin 1997 (vol. 1):41–53, 135–
45; (vol. 2):33–37, 89, 109; León-Portilla 1992a:xxxvii–xli (“It is not
fitting,” xxxviii); 1963:158–66. As Chimalpahin put it, Tlacaelel “was
the instigator, the originator, through wars [of the system] by which he
made the great city of México Tenochtitlan eminent and exalted” (35;
trans. slightly altered for readability).
“In this Sun”: Anon. 1994:66. Experts dispute the verse structure in all
these poems.
“tortillas”: Durán 1994:231.
“moral combat”: León-Portilla 1963:216.
Cortés on sacrifice: Cortés 1986:35–36 (both quotes). See also, Durán
1994:406 (excitedly, raising the toll to “2,000, 3,000, 5,000, or 8,000
men” a day on special occasions).
Denial of sacrifice: Hassler 1992; Moctezuma and Solis Olguín 2003
(indigenous images of sacrifice). The anthropologist Michael Harner
argued (1977) that the human sacrifice and cannibalism of the Mexica
were “natural and rational,” “the only possible solution” (both 132) to
supply protein to a dense population with no domesticated animals.
But the Mexica lived on a lake with abundant fish and aquatic life and
also obliged conquered peoples to ship them food (Ortiz de Montellano
1978). See also, Graulich 2000.
European executions: Braudel 1981–84 (vol. 2):516–18 (Tyburn, “the
corpses,” 518); Pepys 1970 (vol. 5):21 Jan 1664 (“at least”).
English executions, population: Gatrell 1994:6–15; Wrigley 1983:121.
Nahuatl corpus: Frances Karttunen, pers. comm.
Tlamatinime: León-Portilla 1963:9–24, 62–81, 136 (quotes, 12–13).
Nezahualcóyotl poems on mortality: Peñafield 1904, quoted in
Sullivan and Knab eds. 1994:163 (“Truly”—I slightly altered the first
line to scan better); León-Portilla 1963:6 (“Do flowers”); 1992:81
(“Like a painting”); Nabokov 1989:19 (“brief crack”).
Nahuatl rhetoric: Author’s interviews, Karttunen; Garibay 1970:115.
Art and truth: León-Portilla 1963:71–79 (“nothing is ‘true,’” 73; “He
goes,” 75; “From whence,” 77).
Northwest Coast art: Jonaitis 1991:chaps. 1, 8.
Spanish reactions to Tenochtitlán: Díaz de Castillo 1975:214–19;
Cortés 1986:102–12 (“can there,” 108–09; “obliterate,” 88).
Conquest of alliance and disease’s role: Thomas 1995. Crosby
(1986:200) calls Cortés’s victory “a triumph of the [smallpox] virus.”
143 Postconquest population decline: Borah 1976; Borah and Cook
1964; Cook and Borah 1963 (25.2 million, 88); Borah 1951; Cook and
Simpson 1948. For postconquest epidemics in Mexico and New Spain,
see the thorough discussions in Prem 1992; N. D. Cook and Lovell
1992; the other articles in N. D. Cook and Lovell eds. 1992; Malvido
1973. Cook and Borah’s estimate was a best guess; more confidently,
they argued that the precontact population was between eighteen and
thirty million.
“We, Christians”: Cieza de León 1959:62.
Holocaust and moral capital: Examples include Thornton 1987;
Stannard 1992; Churchill 1997. To be clear: Many of the books and
articles that employ the term “holocaust,” such as Russell Thornton’s
American Indian Holocaust and Survival (1987), are careful works of
scholarship. But their authors wish also to make a political point, one
that in their view flows directly from their research. Sensitive to
language, they have selected a charged term to convey that point. For
discussions of the moral capital that is the reward of mass victimhood,
see Stannard 2001; Alexander 1994:esp. 195.
“Very probably”: Katz 1994 (vol. 1):20 (emphasis in original).
“economic depression”: Borah 1951:27.
Holmes: Quoted in Stannard 1992:244.
Inadvertent subjugation: I made this argument myself in Chap. 2.
Siege of Kaffa: O’Connell 1989:171.
“And what was”: Churchill 2003:53.
“the Spaniards are”: Klor de Alva 1992:xx–xxi.
Díaz de Castillo: This line is not in any recent English translation, all
of which are abridged; it is the last sentence of chapter 174 in the
Spanish original.
Argument in Spanish court: Detailed in Pagden 1990: Chap. 1.
Spanish view of sickness: Porter 1998; interviews, Crease, Denevan,
Lovell.
Salomon: Salomon 1993.
Las Casas: Las Casas 1992b:28 (“beehive”), 31 (“twelve million”).
See also, Motolinía 1950:38–40.
Colonial accounts came to seem exaggerated: “Modern students
commonly have been inclined to discount early opinions of native
numbers, but rarely specified their reasons for doing so” (Sauer
1935:1). Responding to Sauer, the anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber
simply said, without further explanation, “I am likely to reject most
[sixteenth- and seventeenth-century documents] outright” (Kroeber
1939:180). See also, Cook and Borah 1971 (vol. 1):376–410
(“Sixteenth-century,” 380).
Numbers creep down: Jennings 1975:16–20.
Forty or fifty million: Spinden 1928:660 (50 to 75 million “souls”
lost); Rivet, Stresser-Pean, and Loukotka 1952 (40 to 45 million).
“Most of the arrows,” Henige’s estimate: Author’s interviews,
Denevan, Henige.
“a very high population”: Zambardino 1978. Henige responded in
Henige 1978a.
5 / Pleistocene Wars
Discovery of Lagoa Santa skeletons: Calogeras 1933 (reproducing
Lund’s initial letters of discovery); Mattos 1939. Lund and his
successors did not well document their initial location (Soto-Heim
1994:81–82; Hrdli ka et al. 1912:179–84).
Fifteen thousand years: Laming-Emperaire 1979. Other researchers got
even older dates, e.g., Prous 1986. Other very early Brazilian dates
include Beltrão et al. 1986.
Morphology of skulls: Neves, Meyer, and Pucciarelli 1996; Soto-Heim
1994:86–103; Neves and Pucciarelli 1991; Beattie and Bryan 1984;
Mattos 1946.
North American scoffing: One example: “These claims [of great
antiquity] have long been shown to be erroneous, although the
proponents of early glacial humans in the area remain vociferous”
(Bruhns 1994:62). No citation for the refutation is provided.
Botocudos history: Wright and Carneiro de Cunha 2000; Paraíso 1999
(botoques, 423–24); Paraíso 1992:esp. 240–43 (“just war,” 241).
Botocudos’ purported similarity to Lagoa Santa Man: Interview, Pena;
Soto-Heim 1994:84.
Two genomes: I borrow the phrase from Margulis and Sagan 2001.
Margulis pioneered the contemporary theory of the origin of
mitochondria.
Human genome project: Genome International Sequencing Consortium
2001; Venter et al. 2001. The announcement was in June 2000;
publication followed seven months later. These genome maps were
preliminary; biologists put together a 99.9 percent complete picture
only in 2003.
Mitochondrial genome project: Anderson et al. 1981.
Mitochondria in sperm: Gyllensten et al. 1991.
History of mtDNA research: Richards and Macaulay 2001.
Four haplogroups: Schurr et al. 1990; Horai et al. 1993; Torroni and
Wallace 1995; Bandelt 2003. In 1998 scientists reported a fifth, very
rare haplogroup. Also found in Europe, it may be a legacy of Genghis
Khan’s incursion (Brown et al. 1998).
Disdain for amateurs: As far back as 1893, William J. McGee reported
with satisfaction that the Anthropological Section of the American
Association for the Advancement of Science was refreshingly free “of
those pseudoscientific communications which tend to cluster about
every branch of science in its formative period…anthropology is
rapidly taking form as an organized body of knowledge no less definite
than the older sciences” (McGee 1900:768).
Taino Letter, Columbus, C., to Santangel, L.D., 14 Mar. 1493, trans. A.
B. Hart and E. Channing, in Eliot ed. 1909–14, online at
http://www.bartleby.com/43/2.htm.
Test of divinity: Benzoni 1857:77.
Motecuhzoma and Spanish “gods”: Restall 2003:108–20. For an
example of the story, see Prescott 2000:171–73; Tuchman 1984:11–14
(“wooden,” 14).
Northeast and supernatural powers: Trigger 1991.
Choctaw and Zuñi origins: Cushman 1999:199; Bunzel 1932.
“mountains of Ararat”: Genesis 8:4 (King James version).
Christian befuddlement: Hallowell 1960.
José de Acosta wrestles with question: Acosta 2002:51–74 (“contradict
Holy Writ,” “Europe or Asia,” 61; “must join,” 63; refutation of Lost
Tribes theory, 71–72).
Candidate ancestors: Wauchope 1962:3. The full list of candidates is
even longer, but some pride of place should be given to the Welsh, who
have had a widespread following for two hundred years. As Lewis and
Clark began their journey across the continent, Thomas Jefferson tried
to put them in contact with a man who had come from Wales to search
for errant bands of Welsh-speaking white Indians (Letter, Jefferson, T.,
to Lewis, M., 22 Jan. 1804, available from the Library of Congress at
http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?
ammem/mtj:@field(DOCID+@lit(je00060)). See also, Williams
1949a, 1949b. In an earlier article (Mann 2002c), I incorrectly wrote
that Jefferson himself had instructed them to look for Welsh Indians.
Most widely accepted answer: Hrdli ka 1912 (“the most widespread
theory, and one with the remnants of which we meet to this day, was
that the American Indians represented the so-called Lost Tribes of
Israel,” 3); Kennedy 1994:225–31 (Mormons); Hallowell 1960:4–6
(Penn, Mather). See also, Parfitt 2002.
Lost Tribes of Israel: II Kings 17:4–24, 18:9–12 (“So was Israel,”
17:23); II (or IV) Esdras 13:39–51 (“a distant land,” 42–48); Ezekiel
37:15–26 (“take the children,” 21); Jeremiah 13:11, 33:7–8. All quotes
except Esdras from King James version; Esdras is from New English
Bible, as it is not in the King James version.
Ussher’s calculation: Ussher 1658:1 (23 Oct. 4004); 68 (721 b.c.).
Ussher’s authority: White 1898:Chap. 6 (“his dates”). One modern
history says that although few endorsed “the exact detail” of Ussher’s
chronology, its precepts ruled “general thought about man’s past”
(Daniel and Renfrew 1986:22).
Discovery of European Pleistocene remains: Grayson 1983. I have
simplified the story somewhat. In 1858 British geologists, Sir Charles
Lyell among them, unearthed tools and Pleistocene fossils in an
English cave. Twenty-one years before, Jacques Boucher de
Crèvecoeur de Perthes, a French customs officer and amateur scientist,
had made a similar but larger find near Abbéville, in northern France.
His announcement was met with ridicule, some of it from Lyell. A year
after the British discovery, Lyell and other scientists went to Abbéville,
decided that Boucher de Perthes had been right all along, and issued
gracious public apologies. From that point on, the scientific consensus
was in favor of an early origin of humankind.
Abbott’s finds, proselytizing: Abbott 1876 (“driven,” 72); 1872a (“so
primitive,” 146); 1872b.
Bureau of American Ethnology: Meltzer 1994; 1993:chaps. 3, 5; Judd
1967. The Smithsonian’s brief history of the Bureau of American
Ethnology is at http://www.nmnh.si.edu/anthro/outreach/depthist.htm.
Holmes critique: Interview, Meltzer; Meltzer 1992; 1994:9–11; Hough
1933.
Abbott, McGee, and the Paleolithic Wars: Abbott 1892a (“The stones
are inspected,” 345); 1892b (“scientific men of Washington,” 270);
1883a (“high degree,” 303); 1883b (“more ‘knowing,’” 327); 1884
(“neither among,” 253); Meltzer 2003; 1994:11–12; 1993:41–50;
Cultural Resource Group 1996.
Hrdli ka’s life work: Meltzer 1994:12–15; 1993:54 (“respectable
antiquity”); Montagu 1944; Loring and Prokopec 1994:26–42.
“favorable cave”: Quoted in Deuel 1967:486.
Folsom: Meltzer 1994:15–16; 1993:50–54; Roberts 1935:1–5; Kreck
1999.
Brown’s announcement: Anon. 1928; Chamberlin 1928.
Whiteman: Anon. 2003; McAlavy 2003; Cotter and Boldurian 1999:1–
10.
“driving mania”: Eiseley 1975:99.
Howard at Clovis: Cotter and Boldurian 1999:11–20 (“EXTENSIVE
BONE,” 11; “One greenhorn,” 14; 130ºF, 15); Anon. 1932; Howard
1935 (I thank Robert Crease for helping me obtain this article).
Discovery of Clovis culture: Cotter 1937; Roberts 1937.
“So far”: Hrdli ka 1937:104. Other skeptics were less careful. Writing
in 1933, Walter Hough, of the U.S. National Museum, flatly claimed
that “archaeologists now agree that there are no American paleolithic
implements” (Hough 1933:757).
Lack of skeletons: Interview, Petersen; Steele and Powell 2002 (ten
skeletons); Preston 1997:72 (interview with Owsley).
More than eighty Clovis and Folsom sites: Hannah Wormington lists
ninety-six sites in the 1957 edition of her well-regarded Ancient Man
in North America. But she describes some as small and uncertain, so I
have hedged and said “more than eighty” (Wormington 1957).
Grayson and Meltzer (2002) tally seventy-six paleo-Indian sites in the
continental United States.
Cosmic-ray race: Crease and Mann 1996:Chap. 10.
Detection of organic C14 and halflife: Anderson et al. 1947a, 1947b;
Engelkemeier et al. 1949.
First radiocarbon dates: Arnold and Libby 1949 (“seen to be,” 680);
Marlowe 1999.
“You read books”: Libby 1991:600.
UA C14 lab and Haynes’s background: Author’s interview, Haynes;
Feldman 1998.
Consistency of C14 dates: Haynes 1964.
13,500 and 12,900 years ago: I use the calibrations in Stuiver et al.
1998 (online at
http://depts.washington.edu/qil/datasets/intcal98_14c.txt.). These
calibrations are essentially applied to Clovis and Folsom in Fiedel
1999b:102. They have been attacked as based on unreliable data
(Roosevelt, Douglas, and Brown 2002; Roosevelt 1997).
Beringia: For a general physical description, see Fiedel 1992:46–47.
Although now a little dated, Fiedel’s book remains one of the best
expositions of the basic issues.
Beringia insects: Elias 2001; Elias et al. 1996; Alfimov and Berman
2001; Colinvaux 1996.
Temperature rise: Alley 2000.
Ice-free corridor and 1950s investigations: E.g., Elson 1957.
“ice-free” and “700 years”: Haynes 1964:1412. The potential
relevance of the ice-free corridor was first described in Johnston
1972:22–25, 44–45. I am grateful to Josh d’Aluisio-Guerreri for
helping me obtain this book.
Pleistocene bestiary: Anderson 1984; Kurtén and Anderson 1980.
11,500 and 10,900 B.C.: Corrected radiocarbon dates from
unpublished data provided to the author by Stuart Fiedel.
“zoologically impoverished”: Wallace 1962 (vol. 1):149–50.
Martin’s overkill thesis: Martin 1984, 1973 (“thoroughly superior
predator,” “swift extermination,” 972), 1967.
Other extinctions: Wilson 1992:244–53.
“Paradigmatic image”: Fiedel 1992:63–84. The image is summed in
Easton 1992 (“stout-hearted,” 31).
Northwest Coast salmon wars: Wilkinson 2000. The treaty language at
issue (“right of taking”) is in Article 3,
http://www.nwifc.wa.gov/tribes/treaties/tmedcreek.asp.
Hrdli ka in Larsen Bay: Denny’s story can be augmented with the
essays in Bray and Killion eds. 1994. Larsen Bay was not an anomaly.
In 1902 Hrdli ka visited Sonora, Mexico, where Yaqui Indians were
fighting the Mexican army. On a battlefield Hrdli ka found sixty-four
fresh Yaqui corpses—men, women, and children. He lopped off their
heads and shipped them to the Smithsonian (Hrdli ka 1904:65–66).
Fifty shot down: Cited in Meltzer 1995:22. “The shelf-life of pre-
Clovis claims seems little more than a decade,” Meltzer wrote (ibid.).
“Clovis police,” new Hrdli ka: Author’s interviews, Meltzer, Haynes,
Thomas Dillehay; Pringle 1999 (police); Alsoszatai-Petheo 1986:18
(new Hrdli ka); Meltzer 1989:478–79. Clovis-firsters were attacked as
the “Clovis Mafia” (Koppel 2003:147–50). Fiedel (2000:42–43)
marshals evidence against the charges.
Landmark article: Greenberg, Turner, and Zegura 1986 (“the three,”
479; “we are dealing,” “28 key,” “dental clusters,” 480; “widely held,”
484; “tripartite division,” 487).
Languages of California: Mithun 1997 (fifteen families); Kroeber 1903
(five families).
180 language families: This rough figure for the linguistic state of the
art in 1986 is created by adding together two then-recent tallies:
Campbell and Mithun 1979 (62 families in North America) and
Loukokta 1968 (118 in South and Central America).
Critiques of three-migrations paper: Campbell 1986 (“Neither,”
“should be,” 488); Morrell 1990b (“zero”). See also, Campbell 1988;
Laughlin 1986.
Geneticists pursued the question: Reviewed in Merriwether 2002.
Mitochondrial DNA indicates multiple migrations: Schurr et al. 1990;
Horai et al. 1993.
Wallace and Neel timing estimate: Torroni et al. 1994.
Haplogroup A study: Bonalto and Bolzano 1997.
Size of founding groups: Schurr et al. 1990 (little mtDNA diversity,
small group); Ward et al. 1991 (much diversity, big group).
Diverse possible origins: Merriwether et al. 1996 (Mongolia); Karafet
et al. 1999 (Lake Baikal); Torroni et al. 1993 (east Asia); Lell 2002
(southern middle Siberia and Sea of Okhkotsk, in two major
migrations).
“only one thing”: Cann 2001:1746.
Monte Verde: Meltzer 1997; Dillehay ed. 1989–97 (summary of dig
history, vol. 2:1–24). See also Dillehay 2001; Gore 1997; Wilford
1998b, 1997b.
Dates: Dillehay ed. 1989–97 (vol. 1):18–19, 133–45, esp. Table 6.1.
Dillehay did not use calibrated radiocarbon dates; I use the calibration
in Stuiver et al. 1998. Fiedel says the likely occupation date is 13,500–
14,100 years ago, if the data are correct (Fiedel 2000:50).
Hostility: Interviews, Crawford, Dillehay, Fiedel, Meltzer; Morrell
1990a:1.
Site visit to Monte Verde: Meltzer 1997; Adovasio and Page
2003:Chap. 9 (according to Meltzer, an accurate account [interview,
Meltzer]); Gibbons 1997; Wilford 1997b (“ball game”). See also,
Haynes 1999.
Fiedel’s critique: Author’s interviews, Fiedel; Fiedel 1999a (“virtually
every,” 1); Pringle 1999. See also, in general, Haynes 2003.
Haynes’s misgivings: Haynes 1999 (“further testing”).
Corridor critics: Levson and Rutter 1996; Burns 1996; Catto 1996;
Jackson, Phillips, and Little 1999.
Lack of evidence in corridor: Driver 2001.
Critique of overkill: Grayson and Meltzer 2003 (“lives on,” 590).
Clovis-firsters in minority: Roosevelt, Douglas, and Brown 2002
(“[T]he tide of public and scholarly opinion has definitely turned
against Clovis as the earliest culture,” 159); Lynch 2001 (“Some of
our,” 39; “blow the whistle,” “political correctness,” 41).
Three other pre-Clovis sites: Meadowcroft Rockshelter, in
Pennsylvania, excavated mainly by James Adovasio; Cactus Hill, in
Virginia, excavated by Joseph McAvoy; and Topper, in South Carolina,
excavated by Allan Goodyear. See Adovasio and Page 2003.
Kennewick Man: Chatters 2001; Thomas 2001. The European
connection links to Smithsonian archaeologist Dennis Stanford’s idea
that the Clovis culture descended from the Solutrean culture in
Pleistocene Era France and Spain. Because Solutrean spear points
resemble Clovis points, Stanford has speculated that they wandered
across a northern arch of ice from Ireland to Greenland to northeast
Canada, in an Atlantic version of the passage through Beringia.
Stanford’s Solutrean proposal was never published in scholarly
journals, though it was adumbrated in Newsweek and the New Yorker.
Specialists in Solutrean culture have not greeted these ideas with equal
warmth (Stanford and Bradley 2002; Straus 2000; see also, Preston
1997; Begley and Murr 1999).
Baja skulls: González-José et al. 2003; Dillehay 2003.
Australians into Brazil: Mattos 1939:105–07.
Fladmark and coastal route: Fladmark 1979 (see references therein to
earlier papers); Mason 1894 (early proposal); Easton 1992; Koppel
2003:68–74; Powledge 1999; Hall 1999.
“Even primitive”: Quoted in Chandler 2002.
(Re)settlement of Europe: Tolan-Smith 1998; Rozoy 1998. Before the
Ice Age, northern Europe was populated, but there was no cultural
continuity between the earlier and later inhabitants.
6 / Cotton (or Anchovies) and Maize
“weft-twining”: My thanks to Nobuko Kajitani and Masa Kinoshita for
helping me with textile terminology.
Huaricanga dig: Author’s interviews, Haas, Creamer, Ruiz, Gerbert
Asencios, Dan Corkill, Luis Huaman, Kit Nelson.
Discovery of Norte Chico: The ruins were first written up by Max Uhle
(1856–1944), a German researcher who is often called the “father of
South American archaeology” (Uhle 1925). For Uhle’s life and work,
see Menzel 1977; Rowe 1954.
Among the world’s biggest buildings: Huaricanga was built before the
Egyptian pyramids, at a time when the only other structures that could
be called monumental were in the city-states of Sumer. But at the time
even these were smaller than the Huaricanga pyramid, so far as
archaeologists can tell. The other main Eurasian culture centers—the
Indus Valley, the Nile Delta, and the Shang homeland in China—did
not even have cities then. Later the ziggurats of Mesopotamia and the
pyramids of Egypt surpassed the Peruvian temples in size.
McNeill book: McNeill 1967.
High-school textbook: Stearns 1987 (“four initial centers,” 16; Indian
history, 203–12). It was better than some other histories. A World
History, by Mazour and People, gave the Americas just five pages
(281–86). R. J. Unstead’s History of the World devoted three and a half
pages to Indians: one and a half in the chapter “Other Cultures,” and
two pages in the chapter “Europeans in America” (Unstead 1983:58–
59, 200–02).
Maize as most important crop: The 2001 maize harvest was 609
million metric tons, whereas rice and wheat were 592 million mT and
582 million mT respectively. Statistics from the FAO agricultural
database are online at http://apps.fao.org/default.htm.
Three-fifths of the crops: Weatherford 1988:204.
Olmec as founder of Peruvian societies: This idea was common in the
1920s and 1930s (Wells 1920 [vol. 2]:189–90). Later it fell out of
favor, though it continued to be mooted until at least the 1960s (Coe
1962).
Sumer as world’s oldest city: Some densely populated settlements
were older, notably Çatalhöyük, in central Turkey, and ’Ain Ghazal, in
Jordan. But archaeologists believe that these were not true cities,
because they show little evidence of public architecture, strong social
hierarchy, and division of labor (Balter 1998; Simmons et al. 1988).
Eurasian trade in ideas: Examples lifted from Teresi 2002.
Pan-American Highway: The roadless gap in Panama and Colombia,
once quite large, has shrunk to about fifty miles. Still, the road is so
bad that the Lonely Planet guidebook describes the Pan-American
Highway as “more of a concept than an actual route.”
Atacama as model for Mars: Navallo-González et al. 2003.
Pizarro’s pilot’s advice: Quoted in Thomson 2003:139.
Possible Paleo-Indian routes to coast: Arriaza 2001.
Two Science reports: Sandweiss et al. 1998; Keefer et al. 1998;
deFrance et al. 2001. See also, Pringle 1998b; Wilford 1998a.
Different early adaptations: A fine summary is provided in Moseley
2001:91–100.
First finding of mummies: Max Uhle found the same mummies but
didn’t further excavate there (Uhle 1917). I am grateful to the
librarians at Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú who hunted down
this article for me.
Chinchorro diet: Aufderheide and Allison 1995. My thanks to Joshua
D’Aluisio-Guerreri for helping me obtain this article.
Chinchorro mummies: Arriaza 1995 (1983 find, chap. 2); Allison 1985;
Pringle 1998a.
Anemia in child mummies: Focacci and Chacón 1989.
Tapeworm eggs: Reinhard and Urban 2003.
Import of Norte Chico: Author’s Interviews, Haas, Creamer, Ruiz,
Mike Moseley. Haas and Creamer 2004 (“The complex of sites,” 36);
Haas, Creamer, and Ruiz, 2004.
Aspero: Willey and Corbett 1954 (“knolls,” 254); Moseley and Willey
1973 (“excellent, if embarrassing,” “temple-type,” 455); Feldman
1985; 1980:246 (rejecting older dates), cited in Haas, Creamer, and
Ruiz, 2004.
Caral: Shady Solis, Haas, and Creamer 2001; Shady Solis and Leyva
eds. 2003; Shady Solis, pers. comm. See also, Pringle 2001; Sandweiss
and Moseley 2001; Fountain 2001; Bower 2001; Ross 2002.
Dating of other Norte Chico sites: Haas, Creamer, and Ruiz 2004.
Egypt: For dates and sizes I have relied on Algaze 1993 and Spence
2000 (which dates construction on the Great Pyramid of Khufu to
begin in 2485–75 B.C.).
Invention of government: Author’s interviews, Haas, Petersen; Haas,
Creamer, and Ruiz 2004.
Cotton domestication: Sauer 1993.
Cotton in Europe and the Andes: Braudel 1981–84 (vol. 1):325–27;
(vol. 2):178–80 (bans, prostitutes), 312–13; Murra 1964.
MFAC hypothesis: Moseley 2005, 1975b. See the critiques in Wilson
1981, Raymond 1981.
Work parties and music: Author’s Interviews, Haas, Creamer; Shady
Solis 2003a, 2003b.
Champ de Mars: Schama 1989:504–09.
Early Staff God: Author’s interviews, Creamer; Makowski, pers.
comm.; Haas and Creamer, forthcoming; Spotts 2003; Makowski
2005.
Norte Chico as foundation: In the past anthropologists have sometimes
tried to describe Peruvian societies in terms of lo Andino, a being
whose special characteristics have uniquely defined those societies
throughout time. I am arguing something different, that people who
have solved problems in one way will often return to those proven
methods to solve new ones.
Domestication of tobacco: Winter 2000.
Itanoní description, plans, history: Author’s interviews, Ramírez
Leyva.
Uniqueness of Itanoní: Small tortillerías using local maize persist in
rural Mexico, although they are threatened by the industrial production
of Maseca, the large, state-affiliated maize and tortilla firm. By
contrast, Itanoní is a boutique operation that sells as many as eight
different varieties of tortillas, each made from a separate local cultivar.
The difference is akin to the difference between an Italian village café
that sells liters of unlabeled local wine and an enoteca, a fine wine
store featuring the carefully labeled production of the region.
Millet as first cereal: Callen 1967.
Genetic similarity of cereals: Gale and Devos 1998.
Productivity of wild cereals: Zohary 1972; Harlan and Zohary 1966.
Teosinte: Author’s interview, Wilkes; Wilkes 1972, 1967 (I am grateful
to Dr. Wilkes for giving me copies of his work); Crosby 2003b:171
(nutritional value).
Wheat and barley nonshattering mutation: Zohary and Hopf 2000:29–
30, 59–60; Hillman and Davies 1990.
General maize history: Warman 2003; Anon. 1982 (“not
domesticated,” 5).
Paleo-Indian agricultural development and MacNeish’s work:
MacNeish 1967, 1964; Flannery and Marcus 2002. MacNeish died in
2001.
Long debate over origin of maize: Kahn 1985:3–82; Galinat 1992.
Mangelsdorf theory: Mangelsdorf, MacNeish, and Galinat 1964.
Mangelsdorf first proposed the extinct-wild-ancestor theory in
Mangelsdorf and Reeves 1939. I am grateful to Dr. Wilkes for lending
me a copy of this document. See also, Mangelsdorf 1986.
Beadle’s theory: Beadle 1939.
Caustic letters: E.g., the exchanges between Beadle and another Nobel-
winning biologist, Barbara McClintock, in 1972 (McClintock Papers,
“Searching for the Origins of Maize in South America, 1957–1981:
Documents,” letters of 22 Jan.–24 Feb. 1972, available online at
http://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/LL/Views/Exhibit/documents/origins.htm).
Iltis theory: Iltis 1983.
Teosinte-gamagrass theory and critiques: Eubanks 2001b (McClintock
quotes, 509), 1997; Bennetzen et al. 2001.
Teosinte mutations: The development of three of these mutations is
elucidated in Jaenicke-Després 2003. See references therein for the
discoverers of the genes.
Maize in a decade: Eyre-Walker et al. 1998. Essentially the team
argued that in ten years breeders with exactly the right teosinte variants
could have created maize if they were as systematic as modern
breeders. One assumes that the actual development time was longer.
Locus and timing of development of maize: MacNeish went back to
his early maize cobs with new tools and decided they dated to about
3500 B.C. (Farnsworth et al. 1985). Subsequently, researchers did the
same for early maize cobs from nearby Oaxaca, pushing back the date
to about 4200 B.C. (Piperno and Flannery 2001; Benz 2001). Both of
these sites contained fully domesticated maize (Benz and Iltis 1990).
Pope et al. found teosinte pollen grains as early as 5100 B.C. in a wet
Gulf Coast site where teosinte is not native, suggesting that it was
moved there from the highlands. By 4000 B.C. the pollen is dominated
by modern maize (Eubanks 2001a; MacNeish and Eubanks 2000; Pope
et al. 2001).
“arguably man’s”: Federoff 2003.
Diversity of maize: Doebley, Goodman, and Stuber 1998. The reason
for the diversity is that the ancestor species were hyperdiverse (Eyre-
Walker et al. 1998).
Aragón Cuevas research: Author’s interviews, Aragón Cuevas. The
number of landraces varies from study to study, because the term is not
precisely defined. It is often claimed that more than two hundred exist
in Latin America (e.g., Wellhausen et al. 1957, 1952).
Five thousand cultivars: Author’s interview, Wilkes. This is a widely
cited guess by a distinguished researcher with long experience in the
field.
Chamula statistics: Anon. ed. 1998a. The data are from 1991, the most
recent year for which census results are available.
Perales’s study: Author’s interview, Perales.
Milpa: Here I describe the Mesoamerican variant of an ideal. Milpa-
style agriculture occurs in much of South America, though centered
often on potatoes or manioc instead of maize. Even in Mesoamerica,
plenty of actual milpas are nothing more than maize fields, especially
where farmers grow maize for the market. Subsistence-farm milpas I
have seen tend to be more diverse. Milpa cultivation is often described
—incorrectly, according to Wilkes (author’s interview)—as
synonymous with “slash-and-burn,” in which farmers clear small areas
for short times and then let them go fallow (e.g., the otherwise useful
Ewell and Sands 1987). Slash-and-burn, though, is generally a modern
innovation (see chap. 9). A good description of the milpa is Wilken
1987. A classic early study is Cook 1921.
Green Revolution and milpa: Author’s interviews, Denevan, Hallberg,
Perales, Wilkes (“most successful”), James Boyce; Mann 2004.
Abundance of wild wheat and barley: Harlan and Zohary 1966
(“square kilometers,” “Over many thousands,” 1078).
“the key”: Coe 1968:26.
Kirkby’s estimate: Kirkby 1973.
Maize iconography: Fields 1994.
Maize in Europe: Crosby 2003b:180–81; Warman 2003: 97–111.
Pellagra in Europe, Goethe: Roe 1973; McCollum 1957:302; Goethe
1962:33–34; Warman 2003:132–50.
Maize and slavery: Author’s interviews, Crosby; Crosby 2003b:186–
88; 1994:24; Warman 2003:60–65.
Oaxaca data: Anon. ed. 1998b:532–68. The data are from 1991, the
most recent year for which census results are available.
Estimated productivity of Green Revolution maize in Oaxaca: Author’s
interviews, Aragon Cuevas, James Boyce. The estimate is roughly
confirmed by the calculations of Ackerman et al. (2002:36) that “a 1
percent increase in use of improved varieties was typically associated
with an increase in yield of 0.037 tons/ha” and hence a 100 percent
switchover is a jump of 3.7 tons/ha.
Economic problems of landrace maize in Oaxaca: Author’s interviews,
Aragón Cuevas, Bellon, Boyce, Hallberg, Ramírez Leyva, Wilkes.
7 / Writing, Wheels, and Bucket Brigades
Stirling’s find of dated stela: Stirling 1939 (“knees,” “hurried,” 213),
1940a; Coe 1976b. Stirling’s position was held previously by William
Henry Holmes, scourge of amateur “relic hunters.” In his National
Geographic article, Stirling says the first giant head was discovered in
1858; others put the find at 1862 (Bernal 1969:29). Following an
earlier, mistaken understanding of the Mesoamerican calendar, Stirling
believed that the stela was earlier than now thought; I use the modern
date. Because carbon-dating had not yet been invented, he had the
dates of Maya emergence wrong, too. Still, he was right to be puzzled
by the Olmec.
Second Veracruz trip, first Olmec article: Stirling 1940b (“designed,”
“‘The ticks,’” 312; “basic civilization,” 333; “mysterious,” 334).
The Olmec: Among the few general book-length overviews are Coe
1996 (especially valuable for its illustrations of Olmec art); Pina Chan
1989; and Bernal 1969 (1968), the last still surprisingly useful despite
its age. All espouse the “mother culture” view, which has come under
increasing fire.
“enigmatic people”: Baird and Bairstow 2004:727. Similar language
can be found in the Eyewitness Travel Guide: Mexico (New York:
Dorling Kindersley, 2003), 254. These characterizations are common
in the popular press (e.g., Stuart 1993a [“the Olmec stand for many as
a kind of ‘mother culture’ to all the civilizations that came after,
including the Maya and the Aztec,” 92]; Lemonick 1996 [“More than
1,500 years before the Maya…, the mysterious Olmec people were
building the first great culture of Mesoamerica,” 56]).
Olmec emerge abruptly: Some researchers have hypothesized that
Olmec society was stimulated into existence by a migration from the
Pacific coast, but recent ceramics research in Veracruz casts doubt on
this idea (Arnold 2003).
“quantum change”: Meggers 1975:17.
“There is now little doubt”: Coe 1994:62.
Bad name: Bernal 1969:11–12. Actually, the name is even worse than I
indicated. “Olmec” doesn’t refer to a people, but to the political
phenomenon that began and ended with their cities. The people in
those cities may still be around, but called something else.
Mixe-Zoquean: Campbell and Kaufman 1976.
Olmec rubber: Hosler, Burkett, and Tarkanian 1999; Rodríguez and
Ortiz 1994.
1800 B.C.: Rust and Sharer 1988.
San Lorenzo: Coe and Diehl 1980; Cyphers ed. 1997.
Olmec theology: Reilly 1994.
Thrones changed into sculptures: Porter 1989.
Africa-Olmec and Shang-Olmec connection: For the Africa-Olmec
connection, see Barton 2001; Winters 1979; Van Sertima 1976. Van
Sertima’s claims are attacked in Haslip-Viera, Ortiz de Montellano,
and Barbour 1997. For the Shang-Olmec connection, see Xu 1996;
Meggers 1975; Ekholm 1969. I am grateful to Mike Xu for sending me
a copy of his manuscript. Meggers was critiqued in Grove 1977 and
responded in Meggers 1977.
Olmec sculptures of fetuses and pathological conditions: Tate and
Bendersky 1999; Dávalos Hurtado and Ortiz de Zárate 1953. I am
grateful to the Bancroft Library staffers who went to considerable
trouble to find the second article for me.
Olmec appearance: Bernal 1969:76–79.
Mirrors: Heizer and Gullberg 1981.
Destruction of sculptures: Grove 1981.
La Venta: Rust and Sharer 1988. A succinct description is in Bernal
1969:35–43.
“not only engendered,” “established the pattern”: Bernal 1969:188. A
well-argued contemporary version of this view is Diehl 2005.
Competitive interaction in Mesoamerica: Flannery and Marcus 2000
(“chiefdoms in the Basin,” 33). I thank Joyce Marcus for walking me
through these ideas.
Zapotec rise: Blanton et al. 1999; Marcus and Flannery 1996; Flannery
and Marcus 2003 (“virtually unoccupied,” 11802; radiocarbon dates,
11804); Spencer 2003.
Oldest writing: Marcus pers. comm. (750 B.C.), 1976 (glyphs and
translation); Flannery and Marcus 2003. See also, Serrano 2002. The
reason I have called the temple carving the first “securely” dated
writing is that two other candidates for the title of first written text
exist, but neither can be dated accurately because their archaeological
context is unknown. Both are from the Tlatilco culture north of
present-day Mexico City; they may have been made as early as 1000
B.C. One seal shows three glyphs that some think resemble Olmec
writing. The other, a true mystery, bears what look like letters in a
script of which there are no other extant examples (Kelley 1966). A
third candidate for earliest Olmec writing exists. In the 1990s a team
led by Mary Pohl of the University of Florida discovered a cylindrical
greenstone seal two miles from La Venta. Dated to 650 B.C., the seal
bears a bas-relief bird with a comic-book speech bubble bursting from
its mouth. Pohl and two colleagues identified the glyphs in the bubble
as precursors to the Mayan glyphs for the date 3-Ajaw (Pohl, Pope,
and von Nagy 2002; Stokstad 2002). The identification is
controversial. The text cannot be Mayan, they say, because Maya
civilization was not firmly set in place until centuries later. Nor can it
be Olmec, because other Olmec texts seem not to be related to Maya
glyphs. According to John Justeson, a linguistic anthropologist at the
State University of New York in Albany who has deciphered other
Olmec texts, “Although many accept the greenstone glyphs as
plausibly being writing, what [Pohl’s team] read as a ritual calendar
date on the ceramic is scarcely accepted by anyone” (email to author).
Inanna temple example: Urton 2003:15–16.
Zero as number: Teresi 2002:79–87 (GPA example, 80).
Tres Zapotes date: In fact, the initial 7 (the baktun figure) was missing,
because the stela was broken. Stirling guessed that it was a 7, a
supposition that was proven correct in 1972, when the other part of the
stela was discovered (Cohn 1972).
Tentative assignation: In The Olmec World, for instance, Bernal never
directly says that the Olmec invented zero. He merely describes the
Long Count, remarking that it “necessarily implies knowledge of the
zero” (Bernal 1969:114).
More than a dozen systems of writing: Coe 1976a:110ff. Coe lists
thirteen forms, but does not include Olmec and whatever is on the
Tlatilco seals.
Deciphered Olmec stela: Stuart 1993a, 1993b; Justeson and Kaufman
1993; 1997; 2001 (Chiapas potsherd translation, 286).
Monte Albán dispute: I have borrowed the formulation in Zeitlin 1990.
Some argue that not enough data exist to resolve the question (O’Brien
and Lewarch 1992).
Slabs as slain enemies: Marcus 1983:106–08, 355–60.
Fight with Tilcajete: Spencer and Redmond 2001.
N ˜udzahui marriage politics: Spores 1974.
8-Deer’s story: Pohl 2002; Byland and Pohl 1994:119–60, 241–44;
Caso 1977–79 (vol. 1):69–83, (vol. 2):169–84; Smith 1962; Clark
1912.
Wheeled toys: Stirling 1940b:310–11, 314; Charnay 1967:178–86.
Egypt and wheel: Wright 2005:46.
Moldboard plow: Temple 1998 (“so inefficient,” 16). I am grateful to
Dick Teresi for directing me to this book and example (“as if Henry
Ford”: e-mail, Teresi to author).
Lack of relation between technology and social complexity: I lift this
point bodily from Webster 2002:77. See also Ihde 2000.
Osmore Valley geography: I am grateful to Mike Moseley and Susan
DeFrance for guiding me through this area, and to Patrick Ryan
Williams and Donna Nash for showing me Moquegua and Cerro Baúl.
Wari and Tiwanaku: A succinct overview is La Lone 2000.
Surprisingly little has been written about Wari. Among the few recent
books are Isbell and McEwan eds. 1991 and Schreiber 1992. The most
widely cited recent works on Tiwanaku are Kolata 1993 and Kolata ed.
1996–2003. William Isbell has pointed out that the two names refer
simultaneously to cities, states, and religions. He has suggested that the
Spanish names Tiahuanaco and Huari be used for the physical ruins
and the Aymara and Runa Suni spellings Tiwanaku and Wari be used
for these polities’ political and cultural styles (Isbell 2001: 457).
Sixth-century climatic disaster: Fagan 1999:Chap. 7. The major
apparent victims were the Moche, who flourished in a three-hundred-
mile strip along the northern coast after 100 A.D. Drought put Moche
society in crisis; El Niño rains led to floods that destroyed entire
villages and canal systems. El Niño also changed ocean current
patterns to deposit river sediments on the shore. These quickly turned
to dunes, which winds blew toward the Andes, threatening farmland.
The Moche tried to regroup—and failed.
Potato’s advantages and status vis-a-vis maize: McNeill 1991, Murra
1960.
Wari religion: It should be emphasized that the common image of the
Staff God did not mean that the deity meant the same thing in every
culture (Makowski 2001).
Terracing, arable land, abandonment: Peruvian ecologist Luis Masson
has estimated that 1.2 to 1.4 million acres was terraced on just the west
side of the Andes, 75 percent of which is now abandoned (pers.
comm., cited in Denevan 2001:173–75); Cobo 1990:213 (“flights of
stairs”); Moseley 2001:230–38 (“patenting and marketing,” 233;
prospering of Wari despite climatic assault, 232).
Isbell-Vranich article: Isbell and Vranich 2004 (“repetitive,” 170).
Wari and Tiwanaku in Cerro Baúl: Interviews, DeFrance, Moseley,
Nash, Williams; Williams, Isla, and Nash 2001.
Geertz’s four states: Geertz 1980:121–22.
Chiripa: The major recent work on Chiripa is described in Hastorf
1999. A summary is Stanish 2003:115–17.
Pukara: Stanish 2003:138–48, 156–60, 283–84. Stanish suggests that a
drought that began in about 100 A.D. may have induced Pukara’s
collapse (157). But the drought may not have occurred—its existence
has been deduced from a study of Lake Titicaca bottom sediments
(Abbott et al. 1997). But the lake-sediment data, as the authors noted,
conflicted with previous ice-core studies; in addition, the depositional
processes were sufficiently poorly understood that one could not judge
when the putative dry periods began and ended.
Rise of Tiwanaku: Stanish 2003:chap. 8, 2001.
Tiwanaku as predatory state: Kolata 1993:81–86, 243–52 (“predatory,”
243; “lower cost,” 245).
Akapana: Interviews, Nicole Couture, Michael Moseley, Alexei
Vranich; author’s visit; Cieza de León 1959:282 (“how human
hands”); Kolata 1993:103–29. Wendell Bennett excavated at Akapana
in the 1930s, but the first major excavations at Tiwanaku in general did
not occur until the late 1960s, with the work of researchers from the
Instituto Nacional de Arqueología de Bolivia, led by Carlos Ponce
Sanginés. Ponce’s work has come under fire, because he published
little of his data and because he “restored” Tiwanaku landmarks
inaccurately. In the 1980s Alan Kolata of the University of Chicago led
a large team that produced the first comprehensive overview of the city
and its environs.
Kalasasaya and Gateway of the Sun: Author’s interviews, Couture,
Vranich; Kolata 1993:143–49.
Isbell-Vranich vision of city: Isbell and Vranich 2004.
Lack of markets: Kolata 1993:172–76 (“a city was,” “symbolically,”
173).
Vranich picture of Tiwanaku: Interviews, Vranich; Vranich 2001;
Vranich et al. 2001:150–52; Isbell and Vranich 2004.
Cerro Baúl final days: Interviews, deFrance, Moseley, Nash, Williams;
Moseley et al. 2005 (“was likely,” “Later,” 17268).
Chimor history: Sakai 1998; Moseley and Cordy-Collins eds. 1990.
Chimor irrigation and canal: Denevan 2001:152–57. Some scholars
attribute the uphill sections to tectonic uplift; Denevan finds the
regularity of the error difficult to reconcile with tectonic causes (156).
Layout of Chan Chan: Shimada 2000:esp. 102; Moseley 1975a.
Fall of Chimor and execution of Qhapaq Yupanki: Sarmiento de
Gamboa 2000:102–03; Rowe 1946:206.
Chimor and Thupa Inka: Rostworowski de Diez Canseco 1999:72–73,
77–79; Sarmiento de Gamboa 2000:102–03, 112–15.
Nazca lines: The original report, which I have not seen, is Mejía
Xesspe 1940. Von Däniken’s claims are found in, among many other
titles, Von Däniken 1969, 1998. Calendrical and astronomical theories
are (to my mind) convincingly dismissed in Morrison and Hawkins
1978. The best explanation I know of the current geology-and-water
hypothesis is Aveni 2000. For a variant, see Proulx, Johnson, and
Mabee 2001.
Moche: Bawden 1996; Uceda and Mujica eds. 1993. Research on the
Moche was greatly stimulated by the discovery of relatively
untouched, art-filled tombs in Sipan in 1987. (Accounts of the efforts
by Peruvian archaeologist Walter Alva to save the site’s artifacts from
looters, include Kirkpatrick 1992 and Atwood 2004.) Since Sipan,
much research on the Moche has focused on their art—understandably
so, given its high quality (e.g., Alva and Donnan 1993).
Chavín de Huantar: Author’s visit; Burger 1992; Lumbreras, González,
and Lietaer 1976 (roaring sounds); Lumbreras 1989; Rowe 1967.
8 / Made in America
Chak Tok Ich’aak’s life and death: Stuart 2000; Schele and Mathews
1998:75–79; Martin and Grube 2000:28–29 (portrait reproduced on 28,
“entered the water,” 29); Harrison 1999:71–81. See also Stone 1989.
The four cities are Palenque (Martin and Grube 2000:156), La
Sufricaya (Estrada-Belli 2002), El Perú and Uaxactun (Martin and
Grube 2000:28–29).
“No words”: Webster 2002:7.
Uniqueness of collapse: Interviews and e-mail, Turner; Turner 1990.
Morley’s theory: Morley 1946:262. The earliest version of the
ecological-overshoot theory I know of is Cooke 1931. Cooke claimed
that overexpansion of agriculture had caused erosion that filled up
Maya water reservoirs.
Pollen studies: Vaughan, Deevey, and Garett-Jones 1985; Deevey et al.
1979.
Environmental degradation, deforestation, floods: Binford et al. 1987;
Abrams and Rue 1988; Woods 2003. I am grateful to Prof. Woods for
sending me a copy of his article.
Deforestation-induced spiral to collapse: Santley, Killion, and Lycett
1986.
Drought: Curtis and Hodell 1996 (“Our findings suggest a strong
relationship between times of drought and major cultural
discontinuities in Classic Maya civilization,” 46). See also, Hodell,
Curtis, and Brenner 1995.
Green parable: See, e.g., Catton 1982; Lowe 1985; Lutz 2000
(“Environmentalists concerned about the rapid growth of world
population repeatedly cite the Maya collapse as an example of what
happens if a region’s population growth exceeds its population
carrying capacity,” vii); Ponting 1991 (“The clearest case of
environmental collapse leading to the demise of a society comes from
the Maya,” 78); Diamond 2004: 157–77; Wright 2005: 94–106 (Maya
collapse shows that “civilizations often behave like ‘pyramid’ sales
schemes, thriving only when they grow,” 83). Part of the appeal, one
assumes, is that the Maya fall (like that of Cahokia, which I cover
later) was not due to Europe.
“were able to,” “Are contemporary”: Ponting 1991:83; 1990:33.
Examples of spiritual books: Grim 2001; Berkes 1999; McGaa 1999;
Durning 1992.
Five Great Values: Derived from Reiten 1995. Reiten, an administrator
in a Bureau of Indian Affairs school in New Mexico, gave her list to
Tony Sanchez, of Oakland State University, who revised it to broaden
the values’ applicability from the Lakota to all Indians—implicitly, and
one assumes benevolently, asserting that all indigenous peoples
thought alike, thus denying their intellectual and cultural diversity. I
quote from Dr. Sanchez’s revised version (Sanchez 2001:420–21).
Van der Donck: Shorto 2004; Van der Donck 1841 (“all free by
nature,” 207; “They remark,” 210; “woods, plains and meadows,”
150–51; “several hundred miles,” 138).
“Such a fire”: Van der Donck 1993:n.p. (“Of the Wood, the Natural
Productions and Fruits of the Land”). I use this translation here
because it is more evocative.
The following discussion of the natural role of fire draws from Mann
and Plummer 1995:89–92; Mt. St. Helens from author’s visits.
Nature not in lockstep: Botkin 1990; Pickett and Thompson 1978.
Ecological role of fire: Wright and Heinselman 1973; Komarek 1965
(“The earth,” 204).
Fire and landscape management: Pyne 1982:71–81 (Lewis and Clark,
71–72; Jefferson, 75); Day 1953:334–39; Williams 1989:47–48;
Williams 2002; Cronon 1983:48–52; Morton 1637:52–54 (“to set fire,”
52). The impact of fire varied; in Martha’s Vineyard, for instance, it
seems to have been negligible (Foster et al. 2002).
Carriages in Ohio: Bakeless 1961:314, cited in Denevan 1992a:369.
“could be”: Wroth ed. 1970:139. See also, Higginson 1792: 117–18
(reporting “thousands of acres of ground as good as need to be, and not
a tree in the same”).
Smith’s gallop: Smith 1910 (vol. 1):64. He also saw Indians hunting
with fire (70).
Bison range: Roe 1951; Mathiessen 1987:147–52; Cronon 1983: 51–
52 (“were harvesting”).
Impact of Native American burning: Pyne 1982:71–83; Little 1974;
Dorney and Dorney 1989; Delcourt et al. 1986; Rostlund 1957a,
1957b.
Great Plains and anthropogenic fire: Axelrod 1985; Steuter 1991;
Sauer 1975; Williams 1989:46–48; Lott 2002:86–88 (“When Lewis
and Clark,” 88).
Fidler’s fires: Fidler 1992 (“Grass all,” “Not a,” “All burnt,” “the
grass,” 13–15; “The Grass,” 36; “very dangerous,” 59).
Return of forest to Midwest: Williams 1989:46 (Wisconsin, Illinois,
Kansas, Nebraska); Fisher, Jenkins, and Fisher 1987 (Wyoming);
author’s visit, Texas (displays of historical photographs).
“disastrous habit”: Palliser 1983:30.
Raup: Raup 1937 (“have been,” 84; “inconceivable,” 85).
“It is at least”: Brown and Davis 1973:116, quoted in Williams
2002:183.
Vale: Vale 2002 (“modest,” 14); 1998. Vale was rebutted in Keeley
2002. An example of how natural scientists continue to dismiss the
human presence is Hillspaugh, Whitlock, and Bartlein 2000
(examining long-term fire frequency at Yellowstone National Park, an
area inhabited for thousands of years, “offers a natural ‘experiment’
that allows us to consider the sensitivity of fire regimes to climate
change alone,” 211 [emphasis added]).
Cahokia description: Author’s visit; author’s interviews, Woods; Dalan
et al. 2003:64–78.
Biggest population concentration: Iseminger 1997, cited in Woods
2004:152.
Controversy over mound origins: Silverberg 1968 (Bancroft, 98);
Garlinghouse 2001; Kennedy 1994:230–39; Jefferson 1894:query XI
(excavation of “barrow”).
Ouachita mounds: Saunders 1997; Pringle 1997 (“I know it,” 1762).
The mounds no longer overlook the river, which has changed its
course since their construction.
Origins and rise of eastern North American agriculture: Smith 1993
(“the indigenous crops in question,” 14), 1989. See the similar early
argument in Linton 1924:349.
Eastern Agricultural Complex: More formally, the Eastern Agricultural
Complex consists of squash (Cucurbita pepo); marshelder or
sumpweed (Iva annua); erect knotweed (Polygonum erectum);
maygrass (Phalaris caroliniana); common sunflower (Helianthus
annuus); little barley (Hordeum pusillum); and lambsquarter, aka
chenopod or goosefoot (Chenopodium berlandieri). Marshelder, like
sunflower, has an edible, oily seed. Erect knotweed is a low plant with
starchy, edible seeds; it is not the invasive Japanese knotweed that is a
problem in the eastern United States. The grain from maygrass and
little barley, both knee-high grasses with tufted stalks, was probably
dried and pounded into flour. Lambsquarter is a spinach-like green that
unfortunately looks like the toxic western black nightshade.
Hopewell culture: Woodward and McDonald 2002; Romain 2000;
Seeman 1979. For the bow and arrow, see Browne 1938. Browne’s
long-accepted argument that the bow and arrow arrived relatively late
has recently been challenged (Bradbury 1997) and reaffirmed
(Boszhardt 2002).
Hopewell religion: Brown 1997.
“stunning vigor”: Silverberg 1968:280–89.
Cahokia chronology: There are many versions of Cahokian
chronology, because the radiocarbon calibrations have been revised
repeatedly, but they differ more in detail than in substance. I use the
chronology in Dalan et al. 2003:69. But see also Fowler 1997:
Appendix 1.
London population: Weinreb and Hibbert eds. 1993:630–32.
Cahokia not a city: Woods and Wells 2001.
Big Bang: Pauketat 1994:168–74. Pauketat himself did not use the
term “Big Bang,” though it is now in common use.
Synchrony and proximity of mound sites: Emerson 2002.
Engineering of Monks Mound: Woods 2001, 2000. My thanks to Ray
Mann for help in understanding the engineering and to Dr. Woods for a
copy of these and other papers.
Pauketat’s model: Pauketat 1998; 1997:30–51; 1994:esp. chap. 7.
Burials in small mound: Fowler et al. 1999.
Slow introduction of maize: Riley et al. (1994) dated maize found near
Cahokia from 170 B.C.–60 A.D.
Maize not important to Hopewell: interviews, Woods; Lynott et al.
1986.
Woods’s model of Cahokia fall: Author’s Interviews, Woods; Woods
2004, 2003; Woods and Wells 2001. In its basics, this scenario is
similar to that in Mehrer 1995:esp. Chap. 5.
Widespread land clearing: Lopinot and Woods 1993.
Sedimentation evidence for flooding: Holley and Brown 1989, cited in
Woods 2004:155; Woods 2003. See also, Holden 1996, Neumann
2002:150–51.
Haudenosaunee villages: Day 1953:332–34 (six square miles,
Denonville, 333; “hundreds of acres,” 338).
American chestnuts: Kummer 2003; Mann and Plummer 2002.
“They pound them”: Bartram 1996:56. For many groups in the
Southeast, milk from mast was the only kind of milk available.
Lack of evidence for deaths or hunger: Milner 1992.
Palisade: Iseminger 1990. In a novel interpretation, Pauketat argues
that the Cahokians’ attempt to shut themselves behind a palisade
actually could have been “an offensive tactic” that let Cahokia’s rulers
“project a larger-than-normal armed force by freeing up people who
otherwise would have guarded the capital” (Pauketat 1998:71).
Status gap: Trubitt 2000.
1811–12 earthquakes: Nuttli 1973. According to Nuttli’s estimates,
which are based on multiple historical accounts, the earthquake was so
powerful that ten miles away from the fault it apparently kicked the
ground up at a foot per second, enough to shotput people into the air
(table 7). Cahokia, 140 miles away from the center of the 1811
earthquakes, would not have experienced such drastic shaking, but
because the soft Mississippi soils readily transmit earthquake waves
the impact would still have been devastating.
Lack of Calakmul investigation: Strictly speaking, this isn’t true. Two
Carnegie Institution archaeologists visited Calakmul several times
after a Carnegie botanist reported its existence, but the site was so
remote that they did little other than map the central area (Lundell
1934; Ruppert and Denison 1943).
Calakmul description: Folan 1992; Folan et al. 1995, 2001.
Calakmul population: Culbert et. al. (1990) estimated the population of
the entire Mutal (Tikal) city-state at 425,000. Fletcher and Gann
(1992) used the same methods for Calakmul, concluding that Calakmul
was 37 percent bigger than its rival (see also Folan 1990:159). The
resultant population would be 582,250, which I have rendered as
575,000 to maintain a similar level of approximation.
Stuart’s work: Stuart 2000. Tatiana Prouskouriakoff and Clemency
Coggins suggested the outlines of the encounter in the 1960s, but later
archaeologists rejected the idea of an actual intrusion from
Teotihuacán, instead arguing that the evidence suggested an influx of
ideas, rather than people. Stuart marshaled enough data to convince
most of his colleagues that Prouskouriakoff and Coggins were right to
begin with.
Mutal-Kaan war: Martin and Grube 1966. I thank Prof. Grube for
sending me a copy of this widely cited and influential work. A recent
summary is in Martin and Grube 2000. See also, Martin 2000.
Beginning of Kaan: Folan et al. 1995:325–30 (discussion of
chronology).
Views of Maya state organization: Fox 1996. The most prominent
early advocate of the small-equal-state position was Morley (Morley
1946:50, 159–61). In the more recent past it was adopted by such
prominent Mayanists as Peter Mathews (1991), Stephen Houston
(1993), Nicholas Dunning (1992), and William Sanders and David
Webster (1988). The most widely cited dissent to the small-state view
that I know of came from Joyce Marcus, who argued for four dominant
centers in several publications (e.g., Marcus 1973). An unpublished but
widely circulated analysis by Martin and Grube (1996) changed many
minds (see also, Grube and Martin 1998). I thank Prof. Grube for
sending me copies of both. The most accessible summary of their
views is Martin and Grube 2000:17–21.
Semblance of empire: This is a revamped version of a sentence in
Chase, Grube, and Chase 1991:1.
Decipherment of y-ahaw: Usually credited to Houston and Mathews
1985:27; Bricker 1986:70.
“The political landscape”: Martin and Grube 2000:21. Martin’s
comparison of the Maya to the Greeks comes from interviews and
email.
Sky Witness: Martin and Grube 2000:90–92, 102–04.
Mutal size and population: Adams and Jones 1981:318–19; Culbert et
al. 1990 (arguing for 425,000 as total size).
Possible motives for Kaan-Mutal war: Fahsen 2003 (trade routes);
Harrison 1999:121 (commerce, dynasty); Grube, pers. comm.
(ideology).
Landscape alteration: The literature is vast. Examples include Darch
1988; Dunning et al. 2002; Fedick and Ford 1990; Gunn et al. 2002
(“geochemically hostile,” 313); Scarborough and Gallopin 1991;
Sluyter 1994. See also, Scarborough 2003.
Oxwitza’ (Caracol): Chase and Chase 2001, 1996, 1994 (population,
5).
Star Wars attack on Mutal: Harrison 1999:122; Houston 1991; Freidel
1993. The Chases are skeptical of Kaan’s role, because they think it
too far from Caracol and because they are skeptical about the
translations by Grube and Martin (Chase and Chase 2000:63).
Maya way of conquest: Grube and Martin 1998.
Dos Pilas: Guenter 2003; Fahsen 2003. Previous attempts at
decipherment include Boot 2002a, 2002b; better readings of the glyphs
led to corrections. See also, Guenter 2002; Williams 2002.
Stairway quotes: Guenter 2002:39 (flint), 27 (skull).
Morley’s tally of dates: Morley 1946:64. Updated in Sidrys and Berger
1979; Hamblin and Pitcher 1980. I use Sidrys and Berger. A few hard-
to-read inscriptions might have been set down as late as 928.
Four lines of evidence: Robichaux 2002 (waterflow evidence); Gill
2000 (ethnohistorical [Gill also uses many other types of data];
“starvation and thirst,” 1); Curtis, Hodell, and Brenner 1996 (oxygen
data; “driest intervals,” 45); Haug et al. 2003 (titanium).
Paradoxical survival in the north: Dahlin 2002 (“How and why,” 327);
Robichaux 2002. The Maya also fled west, toward Guatemala’s Pacific
coast, another dry area in which they thrived during the drought. I
leave the western cities out of the main account solely for simplicity.
Chichén Itzá: Milbrath and Peraza Lope 2003.
9 / Amazonia
Orellana’s expedition: The main sources are collected in Heaton ed.
1934 (“by God,” 262). The best histories of the expedition that I have
come across are Smith 1990:chap. 2; Hemming 1987:185–94. Still
enjoyable to read, though dated, is Prescott 2000 (“Not a bark,” 1075).
Orellana’s betrayal: The case for the prosecution is summed up in
Means 1934. For Pizarro’s reaction, see letter, Pizarro, G., to king, 3
Sept. 1542, in Heaton 1934:245–51 (“the greatest cruelty,” 248).
“We were eating”: Heaton ed. 1934:408.
Angry hives: I have borrowed the simile from Smith 1990:68. The next
two sentences are essentially reworkings of his sentences.
Carvajal on populousness, Tapajós attacks: Heaton 1934 (“farther we
went,” 202; “all inhabited,” “five leagues,” 198; “numerous and very
large,” 200; “Inland,” 216; “more than twenty,” 203).
Carvajal publication: Medina ed. 1894.
Carvajal criticism: López de Gómara 1979:131 (“mentirosa”); Myers
et al. 1992; Denevan 1996a:661–64; see also, Shoumatoff 1986.
Oddly, critics rarely mention that Orellana’s account is similar to those
from the second Amazon expedition. This was the Pedro de Orsua
expedition of 1559–61, subject of the Werner Herzog film Aguirre, the
Wrath of God. The basic sources are collected in González and Tur
eds. 1981. It stopped at the Tapajós in 1561, but provided little further
information about the region, except for the suggestive fact that the
Indian towns’ streets were laid out in a grid and that they had wooden
temples with deities painted on the doors (González and Tur eds.
1981:111, 370).
Ecologists’ views: Arnold 2000. For how they fit into the general
Western propensity to view the Amazon as a tropical Eden, see
Holanda 1996; Slater 1995; and the polemical Stott 1999. German
ecologist Andreas Schimper invented “tropical rain forest” as a
scientific construct in 1898 (Schimper 1903). It was an example of a
new scientific category that included the living community and its
nonliving environment together as a single functioning unit—an
ecosystem, a term Schimper’s school coined in 1935.
More sympathetic views of Carvajal: Author’s intervews, Balée,
Erickson, Peter Stahl, Anna Roosevelt. See also, Porro 1994,
Whitehead 1994, for contemporary treatments of early accounts.
Must become priority: E.g., “The time bomb of ecological,
environmental, climatic and human damage caused by deforestation
continues to tick, and the problem of tropical rainforest clearance must
remain a priority within international politics” (Park 1992:162).
“A ceaseless round”: Belt 1985:184; Darwin ed. 1887 (vol. 3):188
(“best of all”).
Richards: Richards 1952. Richards’s ideas drew heavily on the idea of
the natural progression of ecosystems toward a final, stable “climax”
developed by ecologists Frederick E. Clements and Arthur George
Tansley. In this view, the tropical forest was the climax, the ultimate
vegetative destination, in hot, humid areas.
“wet desert”: The image of the Amazon as a lush forest growing on a
desert was apparently popularized in Goodland and Irwin 1975.
Rainforest soils: This argument is crisply stated in Wilson 1992:273–
74.
Counterfeit Paradise: Meggers 1996 (orig. ed., 1971).
Slash-and-burn as ecologically sensitive response: Interviews,
Meggers; Meggers 1996: 20–23. See also, Kleinman, Bryant, and
Pimentel 1996; Luna-Orea and Wagger 1996.
Unchanged harmony: “In the Western imagination, more generally
speaking, the Amazon has stood for centuries as the benchmark of
primordial (pure) nature and as a refuge of ‘primitive’ peoples: our
contemporary ancestors” (Heckenberger, forthcoming).
Yanomamo as windows into the past: E.g., Brooke 1991 (“a tribe
virtually untouched by modern civilization whose ways date from the
Stone Age”); Chagnon 1992. In the foreword to the latter, Harvard
biologist Edward O. Wilson calls the Yanomamo “the final tribes living
strong and free in the style of the preliterate peoples first encountered
by Europeans five centuries ago.” To Wilson, “the Yanomamö way of
life gives us the clearest view of the conditions under which the human
mind evolved biologically during deep history”(ix).
“mega-Niño events”: Author’s interviews, Meggers; Meggers 1994;
1979 (other climatic constraints).
El Niño fires: Cochrane and Schulze 1998; Pyne 1995:60–65. Fires
from a big El Niño in 1925–26 were described in a short, apparently
self-published monograph by Giuseppe Marchesi (Marchesi 1975) that
I found in a used-book store in Manaus. According to Marchesi, the
fires on the Río Negro were so intense that the smoke blocked out the
sun in Manaus, hundreds of miles away.
Recovery time of forest: Uhl 1987; Uhl and Jordan 1984; Uhl et al.
1982.
Upper limit of a thousand: Meggers (1954) says that the rainforest will
not permit societies to surpass the “Tropical Forest” pattern of slash-
and-burn subsistence (809), which she defines as “villages of 50–1,000
pop[ulation]” (814, fig. 1). The implication is that environmental limits
set the maximum village population at one thousand.
Meggers dismisses Carvajal: Meggers 1996:187 (“Evidence [of
environmental limits] casts doubt on the accuracy of the early
European descriptions of large sedentary populations along the
floodplain”). Oddly, Meggers endorsed Carvajal in the same book
(“These eyewitness reports of numerous large villages are
substantiated by archaeological evidence,” 133). See also, Meggers
1992a, 1992c.
Unchanged lives, population: Meggers 1992 (two thousand years,
199).
Meggers and Marajó: Author’s interviews, Meggers; Popsin 2003;
Meggers and Evans 1957. See also Schaan 2004.
Meggers’s law: Meggers 1954 (“There is a force,” 809; “level to
which,” 815). Meggers called the stage of slash-and-burn cultivation
the “Tropical Forest” pattern. In the brackets, I have replaced
references to that term. Her law drew on the environmental-determinist
arguments of earlier geographers such as Ellen Churchill Semple,
whose Influences of Geographic Environment trained two generations
of researchers: “The geographic element in the long history of human
development has been operating strongly and operating persistently…
[and] is for all intents and purposes immutable in comparison with the
other factor in the problem—shifting, plastic, progressive,
retrogressive man” (Semple 1911:2).
Marajó as offshoot: Meggers and Evans 1957:412–18. See also, Evans
and Meggers 1968. Meggers and Evans were influenced by Julian
Steward, editor of the influential Handbook of South American
Indians, who also thought that Marajóara culture originated
somewhere else—the Caribbean, he suspected (Steward 1948).
Diminishing influence: “Few contemporary scholars accept the
hypothesis of environmental limitations and lack of cultural
development in the Amazon Basin” (Erickson 2004:457).
“Rather than admiration”: Cunha 1975:1. I thank Susanna Hecht for
letting me use her translation, which is from her forthcoming
compilation of da Cunha’s Amazonian writings. In the meantime, the
original version of this marvelous book can be found at
http://www.librairie.hpg.com.br/Euclides-da-Cunha-A-Margem-da-
Historia.rtf.
Not a disaster: I paraphrase anthropologist Roland Bergman (Bergman
1980:53, quoted in Denevan 2001:60).
Rock paintings: Author’s visit; Consens 1989.
Roosevelt reexcavates: Author’s interviews, Roosevelt; Roosevelt
1991 (“outstanding indigenous,” 29; “100,000,” 2).
Earlier challenges to Meggers: Author’s interviews, Balée, Denevan,
Erickson, Peter Stahl, Woods. Donald Lathrap of the University of
Illinois (1970), Michael Coe of Yale (1957), and Robert L. Carneiro of
the American Museum of Natural History in New York City (1995, see
refs.) mounted the most important ones.
Meggers reaction: Author’s interviews, Meggers; Meggers 1992b
(“polemical,” 399; “extravagant,” 403). See also Meggers 2004, 2001.
Montaigne: Montaigne 1991:233–36.
“forest animals”: Condamine 1986, quoted in Myers et al. 2004:22.
“Where man has remained”: Semple 1911:635. The ideas in Influences
of Geographic Environment were typical for their day. “The Amazon
winds its slow way amid the malarious languor of vast tropical forests
in which the trees shut out the sky and the few natives are apathetic
with the eternal inertia of the hot, damp tropics,” Semple’s Yale
contemporary, Ellsworth Huntington, wrote in 1919 (Huntington
1919:49). “It is generally agreed,” Huntington said, “the native races
within the tropics are dull in thought and slow in action. This is true
not only of the African Negroes, the South American Indians, and the
people of the East Indies, but of the inhabitants of southern India and
the Malay peninsula” (Huntington 1924:56). See also, Taylor 1927.
Meggers-Roosevelt dispute: Author’s interviews, Meggers, Roosevelt,
Balée, Denevan, Erickson; Meggers 1992a:37 (colonialism, elitism);
Baffi et al. 1996 (CIA membership).
Painted Rock Cave excavations: Roosevelt et al. 1996; Fiedel et al.
1996; Haynes et al. 1997. Press coverage was unusually thorough.
(Gibbons 1996; Wilford 1997a; Hall 1996). In Science, Roosevelt
presented her estimate of initial occupation as [.similar]11,200 to
10,500 uncalibrated radiocarbon years B.P. (380); I converted the
mean, 10,600 B.P., into calendar years with Stuiver et al. 1998.
Contemporaneity with Clovis: This is subject to debate, with Clovis-
firsters challenging Roosevelt’s earliest radiocarbon dates, and
Roosevelt crying foul because (in her view) the Clovisites apply more
stringent standards to challengers than they do to Clovis (Haynes et al.
1997). Further confusing the issue is the participants’ disagreement
over the best way of calibrating raw radiocarbon dates from this
period.
138 crops: Clement 1999a, 1999b.
Stone axes: Author’s interviews, Denevan; Denevan 1992b. I am
grateful to Prof. Denevan for sending me a copy of this article, upon
which my discussion of stone axes is based. See also the updated
version of the argument in Denevan 2001:116–23. To some extent,
Denevan was anticipated by Donald Lathrap, who called slash-and-
burn “a secondary, derived, and late phenomenon within the Amazon
Basin,” which only made economic sense after the introduction of
maize (quoted in ibid.:132). Denevan argued for a much later, post-
1492 introduction of slash-and-burn.
Experiments with stone and steel axes: Carneiro 1979a, 1979b; Hill
and Kaplan 1989 (difference between hardwoods and softwoods).
True, Carneiro’s workers had no experience with stone axes, which
one assumes unfairly magnified their inefficiency. But Carneiro also
did not include the effort required to obtain the stone (often far away),
make the ax, and keep it sharp, all of which were time sinks. Girdling,
too, has been suggested, but it is also very slow.
Three years: Beckerman 1987. I thank Prof. Brush for helping me get
this book.
Yanomamo history: Author’s interviews, Balée, Petersen, Chagnon.
Yanomami and steel tools: Author’s interview, Ferguson; Ferguson
1998 (lifestyle changes, 291–97), 1995; Colchester 1984 (seventeenth-
century change, 308–10). Ferguson’s thesis is disputed, in part because
it downplays the antiquity of Yanomamo warfare (author’s interview,
James Petersen).
Controversy on Yanomami gifts: These and other charges were
publicized and amplified in Tierney 2000. Tierney’s charges of
exacerbating epidemics seem to have been refuted (see note to p. 102),
but the furor over them obscured discussion of uncontrolled gifts of
steel tools (Mann 2001, 2000a).
Absence of slash-and-burn in North America: Doolittle 2000:174–90
(“gossamer,” 186; “once fields,” 189).
Small farmer slash-and-burn as contributor to deforestation: Author’s
interviews, Clement, Fearnside; Fearnside 2001. Fearnside’s figure is a
step down from the estimate that slash-and-burn was responsible for 55
percent of total tropical forest clearing in the Americas in Hadley and
Lanly 1983.
Nutrient loss: Hölscher 1997. I thank Beata Madari for giving a copy
of this article to me.
Meggers survey: Meggers et al. 1988; Meggers 1996:183–87.
Central Amazon archaeology: Author’s interviews, Bartone,
Heckenberger, Neves, Petersen; Heckenberger, Petersen, and Neves
2004; Neves et al. 2004; Mann 2002a. I convert uncalibrated
radiocarbon years as per Stuiver et al.1988. The site discussed here is
called Hatahara, after its owners.
Rainfall and canopy: Brandt 1988.
Importance of agroforestry: Interviews, Clement. See also, Denevan
2001:69–70, 83–90, 126–27; Posey 1984; Herrera 1992.
Bluffs as preferred sites: Denevan 1996.
More than half are trees: Clement 1998 (80 percent); 1999a:199. I am
grateful to Dr. Clement for sending me copies of his work.
Uses of peach palm: Interviews, Clement; Mora-Urpí, Weber, and
Clement 1997 (“only their wives,” quoted on 19); Clement and Mora-
Urpí 1987 (yield); Denevan 2001:77 (saws).
Domestication of peach palm: Clement 1995, 1992, 1988.
Agricultural regression and fallows forests: Balée 2003 (“These old
forests,” 282); 1994.
Anthropogenic forests: Interviews, Balée, Clement, Erickson, Nigel
Smith, Stahl, Woods; Balée 1998; 1989 (11.8 percent, 14); Erickson
1999 (I am grateful to Prof. Erickson for sending me a copy of this
paper); Smith 1995; Stahl 2002,1996.
“Gift from the past”: I have lifted this phrase from the title of Petersen,
Neves, and Heckenberger 2001.
Terra preta: Much of what follows below is taken from the excellent
Lehmann et al. eds. 2003; Glaser and Woods eds. 2004; and Petersen,
Neves, and Heckenberger 2001. For a popular treatment, see Mann
2002b, 2000b. Lehmann et al. argue that from a scientific standpoint
ADE (Amazonian dark earth) is a better term than terra preta. I use
terra preta to avoid acronyms.
Terra preta valued: Smith 1980:562. Smith’s fine early article on terra
preta was largely ignored on publication—“I got two reprint requests
for that article,” he told me. “Nobody was ready to hear it.”
Terra preta distribution estimates: Author’s interviews, Woods, Wim
Sombroek; Sombroek et al. 2004:130 (.1–.3 percent); Kern et al.
2004:52–53 (terra preta sites every five kilometers along tributaries).
Maya heartland: The Maya heartland—from Petén, Guatemala, and
Belize north to southern Campeche and Quintana Roo in Mexico—
covers about fifteen thousand square miles, a third or half of which
was devoted to agriculture.
Charcoal: Glaser, Guggenberger, and Zech 2004; Glaser, Lehmann,
and Zech 2002. My thanks to Prof. Glaser for giving me a copy of this
article.
Microbial activity: Author’s interview, Janice Theis; Theis and Suzuki
2004; Woods and McCann 1999 (inoculation). I thank Joe McCann for
giving me a copy of this article.
Charcoal and global warming: Author’s interview, Ogawa; Okimori,
Ogawa, and Takahashi 2003.
Kayapó: Author’s interviews, Hecht; Hecht 2004 (“low-biomass,”
“cool,” 362–63; “To live,” 364). I am indebted to Prof. Hecht for
several fascinating discussions.
Terra preta experiments: Author’s interview, Steiner; Steiner, Teixeira,
and Zech 2004.
Río Negro site: Author’s interviews, Bartone, Neves, Petersen;
Heckenberger, Petersen, and Neves 2004, 1999.
Timing of terra preta at plantation: Neves et al. 2004:table 9.2.
Xingu and black earth: Heckenberger et al. 2003 (“regional plan,”
“bridges,” 1711; “built environment,” 1713). For criticism, see
Meggers 2003.
Santarém terra preta: Interviews, Woods, Sombroek; author’s visit;
Kern et al. 2004.
Meggers reaction: Meggers 2001 (“without restraint,” 305;
“accomplices,” 322). A response appears in Heckenberger, Petersen,
and Neves 2001.
“rev up”: DeBoer, Kintigh, and Rostoker 2001:327.
“Rather than adapt”: I swipe this phrase from Erickson 2004 (“Native
Amazonians did not adapt to nature, but rather they created the world
that they wanted through human creativity, technology and
engineering, and cultural institutions,” 456).
10 / The Artificial Wilderness
“all the trees”: Columbus 1963:84. I discovered this quotation, and the
ideas around it, in Crosby 2003:3–16, 1986:9–12 (knitting together
Pangaea).
Invention of Columbian Exchange: McNeill 2003:xiv.
Kudzu: Blaustein 2001; Kinbacher 2000.
A thousand kudzus everywhere: Crosby 1986:154–56 (spinach, mint,
peach, endive, clover), 161 (Darwin), 191 (Jamestown, Garcilaso).
Cod and sea urchins: Jackson et al. 2001.
Keystone species: Wilson 1992:401.
“widowed land”: Chapter title in Jennings 1975.
Passenger pigeons: Schorger 1955 (vomiting, 35; rain of droppings,
54; huge roostings, 10–15, 77–89; excommunication, 51; one out of
four, 205).
Muir and pigeons: Muir 1997:78–82.
Audubon and pigeons: Audubon 1871 (vol. 5):115.
Seneca and pigeon: Harris 1903:449–51.
“living, pulsing”: French 1919:1.
Leopold and monument: Leopold 1968.
Mast competition, lack of passenger pigeons: Interview, Neumann,
Woods; Neumann 2002:158–64, 169–72; Herrmann and Woods 2003
(I thank Prof. Woods for giving me a copy of this paper).
Seton’s estimate: Seton 1929 (vol. 3):654–56. See, in general, Krech
1999:chap. 5.
Lott’s and other modern estimates of abundance: Lott 2002:69–76
(“primitive America,” 76); Flores 1997; 1991 (“perhaps” twenty-eight
to thirty million, 471); Weber 2001 (“more likely” twenty to forty-four
million). Shaw (1995) and Geist (1998) suggested the number should
be ten to fifteen million.
Inka tree farms: Daniel W. Gade, pers. comm.
De Soto never saw bison: Crosby 1986:213.
La Salle’s buffalo: Parkman 1983 (vol. 1):765.
“post-Columbian abundance”: Geist 1998:62–63.
Elk begin to appear: Kay 1995.
California: Preston 2002 (Drake, 129).
“The virgin forest”: Pyne 1982:46–47. See also, Jennings 1975:30.
“artificial wilderness”: I borrow the phrase from Callicott and Nelson
eds. 1998:11.
More “forest primeval” in nineteenth century: Denevan 1992a:377–81
(“pristine myth” article).
Cronon, academic brouhaha: Cronon 1995a, 1995b; Soulé and Lease
eds. 1995; Callicott and Nelson eds. 1998 (“Euro-American men,” 2).
An abridged version of Cronon 1996b appeared in the New York Times
Sunday Magazine, 13 Aug. 1995.
Making gardens: Janzen 1998.
Creating future environments: I have borrowed the phrase and the
thought from McCann 1999a:3.
11 / The Great Law of Peace
Nabokov in New York: Boyd 1991:11–12.
Early history of Haudenosaunee, Deganawidah story: Fenton 1998;
Snow 1994:58–65; Hertzberg 1966.
Rules of operation: Tooker 1988:312–17. The basic source is Morgan
1901:77ff.
Checks and balances: Grinde 1992:235–40; Tehanetorens 1971
(“especially important,” sec. 93; impeachment grounds and
procedures, secs. 19–25, 39 (“warnings,” sec. 19); rights of individuals
and nations, secs. 93–98). A modern translation is online at
http://www.iroquoisdemocracy.pdx.edu/html/greatlaw.htm.
“they will not conclude”: Williams 1936:201.
Iroquois women: Wagner 2001; Parker 1911:252–53 (“Does the
modern American woman [who] is a petitioner before man, pleading
for her political rights, ever stop to consider that the red woman that
lived in New York state five hundred years ago, had far more political
rights and enjoyed a much wider liberty than the twentieth century
woman of civilization?”). I thank Robert Crease for helping me obtain
this source.
Underwood’s estimate: cited in Johansen 1995:62.
Condolence Canes: Barreiro and Cornelius eds. 1991; Fenton 1983.
Age of council: Mann and Fields 1997. See also, Johansen 1995.
Haudenosaunee as second oldest: Some of the Swiss cantons have
continuously functioning parliaments that are older, too. But I did not
include them because the individual cantons seem more comparable to
the individual nations of Haudenosaunee than to the league as a whole.
Great Law as inspiration: Grinde and Johansen 1991; Grinde 1977;
Johansen 1987; Wright 1992:94 (“Their whole”).
Differences between Constitution and Great Law: Venables 1992:74–
124 (Adams’s reminiscences, 108).
Franklin: Johansen 1987:40–42.
Indian freedoms: Josephy ed. 1993:29.
“Every man”: Quoted in Venables 1992:235.
“such absolute”: Colden 1747:100.
Perrot, Hennepin, Jesuit on Indian liberty: Quoted in Jaenen 1976:88
(Jesuit), 89 (Perrot), 92 (Hennepin).
Lahontan: Lahontan 1703 (vol. 2):8.
Montaigne: Montaigne 1991:233.
Greater attractiveness of native lives: Axtell 1975; Wilson 1999:67
(fleeing Jamestown). Axtell’s conclusions were sharply critiqued in
Vaughan and Richter 1980; Axtell’s response (1981:351) was
convincing, at least to me. See also Calloway 1986; Treckel and Axtell
1976.
Pilgrims dismayed by renegades: Salisbury 1982:128–33.
“When an Indian”: Quoted in Axtell 1975:57.
“troubled the power elite”: Jaenen 1976:95.
Appendixes
“I abhor”: Quoted at http://www.russellmeans.com/russell.htm.
Insulting names: This is a separate issue from the use of Indian
references on geographical features and U.S. sports teams, some of
which have long annoyed Indians. Various efforts have been made to
ban the use of “squaw,” for example, as in Squaw Valley, home of a
big ski resort in California, on the grounds that the word is a vulgar
term for the vagina used to demean native women. Most linguists do
not believe this is true. Still, the use of specific terms for the women of
an ethnic group rings oddly these days—one can’t imagine a resort
called Jewess or Negress Valley. Redskin, as in the Washington
Redskins, the football team of the U.S. capital, also seems unhappily
anachronistic. According to the team, the name is intended to celebrate
Indians’ warrior spirit, a good quality, and is therefore not derogatory.
But it seems like calling a dance troupe the New York Pickaninnies
and saying the name is intended to extol African Americans’ innate
sense of rhythm, a good quality.
“snowshoe,” “people who”: Goddard 1984; Mailhot 1978.
Crosby on civilization: Crosby 2002:71. See also, Wright 2005:32–33.
“‘Tribe’ and ‘chiefdom’”: Kehoe 2002:245.
Khipu: For a brief overview, see Mann 2003.
“resembles a mop”: Joseph 1992:28.
Governor consults khipu: Collapiña, Supno et al. 1921.
Khipu are banned: Urton 2003:22, 49.
Locke and Mead on khipu: Mead 1923 (“the mystery”, n.p.). Locke
(1923:32) shared Mead’s view: “The evidence is intrinsically against
the supposition that the quipu was a conventional scheme of writing”
(italics in original). For another early attempt at decipherment, see
Nordenskiöld 1979.
“Inka had no writing”: Fagan 1991:50.
Aschers’ work: Interview, R. Ascher (“clearly non-numerical”); Ascher
and Ascher 1997:87 (“rapidly developing”).
Urton and khipu writing: Urton 2003.
Breakdown of khipu meaning units: Urton 2003:chaps. 2–5 (“system
of coding information…binary code,” 1; comparison with Sumer,
Maya, Egypt, 117–18).
Khipu placename deciphered: Urton and Brezine 2005.
Miccinelli documents: Laurencich-Minelli 2001; Laurencich-Minelli et
al. 1998, 1995; Zoppi 2000.
Tentative decipherment: Urton 2001.
Charles VIII and European syphilis epidemic: Baker and Armelagos
1988:708.
“lyen in fire”: Quoted in Crosby 2003:125–26.
Darwinian predictions about diseases: Ewald 1996:chap. 3. More
precisely, nonvectorborne microorganisms evolve toward moderate
malignity.
Díaz and Las Casas: Williams, Rice, and Lacayo 1927:690 (“origin”).
My thanks to June Kinoshita for helping me obtain this article. On the
origin of syphilis, Las Casas was unequivocal: “From the beginning,
two things did and do afflict the Spanish on this island [Hispaniola]:
the first is the sickness of the bubas [pustules], which in Italy is called
the French disease. And I know for the truth that it came from this
island or from when the first Indians came here, when Admiral
Christopher Columbus returned with the news of the discovery of the
Indies, which I saw in Seville, and they were stuck rotting in Spain,
infecting the air or some other route, or else there were some Spanish
with the disease among the first returnees to Castille.” Las Casas also
says the epidemic began during the war in Naples (Las Casas 1992
[vol. 6]:361–62).
Recent syphilis findings: Rothschild and Rothschild 2000 (Colorado);
1996 (U.S. and Ecuador); Rothschild et al. 2000b (Caribbean). See
also, Rogan and Lentz 1994, cited in Arriaza 1995:78.
Evidence for early European syphilis: E.g., Pearson 1924 (suggesting
that Bruce’s recently excavated skeleton and deathmask support a
diagnosis of syphilis, rather than leprosy); Power 1992 (I am grateful
to Robert Crease for making it possible for me to obtain this source);
Stirland 1995:109–15. News reports indicate that other such skeletons
exist, too, though some have not yet appeared in the scholarly
literature (e.g., Studd 2001; Barr 2000). In the past, though, few of “the
numerous cases of pre-Columbian Old World syphilis…have
withstood reexamination” (Baker and Armelagos 1988:710).
Universal presence of syphilis: Hudson 1965a, 1965b.
Confusion with Hansen’s disease: Baker and Armelagos 1988:706–07.
Historians’ motives: Crosby, “Preface to the 2003 Edition,” in
2003b:xix.
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MAP CREDITS
Map designs by Nick Springer, Springer Cartographics. Maps on chapter 2,
3, and 5 by Timothy William Gibson and author; maps on chapter 1, 4, 6-10
and frontispiece by the author.
Chapter 1:
data from Diehl, 1983; Martin and Grube, 2000; Flannery
and Marcus, 2000, 2003; MacEwan, Barreto, and Neves,
2001; Heckenberger et al., 2003; Pärssinen, 2003;
Denevan pers. comm.; Erickson pers. comm.; Petersen
pers. comm.; Woods pers. comm.
Chapter 2 Map-1,
Chapter 2 Map-2:
after Salisbury, 1982; Vaughan, 1995; Plimoth Plantation
Education Dept.
Chapter 3:
after Hyslop, 1984; Moseley, 2001; Pärssinen, 2003
Chapter 3:
data from Rowe, 1946; Moseley, 2001; D’Altroy, 2002;
Pärssinen, 2003
Chapter 4:
data from Berdan and Anawalt, 1997; Townsend, 2000;
Pollard, 2003
Chapter 5:
after Haynes, 1964
Chapter 6:
after Haas, Creamer, and Ruiz, 2004
Chapter 7:
data from Flores, 1974; Bernal, 1969; Coe, 1994, 1999;
Martin and Grube, 2000; Flannery and Marcus, 2000,
2003; Pohl, Pope, and von Nagy, 2002; FAMSI, n.d.
Chapter 7:
after Owen and Goldstein, 2001; Stanish, 2003
Chapter 8:
data from Brown, 1992; Saunders et al., 1997; Petersen
pers. comm.; Woods pers. comm.; U.S. National Park
Service, n.d.
Chapter 8:
after Fowler, 1997
Chapter 8:
data from Martin and Grube, 1996, 2000; Guenter, 2003;
Fahsen, 2003
Chapter 9:
after Denevan, 1996; MacEwan, Barreto, and Neves,
2001; Heckenberger et al., 2003
Chapter 10:
data from Doolittle, 2000; Denevan, 2001; Whitmore and
Turner, 2001; MacEwan, Barreto, and Neves, 2001;
Denevan pers. comm.; Petersen pers. comm.; Pyne pers.
comm.; Roosevelt, pers. comm.; Woods pers. comm. (The
author is extremely grateful to Steven Pyne, Jim Petersen,
Bill Woods, and especially William Denevan for putting
aside their entirely justified misgivings and helping him
with this map.)
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
() Image digitally altered by author, usually to remove dust, scratches and
bleed-through
Chapter 1
(t) Martti Pärssinen, University of Helsinki; (b) Clark L.
Erickson, University of Pennsylvania Museum of
Archaeology and Anthropology ()
Chapter 2,
Chapter 3,
Chapter 6 Photo-1,
Chapter 6 Photo-2,
Chapter 7 Photo-1,
Chapter 7 Photo-2,
Chapter 7 Photo-3,
Chapter 10,
Appendix D Author’s collection
Chapter 2
(t) Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
(hereafter LOC), Reproduction No. LC-USZ62-53338; (b)
LOC, Reproduction No. LC-USZ62-54015
Chapter 2
LOC, Reproduction No: LC-USZ62-54018
Chapter 3 Photo-1,
Chapter 3 Photo-2
Julia Chambi and Teo Allain Chambi, Archivo Fotográfico
Martín Chambi, Cusco, Peru
Chapter 3
LOC, Reproduction No. LC-USZ62-97754
Chapter 3
Royal Library, Copenhagen, facsimile with transcription
from Guamán Poma Web site, www.kb.dk/elib/mss/poma
(*)
Chapter 3
Rutahsa Adventures, www.rutahsa.com (photo by Ric
Finch)
Chapter 4,
Chapter 6 Photo-1,
Chapter 6 Photo-2,
Chapter 6 Photo-3,
Chapter 8 (t),
Chapter 9
Peter Menzel, www.menzelphoto.com
Chapter 4
Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Mexico City
(painting by Miguel Covarrubias)
Chapter 4
(t) Bibliothèque Nationale de France, MS Mex. 385
(Codex Telleriano-Remensis, folio 45v.) (*); (b) Museum
of Indian Arts and Culture, Santa Fe, N.M. (Fray
Bernardino de Sahagún, Historia General de las Cosas de
Nueva España, vol. 4, book 12, plate 114)
Chapter 5
Peabody Museum, Harvard University, Photo N25826; (r)
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. /
Art Resource, N.Y. (Painting by Nicholas R. Brewer
[1857-1949])
Chapter 5
National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian
Institution (hereafter NAA), Photo MNH 31,213
Chapter 5
Pete Bostrom, Lithic Casting Lab (*)
Chapter 5
University Photo Center, University of Arizona, Tucson,
Ariz.
Chapter 5
Vanderbilt University (photo by Steve Green)
Chapter 6
Proyecto Arqueológico Norte Chico
Chapter 7
National Geographic Image Collection (photo by Mathew
W. Stirling)
Chapter 7
Joyce Marcus, University of Michigan (originally printed
in Marcus 1976) (*)
Chapter 7
Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections
(Codex Zouche-Nuttall, 1902, facsimile, original at British
Museum)
Chapter 7
Paul Harmon, QalaYampu Project, www.reedboat.org
Chapter 7
Library, American Museum of Natural History (hereafter
AMNH), Neg. no. 334876 (photo by Shippee-Johnson
Expedition)
Chapter 7
AMNH, Neg. no. 334611 (photo by Shippee-Johnson
Expedition)
Chapter 8
University of Pennsylvania Museum, Tikal Project Neg.
No. 64-5-29, Vessel 10E-52
Chapter 8
Southeast Archaeological Center, National Park Service
(painting by Martin Pate)
Chapter 8
Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site ([t] painting by Lloyd
K. Townsend; [b] painting by Michael Hampshire)
Chapter 8
(b) Courtesy Gabriel González Maury,
www.campeche.com
Chapter 8
James Porter (*)
Chapter 8
Justin Kerr
Chapter 9
Araquém Alcântara
Chapter 9
NAA, Photo Lot 83-15
Chapter 9
Academic Press
Chapter 9
Anna C. Roosevelt
Chapter 9
(l) Museum of World Culture, Göteborg, Sweden (photo
by Hakan Berg); (r) Museu de Arqueologia e Etnologia da
Universidade de São Paulo (photo by Wagner Souza e
Silva)
Chapter 10
(r, l) Harris H. Wilder Papers, Smith College Archives,
Smith College
Chapter 10
AMNH, Neg. no. 334717 (photo by Shippee-Johnson
Expedition)
CHARLES C. MANN
1491
Charles C. Mann is a correspondent for Science and The Atlantic
Monthly, and has cowritten four previous books, including Noah’s
Choice: The Future of Endangered Species and The Second Creation:
Makers of the Revolution in Twentieth-Century Physics. A three-time
National Magazine Award finalist, he has won awards from the
American Bar Association, the Margaret Sanger Foundation, the
American Institute of Physics, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation,
among others. His writing was twice selected for both The Best
American Science Writing and The Best American Science and Nature
Writing. He lives with his wife and their children in Amherst,
Massachusetts.
ALSO BY CHARLES C. MANN
@ Large: The Strange Case of the World’s Biggest Internet Invasion (1997)
(with David H. Freedman)
Noah’s Choice: The Future of Endangered Species (1995) (with Mark L.
Plummer)
The Aspirin Wars: Money, Medicine and 100 Years of Rampant Competition
(1993) (with Mark L. Plummer)
The Second Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Twentieth-Century
Physics (1987) (with Robert P. Crease)
ACCLAIM FOR CHARLES C. MANN’S
1491
A Time Magazine • Boston Globe • Salon • San Jose Mercury News
Discover Magazine • San Francisco Chronicle • USA Today
New York Sun • Times Literary Supplement • New York Times
Best Book of the Year
“A journalistic masterpiece: lively, engaging…. A wonderfully provocative
and informative book.”
—The New York Review of Books
“Provocative…. A Jared Diamond–like volley that challenges prevailing
thinking about global development. Mann has chronicled an important shift
in our vision of world development, one our young children could end up
studying in their textbooks when they reach junior high.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Engagingly written and utterly absorbing…. Exciting and entertaining….
Mann has produced a book that’s part detective story, part epic and part
tragedy. He has taken on a vast topic: thousands of years, two huge
continents and cultures that range from great urban complexes to small
clusters of villages, a diversity so rich that our shorthand word for the
people who inhabited the Americas—Indians—has never seemed more
inadequate or inaccurate.”
—San Jose Mercury News
“Marvelous…. A revelation…. Our concept of pure wilderness untouched
by grubby human hands must now be jettisoned.”
—The New York Sun
“Mann does not present his thesis as an argument for unrestrained
development. It is an argument, though, for human management of natural
lands and against what he calls the ‘ecological nihilism’ of insisting that
forests be wholly untouched.”
—The Seattle Times
“A must-read survey course of pre-Columbian history—current,
meticulously researched, distilling volumes into single chapters to give
general readers a broad view of the subject.”
—The Providence Journal
“Eminently evenhanded and engaging…. Mann’s colorful commentary sets
the right tone: scholarly but hip.”
—St. Petersburg Times
“Concise and brilliantly entertaining…. Reminiscent of John McPhee’s
eloquence with scientific detail and Jared Diamond’s paradigm-shifting
ambition…. Makes me think of history in a new way.”
—Jim Rossi, Los Angeles Times
“Engrossing…. Sift[s] adroitly through the accumulating evidence and the
academic disputes. 1491 should be required reading in all high school and
university world history courses.”
—Foreign Affairs
“An excellent bit of missionary work in relieving the general ignorance in
the West about these once-great American cultures…. Mann has a facility
for translating academese into laymen’s language and for writing about
scientific complexities with a light hand…. There is, incidentally, nothing of
political correctness in this book other than a recognition of the sensitivity
of the issues.”
—Literary Review
“Monumental…. 1491 is less a self-contained work per se and more an
induction ceremony into what, for many readers, promises to be a lifelong
obsession with the startling new perspective slowly opening up on this
prehistory. What’s most shocking about 1491 is the feeling it induces of
waking up from a long dream and slowly realizing just how thoroughly one
has been duped…. Mann slips in so many fresh, new interpretations of
American history that it all adds up to a deeply subversive work.”
—Salon
“Well-researched and racily written…. Entertainingly readable, universally
accessible…. There are few better introductory books on the civilizations of
pre-Columbian America, and none so up-to-date”
—The Spectator
“[A] triumph…. A fascinating, unconventional account of Indian life in the
Americas prior to 1492.”
—BusinessWeek
FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, OCTOBER 2006
Copyright © 2005, 2006 by Charles C. Mann
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a
division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random
House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in slightly
different form in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a
division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2005.
Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Portions of this book have appeared in different forms in The Atlantic
Monthly, Harvard Design Magazine, Journal of the Southwest, The New
York Times, and Science.
Insert credits (clockwise left to right): Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan ©
Peter Menzel/menzelphoto.com; Central Cahokia circa AD 1150–1200
(detail) by Lloyd K. Townsend courtesy of Cahokia Mounds State Historic
Site; photograph of chicha seller in Cuzco (detail), 1921, by Martín Chambi
courtesy of Julia Chambi and Teo Allain Chambi, Archivo Fotográfico
Martín Chambi, Cusco, Peru; Community Life at Cahokia (detail) by
Michael Hampshire courtesy of Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site; Ruins
in Machu Picchu © Peter Menzel/menzelphoto.com; The Grolier Codex
(detail), photograph © Justin Kerr; reed boat (detail) © Paul Harmon, Qala
Yampu Project, www.reedboat.org; photograph of Inka ruin Wiñay Wayna
(detail) by Martín Chambi courtesy of Julia Chambi and Teo Allain
Chambi, Archivo Fotográfico Martín Chambi, Cusco, Peru; Landrace maize
from Oaxaca (detail) © Peter Menzel/menzelphoto.com; sixteenth-century
Mexica drawing of smallpox (detail) from the Historia General de las
Cosas de Nueva España, vol. 4, book 12, plate 114 by Fray Bernardino de
Sahagún/Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, Santa Fe, N.M.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows: 1491:
new revelations of the Americas before Columbus / Charles C. Mann.—1st
ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
- Indians—Origin. 2. Indians—History. 3. Indians—Antiquities. 4.
America—Antiquities.
I. Title.
E61.m266 2005
970.01’1—dc22 2004061547
Author photograph © J.D. Sloan
www.vintagebooks.com
eISBN: 978-0-307-27818-0
v3.0