1491 (Second Edition): New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
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1 A View from AboveRead more at location 254
Note: La tesi:le civiltà pre colombiane erano popolose e avanzate... Implicazioni imbarazzanti : 1) per i conservatori: rivedere al rialzo i numeri della strage perpetrata dai bianchi e 2) per i progressisti: rivedere l'impatto ambientale e il mito ecologista di qs popolazioni... Che fare dei territori con i resti di qs civiltà? Proposta indigena: farne un deposito scorie nucleari. La democrazia spesso ci delude... Indizio a conferma della tesi: la quantità di spazzatura rinvenuta... Il classico errore degli storici: una civiltà primitiva è sempre stata tale. No, le civiltà possono regredire: malattie, genetica, guerre, eventi catastrogici costituiscono spesso un giro di boa...... Lo stereotipo di Holbrook:: incontrò e si unì ad indiani in fuga credendo che tutti vivessero in modo tanto precario. S'impose così lo strreotipo dell' indiano barbaro... Da dove arrivano i cosiddetti "nativi"? Crolla l' ipotesi di bering. Oggi vige su qs punto uno stato d' incertezza in cui competono più ipotesi... Ma una cosa smbra fissata: gli indiani sono gli ultimi arrivati di un flusso che conta almeno 5 insediamenti precedenti... L' ipotesi degli insediamenti stratificati è accusato di essere un complotto dell'antropologia bianca x poter dire che se noi abbiamo rubato la terra lo avevano fatto a loro volta anche i "derubati"… Ma: 1) due torti nn fanno una ragione 2) nulla sappiamo sul primo torto 3) arrivati prima o dopo non inficia il giudizio sulla civiltà che hanno costruito... Gli indios arrivarono dall Eurasia PRIMA della rivoluzione Neolitica (10000 anni fa). Teniamo conto del punto di partenza... Eurasia: agricoltura + ruota+ metalli + scrittura => Sumeri, prima vera civiltà (3000 AC). Ebbene, anche le Americhe conobbero una processo simile con tempi solo leggermente posticipati... Motivi del ritardo: 1) densità della popolazione insufficiente 2) abbondanza di mais che garantiva già diete equilibrate... Olmec. Sono i sumeri del mesoamerica: sacrifici umani ma anche commerci, scienza, tecnologia, invenzione dello zero... Ma i Maya erano una civiltà + avanzata delle ns? Difficile rispondere: inventarono lo zero ma nn avevano la ruota (se nn nei giochi dei bambini). Prendiamo allora solo ciò che è certo: in America esistevano civiltà di livello pari a quelle europee.. Immagina di viaggiare in aereo 3000 anni fa. Cosa vedi? Le ipotesi sono cambiate radicalmente negli ultimi 59 anni. Prima: territori selvaggi con insediamenti sporadici. Oggi: canalizzazione diffusa, terre curate e popolazione densa anche in montagna... Wari e Tiwanaku: civiltà popolose e ben organizzate su un territorio difficile. Grandi opere pubbliche... Che importanza dare agli eventi atmosferici? Per l'europa nessuno tira in ballo la piccola glaciazione x spiegarne la storia. Al contrario c'è chi enfatizza il mega Nino x spiegare le dinamiche americane... 1@@@@@@@@@@@@ Edit
Below us lay the Beni, a Bolivian province about the size of Illinois and Indiana put together, and nearly as flat.Read more at location 259
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.Read more at location 263
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.Read more at location 265
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.Read more at location 271
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.Read more at location 275
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 environmentRead more at location 276
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.Read more at location 279
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.Read more at location 283
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.Read more at location 290
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.Read more at location 292
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.Read more at location 302
In the late 1990s, when I first visited the Beni, few knew that the wholesale clearing in Acre was exposing large earthworks—geometric figures that Alceu Ranzi, a researcher at the Federal University of Acre, has dubbed “geoglyphs.” Today more than two hundred have been identified; many are as much as 500 feet from one side to the other. Created by digging precise circles, squares, and rectangles into the Amazonian clay, the geoglyphs are as striking to see from the air as the raised fields and causeways Erickson and Balée showed me in the Beni.Read more at location 312
Erickson, who has found similar earthworks in the Beni, believes that before Columbus an 800- or 1000-mile swath of western Amazonia was occupied by a previously unknown mix of cultures that radically reshaped the landscape around them.Read more at location 318
Meanwhile, conservationists argue for keeping this unpopulous region as close to nature 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?Read more at location 322
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.Read more at location 324
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.Read more at location 332
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.Read more at location 342
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.Read more at location 369
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”).Read more at location 374
Before Columbus, Holmberg believed, both the people and the land had no real history.Read more at location 389
But flaws in perspective often appear obvious only after they are pointed out. In this case they took decades to rectify.Read more at location 391
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.Read more at location 399
(A genetic bottleneck occurs when a population becomes so small that individuals are forced to mate with relatives, which can produce deleterious hereditary effects.)Read more at location 403
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.Read more at location 408
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.Read more at location 412
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.Read more at location 436
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.Read more at location 444
A thousand years ago their society was at its height. Their villages and towns were spacious, formal, and guarded by moats and palisades.Read more at location 447
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.Read more at location 454
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.Read more at location 458
Holmberg’s Mistake explained the colonists’ view of most Indians as incurably vicious barbarians;Read more at location 461
its mirror image was the dreamy stereotype of the Indian as a Noble Savage.Read more at location 462
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.Read more at location 464
To his way of thinking, Indians were natural creatures who dwelt, gentle as cows, in the “terrestrial paradise.”Read more at location 467
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.”Read more at location 469
In our day, beliefs about Indians’ inherent simplicity and innocence refer mainly to their putative lack of impact on the environment.Read more at location 471
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.Read more at location 472
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.Read more at location 474
For almost a decade the image of the crying Indian appeared around the world.Read more at location 476
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.”Read more at location 482
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.”Read more at location 486
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.”Read more at location 490
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.Read more at location 493
Imprisoned in changeless wilderness, they were “pagans expecting short and brutish lives, void of any hope for the future.”Read more at location 494
later books froze them into a formula: “lazy, childlike, and cruel.”Read more at location 500
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.Read more at location 502
But the Second World War taught the West that non-Westerners—the Japanese, in this instance—were capable of swift societal change.Read more at location 506
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.Read more at location 514
They were not nomadic, but built up and lived in some of the world’s biggest and most opulent cities.Read more at location 519
Far from being dependent on big-game hunting, most Indians lived on farms.Read more at location 519
Americas were immeasurably busier, more diverse, and more populous than researchers had previously imagined. And older, too.Read more at location 521
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.Read more at location 524
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 yearsRead more at location 526
ago—two great glacial sheets in northwest Canada parted, leaving a comparatively warm, ice-free corridor between them.Read more at location 529
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.)Read more at location 536
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.Read more at location 540
No consensus has emerged, but a growing number of researchers believe that the New World was occupied by a single small group that crossed the Bering Strait, got stuck on the Alaska side, and trickled to the rest of the AmericasRead more at location 545
some scientists have theorized that the Americas may have been hit with as many as five waves of settlement before Columbus,Read more at location 547
In many versions, though, today’s Indians are seen as relative latecomers.Read more at location 548
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 in a conversation before his death in 2005. Deloria was 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.”Read more at location 549
“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?’ ”Read more at location 556
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 wavesRead more at location 558
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.Read more at location 561
It began in the Middle East about eleven thousand years ago, in the western half of the Fertile Crescent, which arcs between southern Iraq and Israel, reaching into southern Turkey along the way. Foraging societies there grouped into permanent villages and learned to cultivate and breed the area’s wild wheat and barley. In the next few millennia the wheel and the metal tool sprang up in the same area.Read more at location 564
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.Read more at location 567
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.Read more at location 569
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.Read more at location 570
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.Read more at location 575
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 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.Read more at location 582
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).Read more at location 586
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.Read more at location 588
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.Read more at location 591
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.Read more at location 596
Mathematicians in India first used zero in its contemporary sense—a number, not a placeholder—sometime in the first few centuries A.D.Read more at location 602
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.Read more at location 608
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.Read more at location 616
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.Read more at location 620
But recent archaeological investigations have revealed that at this time the Andes housed two mountain states, each much larger than previously appreciated.Read more at location 625
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.Read more at location 635
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,Read more at location 640
“Building this enormous place up here is really remarkable,” she said. “I realize that again every time I come back.”Read more at location 648
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.Read more at location 649
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.Read more at location 652
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.Read more at location 664
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.Read more at location 673
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.Read more at location 680
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.Read more at location 683
the Maya realm was home to one of the world’s most intellectually sophisticated cultures.Read more at location 687
About a century before our imaginary surveillance tour, though, the Maya heartland entered a kind of Dark Ages.Read more at location 688
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.Read more at location 691
The drought, possibly caused by a mega-Niño, pushed the society, already so close to the edge, over the cliff.Read more at location 693
Such scenarios resonate with contemporary ecological fears, helping to make them popular outside the academy. Within the academy skepticism is more common.Read more at location 694
at the hills of what are now the Mexican states of Oaxaca and Guerrero. Here are the quarrelsome city-states of the Ñudzahui (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.)Read more at location 700
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.Read more at location 717
According to the Finnish archaeologists who first brought the Acre earthworks to attention, “it is obvious” that “relatively high population densities” were “quite common everywhere in the Amazonian lowlands.”Read more at location 728
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.Read more at location 743
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.Read more at location 747
