2 Why Billington Survived

2 Why Billington Survived 1491 (Second Edition): New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

Charles C. Mann

Note:2@@@@@@@@@@@ da indicizzare fino al segnalibro 1031 poi da leggereil primo contatto tra indiani e colonigli indigeni si alleano a fini militari (x combattere meglio i nemici) non x spirito di amicizial omissione dei reali motivi è sintomatica e nn riguarda solo i testi x bimbidio e la tecnologia c entrarono poco con la sopravvivenza dei primi colonil etnocentrismo sembra universale: entrambe le parti si credevano superiorile tende indiane: tutt altro che primitivei givani indiani: bamboccionila proprietà: c era eccome... veniva poco utilizzata ma c erail capo: si votava coi piedile battaglie rrano più che altro risse... prima degli europei: una rissa continua tra tribufisicamente gli indiani erano più prestanti di noi... nn hanno conosciuto carestie o epidemie

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THE FRIENDLY INDIAN
Note:T

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They encouraged the exchange of goods, but would only allow their visitors to stay ashore for brief, carefully controlled excursions.
Note:la politica degli indiani nei confronti dei bianchi

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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.
Note:alcune tribù sfruttano l'aiuto dei bianchi nei loro conflitti interni

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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.
Note:come la etorica scolastica ha ridotto l'incontro tra indiani e bianchi

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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.
Note:l'idea del pesce come fertilizzante

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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.
Note:l'omissione fondamentale dei testi storici canonici

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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.
Note:c'è un errore opposto ovvero considerare la resa indiana una volontà Divina

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“Indians were seen as trivial, ineffectual patsies,” Salisbury, a historian emeritus at Smith College, told me. “But that assumption—a whole continent of patsies—simply didn’t make sense.”
Note:gli indiani non erano considerati un popolo arretrato e barbaro

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The fall of Indian societies had everything to do with the natives themselves, researchers argue, rather than being religiously or technologically determined.
Note:le cause della sconfitta indiana

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When native met newcomer, both groups tried to benefit, as people will. In almost every case, each side believed itself to be superior—ethnocentrism seems to be a near-universal human quality—and
Note:i due gruppi si ritenevano entrambi superiori

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Tisquantum was not an Indian. True, he belonged to that category of people whose ancestors had inhabited the Western Hemisphere for thousands of years.
Note:l'amico indiano non era affatto un indiano

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As Tisquantum’s later history made clear, he regarded himself first and foremost as a citizen of Patuxet,

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lui stesso non si riteneva tale

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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.
Note:il Nord America una periferia dell'Impero

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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.
Note:la prima cultura del Nord America di cui abbiamo traccia

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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,”
Note:gli indiani non erano considerati dei primitivi dai coloni

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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.
Note:abitazioni e cucina indiane erano ammirate e limitate anche dai coloni

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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.
Note:famiglia presso gli indiani

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The primary goal of Dawnland education was molding character. Men and women were expected to be brave, hardy, honest, and uncomplaining.
Note:pedagogia indiana

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When Indian boys came of age, they spent an entire winter alone in the forest,
Note:cccccc

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To master the art of ignoring pain, future pniese had to subject themselves to such miserable experiences as running barelegged through brambles.
Note:dominare il dolore

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(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.)
Note:il sistema della proprietà

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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.
Note:gli indiani potano con i piedi

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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.
Note:cresce il numero degli indiani cominciano le prime tensioni territoriali

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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,
Note:i conflitti sono numerosi ma poco intensi per lo standard europeo

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Women and children were rarely killed,
Note:cccccc

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Nevertheless, by Tisquantum’s time defensive palisades were increasingly common, especially in the river valleys. Inside the settlement was a world of warmth, family,
Note:warfare indiano

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outside, as Thomas put it, was “a maze of confusing actions and individuals fighting
Note:tutti contro tutti

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TOURISM AND TREACHERY
Note:ttttttttt

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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.
Note:il primo a descriverli

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Europeans described the People of the First Light as strikingly healthy specimens.
Note:sani e aitanti

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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.
Note:poche carestia e poche epidemie

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The Pilgrims were less sanguine about Indians’ multicolored, multitextured mode of self-presentation.
Note:i nostri sempre più malaticcii

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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.
Note:la grande bellezza dei capelli

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As for the Indians, evidence suggests that they tended to view Europeans with disdain as soon as they got to know them.
Note:il disprezzo delle indiano per il bianco

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With striking uniformity, these travelers reported that New England was thickly settled and well defended.
Note:una terra ben difesa

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THE PLACE OF THE SKULL
Note:ttttttt

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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.
Note:come sono sopravvissuti i padri fondatori?

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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.
Note:i Padri Pellegrini all'avventura

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Huddled in their half-built village that first terrible winter, the colonists rarely saw the area’s inhabitants, except for the occasional shower of copper- 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.
Note:primi contatti tra i padri e gli indiani

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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.”)
Note:gli indiani in Europa. Il fenomeno da baraccone. L'opposizione cattolica ad ogni brutalità.

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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.
Note:la strage. I prigionieri europei erano malati. Probabilmente si trattava di epatite. il contagio fu terribile nelle sue conseguenze

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In their panic, the healthy fled from the sick, carrying the disease with them to neighboring communities.
Note:cccccccc

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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.
Note:la mancanza di nozioni sulla viralità scatenò interpretazioni di carattere religioso

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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
Note:Il prima è il dopo. Sintesi, dapprima gli indiani si alleano con gli europei in cerca di alleanze strumentali ai loro conflitti interni. La strage avviene a causa dell'epatite portata da alcuni francesi

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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.”
Note:l'interpretazione della strage. Il nostro Dio ci favorisce. È la stessa interpretazione degli indiani medesimi

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The epidemic, Gorges said, left the land “without any [people] to disturb or appease
Note:l'epidemia lascia un territorio deserto da conquistare

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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.
Note:altra richiesta di aiuto da parte dei capi indiani per combattere i loro nemici. Ora vogliono le nostre pistole.

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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, an unrifled, early seventeenth-century gun had fewer advantages over a longbow than may be supposed.
Note:un luogo comune da sfatare. La superiorità tecnologica degli Europei. È vero, le pistole fecero da prima impressione agli indiani ma si rivelarono ben presto solo degli aggeggi molto rumorosi e poco pratici.

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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
Note:d'altro canto gli europei stupirono per la tecnologia indiana. Il mais, i mocassini, e molto altro

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the stunned British eagerly exchanged knives and guns for Indian canoes.
Note:gli europei scambiarono ben volentieri i loro coltelli e le loro pistole con le pratiche canoe indiane

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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.
Note:gli indiani vedevano gli europei come un'ennesima tribù con cui allenarsi

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MACHINATIONS
Note:tttttttt

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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 many other groups joined in. The conflict, brutal and sad, tore through New England. The Europeans won. Indeed, after the war Massachusetts sold more than a thousand Indians into slavery—perhaps one out of every ten native adults in the region. Most went to the Caribbean, but a few ended up as far away as North Africa.
Note:il patto tra coloni e indiani durò 15 anni. Fu infine rotto dagli indiani che scatenarono una guerra vinta dagli europei. I vincitori schiavizzarono i vinti e li vendettero spedendoli soprattutto ai Caraibi e in Africa

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The historian Alan Gallay has estimated that between 1670 and 1715 English slavers in the South sold somewhere between thirty and fifty thousand native people.
Note:numeri

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What happened? Europeans won military victories in New England, historians say, partly because they were divided among themselves. Indians were unwilling, too, to match the English tactic of massacring whole villages.
Note:perché i coloni vinsero le loro guerre? Non per la presunta superiorità tecnologica ma per la maggior coesione. Le tribù indiane erano divise e incapaci di coalizzarsi.

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But another, bigger part of the reason for the foreigners’ triumph was that by the 1670s the newcomers outnumbered the natives.
Note:ci fu poi la questione del numero da una certa data in poi gli europei erano superiori anche per numero

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Groups like the Narragansett, which had been spared by the epidemic of 1616, were crushed by a smallpox epidemic in 1633.
Note:infine un ruolo fondamentale continuarono ad averlo le epidemie

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Their societies were destroyed by weapons their opponents could not control and did not even know they had.
ccccccc

Il selvaggio ecologista non era né selvaggio né ecologista

Per capire meglio cosa furono le civiltà precolombiane la cosa migliore è volare in Bolivia nella regione del Beni.

Qui si incontreranno parecchi studiosi, specie antropologi, poiché nella foresta vivono ancora tribù "incontaminate" prive di contatti con il mondo esterno. Ma alcuni ricercatori non sono qui per loro, cercano altro. Cosa cerchino lo spiega meravigliosamente Charles C. Mann nel libro “1491 New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus”…

... 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...

Indagano, insomma, le vestigia di una civiltà popolosa e tecnologicamente molto avanzata...

... 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....

Ebbene, parlare in questi termini delle civiltà precolombiane significa compiere uno dei più interessanti revisionismi storici...

... 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...

L'ortodossia ci tramanda invece la presenza di  piccoli gruppi con uno scarso impatto sull'ambiente...

... 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...

La tesi revisionista ribalta la visuale: i nativi erano qui da molto tempo, erano numerosi e avevano trasformato completamente il loro ambiente...

... 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...

La reazione alle nuove tesi fu dapprima irrisoria...

... 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...

C'è chi si preoccupava del portato politico di tutta questa faccenda: popolazioni molto più numerose imponevano di rivedere al rialzo le perdite conseguenti all’invasione europea…

... 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...

D'altro canto, crollava il mito del "selvaggio ecologista" che vive in armonia con l’ambiente naturale…

... 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...

Esempio: l'uso del fuoco per disboscare era impiegato massicciamente…

... 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...

I cosiddetti "geoglifici" osservati nel Beni costituivano una grandiosa trasformazione del territorio...

... 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...

L'Amazzonia fu completamente rimodellata dalle popolazioni indigene...

... 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...

Ancora oggi le popolazioni locali guardano con diffidenza ai progetti dei "conservazionisti": se si istituisce un parco come potremo continuare a bruciare il bosco?...

... 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?...

L'attivista, d'altronde, si oppone con malcelata testardaggine a consegnare la terra ai locali. Dove la cosa è successa, incendi, discariche e depositi di scorie nucleari si sono moltiplicati...

... 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...

È sorprendente scoprire che molte colline dell'Amazzonia non erano altro che depositi di rifiuti a latere di grandi città. Noi ne sappiamo qualcosa...

... Monte Testaccio, the hill of broken pots southeast of Rome, was a garbage dump for the entire imperial city...

***************

Gran parte degli studi sulle civiltà precedenti è stata sviata da un'ipotesi che tutti hanno accettato ma che non ha retto alle verifiche successive. Si parla oggi dell' "errore di Holmberg". Chi era costui? Visse a lungo tra gli Sirionò...

... 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...

Definì quella popolazione "incolta ed arretrata"...

... 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”)...

Ne dedusse che prima di Colombo, gli abitanti di quelle terre, erano qualcosa di molto simile ai loro pronipoti. Ci vollero decenni per rettificare questa indebita inferenza.

I Siorionò erano stati ridotti così da tifo e influenza...

... 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...

... e anche dai matrimoni tra parenti...

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

... e anche dagli abusi dei bianchi...

... 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...

Un'analogia che la dice lunga...

... 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...

Se incappassimo in persone sfuggite da Dachau e rifugiata per anni nei boschi concluderemmo forse che vengono da una civiltà arretrata?

Basta volare sulla ragione del Beni per notare che il panorama è del tutto artificiale...

... 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....

Il panorama è "umanizzato" anche se oggi di uomini non c'è l'ombra.

Evidentemente, una civiltà avanzata in grado di sviluppare una potenza d’intervento notevole aveva completamente rimodellato l’assetto naturale del territorio…

... 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... A thousand years ago their society was at its height. Their villages and towns were spacious, formal, and guarded by moats and palisades...

Tutto è antropomorfizzato...

... 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...

Ma il Beni è un'eccezione? No, anche se l' "errore di Holmberg" ci indurrebbe a pensarlo...

... 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...

L'errore di Holmberg ha contagiato una buona parte dell'antropologia che si occupava delle Americhe e spiega il perché i coloni giudicavano gli indigeni alla stregua di congeniti barbari viziosi.

Ma l'immagine speculare del "buon selvaggio" è altrettanto errata e forse le origini dell'equivoco sono le stesse. Ma facciamo qualche nome sui responsabili di questa clamorosa cantonata...

... 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... To his way of thinking, Indians were natural creatures who dwelt, gentle as cows, in the “terrestrial paradise.”... 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.”...

Oggi è l'ecologismo più ingenuo a prolungare l'illusione...

... 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... For almost a decade the image of the crying Indian appeared around the world....

E ora qualche nome della visione opposta, quella legata al primitivismo congenito di queste popolazioni...

... 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.”... 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.”... 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.”... 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...

Imprigionati nella loro natura selvaggia, questi pagani conducevano una vita breve e violenta. "Pigri, infantili e crudeli", ecco come venivano definiti.

Inevitabile che nascesse un sentimento di superiorità verso di loro...

... 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....

Anche perchè la mentalità innatista era preminente: le società umane non cambiano. Ma alcuni eventi storici del periodo post-bellico scossero questa certezza...

...  But the Second World War taught the West that non-Westerners—the Japanese, in this instance—were capable of swift societal change...

A dire il vero anche il revisionismo in atto ha subito critiche...

... 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...

Ma un fatto è certo: non parliamo di nomadi bensì di gente che ha costruito e abitato le città più grandi e opulente del loro tempo. Non dipendevano affatto dalla caccia, l'agricoltura era conosciuta e praticata su vasta scala.

Conclusione provvisoria...

... Americas were immeasurably busier, more diverse, and more populous than researchers had previously imagined. And older, too...

*****

Occupiamoci ora delle origini: come è stato occupato il continente americano? Partiamo dall' ortodossia...

... 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... 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... two great glacial sheets in northwest Canada parted, leaving a comparatively warm, ice-free corridor between them...

È la storia del Cile ricostruita da scavi meticolosi ad aver messo in crisi la  vulgata...

... 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.)...

La tempistica non torna. Cominciano a fioccare ipotesi alternative...

... 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...

Un consenso fatica ad emergere...

... No consensus has emerged, but a growing number of researchers believe that the New World was occupied by a single small group that crossed the Bering Strait, got stuck on the Alaska side, and trickled to the rest of the Americas...

Molti sembrano ritrovarsi nell'ipotesi di una colonizzazione del continente per ondate successive. Almeno cinque...

... some scientists have theorized that the Americas may have been hit with as many as five waves of settlement before Columbus...

Le popolazioni incontrate da Colombo erano solo le ultimi arrivati.

Gli attivisti vicini alle popolazioni indigene si opposero in modo veemente all'ipotesi delle ondate...

... 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....

L'ipotesi delle "ondate" implica – o comunque rende probabile - l'eliminazione delle civiltà precedenti da parte di quelle successive, cosicché fa pendere in modo più o meno velato l'accusa di genocidio anche sugli indios, finora presentati solo nei panni delle vittime. Gli attivisti temono che "i bianchi" si lavino la coscienza...

... “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?’ ”...

Una preoccupazione comprensibile anche se moralmente infondata: un male non lava l’altro...

... 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...

La migrazione verso il continente americano avvenne comunque prima della rivoluzione neolitica, ovvero prima della scoperta dell’agricoltura…

... 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...

Ricordiamo brevemente questo fenomeno, forse il più importante della nostra storia...

... 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 ... 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...

Ebbene, tutto questo gli americani lo hanno fatto tutto da soli...

... 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...

Possiamo allora dire che la civiltà umana ha conosciuto almeno due neolitici...

... 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....

La diffusione delle culture è stata dapprima più lenta nel nuovo continente, forse perché meno popoloso...

...  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...

L'agricoltura americana, a base di mais, forniva diete più bilanciate...

... 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...

In seguito, gli americani recuperarono presto lo svantaggio iniziale...

... 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)...

Gran parte del merito è da attribuire agli Olmec...

...  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...

Stiamo parlando di una civiltà estremamente avanzata per l’epoca... che inventò lo zero....

...  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.... Mathematicians in India first used zero in its contemporary sense—a number, not a placeholder—sometime in the first few centuries A.D...

Quanto detto per gli Olmec può ripetersi per i Maya. Domanda: erano più avanzati degli occidentali? Qualcuno ne dubita facendo notare che non conoscevano la ruota. Calma, la conoscevano eccome, solo che non la usavano...

... 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...

****

Per comprendere a fondo la portata del revisionismo sulle civiltà precolombiane la cosa migliore è di immaginarsi un viaggio in aereo sulla regine del Beni e dintorni  mille anni prima di Cristo. Cosa vediamo dal finestrino?...

... 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... 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... But recent archaeological investigations have revealed that at this time the Andes housed two mountain states, each much larger than previously appreciated... 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... 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... 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... 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...

Almeno due stati andini, prosperi, popolosi e tecnologicamente avanzati. Come tramontarono queste civiltà? Qualcuno pensa a fenomeni climatici come un mega Nino, c' è da dubitarne...

... 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...

Anche la civiltà Maya ci appare oggi più vasta e complessa di quel che si credeva...

... 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... 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...

Devastanti guerre fratricide devastarono i Maya...

... 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... 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...

Ma anche la siccità di cui fu portatore il mega Nino contribuì al collasso...

... 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...

Ma gli accademici sono scettici sul ruolo della siccità, proposto più che altro da chi è alla ricerca di una sintonia con le paure ecologiche della contemporaneità. L'ipotesi più accreditata anche in questo caso resta la guerra, una guerra totale...

... 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.)...

E a nord? Gli indiani che tutti conosciamo dai film western?...

... 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...

Erano la periferia dell'impero, un po' come i mongoli o la Siberia erano la periferia del grande e prosperoso impero cinese. Il fulcro stava nell'America centrale, l' Amazzonia, per esempio, era un territorio densamente popolato...

...  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.”...

La dinamica nella scoperta delle civiltà estinte e lontane si ripete: dapprima le si identifica con quel che vediamo, e noi vediamo solo dei rozzi ruderi. Poi, si comincia a ricostruire lentamente finché ci si ritrova di fronte alla loro reale grandezza...

...  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...

Possibile riepilogo: civiltà prosperose e tecnologicamente avanzate sorsero nel nuovo mondo. Guerre devastanti e forse anche fenomeni climatici le fecero cadere, a finirle furono le malattie e il giogo imposto dagli europei. L'annientamento fu tale che solo a gran fatica e di recente gli studiosi hanno saputo ricostruirne la grandezza...

... 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...