ALTA DENSITA’ CAUSALE

ALTA DENSITA’ CAUSALE

Quando un evento è originato da molti fattori il compito del ricercatore diventa quello di isolare il principale.
Caso 1: riscaldamento globale.
Caso 2: strage dei nativi dopo la scoperta dell’America.
Il caso 1 è ancora irrisolto: le attività umane sono una componente ma ancora non si capisce se siano “la causa principale”.

Il caso 2 invece è risolto, la causa principale sembra delinearsi: le malattie. In particolare l’avvento del maiale. I nuovi arrivati, gli europei, avevano una lunga consuetudine di promiscuità con le bestie: mangiavano e dormivano insieme a loro da secoli. La conversione dell’aviaria in influenza umana era business as usual. I nativi americani, invece, avevano addomesticato giusto il cane, dalle bestie stavano alla larga e non ebbero mai modo di sviluppare certi anticorpi. L’azione del maiale nelle Americhe fa impallidire quella del ratto in Europa, persino la peste nera del trecento è “nanificata” da certe impetuose epidemie del nuovo continente! A proposito, molte popolazioni americane che noi consideriamo “nomadi” non lo erano affatto in origine, lo sono diventate dopo che le loro città si trasformarono in cimiteri.

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,

Note | Location: 891

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.
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intro+1 - 1491 New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann

1491 (Second Edition): New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann

You have 161 highlighted passages

You have 107 notes

Last annotated on January 30, 2017

Tiwanaku,Read more at location 150

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the program,Read more at location 159

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INTRODUCTIONRead more at location 251

Note: INTRO@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ Edit

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

Note: 1@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ Edit

IN THE BENIRead more at location 255

Note: T 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

Note: BENI Edit

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

Note: ISOLAMENTO Edit

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

Note: I PROTAGONISTI Edit

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

Note: TECNOLOGIE AVSNZATE Edit

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

Note: REVISIONISMO Edit

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

Note: ORTODOSSIA Edit

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

Note: LA TEDI ALTERNATIVA Edit

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

Note: REAZIONE RRRISORIA Edit

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

Note: CORRETTEZZA POLITICA E STERMINIO Edit

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

Note: CONTRO IL MITO DEL SELVAGGIO ECOLOGISTA Edit

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

Note: FUOCO Edit

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

Note: GEOGLIFICI Edit

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

Note: AMAZZONIA MODELLATA Edit

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

Note: INDIGENI VS CONSERVAXIONISMI Edit

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

Note: AUTONOMIA E DISCARICHE NATURALI Edit

HOLMBERG’S MISTAKERead more at location 327

Note: T Edit

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

Note: DEVIL TREE Edit

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

Note: MONNEZZA Edit

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

Add a note

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

Note: H. POP INCOLTA E ARRETRATA Edit

Before Columbus, Holmberg believed, both the people and the land had no real history.Read more at location 389

Note: STORIA Edit

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

Note: ERRORE Edit

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

Note: TIFO E INFLUENZA Edit

(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

Note: MATRIMONIO TRA PARENTI Edit

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

Note: PERSRCIZIONI Edit

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

Note: ANALOGIA Edit

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

Note: PANORAMA Edit

“I knew these things were not natural.Read more at location 439

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“It’s a completely humanized landscape,”Read more at location 441

Note: TUTTO UMANIZZATO Edit

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

Note: GLI ANTENATI Edit

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

Note: L APICE Edit

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

Note: TUTTO ANTROPOMORFIZZATO Edit

“EMPTY OF MANKIND AND ITS WORKS”Read more at location 456

Note: T Edit

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

Note: UN ERRORE CONTAGIOSO Edit

Holmberg’s Mistake explained the colonists’ view of most Indians as incurably vicious barbarians;Read more at location 461

Note: DISPREZZO Edit

its mirror image was the dreamy stereotype of the Indian as a Noble Savage.Read more at location 462

Note: IMMAGINE SPECULARE Edit

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

Note: GENEALOGIA DEL NOBLE SAUVAHE Edit

To his way of thinking, Indians were natural creatures who dwelt, gentle as cows, in the “terrestrial paradise.”Read more at location 467

Note: DEF Edit

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

Note: ALTRO COMMENTATORE Edit

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

Note: ECOLOGISMO Edit

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

Note: THOREAU Edit

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

Note: 1970 Edit

For almost a decade the image of the crying Indian appeared around the world.Read more at location 476

Note: PUBBLICOTÀ Edit

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

Note: VISIONE ANTOTETICA. BANCROFT Edit

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

Note: KROEBER Edit

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

Note: AGRICOLTURA Edit

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

Note: ARTE Edit

Imprisoned in changeless wilderness, they were “pagans expecting short and brutish lives, void of any hope for the future.”Read more at location 494

Note: VITA CORTA E BRITALE Edit

later books froze them into a formula: “lazy, childlike, and cruel.”Read more at location 500

Note: PIGRONI Edit

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

Note: SUPERIORITÀ Edit

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

Note: GIAPONE Edit

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

Note: CRITICHE Edit

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

Note: NOMADI? Edit

Far from being dependent on big-game hunting, most Indians lived on farms.Read more at location 519

Note: AGRI Edit

Americas were immeasurably busier, more diverse, and more populous than researchers had previously imagined. And older, too.Read more at location 521

Note: CPNCLUSIONE Edit

THE OTHER NEOLITHIC REVOLUTIONSRead more at location 523

Note: T Edit

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

Note: ORTODOSSIA SULLE ORIGINI Edit

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

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ago—two great glacial sheets in northwest Canada parted, leaving a comparatively warm, ice-free corridor between them.Read more at location 529

Note: HAYNES Edit

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

Note: IL CILE CONFUTA Edit

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

Note: UN CASINO Edit

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

Note: IPOTESI Edit

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

Note: 5 ONDATE Edit

In many versions, though, today’s Indians are seen as relative latecomers.Read more at location 548

Note: GLI ULTOMI ARRIVATI Edit

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

Note: INDIANI ABUSIVI Edit

“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

Note: LA PAURA Edit

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

Note: CONTRO DELORIA Edit

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

Note: IMMIGRATI PRIMA DELLA RIV AGRICOLA Edit

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

Note: AGRICOLTURA Edit

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

Note: SUMERI Edit

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

Note: TUTTO DA SOLI Edit

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

Note: 2NEOLITICI Edit

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

Note: DIFFUSIONE Edit

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

Note: MAIS Edit

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

Note: MENO TEMPO Edit

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

Note: OLMEC Edit

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

Note: CIVILTÀ AVANZATE Edit

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

Note: ZERO Edit

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

Note: INDIA Edit

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

Note: RUOTA. LA DOMANDA Edit

A GUIDED TOURRead more at location 615

Note: T Edit

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

Note: VIAGGIO IMMAGINARIO Edit

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

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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

Note: ANDE Edit

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

Note: STATO ANDIMO Edit

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

Note: NUMERO Edit

Other researchers believe this population estimate is too high.Read more at location 644

Add a note

Which view is right?Read more at location 646

Add a note

“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

Note: REALIZZAZIONI Edit

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

Note: WARI Edit

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

Note: 70000 Edit

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

Note: CLOMA E STORIA Edit

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

Note: MAYA Edit

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

Note: BIGGER Edit

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

Note: AKAAN Edit

the Maya realm was home to one of the world’s most intellectually sophisticated cultures.Read more at location 687

Note: CULTURA SOFISTICATA Edit

About a century before our imaginary surveillance tour, though, the Maya heartland entered a kind of Dark Ages.Read more at location 688

Note: COLLASSO Edit

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

Note: SICCITÀ Edit

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

Note: MEGA NINO Edit

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

Note: SCENARIO CHE NN CONVINFE Edit

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

Note: GUERRA Edit

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

Note: PELLEROSSA Edit

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

Note: AMAZZONIA POPOLATA Edit

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

Note: SCIENZA E ARTE Edit

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

Note: ARIEPILOGO Edit