In the comments thread of my most recent Damn Interesting article (linked in my RSS feed, go check it out if you haven’t subscribed) about the Passenger Pigeon, a reader mentioned the book 1491 by Charles C. Mann. It’s about the latest ideas in archaeology and anthropology relating to native peoples of the Americas prior to Columbus’ arrival (hence the title).
I almost immediately went out and purchased the book and have started reading it this evening. I’m excited for a number of reasons, but mostly because it turns out–like most things we learn about in elementary school–that what we were taught about Prehistoric America is entirely wrong.
Some highlights from the dustjacket suggest that the Americas were more heavily populated than Europe in 1491. Cities such as Tenochtitlan were more populous than any European city. Irrigated agriculture and large-scale landscape modification was well underway. And just about every entrenched idea we have about the people on this continent (and the superiority of Western culture) before Columbus is misguided or incorrect.
One of the most intriguing ideas to me is that the state that settlers found the American midwest and west in when they arrived may not have been the state it was in for the thousand years previous. Instead, the smallpox pandemic that wiped out greater than 90% of the native peoples changed their societies so greatly that they could no longer affect the landscape as they had before. Enormous forests were allowed to grow and huge herds of bison thrived without their main natural predator.
I’ll be writing about certain points in the book at other times, I’m sure (especially related to the implications, if there are any, for this new knowledge about the state of the land on the environmental movement). But for now, I want to highlight yet another use of virtual globe software, such as Google Earth.
In the first chapter of 1491, Mann discusses the people that once inhabited the Beni plains in north-central Bolivia. Apparently, these people were able to create amazing islands above the perennially-flooded plain on which to live. They connected these islands with causeways. How do we know? We can see them from the air. And, we can see them in Google Earth. Check out this 
amazing view of the islands (forested) and the causeways (also forested) standing out from the savannah lands on which they are built. In the academic literature it’s known as the Baures Prehispanic Hydraulic Complex. Anthropologists and archaeologists surmise that it’s actually a network of wiers and channels (click here for close-up images of some of the features) designed to allow for large scale fishing during the wet season. How could a culture obviously advanced enough to produce this amazing (and large, use the measurement tool, the network I’ve highlighted in the placemark is about 5 miles across!) network of hydraulic control structures just vanish from our historical radar?
Hopefully that’s a question that will get answered more definitively in years to come. The field of Pre-Columbian (and thus Pre-Historic, perhaps) American Anthropology is a very quickly moving one. We’re being forced to change our perspectives on when native people first arrived, what tools and technology they had, and how advanced their cultures were. It also is becoming a lesson on the devastating impacts of continental pandemics.
I’m curious if the book addresses any of the questions about the brutality of some of these civilizations. Two notable examples I can think of of horrifically brutal peoples are the Aztecs and the Blackfeet. Obviously the Aztecs were brutal enough before any western introduced epidemics. A bigger question to me is whether tribes like the Blackfeet were as brutal before the smallpox hit, or whether the general chaos of the situation was enough temptation for them to begin taking advantage of it and forming raiding parties much as the vikings did. Most likely it is some of column A and some of column B, but to what proportions? The few tribes that were barbarically brutal of course certainly caused stereotyping of the rest of the Native Americans much to their detriment.
Ian,
It has addressed brutality a little bit, so far. Though it points out that the brutality of the Aztecs is more than a bit overstated for a couple of reasons:
1) The Spanish erased most of Aztec history and rewrote it as their own. In their story the Aztecs were a bloodthirsty band of human sacrificers.
2) Cortez’ own account of the number of sacrifices is on the order of a few thousand per year. Comparing this to the number of people executed in public spectacles shows that, per capita, the Aztecs killed about as many people as did most European countries of the time. The difference was that the Aztecs used the sacrifice as a religious ceremony, while the Europeans used it as a secular message to criminals.
He has not discussed much about the Blackfeet yet, but mentioned briefly that Northeastern tribes occasionally scalped victims much as Europeans would decapitate their foes and place their heads on pikes.
My indication from everything in the book is that the native peoples of the Americas were no more brutal in any regards than people elsewhere at the time. By our modern standards, they are all horiffic.
Oh, true, I agree with that last statement completely, and I’m certainly not trying to exonerate the europeans in any way. I was mostly curious because of the villification all of the Natives recieved due to a couple raiding warbands.
I would have to say though, that even if the death per capita is the same, the reason behind the killing (comparing Aztecs to most of the Europeans of the era) can make all the difference. Being executed because you stole from a wealthy merchant is different than being executed because you were born on the solstice during a year with a lunar eclipse. And was it the Incans or the Mayans that the Aztecs wiped out? Not that Europe didn’t have it’s own ethnic purgings…
–Ian
[…] Scientific Debates: When Theory Outpaces Data [Anthropology, Clovis, Debate, Philosophy of Science, Science]I’ve just finished reading the first five chapters in Charles Mann’s fantastic 1491 and have been simply blown away so far. But, that will have to wait until a future entry. Today I’m going to share an idea I had when reading Mann’s chapter about the scientific infighting surrounding the Clovis culture. Pardon me if it’s a bit rambling, I’m just beginning to firm up my thoughts here. […]
“How could a culture… just vanish from our historical radar?”
A century ago, German ethnographer/archaeologist Leo Frobenius made a point so stunningly obvious that it never sank in. We have a pervasive tendency to identify Important Past Cultures with Large Stone Structures, because — duhh — those are what survive long enough to attract attention centuries or millennia later and get us digging. Because they provided our first benchmarks in reconstructing the past, we imagined a timeline in which monumental stonework = civilization.
But many of archeology’s “classic” cultures turned to work in stone (or baked brick) not necessarily because they Advanced to Higher-Tech Masonry, but because they were busily deforesting their environments. Tropical and subtropical environments typically allow cultures to get a lot farther with abundant wood. So Frobenius posited the “invisible counterplayer” — a belt of African, South Asian, and Central/South American cultures that simply didn’t leave the conspicuous traces of their counterparts to north and south. Exceptions prove the rule; you know much more about Chichen Itza and Great Zimbabwe and Borobudur than about their contemporaries working in bamboo, palm, liana and thatch.
But for those who care to look, traces of the latter keep turning up in earthworks, odd plant distributions, etc.
[BTW, I tried to post this June 30 — not sure what happened to it then]
Monte,
Sorry it didn’t post properly on June 30, but thanks for the excellent comment. I haven’t heard of this idea before, but of course it makes perfect sense. Just look at the grand strucutres that the Chinese constructed from wood. Of course other cultures could create elaborate and impressive palaces and temples with those materials that just don’t last as long.
Do you have a book or resource to recommend that I look at in particular about this hypothesis? I’m particularly interested in the plant distribution part of it.
Thanks!
Sorry to be so slow — my reader was set up for posts here, not comments.
The only Frobenius in print in English I know is
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0486409112/sr=8-1/qid=1152889083/ref=pd_bbs_1/002-3940202-7940816?ie=UTF8
which has some glancing references to the “invisible counterplayer” thesis.
I see Amazon also has
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0006CICX4/sr=8-16/qid=1152889083/ref=sr_1_16/002-3940202-7940816?ie=UTF8
which I remember as weird and interesting based on one reading in MS 30+ years back.
Online, start with
http://www.frobenius-institut.de/index_en.htm?frobenius_en.htm
and with
http://www.as.ua.edu/ant/Faculty/murphy/diffusion.htm
The “diffusionist” connection is central: Frobenius noticed some clusters of cultural features in Egypt and the Middle East that seemed to have arrived full-blown from elsewhere, and asked hismelf “what if E. and M.E. interacted with neighbors to the SW and SE who had a lot of highly evolved rituals, mythologies, etc. without a lot of enduring excavatable ruins?”
(Caution: because Frobenius was a German, active from the Kaiser’s-Kolonies era into Nazi times, some people lump him with the Ayanist/racist nuts. In fact, he fell out of favor in the 1930s precisely because he proposed that the accepted “high” historic cultures owed more to black & brown equatorial wogs than anyone suspected.)
Plant distributions: take a look at
http://marc.ucsb.edu/elpilar/fieldreports/2001report/2001_report.pdf
Those and other researchers are learning to recognize ecological as well as topographical traces of _champas_, the raised-and- drained “fields” that seem to have been ultra-productive from Yucatan around the southern edge of the Caribbean.
Follow up Mann’s notes. Try Alfred W. Crosby’s _Ecological Imperialism_ and _The Columbian Exchange. Read up on the much-contested history of teosinte->maize, which spread (along with the big populations it could support) farther and faster than the Mexican stone building habit — e.g. the earthworks of the Cahokian/Mississippi culture(s), which as Mann notes took so long to be recognized.
[…] Terra Preta de Indio: An Amazonian Lesson in Sustainability [1491, Amazon, Archaeology, Charles Mann, Rainforest, Soil, Sustainability, Terra Preta]Rarely does one see the words “Amazon” and “sustainable” in the same sentence, let alone the same title. To the modern mind, the Amazon is synonymous with two things: astounding ecological diversity and rapacious environmental degradation. As I’m learning from Charles Mann’s masterwork 1491, that view is not now as it once was. […]
Just one thing…
“Prehistoric” refers a period of time on which we dont have written evidence, nor documents…
but this does not fit to the Mesoamerican civilizations (such as aztec and maya) wich used a writing system, although rudimentary, enough to remove them from prehistory…
i mean, we dont consider even the early times of the Ancient Egyptian civilization like “prehistoric” because they used the hieroglyphic system of writing, and the aztec and maya scripture were similar to those…
we know a lot of information of those cultures thanks to some precolumbian pictographic documents and later copies from lost original documents…
i think that “prehistory”, although used traditionally, is a mistake to aztecs and mayas and isnt a suitable concept to talk about them, although it is for talking about less advanced indigenous cultures of the continent (exept maybe the arguable subject of the Inca)…