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)…

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.

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!

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]

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

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.