Top Quotes: “1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus” — Charles Mann
Introduction
“Tisquantum’s childhood wetu (home) was formed from arched poles lashed together into a dome that was covered in winter by tightly woven rush mats and in summer by thin sheets of chestnut bark. A fire burned constantly in the center, the smoke venting through a hole in the center of the roof. English visitors did not find this arrangement peculiar; chimneys were just coming into use in Britain, and most homes there, including those of the wealthy, were still heated by fires beneath central roof holes. 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,” sighed the colonist William Wood. The wetu was less leaky than the typical English wattle-and-daub house, too. Wood did not conceal his admiration for the way Indian mats “deny entrance to any drop of rain, though it come both fierce and long.””
“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.
Pilgrim writers universally reported that 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.”
“Time and time again Europeans described the People of the First Light as strikingly healthy specimens. Eating an incredibly nutritious diet, working hard but not broken by toil, the people of New England were taller and more robust than those who wanted to move in — “as proper”as men and women for feature and limbes as can be founde,” in the words of the rebellious Pilgrim Thomas Morton. 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. Native New Englanders, in William Wood’s view, were “more amiable to behold (though [dressed] only in Adam’s finery) than many a compounded fantastic [English dandy] in the newest fashion.””
“As for the Indians, evidence suggests that they tended to view Europeans with disdain as soon as they got to know them. The Wendat (Huron) in Ontario, a chagrined missionary reported, thought the French possessed “little intelligence in comparison to themselves.” Europeans, Indians told other Indians, were physically weak, sexually untrustworthy, atrociously ugly, and just plain smelly. (The British and French, many of whom had not taken a bath in their entire lives, were amazed by the Indian interest in personal cleanliness.) A Jesuit reported that the “savages” were disgusted by handkerchiefs: “They say, we place what is unclean in a fine white piece of linen, and put it away in our pockets as something very precious, while they throw it upon the ground.” The Mi’kmaq in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia scoffed at the notion of European superiority. If Christian civilization was so wonderful, why were its inhabitants all trying to settle somewhere else?”
“Although Billington was in fact hanged, at least two other Europeans were executed in North America before him. And one of them was convicted for the much more interesting offense of killing his pregnant wife and eating her.”
“Beginning in 1616, the pestilence took at least three years to exhaust itself and killed as much as 90 percent of the people in coastal New England.”
“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.”
“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 than any small European boat. In 1605 three laughing Indians in a canoe literally paddled circles round the lumbering dory rowed by traveler George Weymouth and seven other men. Despite official disapproval, the stunned British eagerly exchanged knives and guns for Indian canoes. Bigger European ships with sails had some advantages. Indians got hold of them through trade and shipwreck, and trained themselves to be excellent sailors. By the time of the epidemic, a rising proportion of the shipping traffic along the New England coast was of indigenous origin.”
“Vastly bigger than any river in Europe or Asia, the Amazon contains a fifth of the earth’s above-ground fresh water. It has islands the size of countries and masses of floating vegetation the size of islands. Half a dozen of its tributaries would be world-famous rivers anywhere else. A thousand miles up from the Atlantic, the river is still so broad that at high water the other side is only a faint dark line on the horizon. Ferries take half an hour to make the crossing. Seagoing vessels travel all the way up to Iquitos, Peru, 2,300 miles from the river’s mouth, the furthest inland deep-ocean port in the world.”
“If loggers or farmers clear away the vegetation, they also remove the local supply of nutrients. Normally the forest quickly fills in bare spots, such as those created when big trees fall, and damage is kept to a minimum. But if the opening is too large or the ground is kept clear too long, the sun and rain decompose whatever organic matter remains and bake the surface into something resembling brick in both color and impermeability. In short order, the land becomes almost incapable of sustaining life. Thus the tropical forest, despite its fabulous vitality, exists on a knife edge.”
The Inka
“In 1491 the Inka ruled the greatest empire on earth. Bigger than Ming Dynasty China, bigger than Ivan the Great’s expanding Russia, bigger than Songhay in the Sahel or powerful Great Zimbabwe in the West Africa tablelands, bigger than the cresting Ottoman Empire, bigger than the Triple Alliance (as the Aztec empire is more precisely known), bigger by far than any European state, the Inka dominion extended over a staggering thirty-two degrees of latitude — as if a single power held sway from St. Petersburg to Cairo. The empire encompassed every imaginable type of terrain, from the rainforest of upper Amazonia to the deserts of the Peruvian coast and the twenty-thousand-foot peaks of the Andes between. “If imperial potential is judged in terms of environmental adaptability,” wrote the Oxford historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto, “the Inka were the most impressive empire builders of their day.”
The Inka goal was to knit the scores of different groups in western South America — some as rich as the Inka themselves, some poor and disorganized, all speaking different languages — into a single bureaucratic framework under the direct rule of the emperor. The unity was not merely political: the Inka wanted to meld together the area’s religion, economics, and arts. Their methods were audacious, brutal, and efficient: they removed entire populations from their homelands; shuttled them around the biggest road system on the planet, a mesh of stone — paved thoroughfares totaling as much as 25,000 miles; and forced them to work with other groups, using only Runa Sumi, the Inka language, on massive, faraway state farms and construction projects.”
“Highland Peru is as extraordinary as the Inka themselves. It is the only place on earth, the Cornell anthropologist John Murra wrote “where millions (of people] insist, against all apparent logic, on living at 10,000 or even 14,000 feet above sea level. Nowhere else have people lived for so many thousands of years in such visibly vulnerable circumstances.” And nowhere else have people living at such heights — in places where most crops won’t grow, earthquakes and landslides are frequent, and extremes of weather are the norm — repeatedly created technically advanced, long-lasting civilizations. The Inka homeland, uniquely high, was also uniquely steep, with slopes of more than sixty-five degrees from the horizontal. (The steepest street in San Francisco, famed for its nearly undrivable hills, is thirty-one-and-a-half degrees.) And it was uniquely narrow; the distance from the Pacific shore to the mountaintops is in most places less than seventy-five miles and in many less than fifty. Ecologists postulate that the first large-scale human societies tended to arise where, as Jared Diamond of the University of California at Los Angeles put it, geography provided “a wide range of altitudes and topographies within a short distance.” One such place is the Fertile Crescent, where the mountains of western Iran and the Dead Sea, the lowest place on earth, bracket the Tigris and Euphrates river systems. Another is Peru. In the short traverse from mountain to ocean, travelers pass through twenty of the world’s thirty-four principal types of environment.”
“Andean grain quinoa from the foothills; llamas and alpacas for wool and meat in the heights — each area had something to contribute. Villagers in the satellite settlements exchanged products with the center, sending beans uphill and obtaining llama jerky in return, all the while retaining their citizenship in a homeland they rarely saw. Combining the fruits of many ecosystems, Andean cultures both enjoyed a better life than they could have wrested from any single place and spread out the risk from the area’s frequent natural catastrophes. Murra invented a name for this mode of existence: “vertical archipelagoes.”
Verticality helped Andean cultures survive but also pushed them to stay small. Because the mountains impeded north-south communication, it was much easier to coordinate the flow of goods and services east to west. As a result the region for most of its history was a jumble of small- and medium-scale cultures, isolated from all but their neighbors.”
“The Inka empire, the greatest state ever seen in the Andes, was also the shortest lived. It began in the fifteenth century and lasted barely a hundred years before being smashed by Spain. Not the least surprising feature of this economic system was that it functioned without money. True, the lack of currency did not surprise the Spanish invaders — much of Europe did without money until the eighteenth century. But the Inka did not even have markets. Economists would predict that this nonmarket economy — vertical socialism, it has been called — should produce gross inefficiencies. These surely occurred, but the errors were of surplus, not want. The Spanish invaders were stunned to find warehouses overflowing with untouched cloth and supplies. But to the Inka the brimming coffers signified prestige and plenty; it was all part of the plan. Most important, Tawantinsuyu “managed to eradicate hunger,” the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa noted. Though no fan of the Inka, he conceded that “only a very small number of empires throughout the whole world have succeeded in achieving this feat.”
When Tawantinsuyu swallowed a new area, the Inka forcibly imported settlers from other, faraway areas, often in large numbers, and gave them land. The newcomers were encouraged to keep their own dress and customs rather than integrate into the host population. To communicate, both groups were forced to use Ruma Suni, the language of their conquerors. In the short run this practice created political tensions that the Inka manipulated to control both groups. In the long term it would have (if successful) eroded the distinctions among cultures and forged a homogeneous new nation in the imprint of Tawantinsuyu. Five centuries later the wholesale reshuffling of populations became an infamous trademark of Stalin and Mao. But the scale on which the Inka moved the pieces around the ethnic checkerboard would have excited their admiration. Incredibly, foreigners came to outnumber natives in many places. It is possible that ethnic clashes would eventually have caused Tawantinsuyu to implode, Yugoslavia-style. But if Pizarro had not interrupted, the Inka might have created a monolithic culture as enduring as China.”
“Because the Inka believed that idleness fomented rebellion, the Spanish traveler Pedro Cieza de León reported, he ordered unemployed work brigades “to move a mountain from one spot to another” for no practical purpose. Cieza de León once came upon three different highways running between the same two towns, each built by a different Inka.”
“Because Wayna Qhapaq had not actually married Washkar’s mother — the union was properly incestuous but not properly legitimate — the new Inka demanded that his mother participate ex post facto in wedding ceremony with his father’s mummy.”
“Martin Luther’s rebellion against Rome was a grandson of the plague, as was modern anti-Semitism.”
“When the Inka died his panaga mummified his body. Because the Inka was believed to be an immortal deity, his mummy was treated, logically enough, as if it were still living. Soon after arriving in Qosqo, Pizarro’s companion Miguel de Estete saw a parade of defunct emperors. They were brought out on litters, “seated on their thrones and surrounded by pages and women with flywhisks in their hands, who ministered to them with as much respect as if they had been alive.
Because the royal mummies were not considered dead, their successors obviously could not inherit their wealth. Each Inka’s panga retained all of his possessions forever, including his palaces, residences, and shrines; all of his remaining clothes, eating utensils, fingernail parings, and hair clippings; and the tribute from the land he had conquered. In consequence, as Pedro Pizarro realized, “the greater part of the people, treasure, expenses, and vices [in Tawantinsuyu] were under the control of the dead.” The mummies spoke through female mediums who represented the panga’s surviving courtiers or their descendants. With almost a dozen immortal emperors jostling for position, high-level Inka society was characterized by ramose political intrigue of a scale that would have delighted the Medici. Emblematically, Wayna Qhapaq could not construct his own villa on Awkaypata — his undead ancestors had used up all the available space. Inka society had a serious mummy problem.”
North America
“Conquistadors tried to take Florida half a dozen times between 1510 and 1560–and failed each time. In 1532 King João III of Portugal divided the coast of Brazil into fourteen provinces and dispatched colonists to each one. By 1550 only two settlements survived. The French were barely able to sustain trading posts in the St. Lawrence and didn’t even try to plant their flag in pre-epidemic New England. European microorganisms were slow to penetrate the Yucatán Peninsula, where most of the Maya polities were too small to readily play off against each other. In consequence, Spain never fully subdued the Maya. The Zapatista rebellion that convulsed southern Mexico in the 1990s was merely the most recent battle in an episodic colonial war that began in the sixteenth century. All of this was important, the stuff of historians’ arguments and doctoral dissertations, but Dobyns was thinking of something else. If Pizarro had been amazed by the size of Tawant-insuyu after the terrible epidemic and war, how many people had been living there to begin with?”
“Smallpox visited before anyone in South America had even seen Europeans. The most likely source of the virus, Dobyns realized, was the Caribbean. Smallpox was recorded to have appeared on the island of Hispaniola in November or December 1518. It killed a third of the native population before jumping to Puerto Rico and Cuba. Spaniards, exposed in childhood to the virus, were mostly immune. During Hernán
Cortés’s conquest of Mexico, an expedition led by Pánfilo de Narváez landed on April 23, 1520, near what is today the city of Veracruz. According to several Spanish accounts, the force included an African slave named Francisco Eguía or Baguía who had smallpox. Other reports say that the carriers were Cuban Indians whom Narvaez had brought as auxiliaries. In any case, someone brought the virus — and infected a hemisphere.
The disease raced to Tenochtitlan, leading city of the Mexica (Aztecs), where it laid waste to the metropolis and then the rest of the empire. From there, Dobyns discovered, colonial accounts show smallpox hopscotching through Central America to Panama. At that point it was only a few hundred miles from the Inka frontier. The virus seemingly crossed the gap, with catastrophic consequences.
Then Dobyns went further. When microbes arrived in the Western Hemisphere, he argued, they must have swept from the coastlines first visited by Europeans to inland areas populated by Indians who had never seen a white person. Colonial writers knew that disease tilled the virgin soil of the Americas countless times in the sixteenth century. But what they did not, could not, know is that the epidemics shot out like ghastly arrows from the limited areas they saw to every corner of the hemisphere, wreaking destruction in places that never appeared in the European historical record. The first whites to explore many parts of the Americas therefore would have encountered places that were already depopulated.
As a result, Dobyns said, all colonial population estimates were too low. Many of them, put together just after epidemics, would have represented population nadir, not approximations of precontact numbers. From a few incidents in which before and after totals are known with relative certainty, Dobyns calculated that in the first 130 years of contact about 95 percent of the people in the Americas died. To estimate native numbers before Columbus, one thus had to multiply census figures from those times by a factor of twenty or more. The results obtained by this procedure were, by historical standards, stunningly high.”
“The Bolivian government’s instability and fits of anti-American and anti-European rhetoric ensured that few foreign anthropologists and archaeologists followed Holmberg into the Beni. Not only was the government hostile, the region, a center of the cocaine trade in the 1970s and 1980s, was dangerous. Today there is less drug trafficking, but smugglers’ runways can still be seen, cut into remote patches of forest. The wreck of a crashed drug plane sits not far from the airport in Trinidad, the biggest town in the province. During the drug wars “the Beni was neglected, even by Bolivian standards,” according to Robert Langstroth, a geographer and range ecologist in Wisconsin who did his dissertation fieldwork there. “It was a backwater of a backwater.” Gradually a small number of scientists ventured into the region. What they learned transformed their understanding of the place and its people.
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. So catastrophic was the decline that the Sirionó passed through a genetic bottleneck. (A genetic bottleneck occurs when a population becomes so small that individuals are forced to mate with relatives, which can produce deleterious hereditary effects.) The effects of the bottleneck were described in 1982, when Allyn Stearman of the University of Central Florida became the first anthropologist to visit the Sirionó since Holmberg. Stearman discovered that the Sirionó were thirty times more likely to be born with clubfeet than typical human populations. And almost all the Sirionó had unusual nicks in their earlobes, the traits I had noticed on the two men accompanying us.
Even as the epidemics hit, Stearman learned, 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.”
“Tisquantum was critical to the colony’s survival, contemporary scholars agree. He moved to Plymouth after the meeting and spent the rest of his life there. Just as my teacher said, Tisquantum told the colonists to bury several small fish in each maize hill, a procedure followed by European colonists for two centuries. Squanto’s teachings, Winslow concluded, led to “a good increase of Indian corn” — the difference between success and starvation.
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. The notion is not as ridiculous as it may seem. Tisquantum had learned English because British sailors had kidnapped him seven years before. To return to the Americas, he in effect had to escape twice once from Spain, where his captors initially sold him into slavery, and once from England, to which he was smuggled from Spain, and where he served as a kind of living conversation piece at a rich man’s house. In his travels, Tisquantum stayed in places where Europeans used fish as fertilizer, a practice on the Continent since medieval times.”
“Their results made Kroeber uneasy. When Columbus landed, Cook and Borah concluded, the central Mexican plateau alone had a population of 25.2 million. By contrast Spain and Portugal together had fewer than ten million inhabitants. Central Mexico, they said, was the most densely populated place on earth, with more than twice as many people per square mile than China or India.
“Historians and anthropologists did not, however, seem to be paying much attention” to Cook and Borah, Dobyns wrote. Years later, his work, coupled with that of Denevan, Crosby, and William H. McNeill, finally made them take notice. Based on their work and his own, Dobyns argued that the Indian population in 1491 was between 90 and 112 million people. Another way of saying this is that when Columbus sailed more people lived in the Americas than in Europe.”
“After De Soto left, no Europeans visited this part of the Mississippi Valley for more than a century. Early in 1682 foreigners appeared again, this time Frenchmen in canoes. In one seat was René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle. La Salle passed through the area where De Soto had found cities cheek by jowl. It was deserted — the French didn’t see an Indian village for two hundred miles. About fifty settlements existed in this strip of the Mississippi when De Soto showed up, according to Anne Ramenofsky, an archaeologist at the University of New Mexico. By La Salle’s time the number had shrunk to perhaps ten, some probably inhabited by recent immigrants. De Soto “had a privileged glimpse” of an Indian world, Hudson told me. “The window opened and slammed shut. When the French came in and the record opened up again, it was a transformed reality. A civilization crumbled. The question is, how did this happen?”
Today most historians and anthropologists believe the culprit was disease. In the view of Ramenofsky and Patricia Galloway, an anthropologist at the University of Texas, the source of contagion was very likely not De Soto’s army but its ambulatory meat locker: his three hundred pigs. De Soto’s company was too small to be an effective biological weapon. Sicknesses like measles and smallpox would have burned through his six hundred men long before they reached the Mississippi. But that would not have been true for his pigs.”
“The second type of vulnerability stems from a quirk of history. Archaeologists dispute the timing and manner of Indians’ arrival in the Americas, but almost all researchers believe that the initial number of newcomers must have been small. Their gene pool was correspondingly restricted, which meant that Indian biochemistry was and is unusually homogeneous. More than nine out of ten Native Americans-and almost all South American Indians — have type O blood, for example, whereas Europeans are more evenly split between types O and A.
Evolutionarily speaking, genetic homogeneity by itself is neither good nor bad. It can be beneficial if it means that a population lacks deleterious genes. In 1491, the Americas were apparently free or almost free of cystic fibrosis, Huntington’s chorea, newborn anemia, schizophrenia, asthma, and (possibly) juvenile diabetes, all of which have some genetic component. Here a limited gene pool may have spared Indians great suffering.
Genetic homogeneity can be problematic, too.”
“In South America, he estimated, the minimum probability that a pathogen in one host will next encounter a host with a similar immune spectrum is about 28 percent; in Europe, the chance is less than 2 percent. As a result, Black argued, “people of the New World are unusually susceptible to diseases of the Old.”*
Actually, some old World populations were just as vulnerable as Native Americans to those diseases, and likely for the same reason. Indians’ closest genetic relatives are indigenous Siberians. They did not come into substantial contact with Europeans until the sixteenth century, when Russian fur merchants overturned their governments, established military outposts throughout the region, and demanded furs in. tribute. In the train of the Russian fur market came Russian diseases, notably smallpox.
The parallels with the Indian experience are striking. In 1768 the virus struck Siberia’s Pacific coast, apparently for the first time. “No one knows how many have survived,” confessed the governor of Irkutsk, the Russian base on Lake Baikal, apparently because officials were afraid to travel to the affected area. A decade later, in 1779, the round-the-globe expedition of Captain James Cook reached Kamchatka, the long peninsula on the Pacific coast. The shoreline, the British discovered, was a cemetery. “We everywhere met with the Ruins of large Villages with no Traces left of them but the Foundation of the Houses,” lamented David Samwell, the ship’s surgeon. “The Russians told us that [the villages] were destroyed by the small Pox.” The explorer Martin Sauer, who visited Kamchatka five years after Cook’s expedition, discovered that the Russian government had at last ventured into the former epidemic zone. Scarcely one thousand natives remained on the peninsula, according to official figures; the disease had claimed more than five thousand lives. The tally cannot be taken as exact, but the fact remains: a single epidemic killed more than three of every four indigenous Siberians in that area.”
“In retrospect, Fenn told me, “One of George
Washington’s most brilliant moves was to inoculate the army against smallpox during the Valley Forge winter of ‘78.” Without inoculation, she said, the smallpox epidemic could easily have handed the colonies back to the British.”
“Tenochtitlan dazzled its invaders — it was bigger than Paris, Europe’s greatest metropolis. The Spaniards gawped like yokels at the wide streets, ornately carved buildings, and markets bright with goods from hundreds of miles away. Boats flitted like butterflies around the three grand causeways that linked Tenochtitlan to the mainland. Long aqueducts conveyed water from the distant mountains across the lake and into the city. Even more astounding than the great temples and immense banners and colorful promenades were the botanical gardens — none existed in Europe. The same novelty attended the force of a thousand men that kept the crowded streets immaculate. (Streets that weren’t ankle-deep in sewage! The conquistadors had never conceived of such a thing.)”
“Mitochondria are widely believed to descend from bacteria that long ago somehow became incorporated into one of our evolutionary ancestors. They replicate themselves independently of the rest of the cell, without using its DNA. To accomplish this, they have their own genome, a tiny thing with fewer than fifty genes, left over from their former existence as free-floating bacteria. Because sperm cells are basically devoid of mitochondria, almost all of an embryo’s mitochondria come from the egg. Children’s mitochondria are thus in essence identical to their mother’s.
More than that, every woman’s mitochondrial DNA is identical not only to her mother’s mitochondrial DNA, but to that of her mother’s mother’s mitochondrial DNA, and her mother’s mother’s mother’s mitochondrial DNA, and so on down the line for many generations. The same is not true for men. Because fathers don’t contribute mitochondrial DNA to the embryo, the succession occurs only through the female line.”
“So complete was the disaster that many of today’s big American mammals, such as caribou, moose, and brown bear, are migrants from Asia.”
“Before the Pleistocene, the Americas had three species of horse and at least two camels that might have been ridden; other mammals could have been domesticated for meat and milk. Had they survived, the consequences would have been huge. Not only would domesticated animals have changed Indian societies, they might have created new zoonotic diseases. Absent the extinctions, the encounter between Europe and the Americas might have been equally deadly for both sides — a world in which both hemispheres experienced catastrophic depopulation.”
“Given that the Ice Age made Europe north of the Loire Valley uninhabitable until some eighteen thousand years ago, the Western Hemisphere should perhaps no longer be described as the “New World.” Britain, home of my ancestor Billington, was empty until about 12,500 B.c., because it was still covered by glaciers. If Monte Verde is correct, as most believe, people were thriving from Alaska to Chile while much of northern Europe was still empty of mankind and its works.”
Conclusion
“The variety in Mexican maize is startling. Red, blue, yellow, orange, black, pink, purple, creamy white, multicolored — the jumble of colors in Mesoamerican maize reflects the region’s jumble of cultures and ecological zones. One place may have maize with cobs the size of a baby’s hand and little red kernels no bigger than grains of rice that turn into tiny puffs when popped; in another valley will be maize with two-foot-long cobs with great puffy kernels that Mexicans float in soup like croutons. “Every variety has its own special use,” Ramírez Leyva explained to me. “This one is for holidays, this one makes tortillas, this one for niquatole [a kind of maize gelatin], this one for tejate,” a cold drink in which maize flour, mamey pits, fermented white cacao beans, and other ingredients are marinated in water overnight and then sweetened and whipped to a froth. As a rule domesticated plants are less genetically diverse than wild species, because breeders try to breed out characteristics they don’t want. Maize is one of the few farm species that is more diverse than most wild plants.”
“When Bolivia declared its independence it had a territorial pseudopod that extended southwest from its Andean heartland through the Atacama Desert to the sea. The land was useless for agriculture but had four plausible seaports and huge underground deposits of prehistoric guano, which Chilean companies mined and shipped to Europe for fertilizer. (Bolivia, then as now impoverished, didn’t have the capital for this industry.) In 1878, Hilarion Daza, the illegitimate son of an Italian acrobat, seized power in Bolivia. Immediately he raised taxes on the Chilean-owned guano mines, which the previous Bolivian government had promised not to do. Outraged, Chile rolled its army into the area. In vain did Bolivia counterattack with its ally, Peru; Chile simply repelled their incompetently led forces and took over the entire territory, as well as a chunk of southern Peru. Ejected in an outburst of popular anger, Daza fled to Europe, taking most of Bolivia’s treasury with him. Chile finally returned most of Peru’s territory in 1929 but never gave back any land to Bolivia — an outcome that nation has never accepted. To this day, Bolivia’s parliament has a representative from the lost maritime province. The Miss Bolivia contest always includes a contestant ostensibly from the coast. Maps are sold in which the conquered land is still part of Bolivia. In a gesture to its longtime, long-suffering ally, Peru symbolically gave two miles of its shoreline to Bolivia in 1992. Bolivia Mar — Bolivia-by-the-Sea — is a little island of Bolivia entirely surrounded by Peru. It has no facilities of any kind, so far as I could tell when I passed by. Private enterprise was supposed to build an industrial duty-free port in Bolivia Mar. Thus far the free market has not accepted the challenge. Every now and then parties of Bolivians drive down to Bolivia Mar to swim — a political gesture.”
“Deer in the Northeast; alligators in the Everglades; buffalo in the prairies; grasshoppers in the Great Basin; rabbit in California; moose in Alaska: all were pursued by fire. Native Americans made big rings of flame, Thomas Jefferson wrote, “by firing the leaves fallen on the ground, which, gradually forcing animals to the center, they there slaughter them with arrows, darts, and other missiles.” Not that Indians always used fire for strictly utilitarian purposes. At nightfall tribes in the Rocky Mountains entertained the explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark by applying torches to sap-dripping fir trees, which then exploded like Roman candles.”
“Because modern-day hunter-gatherers in Africa live in egalitarian bands that constantly move from place to place, archaeologists assumed that Native American hunter-gatherers must also have done so. Discovering the Louisiana mounds upset this view: they suggest that at least some early Indians were stay-at-homes. More important, they testify to levels of public authority and civic organization rarely associated with nomads. Building a ring of mounds with baskets or deerskins full of dirt is a long-term enterprise. During construction the workers must eat, which in turn means that other people must provide their food. Such levels of planning are ordinarily thought to kick in with the transition to agriculture. When people till and sow the land, anthropologists say, they set up systems to protect their investment. Eventually somebody ends up in charge of allocating goods and services. But the mound builders in Louisiana built these massive constructions at a time when agriculture was barely under way — it was like the whiff in the air from a faraway ocean. In the central river valleys of North America, people had a way of life without known analogue.”
“Adena tobacco, a different species from the tobacco in cigarettes today, contains several hallucinogens and five to ten times as much nicotine — enough, all told, to make it psychoactive.
Tobacco was only one of the crops grown at Adena villages. The Mississippi and Ohio Valleys and much of the U.S. Southeast were home to what is known as the Eastern Agricultural Complex. A full-fledged agricultural revolution with a multifarious suite of crops, the complex is an example of a major cultural innovation that has completely disappeared. Its crops were such unfamiliar plants as marshelder, knotweed, maygrass, and little barley. All of these species still exist; one could stock a specialty restaurant with them. (Sample menu: maygrass patties, steamed knotweed beans, and buffalo tongue.) No one seems to be doing that, though. In fact, farmers today treat several of these crops as weeds — they routinely blast little barley with herbicides. Archaeologists have tentative indications of early domestication in spots from Illinois to Alabama by 1000 BC. But agriculture did not begin to flower, so to speak, until the Adena.”
“Known collectively as “Mississippian” cultures, these societies arose several centuries after the decline of the Hopewell culture, and probably were its distant descendants. At any one time a few larger polities dominated the dozens or scores of small chiefdoms. Cahokia, biggest of all, was preeminent from about 950 to about 1250 A.D. It was an anomaly: the greatest city north of the Río Grande, it was also the only city north of the Río Grande. Five times or more bigger than any other Mississippian polity, Cahokia’s population of at least fifteen thousand made it comparable in size to London, but on a landmass without Paris, Córdoba, or Rome.
I call Cahokia a city so as to have a stick to beat it with, but it was not a city in any modern sense. A city provides goods and services for its surrounding area, exchanging food from the countryside for the products of its sophisticated craftspeople. By definition, its inhabitants are urban — they aren’t farmers. Cahokia, however, was a huge collection of farmers packed cheek by jowl. It had few specialized craftworkers and no middle-class merchants. On reflection, Cahokia’s dissimilarity to other cities is not surprising; having never seen a city, its citizens had to invent every aspect of urban life for themselves.”
“Passenger pigeons were greedy eaters with terrible manners; if they found some food they liked just after finishing a meal, they would vomit what they had previously eaten and dig in. Gobbling their chow, they sometimes twittered in tones musical enough that people mistook them for little girls. They gorged on so many beechnuts and acorns that they sometimes fell off their perches and burst apart when they hit the ground. But in flight they were angelic: they cut through the air with such speed and grace that they were called “blue meteors.”
When passenger pigeons found an area with grain or nuts to eat, they formed a long, linear front that advanced forward, heads peck-peck-pecking at the ground. Acorns, beechnuts, and chestnuts; strawberries, huckleberries, and blackberries; wheat, oats, and maize — all went down the pigeons’ iridescently feathered gullets. To grab their share, the pigeons at the rear constantly fluttered over the heads of their compatriots and landed at the leading edge of the front. Then the birds in the back flew over them. The line of birds advanced in a continuous swirl, the conservationist John Muir recalled, “revolving something like a wheel with a low buzzing wing roar that could be heard a long way off.”
Passenger pigeons traveled in massive assemblies, billions strong, that rained enough excrement to force people indoors. As a boy Muir saw a mob of birds sweep “thousands of acres perfectly clean of acorns in a few minutes.” Pigeons destroyed farm fields so often that the bishop of Quebec formally excommunicated the species in 1703. A hundred and ten years later the artist and naturalist John J. Audubon saw a flock passing overhead in a single cloud for three whole days. “The air,” Audubon wrote later, “was literally filled with Pigeons; the light of noon-day was obscured as by an eclipse.” When he visited their roost, the “dung lay almost two inches deep” for miles.”
“According to Arlie W. Schorger, author of a definitive study on the bird, in Audubon’s day at least one out of every four birds in North America was a passenger pigeon.
In colonial times, the Haudenosaunee celebrated pigeon roostings by gathering around the birds for a massive feast. Horatio Jones, captured as a teenager by the Seneca (one of the six nations in the alliance), participated around 1782 in a mass pigeon hunt near the Genesee River. The birds, roosting on low branches, were too full and too stupid to flee. Men knocked them down with poles or toppled the trees they were sitting on. Children wrung the birds’ necks while women stewed them in pots, smoked them over fires, and dried them to preserve in storehouses. Sometimes the Seneca ate half a dozen squabs at a time, necks tied together in a carnivorous sculpture. “It was a festival season,” Jones later recalled. “Even the meanest dog in camp had his fill of pigeon meat.” In Haudenosaunee lore, the birds represented nature’s generosity, a species literally selected by the spirit world to nourish humankind.
Non-Indians, too, saw the pigeon as a symbol of the earth’s richness — “the living, pulsing, throbbing, and picturesque illustration of the abundance of food, prepared by bountiful Nature, in all her supreme ecstasy of redundant production of life and energy,” one businessman/pigeon enthusiast gushed. Colonists grilled the birds, stewed them with salt pork, and baked them into pies; they plucked their feathers to stuff mattresses, pickled them in barrels as a winter treat, and fed them to livestock. Incredibly, hunters in the countryside captured tens of thousands of pigeons in nets and sent the living birds to urban hunting clubs for target practice.
Then, suddenly, the passenger pigeon vanished — the last bird Martha, named after Martha Washington, died on September 1, 1914.”
“Passenger pigeons’ diet centered on mast, the collective name for acorns, beechnuts, hazelnuts, chestnuts, and the like; they also really liked maize. All were important foods to the Indians of eastern North America. Thus passenger pigeons and Native Americans were ecological competitors.
What would be the expected outcome of this rivalry? asked Thomas W. Neumann, a consulting archaeologist in Atlanta. Neurann noted that Indians had also vied for mast and maize with deer, raccoons, squirrels, and turkeys. Unsurprisingly, they hunted all of them with enthusiasm, as documented by the bones found in archaeological sites. Indeed, as Neumann noted, Indians actually sought out pregnant or nursing does, which hunters today are instructed to let go. They hunted wild turkey in spring, just before they laid eggs (if they had waited until the eggs hatched, the poults could have survived, because they will follow any hen). The effect was to remove competition for tree nuts. The pattern was so consistent, Neumann told me, that Indians must have been purposefully reducing the number of deer, raccoons, and turkeys.
Given passenger pigeons’ Brobdingnagian appetites for mast and maize, one would expect that Indians would also have hunted them and wanted to keep down their numbers. Thus their bones should be plentiful at archaeological sites. Instead, Neumann told me, “they almost aren’t there — it looks like people just didn’t eat them.” Pigeons, roosting en masse, were easy to harvest, as the Seneca hunt showed. “If they are so easy to hunt, and you expect people to minimize labor and maximize return, you should have archaeological sites just filled with these things. Well, you don’t.” To Neumann, the conclusion was obvious: passenger pigeons were not as numerous before Columbus. “What happened was that the impact of European contact altered the ecological dynamics in such a way that the passenger pigeon took off.” The avian throngs Audubon saw were “outbreak populations — always a symptom of an extraordinarily disrupted ecological system.””
“Passenger pigeons were but one example of a larger phenomenon. According to the naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton, North America at the time of Columbus was home to sixty million bison, thirty to forty million pronghorns, ten million elk, ten million mule deer, and as many as two million mountain sheep. Sixty million bison! The imagination shrinks from imagining it. Bison can run for hours at thirty miles per hour and use their massive, horned skulls like battering rams. Mature animals weigh up to a ton. Sixty million of them would have been more than sixty billion pounds of grouchy, fast-moving mammal pounding the plains.
Seton made his estimate in 1929, and it is still widely quoted today. Ecologists have since employed more sophisticated theoretical tools to produce new, lower population estimates; ethologist Dale Lott put the number of bison in “primitive America” at twenty-four to twenty-seven million in 2002. Nonetheless, most continue to accept Seton’s basic thesis: the Americas seen by the first colonists were a wildland of thundering herds and forests with sky-high trees and lakes aswarm with fish. Increasingly, though, archaeologists demand a caveat. The Americas seen by the first colonists were teeming with game, they say. But the continents had not been that way for long. Indeed, this Edenic world was largely an inadvertent European creation.
At the time of Columbus the Western Hemisphere had been thoroughly painted with the human brush. Agriculture occurred in as much as two-thirds of what is now the continental United States, with large swathes of the Southwest terraced and irrigated. Among the maize fields in the Midwest and Southeast, mounds by the thousand stippled the land. The forests of the eastern seaboard had been peeled back from the coasts, which were now lined with farms. Salmon nets stretched across almost every ocean-bound stream in the Northwest. And almost everywhere there was Indian fire.
All of this had implications for animal populations. As Cahokia grew, Woods told me, so did its maize fields. For obvious reasons its farmers did not relish the prospect of buffalo herds trampling through their fields. Nor did they want deer, moose, or passenger pigeons eating the maize. They hunted them until they were scarce around their homes. At the same time, they tried to encourage these species to grow in number farther away, where they would be useful. “The net result was to keep that kind of animal at arm’s length,” Woods told me. “The total number of bison, say, seems to have gone down quite a bit, but they wanted to have them available for hunting in the prairie a couple days’ journey away.”
When disease swept Indians from the land, this entire ecological ancien régime collapsed. Hernando De Soto’s expedition staggered through the Southeast for four years in the early sixteenth century and saw hordes of people but apparently didn’t see a single bison. (No account describes them, and it seems unlikely that chroniclers would have failed to mention sighting such an extraordinary beast.) More than a century later the French explorer La Salle canoed down the Mississippi. Where De Soto had found prosperous cities La Salle encountered “a solitude unrelieved by the faintest trace of man,” wrote the nineteenth-century historian Francis Parkman. Everywhere the French encountered bison, “grazing in herds on the great prairies which then bordered the river.” When Indians died, the shaggy creatures vastly extended both their range and numbers, according to Valerius Geist, a bison researcher at the University of Calgary. “The post-Columbian abundance of bison,” in his view, was largely due to “Eurasian diseases that decreased Indian] hunting.” The massive, thundering herds were pathological, something that the land had not seen before and was unlikely to see again.
The same may have held true for many other species.”
“The female-led clan councils set the agenda of the League — “men could not consider a matter not sent to them by the women.” Women, who held title to all the land and its produce, could vote down decisions by the male leaders of the League and demand that an issue be reconsidered. Under this regime women were so much better off than their counterparts in Europe that nineteenth-century U.S. feminists like Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, all of whom lived in Haudenosaunee country, drew inspiration from their lot.”
