"1491"

Charles C. Mann's account of the Americas before the Columbian Exchange is hugely informative and corrective, but its organization leaves something to be desired.

• In Northwest Coast art the subjects are flattened and distorted—it’s as if they’ve been reduced from three dimensions to two and then folded like origami. At first I found all the designs hard to interpret, but soon some seemed to pop right out of the surface. They had clean lines that cut space into shapes at once simple and complex: objects tucked into objects, creatures stuffed into their own eyes, humans who were half beast and beasts who were half human—all was metamorphosis and surreal commotion.


• Beni, a Bolivian province: 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.


• 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.


• * 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.


• Nonetheless, he was wrong about the Sirionó. And he was wrong about the Beni, the place they inhabited—wrong in a way that is instructive, even exemplary. <> Before Columbus, Holmberg believed, both the people and the land had no real history. Stated so baldly, this notion—that the indigenous peoples of the Americas floated changelessly through the millennia until 1492—may seem ludicrous. But flaws in perspective often appear obvious only after they are pointed out.


• the Sirionó were among the most culturally impoverished people on earth... 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... 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.


• According to Joseph Conrad, the violence was of culinary origin. “The Noble Red Man was a mighty hunter,” explained the great novelist, “but his wives had not mastered the art of conscientious cookery—and the consequences were deplorable. The Seven Nations around the Great Lakes and the Horse tribes of the plains were but one vast prey to raging dyspepsia.”


• But the Second World War taught the West that non-Westerners—the Japanese, in this instance—were capable of swift societal change. The rapid disintegration of European colonial empires further adumbrated the point.


• a torrent of novel perspectives and techniques cascaded into use. And when these were employed, the idea that the only human occupants of one-third of the earth’s surface had changed little for thousands of years began to seem implausible... at the time of Columbus the great majority of Native Americans could be found south of the Río Grande. They were not nomadic, but built up and lived in some of the world’s biggest and most opulent cities. Far from being dependent on big-game hunting, most Indians lived on farms.


• * Clovis: For much of the last century archaeologists believed that Indians came to the Americas through the Bering Strait about thirteen thousand years ago at the tail end of the last Ice Age... In 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... 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... In every imaginable scenario, they left Eurasia before the first whisper of the Neolithic Revolution. <> The Neolithic Revolution is the invention of farming,


• Researchers have long known that a second, independent Neolithic Revolution occurred in Mesoamerica. .. In 2003, though, archaeologists discovered ancient seeds from cultivated squashes in coastal Ecuador, at the foot of the Andes, which may be older than any agricultural remains in Mesoamerica—a third Neolithic Revolution.


• Maize can’t reproduce itself, because its kernels are securely wrapped in the husk, so Indians must have developed it from some other species. But there are no wild species that resemble maize... Coupled with squash, beans, and avocados, maize provided Mesoamerica with a balanced diet, one arguably more nutritious than its Middle Eastern or Asian equivalent.


• 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.


• 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, with another quarter million in the surrounding countryside—numbers that Paris would not reach for another five centuries. The comparison seems fitting; at the time, the realm of Tiwanaku was about the size of modern France... some climatologists believe that the Pacific is subject to “mega-Niño events,” murderously strong versions of the well-known El Niño patterns


• * the Maya realm was home to one of the world’s most intellectually sophisticated cultures. About a century before our imaginary surveillance tour, though, the Maya heartland entered a kind of Dark Ages. Many of the greatest cities emptied, as did much of the countryside around them. Incredibly, some of the last inscriptions are gibberish, as if scribes had lost the knowledge of writing and were reduced to meaningless imitation of their ancestors.

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• 1600s New England: Shorter than the natives, oddly dressed, and often unbearably dirty, the pallid foreigners had peculiar blue eyes that peeped out of the masks of bristly, animal-like hair that encased their faces. They were irritatingly garrulous, prone to fits of chicanery, and often surprisingly incompetent at what seemed to Indians like basic tasks.


• the 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. But it was a disaster from the point of view of New England Indian society as a whole, for the alliance ensured the survival of Plymouth colony, which spearheaded the great wave of British immigration... “When you look at the historical record, it’s clear that Indians were trying to control their own destinies,” Salisbury said. “And often enough they succeeded”—only to learn, as all peoples do, that the consequences were not what they expected.


• Consider Tisquantum, the “friendly Indian” of the textbook... In that part of the Northeast, tisquantum referred to rage, especially the rage of manitou, the world-suffusing spiritual power at the heart of coastal Indians’ religious beliefs. When Tisquantum approached the Pilgrims and identified himself by that sobriquet, it was as if he had stuck out his hand and said, Hello, I’m the Wrath of God.


• Instead people spread themselves through estuaries, sometimes grouping into neighborhoods, sometimes with each family on its own, its maize ground proudly separate. Each community was constantly “joining and splitting like quicksilver in a fluid pattern within its bounds,” .. But the most important fish harvest came in late spring, when the herring-like alewives swarmed the fast, shallow stream that cut through the village.


• 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... its multiple layers of mats, which trapped insulating layers of air, were “warmer than our English houses,”


• 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 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... Inspired by asymmetrical Indian coiffures, seventeenth-century London blades wore long, loose hanks of hair known as “lovelocks.”


• 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.”


• In Europe, the Pilgrims had refused to hire the experienced John Smith as a guide, on the theory that they could use the maps in his book. In consequence, as Smith later crowed, the hapless Mayflower spent several frigid weeks scouting around Cape Cod for a good place to land, during which time many colonists became sick and died... The newcomers—hungry, cold, sick—dug open burial sites and ransacked homes, looking for underground stashes of food.


• Tisquantum persuaded him to arrange for passage to North America on a fishing vessel. He ended up in a tiny British fishing camp on the southern edge of Newfoundland. It was on the same continent as Patuxet, but between them were a thousand miles of rocky coastline and the Mi’Kmac and Abenaki alliances, which were at war with one another... Tisquantum began looking for a ride to Patuxet. He extolled the bounty of New England to Thomas Dermer, one of Smith’s subordinates


• * Tisquantum's return: 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. “And the bones and skulls upon the severall places of their habitations made such a spectacle,” Morton wrote, that the Massachusetts woodlands seemed to be “a new-found Golgotha,” the Place of the Skull, where executions took place in Roman Jerusalem.


• As he had before, Tisquantum talked his way out of a jam. This time he extolled the English, filling Massasoit’s ears with tales of their cities, their great numbers, their powerful technology... When the Powhatan later captured John Smith, Chaplin notes, Smith broke his pistol rather than reveal to his captors “the awful truth that it could not shoot as far as an arrow could fly.”


• Faced with the possibility of disrupting their favored position as middlemen, the Narragansett might think twice before staging an incursion. 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. But with the entire confederation now smaller than one of its former communities, the best option seemed to be allowing the Pilgrims to remain. It was a drastic, even fatal, decision.


• The Europeans won. Historians attribute part of the victory to Indian unwillingness to match the European tactic of massacring whole villages. Another reason for the newcomers’ triumph was that by that time they outnumbered the natives.


• * Peru, Dobyns learned, was one of the world’s cultural wellsprings, a place as important to the human saga as the Fertile Crescent. Yet the area’s significance had been scarcely appreciated outside the Andes, partly because the Spaniards so thoroughly ravaged Inka culture, and partly because the Inka themselves, wanting to puff up their own importance, had actively concealed the glories of the cultures before them.


• The Inka practiced a form of central planning, which led scholars into a sterile Cold War squabble about whether they were actually socialists avant la lettre in a communal Utopia or a dire precursor to Stalinist Russia.


• * the Inka dominion extended over a staggering thirty-two degrees of latitude—as if a single power held sway from St. Petersburg to Cairo... 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... 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.”... 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.


• the Inka style was severe, abstract, stripped down to geometric forms—startlingly contemporary, in fact. (According to the Peruvian critic César Paternosto, such major twentieth-century painters as Josef Albers, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko were inspired by Inka art.)


• To keep track of the florid abundance of shrines and lines, Cobo observed, the empire “had more than a thousand men in the city of Qosqo who did nothing but remember these things.”


• Peasants thus had to work periodically for the empire as farmers, herders, weavers, masons, artisans, miners, or soldiers. Often crews spent months away from home. While they were on the road, the state fed, clothed, and housed them... Dictatorially extending Andean verticality, the imperium shuttled people and materiel in and out of every Andean crevice. <> Not the least surprising feature of this economic system was that it functioned without money... 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.


• worshipped and adored” him by “pulling out their eyebrows and eyelashes.” Minions collected and stored every object he touched, food waste included, to ensure that no lesser persons could profane these objects with their touch.


• According to Lechtman, Europeans sought to optimize metals’ “hardness, strength, toughness, and sharpness.” The Inka, by contrast, valued “plasticity, malleability, and toughness.” Europeans used metal for tools. Andean societies primarily used it as a token of wealth, power, and community affiliation... Then they pounded the hot metal with mallets, making the corrosion flake off the outside. By repeating this process many times, they removed the copper atoms from the surface of the metal, creating a veneer of almost pure gold. Ultimately the Inka ended up with strong sheets of metal that glittered in the sun.


• * Andean cultures did make tools, of course. But rather than making them out of steel, they preferred fiber... Mechanical engineering depends on two main forces: compression and tension... the arch is a classic example of compression. By contrast, tension was the Inka way. “Textiles are held together by tension,” <> In the technosphere of the Andes, Lechtman explained, “people solved basic engineering problems through the manipulation of fibers,” not by creating and joining hard wooden or metal objects. To make boats, Andean cultures wove together reeds.. Famously, the Inka used foot-thick cables to make suspension bridges across mountain gorges... elite garments could have a thread count of five hundred per inch—and structured in elaborate layers. Soldiers wore armor made from sculpted, quilted cloth that was almost as effective at shielding the body as European armor and much lighter. 


• More critical than steel to Pizarro’s success was the horse. The biggest animal in the Andes during Inka times was the llama, which typically weighs three hundred pounds. Horses, four times as massive, were profoundly, terribly novel... Mounted troops were able to move at rates never encountered in Tawantinsuyu... Llamas prefer the coolness of high altitudes and, unlike horses, readily go up and down steps. As a result, Inka roads eschewed valley bottoms and used long stone stairways to climb up steep hills directly—brutal on horses’ hooves, as the conquistadors often complained.


• Their military was hampered by the cult of personality around its deified generals, which meant both that leaders were not easily replaced when they were killed or captured and that innovation in the lower ranks was not encouraged. And the army never learned to bunch its troops into tight formations, as the Greeks did at Marathon, forming human masses that can literally stand up to cavalry. Nonetheless, by the time of the siege of Qosqo the Inka had developed an effective anti-cavalry tactic: bolas... If not technology or the horse, what defeated the Inka? As I said, some of the blame should be heaped on the overly centralized Inka command structure, a problem that has plagued armies throughout time. 


• Smallpox has an incubation period of about twelve days, during which time sufferers, who may not know they are sick, can infect anyone they meet. With its fine roads and great population movements, Tawantinsuyu was perfectly positioned for a major epidemic. Smallpox radiated throughout the empire like ink spreading through tissue paper.


• After smallpox wiped out much of the political elite, each panaqa tried to move into the vacuum, stoking the passions of the civil war. Different mummies at different times backed different claimants to the Inka throne.


• * To Dobyns, the moral of this story was clear. The Inka, he wrote in his 1963 article, were not defeated by steel and horses but by disease and factionalism.


• In fact, Europeans routinely lost when they could not take advantage of disease and political fragmentation. Conquistadors tried to take Florida half a dozen times between 1510 and 1560—and failed each time... 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.


• Dobyns’s population projections were quickly seen by some as politically motivated—self-flagellation by guilty white liberals or, worse, a push to inflate the toll of imperialism from the hate-America crowd.

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• 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. <> Pigs were as essential to the conquistadors as horses. Spanish armies traveled in a porcine cloud; drawn by the supper trough, the lean, hungry animals circled the troops like darting dogs.


• “That’s one reason whites think of Indians as nomadic hunters,” Russell Thornton, an anthropologist at the University of California at Los Angeles, said to me. “Everything else—all the heavily populated urbanized societies—was wiped out.”


• In addition to having no acquired immunity (the first kind of vulnerability),... 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... overall Indians have fewer HLA types than populations from Europe, Asia, and Africa. European populations have at least thirty-five main HLA classes, whereas Indian groups have no more than seventeen.


• 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... 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,”.. a single epidemic killed more than three of every four indigenous Siberians in that area.


• the three researchers suggested, adult Indians were—and possibly still are—more vulnerable to infectious diseases than adult Europeans. Conversely, Europeans would be comparatively more vulnerable to parasites. If further research supports this hypothesis, preventing childhood parasite infections might allow Indian immune systems to orientate themselves toward bacteria and viruses


• 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.


• a fluid collection of hunting bands known today as the Comanche (the name, awarded by an enemy group, means “people who fight us all the time”).


• Living in the era of antibiotics, we find it difficult to imagine the simultaneous deaths of siblings, parents, relatives, and friends. As if by a flash of grim light, Indian villages became societies of widows, widowers, and orphans; parents lost their children, and children were suddenly alone.


• Dozens died. Among them was the Huron leader Kondiaronk, a famed orator who had, more than any other, convened the gathering as a last-ditch effort to avoid internecine conflict.


• Historians increasingly shy away from the term “Aztec,” because the nineteenth-century naturalist Alexander von Humboldt coined it in a misapprehension. Humboldt’s “Aztecs” were actually the people of three nations, the members of the Triple Alliance.


• * In addition to taking slaves and booty, wartime victors in central Mexico often burned their enemies’ codices, the hand-painted picture-texts in which priests recorded their people’s histories. Tlacaelel insisted that in addition to destroying the codices of their former oppressors the Mexica should set fire to their own codices. His explanation for this idea can only be described as Orwellian: “It is not fitting that our people / Should know these pictures. / Our people, our subjects, will be lost / And our land destroyed, / For these pictures are full of lies.” The “lies” were the inconvenient fact that the Mexica past was one of poverty and humiliation.


• Between 1530 and 1630, according to Cambridge historian V. A. C. Gatrell, England executed seventy-five thousand people. At the time, its population was about three million, perhaps a tenth that of the Mexica empire. Arithmetic suggests that if England had been the size of the Triple Alliance, it would have executed, on average, about 7,500 people per year, roughly twice the number Cortés estimated for the empire.


• In Nahuatl rhetoric, things were frequently represented by the unusual device of naming two of their elements—a kind of doubled Homeric epithet. Instead of directly mentioning his body, a poet might refer to “my hand, my foot” (noma nocxi), which the savvy listener would know was a synecdoche... “Flowers and song” was a standard double epithet for poetry, the highest art; ... Through art alone, the Mexica said, can human beings approach the real.


• * British ships in the nineteenth century radically transformed native art by giving the Indians brightly colored paints that unlike native pigments didn’t wash off in the rain. Indians incorporated the new pigments into their traditions, expanding them and in the process creating an aesthetic nouvelle vague. European surrealists came across this colorful new art in the first years of the twentieth century. As artists will, they stole everything they could,

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• Aleš Hrdlika.. By temperament, he was suspicious of anything that smacked of novelty and modishness. Alas, the list of things that he dismissed as intellectual fads included female scientists, genetic analysis, and the entire discipline of statistics—even such simple statistical measures as standard deviations were notably absent from the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.


• At about the time of Clovis almost every one of these species vanished. So complete was the disaster that most of today’s big American mammals, such as caribou, moose, and brown bear, are immigrants from Asia. The die-off happened amazingly fast, much of it in the few centuries between 11,500 and 10,900 B.C... 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.


• Students of languages had long puzzled over the extraordinary variety and fragmentation of Indian languages. California alone was the home of as many as 86 tongues, which linguists have classified into between 5 and 15 families (the schemes disagree with one another). No one family was dominant. Across the Americas, Indians spoke some 1,200 separate languages that have been classified into as many as 180 linguistic families... According to Greenberg’s linguistic analysis, paleo-Indians had crossed over Beringia not once, but thrice.


• The coastal route has equally little empirical backing, but in their view makes more sense. Most important, the image of a seagoing people fits into a general rethinking of paleo-Indian life... Instead they may have been made from animal skin, a readily available resource; though soft beneath the foot, fragile-looking hide vessels have been known to traverse hundreds of miles of open water. A visitor to the Northwest twenty thousand years ago might have seen such a craft bobbing over the waves like a long, floating balloon, ten or twenty men lining its sides, chasing minke whales with stone-tipped spears.

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• Peru has so many ruins from so many cultures that in many small towns archaeological labor is a flourishing blue-collar trade. The others were graduate students from Peru and the United States.


• Today we know that technologically sophisticated societies arose in Peru first—the starting date, to archaeologists’ surprise, keeps getting pushed back. Between 3200 and 2500 B.C., large-scale public buildings, the temple at Huaricanga among them, rose up in at least seven settlements on the Peruvian coast—an extraordinary efflorescence for that time and place. When the people of the Norte Chico were building these cities, there was only one other urban complex on earth: Sumer... a parallel intellectual journey: the growth in understanding of the antiquity, diversity, complexity, and technological sophistication of Indian societies.


• “I say that nobody in Europe or Asia ever invented anything—they got it from somebody else.” He added, “When you think of the dozen most important things ever invented—the wheel, the alphabet, the stirrup, metallurgy—none of them were invented in Europe. But they all got used there.” <> By contrast, there was very little exchange of people, goods, or ideas between Mesoamerica and the Andes... But there was no road whatsoever across the two thousand miles of jagged mountains and thick rainforest between Mesoamerica and the Andes. In fact, there still isn’t any road. The section of the Pan-American Highway that runs between them remains unfinished


• Walled off from wet air by both the Andes and the Humboldt Current, the Peruvian littoral is astonishingly dry: the average annual precipitation is about two inches. The Atacama Desert, just south of Peru on the Chilean shore, is the driest place on earth—in some places rain has literally never been recorded. Space researchers use the Atacama as a model for the sands of Mars... It is punctuated by more than fifty rivers, which channel Andes snowmelt to the sea. The lines of vegetation along their banks are like oases, fertile places where people can farm in an otherwise almost lifeless land.


• Sometime before 5000 B.C. they began mummifying bodies—children at first, adults later on. Nobody knows why. They peeled off the skin from the limbs like so many socks, covered the result with white clay, painted it to resemble the deceased, and fitted the head with a wig made from its own hair. Such was the skill of the Chinchorro at preserving human flesh that scientists have been able to extract intact DNA from cadavers thousands of years older than the Egyptian pyramids.


• “The complex of sites in the Norte Chico region is nothing short of extraordinary,” .. Indeed, Aspero may have had as many as seventeen artificial mounds, all of which Willey missed the first time round. “It is an excellent, if embarrassing, example,” he remarked, “of not being able to find what you are not looking for.”


• * Because the Cordillera Negra bulges especially close to the coast in the Norte Chico, the valleys are short and steeply walled; almost hurled from the heights, the rivers shoot toward the sea at high velocity. Even after diversion, the water gushes through irrigation channels so quickly that it can’t evaporate and build up salts in the soil. To this day, one can only reach many archaeological sites in the Norte Chico by navigating around surging, brimfull irrigation ditches, some of them probably laid out originally by the same farmers who built the mounds. <> he most important product of irrigation was cotton.


• When cotton became readily available there in the eighteenth century, it grabbed so much of the textile market that French woolmakers persuaded the government to ban the new fiber. The law failed to stem the cotton tide... some woolmakers then thought outside the box: they proposed sending prostitutes in cotton clothing to wander Paris streets, where police would publicly strip them naked. In theory, bourgeois women would then avoid cotton for fear of being mistaken for prostitutes and forcibly disrobed.


• the MFAC hypothesis: the maritime foundations of Andean civilization. He proposed that there was little subsistence agriculture around Aspero because it was a center of fishing, and that the later, highland Peruvian cultures, including the mighty Inka, all had their origins not in the mountains but in the great fishery of the Humboldt Current... To Moseley, the fish bones suggested that the ample protein on the coast allowed people to go inland and build irrigation networks to produce the cotton needed to expand fishing production. The need for nets, in Haas’s view, gave the inland cities the whip hand—Norte Chico was based on farming, like all other complex societies, although not on farming for food.


• visitors to Andean history note certain ways of doing things that recur in ways striking to the outsider, sometimes in one variant, sometimes in another, like the themes in a jazz improvisation. The primacy of exchange over a wide area, the penchant for collective, festive civic work projects, the high valuation of textiles and textile technology—Norte Chico, it seems possible to say, set the template for all of them.


• Then stone-grind the kernels into masa, a light, slightly sticky paste with a distinct maize fragrance. Made without salt, spices, leavening, or preservatives, masa must be cooked within a few hours of being ground, and the tortilla should be eaten soon after it is cooked. Hot is best, perhaps folded over with mushrooms or cheese in a tlacoyo. Like a glass of wine, he said, a tortilla should carry the flavor of its native place.


• The grain in wild grasses develops near the top of the stem. As it matures, the stem slowly breaks up—shatters, in the jargon—letting the seed dribble to the ground. In wild wheat and barley, a common single-gene mutation blocks shattering. For the plant the change is highly disadvantageous, but it facilitates harvest by humans—the grain waits on the stem to be collected. The discovery and planting of nonshattering grain is thought to have precipitated the Neolithic revolution in the Middle East. Like other grasses, teosinte shatters, but there is no known nonshattering variant. (At least sixteen genes control teosinte and maize shattering,.. By then the dispute over the origin of maize had filled almost as much paper—and became as acrimonious—as the battle over Clovis.


• Maize is one of the few farm species that is more diverse than most wild plants... Uncontrolled, open pollination would, over time, turn the species into a single, relatively homogeneous entity. But it does not, because farmers carefully sort through the seed they will sow in the next season and generally do not choose obvious hybrids.


• * In nature, wild beans and squash often grow in the same field as teosinte, the beans using the tall teosinte as a ladder to climb toward the sun; below ground, the beans’ nitrogen-fixing roots provide nutrients needed by teosinte. The milpa is an elaboration of this natural situation, unlike ordinary farms, which involve single-crop expanses of a sort rarely observed in unplowed landscapes. <> Milpa crops are nutritionally and environmentally complementary... Squashes, for their part, provide an array of vitamins; avocados, fats. The milpa, in the estimation of H. Garrison Wilkes, a maize researcher at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, “is one of the most successful human inventions ever created.”.. The milpa, by contrast, has a long record of success. “There are places in Mesoamerica that have been continuously cultivated for four thousand years and are still productive,”


• * the Olmec clearly understood the profound changes wreaked by maize—indeed, they fêted them in their art. Like the stained-glass windows in European cathedrals, the massive Olmec sculptures and bas-reliefs were meant both to dazzle and instruct. A major lesson is the central place of maize, usually represented by a vertical ear with two leaves falling to the side, a talismanic symbol reminiscent of a fleur-de-lys. In sculpture after sculpture, ears of maize spring like thoughts from the skulls of supernatural beings.


• “The probability is that the population of Africa was greatly increased because of maize and other American Indian crops,” Alfred Crosby told me. “Those extra people helped make the slave trade possible.” (“Other American Indian crops” included peanuts and manioc, both now African staples.)

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• Olmec: Among these repeated subjects is a crouched, blobby figure with a monstrously swollen head. Puzzled researchers long described these sculptures as “dwarves” or “dancers.” In 1997 an archaeologist and a medical doctor with archaeological leanings identified them as human fetuses. Their features were portrayed accurately enough to identify their stage of development. Researchers had not recognized them because artistic renditions of fetuses are almost unheard of in European cultures


• * In Mesoamerican cultures, the date of one’s birth was such an important augury of the future that people often acquired that day as their name... Between his feet are two glyphs, one resembling a stovepipe hat with a U painted across the front, the other looking vaguely like a smiling pet monster from a Japanese cartoon. According to Marcus, the Michigan anthropologist, the glyphs correspond to 1-Earthquake, the Zapotec name for the seventeenth day of the 260-day sacred calendar... No fewer than four of the codices treat the story of 8-Deer Jaguar Claw, a wily priest-general-politician with a tragic love for the wife of his greatest enemy.


• boats were a primary means of transportation until recently. In addition one might note that Mesoamerican societies were not alone in their wheel-blindness. Although Mesopotamia had the wheel in about 4000 B.C., nearby Egypt did not use the wheel until two thousand years later,


• * the Chinese invented the moldboard plow by the third century B.C. Made of cast iron, the plowshare was shaped like a V, with the blade carving into the ground and the two arms arcing away like gull wings. Because the arms were curved, they turned the earth away from the blade, which both reduced friction and more effectively plowed the soil... The design of the moldboard plow is so obvious that it seems incredible that Europeans never thought of it. Until the Chinese-style plow was imported in the seventeenth century,... European agricultural production exploded after the arrival of the moldboard plow. The prosperity this engendered was one of the cushions on which the Enlightenment floated.


• 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.


• * only a thicket of walls and narrow streets strewn with garbage (archaeologists have turned up so few clean floors and surfaces, Isbell and Vranich wrote, “that it is apparent that Wari people experienced domestic refuse as benign and unthreatening”).


• The celebrated anthropologist Clifford Geertz has half-jokingly suggested that all states can be parceled into four types: pluralist, in which the state is seen by its people as having moral legitimacy; populist, in which government is viewed as an expression of the people’s will; “great beast,” in which the rulers’ power depends on using force to keep the populace cowed; and “great fraud,” in which the elite uses smoke and mirrors to convince the people of its inherent authority. Every state is a mix of all of these elements, but in Tiwanaku, the proportion of “great fraud” may have been especially high. Nonetheless, Tiwanaku endured for many centuries.


• * Tiwanaku transformed itself to become what Alan Kolata, an archaeologist at the University of Chicago, has called a “predatory state.” It was not the centrally administered military power that term conjures. Instead, it was an archipelago of cities that acknowledged Tiwanaku’s religious preeminence. “State religion and imperial ideology,” Kolata argued, “performed much the same work as military conquest, but at significantly lower cost.” Awed by its magnificence, fearful of the supernatural powers controlled by its priesthood


• Central to this strategy of intimidation was Tiwanaku city. A past wonder of the world,... Rising from the center of a large moat, Akapana mimicked the surrounding mountains. A precisely engineered drainage system added to the similarity by channeling water from a cistern-like well at the summit down and along the sides, a stylized version of rainwater plashing down the Andes.


• * From the very beginning, the two men wrote in 2004, the city was partly in ruins—intentionally so, because the fallen walls bequeathed on Tiwanaku the authority of the past. Meanwhile, other parts of the city were constantly enveloped in construction projects, which testified to the continued wealth and vitality of the state. Sometimes these projects acquired construction materials by cannibalizing old monuments, thereby hastening the process of creating ruins... Completion was not the object. The goal was a constant buzz of purposeful activity.


• Tiwanaku was utterly different. Andean societies were based on the widespread exchange of goods and services, but kin and government, not market forces, directed the flow. The citizenry grew its own food and made its own clothes, or obtained them through their lineages, or picked them up in government warehouses. And the city, as Kolata put it, was a place for “symbolically concentrating the political and religious authority of the elite.”


• The social-science word for such intermingling without intermixing is “interdigitization.” For two centuries at Cerro Baúl, Wari and Tiwanaku were like people in parallel worlds, sharing the same time and space but implacably separate from each other.


• Chimor capital: Chan Chan suffered a palace surfeit because dead rulers were regarded as divine figures. As with the Inka, the kings’ mummified bodies continued to live opulently in their own homes and could not be displaced; indeed, the mummies were necessary presences at important state occasions. As a result, each new ruler had to build his own palace and acquire the riches necessary to maintain it till the end of time. The system almost guaranteed imperial ambitions and exuberant construction plans.


• the Nazca did not have to see the figures to experience them, for they can be understood by walking the lines, which it is believed the Indians did. The prevailing theory today is that the straight lines mapped out the area’s many underground faults, which channel water. But nobody knows why the Nazca made the animal and plant figures, which seem less likely to have a direct function.


• the Moche: (Unwilling to laboriously dig their way through the palace’s tombs, the Spaniards diverted the Moche River through it, washing out the riches in orthodox Augean-stable style; contemporary thieves have contented themselves with picks and shovels.)

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• So strongly endorsed is this view of Native Americans that checklists exist to judge whether books correctly depict their environmental values... Indians as poster children for eco-catastrophe, Indians as green role models: the two images contradict each other less than they seem. Both are variants of Holmberg’s Mistake, the idea that Indians were suspended in time, touching nothing and untouched themselves, like ghostly presences on the landscape.


• From the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Hudson’s Bay to the Río Grande, the Haudenosaunee and almost every other Indian group shaped their environment, at least in part, by fire. <> Early in the last century, ecologists discovered the phenomenon of “succession,” the more or less well-defined sequence by which ecosystems fill in open land... If ecological succession were unstoppable, the continents would be covered by climax-stage vegetation: a world of great trees, dark and silent.


• Rather than domesticate animals for meat, Indians retooled ecosystems to encourage elk, deer, and bear. Constant burning of undergrowth increased the numbers of herbivores, the predators that fed on them, and the people who ate them both.


• * People accustomed to keeping domesticated animals lacked the conceptual tools to recognize that the Indians were practicing a more distant kind of husbandry of their own. <> Indian fire had its greatest impact in the middle of the continent, which Native Americans transformed into a prodigious game farm. Native Americans burned the Great Plains and Midwest prairies so much and so often that they increased their extent; ... Europeans forgot what the landscape had looked like before and why.


• Carrying their flints and torches, Native Americans were living in balance with Nature—but they had their thumbs on the scale. Shaped for their comfort and convenience, the American landscape had come to fit their lives like comfortable clothing. It was a highly successful and stable system


• To we moderns the sensation of being in a constructed environment is so ubiquitous as to be invisible—in the cocoon of our strip malls and automobiles, we are like the fish that cannot feel the water through which they swim. In Cahokia’s day it was different. A thousand years ago it was the only place for a thousand miles in which one could be completely enveloped in an artificial landscape. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cahokia


• 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.


• To envelop a corpse from head to feet in pearls, to weigh it down in many pounds of copper, to surround it with masterpieces of sculpture and pottery, and then to bury everything under tons of earth—this betokens a kind of cultural energy that numbs and awes those who follow after. <> Vibrant and elaborate, perhaps a little vulgar in its passion for display, Hopewell religion spread through most of the eastern United States in the first four centuries A.D.


• To minimize instability, he told me, the Cahokians kept the slab at a constant moisture level: wet but not too wet. Moistening the clay was easy—capillary action will draw up water from the floodplain, which has a high water table. The trick is to stop evaporation from drying out the top. In an impressive display of engineering savvy, the Cahokians encapsulated the slab, sealing it off from the air by wrapping it in thin, alternating layers of sand and clay. The sand acts as a shield for the slab. Water rises through the clay to meet it, but cannot proceed further because the sand is too loose for further capillary action. Nor can the water evaporate; the clay layers atop the sand press down and prevent air from coming in. In addition, the sand lets rainfall drain away from the mound, preventing it from swelling too much.


• Chestnut was especially popular... Hickory was another favorite.... Within a few centuries, the Indians of the eastern forest reconfigured much of their landscape from a patchwork game park to a mix of farmland and orchards. Enough forest was left to allow for hunting, but agriculture was an increasing presence. The result was a new “balance of nature.” <> From today’s perspective, the success of the transition is striking. It was so sweeping and ubiquitous that early European visitors marveled at the number of nut and fruit trees and the big clearings with only a dim apprehension that the two might be due to the same human source.


• The region does have permanently water-filled swamps, sinkholes, and lakes, but often these are too salty to drink or use for irrigation. So toxic is the groundwater, a U.S.-Mexican research team remarked in 2002, that the Maya realm was “geochemically hostile” to urban colonization... To make the water potable, the Maya laid a layer of crushed limestone atop the sediments, effectively paving over the salt. As the researchers noted, the work had to be done before the Maya could move in and set up their milpas and gardens... The Maya heartland, in other words, was a network of artificially habitable terrestrial islands.


• The contrast between north and south is striking—and instructive. The obvious difference between them was the century and a half of large-scale warfare in the south. Both portions of the Maya realm depended on artificial landscapes that required constant attention. But only in the south did the Maya elite, entranced by visions of its own glory, take its hands off the switch. Drought indeed stressed the system, but the societal disintegration in the south was due not to surpassing inherent ecological limits but the political failure to find solutions.

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• the tropical forest. And in growing numbers researchers came to believe that the Amazon basin, too, bears the fingerprints of its original inhabitants.


• No matter what its original condition, the intense rain and heat of the forest have eroded its surface, washed out all its minerals, and decomposed vital organic compounds. As a result, much of the red Amazonian soil is weathered, harshly acid, and almost bereft of essential nutrients—one reason ecologists refer to the tropical forest as a “wet desert.” <> Correspondingly, most nutrients in tropical forests are stored not in the soil, as in temperate regions, but in the vegetation that covers it... Thus the tropical forest, despite its fabulous vitality, exists on a knife edge. <> These views were picked up and amplified in Amazonia: Man and Culture in a Counterfeit Paradise, by Betty J. Meggers, the Smithsonian archaeologist.


• Slash-and-burn, Meggers told me, is “a superb response to ecological limits.” Farmers grab a few harvests, but the soil is not bared to rain and sun long enough to incur permanent damage... In other words, any Indians who tried to go beyond slash-and-burn to permanent cultivation would be knocked back to slash-and-burn by a mega-Niño... Swidden, Meggers admitted, has a major drawback: it cannot yield enough to support a complex society... The impossibility of passing beyond slash-and-burn, Meggers said, was a consequence of a more general “law of environmental limitation of culture.” And she stated the law, italicizing its importance: “The level to which a culture can develop is dependent upon the agricultural potentiality of the environment it occupies.”


• * To be sure, advocates of environmental limitations today do not endorse the racist views of the past, but they still regard the original inhabitants of the Amazon as trapped in their environment like flies in amber. Meggers’s “law of environmental limitation of culture,” her critics in essence say, is nothing but a green variant of Holmberg’s Mistake. <> Over time, the Meggers-Roosevelt dispute grew bitter and personal;


• Rather than being the timeless indigenous adaptation portrayed in ecology textbooks, many archaeologists now view slash-and-burn agriculture as a relatively modern technique whose spread was driven by European technology. The main reason is the stone ax... when a source appeared the Yanomami would relocate whole villages to be near it. Steel tools, he told me, “had a major, transformative effect on all the trade and marriage relations in a whole area... “Steel to the Yanomamo was like gold for the Spanish,”


• Slash-and-burn was a product of European axes—and European diseases, which so shrank Indian groups that they adopted this less laborious but also less productive method of agriculture.


• * Speaking broadly, their solution was not to clear the forest but to replace it with one adapted to human use. They set up shop on the bluffs that mark the edge of high water—close enough to the river to fish, far enough to avoid the flood. And then, rather than centering their agriculture on annual crops, they focused on the Amazon’s wildly diverse assortment of trees... constantly pick fruit from trees,” Clement said. “That’s because people planted them. They’re walking through old orchards.” peach palms...  a widely cited article published in 1989, that at least 11.8 percent, about an eighth, of the nonflooded Amazon forest was “anthropogenic”—directly or indirectly created by humans.


• * But in the 1990s researchers began studying these unusual regions of terra preta do Índio—rich, fertile “Indian dark earth” that anthropologists believe was made by human beings... Woods has guessed that terra preta might represent as much as 10 percent of the Amazon basin, an area the size of France.


• As a rule, terra preta has more “plant-available” phosphorus, calcium, sulfur, and nitrogen than is common in the rain forest; it also has much more organic matter, better retains moisture and nutrients, and is not rapidly exhausted by agricultural use when managed well. The key to terra preta’s long-term fertility, Glaser says, is charcoal: terra preta contains up to sixty-four times more of it than surrounding red earth. Organic matter “sticks” to charcoal, rather than being washed away or attaching to other, nonavailable compounds. “Over time, it partly oxidizes, which keeps providing sites for nutrients to bind to.”


• Instead of completely burning organic matter to ash, ancient farmers burned it incompletely to make charcoal, then stirred the charcoal into the soil. In addition to its benefits to the soil, slash-and-char releases much less carbon into the air than slash-and-burn,.. “Nobody in Europe or Asia that I know of ever understood the properties of charcoal in soil.”... “low-biomass” fires “cool enough to walk through” of pulled-up weeds, cooking waste, crop debris, palm fronds, and termite mounds. Burning, she wrote, is constant:

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• In the 1930s the U.S. Civilian Conservation Corps planted millions of kuzu seedlings to fight soil loss, a major fear in the era of the Dust Bowl. Renamed “kudzu,” the vine prevented so much erosion that villages across the U.S. Southeast celebrated kudzu festivals and crowned kudzu queens.


• When passenger pigeons drank, they stuck their heads beneath the surface of the water until they were eye deep.. 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... 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.


• * 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.”


• Bison: 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... When disease swept Indians from the land, this entire ecological ancien régime collapsed... The product of demographic calamity, the newly created wilderness was indeed beautiful. But it was built on Indian graves and every bit as much a ruin as the temples of the Maya.


• Beneath the entangling personal motives, the debate is one of the oldest in the Western philosophical tradition, between nomos and physis. The ancient Greeks saw existence as a contest between nomos (rationality/order/artifice) and physis (irrationality/chaos/nature). In environmental terms, Thoreau, who saw the landscape as imbued with an essential wildness that could be heedlessly destroyed, embodies physis.


• In 1983 Cronon laid out the history of the New England countryside in his landmark book, Changes in the Land. In it he observed that wilderness as it was commonly understood simply did not exist in the eastern United States, and had not existed for thousands of years... It precipitated one of the only books attacking postmodern philosophy ever written largely by biologists.


• Striking to the contemporary eye, the 117 codicils of the Great Law were concerned as much with establishing the limits on the great council’s powers as on granting them. Its jurisdiction was strictly limited to relations among the nations and outside groups; internal affairs were the province of the individual nations. Although the council negotiated peace treaties, it could not declare war—that was left to the initiative of the leaders of each of Haudenosaunee’s constituent nations.


• But both traditional lore and contemporary astronomical calculations suggest that Haudenosaunee dates back to between 1090 and 1150 A.D.


• nobody disputes that the Haudenosaunee exemplified the formidable tradition of limited government and personal autonomy shared by many cultures north of the Río Grande. To some extent, this freedom simply reflected North American Indians’ relatively recent adoption of agriculture. Early farming villages worldwide were much less authoritarian places than later societies. But the Indians of the eastern seaboard institutionalized their liberty to an unusual extent


• In the most direct way, Indian liberty made indigenous villages into competitors for colonists’ allegiance. Colonial societies could not become too oppressive, because their members—surrounded by examples of free life—always had the option to vote with their feet.


• According to an influential essay Axtell published in 1981, the most important role Indians played in the evolution of the United States was as “military foes and cultural foes”—to be the “otherness” that colonists reacted against. “The whole colonial experience of trying to solve a related series of ‘Indian problems’ had much to do with giving the colonists an identity indissolubly linked to America,” he wrote.


• * Instead of creating Winthrop’s vision of an ordered society, the Pilgrims actually invented the raucous, ultra-democratic New England town meeting—a system of governance, the Dartmouth historian Colin Calloway observes, that “displays more attributes of Algonkian government by consensus than of Puritan government by the divinely ordained.”