1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus Read online

  After a while Sterritt took me to see ‘Ksan, a historical park and art school created in 1970. In the park were several re-created long-houses, their facades covered in the forcefully elegant, black-and-red arcs of Northwest Coast Indian art. The art school trained local Indians in the techniques of translating traditionally derived designs into silk-screen prints. Sterritt left me in a back room of the schoolhouse and told me to look around. There was more in the room than he may have realized, for I quickly found what looked like storage boxes for a number of old and beautiful masks. Beside them was a stack of modern prints, some of which used the same designs. And there were boxes of photographs, old and new alike, many of splendid artworks.

  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.

  A few of the objects I looked at I understood immediately, many I didn’t understand at all, some I thought I understood but probably didn’t, and some maybe even the Gitksan didn’t understand, in the way that most Europeans today can’t truly understand the effect of Byzantine art on the spirits of the people who saw it at the time of its creation. But I was delighted by the boldly graphic lines and dazzled by the sense that I was peeking into a vibrant past that I had not known existed and that continued to inform the present in a way I had not realized. For an hour or two I went from object to object, always eager to see more. In assembling this book, I hope to share the excitement I felt then, and have felt many times since.

  A NOTE ON THIS EDITION

  From time to time readers of 1491 have written to ask whether I would change anything fundamental in the book if I could write it again. In the past, I always said that I didn’t know. The question seemed too theoretical to answer—nobody was offering me the opportunity to find out. Preparing this updated and revised edition of 1491 gave me that chance. Since the first publication of this book, researchers have indeed made fascinating discoveries about the first fifteen thousand years of American history. But they fit well into the new ideas that are the subject of this book. Its basic arguments—that Indian societies were bigger than had been previously believed (the focus of Part I), that they were older and more sophisticated than previously believed (Part II), and that they had greater impact on the environment than previously believed (Part III)—continue, in my view, to represent the views of the great majority of scholars in the field. I therefore have not changed 1491’s fundamental architecture, so to speak, though I did refurbish many of the rooms. The book remains recognizably itself, but tweaked, polished, and gussied-up for (I hope) the enjoyment of new readers.

  INTRODUCTION

  Holmberg’s Mistake

  1

  A View from Above

  IN THE BENI

  The plane took off in weather that was surprisingly cool for central Bolivia and flew east, toward the Brazilian border. In a few minutes the roads and houses disappeared, and the only traces of human settlement were the cattle scattered over the savanna like sprinkles on ice cream. Then they, too, disappeared. By that time the archaeologists had their cameras out and were clicking away in delight.

  Below us lay the Beni, a Bolivian province about the size of Illinois and Indiana put together, and nearly as flat. For almost half the year rain and snowmelt from the mountains to the south and west cover the land with an irregular, slowly moving skin of water that eventually ends up in the province’s northern rivers, which are upper tributaries of the Amazon. The rest of the year the water dries up and the bright green vastness turns into something that resembles a desert. This peculiar, remote, often watery plain was what had drawn the researchers’ attention, and not just because it was one of the few places on earth inhabited by some people who might never have seen Westerners with cameras.

  Clark Erickson and William Balée, the archaeologists, sat up front. Erickson, based at the University of Pennsylvania, worked in concert with a Bolivian archaeologist, who that day was elsewhere, freeing up a seat in the plane for me. Balée, of Tulane, is actually an anthropologist, but as scientists have come to appreciate the ways in which past and present inform each other, the distinction between anthropologists and archaeologists has blurred. The two men differ in build, temperament, and scholarly proclivity, but they pressed their faces to the windows with identical enthusiasm.

  Scattered across the landscape below were countless islands of forest, many of them almost-perfect circles—heaps of green in a sea of yellow grass. Each island rose as much as sixty feet above the floodplain, allowing trees to grow that otherwise could not endure the water. 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. Balée, newer to the Beni, leaned toward this view but was not yet ready to commit himself.

  Erickson and Balée belong to a cohort of scholars that in recent years has radically challenged conventional notions of what the Western Hemisphere was like before Columbus. When I went to high school, in the 1970s, I was taught that Indians came to the Americas across the Bering Strait about thirteen thousand years ago, that they lived for the most part in small, isolated groups, and that they had so little impact on their environment that even after millennia of habitation the continents remained mostly wilderness. Schools still impart the same ideas today. One way to summarize the views of people like Erickson and Balée would be to say that they regard this picture of Indian life as wrong in almost every aspect. Indians were here far longer than previously thought, these researchers believe, and in much greater numbers. And they were so successful at imposing their will on the landscape that in 1492 Columbus set foot in a hemisphere thoroughly marked by humankind.

  Given the charged relations between white societies and native peoples, inquiry into Indian culture and history is inevitably contentious. But the recent scholarship is especially controversial. To begin with, some researchers—many but not all from an older generation—deride the new theories as fantasies arising from an almost willful misinterpretation of data and a perverse kind of political correctness. “I have seen no evidence that large numbers of people ever lived in the Beni,” Betty J. Meggers, of the Smithsonian Institution, told me. “Claiming otherwise is just wishful thinking.” Indeed, two Smithsonian-backed archaeologists from Argentina have argued that many of the larger mounds are natural floodplain deposits; a “small initial population” could have built the remaining causeways and raised fields in as little as a decade. Similar criticisms apply to many of the new scholarly claims about Indians, according to Dean R. Snow, an anthropologist at Pennsylvania State University. The problem is that “you can make the meager evidence from the ethnohistorical record tell you anything you want,” he says. “It’s really easy to kid yourself.” And some have charged that the claims advance the political agenda of those who seek to discredit European culture, because the high numbers seem to inflate the scale of native loss.

  Disputes also arise because the new theories have implications for today’s ecological battles. Much of the environmental movement is animated, consciously or not, by what geographer William Denevan calls “the pristine myth”—the belief that the Americas in 1491 were an almost untouched, even Edenic land, “untrammeled by man,” in the words of the Wilderness Act of 1964, a U.S. law that is one of the founding documents of the global environmental movement. To green activists, as the University of Wisconsin historian William Cronon has written, restoring this long-ago, putatively natural state
is a task that society is morally bound to undertake. Yet if the new view is correct and the work of humankind was pervasive, where does that leave efforts to restore nature?

  The Beni is a case in point. In addition to building roads, causeways, canals, dikes, reservoirs, mounds, raised agricultural fields, and possibly ball courts, Erickson has argued, the Indians who lived there before Columbus trapped fish in the seasonally flooded grassland. The trapping was not a matter of a few isolated natives with nets, but a society-wide effort in which hundreds or thousands of people fashioned dense, zigzagging networks of earthen fish weirs (fish-corralling fences) among the causeways. 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. The Beni’s current inhabitants still burn, although now it is mostly to maintain the savanna for cattle. When we flew over the region, the dry season had just begun, but mile-long lines of flame were already on the march. Smoke rose into the sky in great, juddering pillars. In the charred areas behind the fires were the blackened spikes of trees, many of them of species that activists fight to save in other parts of Amazonia.

  North of the Beni is the department of Pando, which is lightly inhabited and largely forested. And north of Pando is the Brazilian state of Acre, which is also lightly inhabited, but which has seen much of its forest removed to create cattle ranches. Only the Brazil-nut trees are left—cutting them is illegal. (They will die out nonetheless; the trees need to be pollinated by particular species of forest bees, which cannot live in the newly created grasslands.) To stop the other tree species from growing back, ranchers’ planes spray clouds of African grass seeds across the newly opened land; the tough, thick-bladed grass grows into a dense, springy carpet that seedlings cannot penetrate. In the late 1990s, when I first visited the Beni, few knew that the wholesale clearing in Acre was exposing large earthworks—geometric figures that Alceu Ranzi, a researcher at the Federal University of Acre, has dubbed “geoglyphs.” Today more than two hundred have been identified; many are as much as 500 feet from one side to the other. Created by digging precise circles, squares, and rectangles into the Amazonian clay, the geoglyphs are as striking to see from the air as the raised fields and causeways Erickson and Balée showed me in the Beni. Even less is known about the Acre geoglyphs, though; the first article in a professional journal about them did not appear until 2007 (Ranzi was a co-author). Five years later, archaeologists remained unsure of the answers to such basic questions as where the geoglyph builders lived—the structures show no sign of habitation. Erickson, who has found similar earthworks in the Beni, believes that before Columbus an 800- or 1000-mile swath of western Amazonia was occupied by a previously unknown mix of cultures that radically reshaped the landscape around them.

  The future of this region is uncertain. The Beni is of increasing interest to ranchers and soybean growers, who covet its open land and relatively good soil. Loggers are eyeing Pando. A new highway to the Pacific is bringing ever-greater numbers of businesses to Acre. Meanwhile, conservationists argue for keeping this unpopulous region as close to nature as possible. Local Indian groups regard this latter proposal with suspicion. If the Beni becomes a reserve for the “natural,” they ask, what international organization would let them continue setting the plains afire? Could any outside group endorse large-scale burning in Amazonia? Instead, Indians propose placing control of the land into their hands. Activists, in turn, regard that idea without enthusiasm—some indigenous groups in the U.S. Southwest have promoted the use of their reservations as repositories for nuclear waste. And, of course, there is all that burning.

  HOLMBERG’S MISTAKE

  “Don’t touch that tree,” Balée said.

  I froze. I was climbing a low, crumbly hill and had been about to support myself by grasping a scrawny, almost vine-like tree with splayed leaves. “Triplaris americana,” said Balée, an expert in forest botany. “You have to watch out for it.” In an unusual arrangement, he said, T. americana plays host to colonies of tiny red ants—indeed, it has trouble surviving without them. The ants occupy minute tunnels just beneath the bark. In return for shelter, the ants attack anything that touches the tree—insect, bird, unwary writer. The venom-squirting ferocity of their attack gives rise to T. americana’s local nickname: devil tree.

  At the base of the devil tree, exposing its roots, was a deserted animal burrow. Balée scraped out some dirt with a knife, then waved me over, along with Erickson and my son Newell, who were accompanying us. The depression was thick with busted pottery. We could see the rims of plates and what looked like the foot of a teakettle—it was shaped like a human foot, complete with painted toenails. Balée plucked out half a dozen pieces of ceramic: shards of pots and plates, a chipped length of cylindrical bar that may have been part of a pot’s support leg. As much as an eighth of the hill, by volume, was composed of such fragments, he said. You could dig almost anywhere on it and see the like. We were clambering up an immense pile of broken crockery.

  The pile is known as Ibibate, at fifty-nine feet one of the tallest known forested mounds in the Beni. Erickson explained to me that the pieces of ceramic were probably intended to help build up and aerate the muddy soil for settlement and agriculture. But though this explanation makes sense on engineering grounds, he said, it doesn’t make the long-ago actions of the moundbuilders any less mysterious. The mounds cover such an enormous area that they seem unlikely to be the byproduct of waste. Monte Testaccio, the hill of broken pots southeast of Rome, was a garbage dump for the entire imperial city. Ibibate is larger than Monte Testaccio and but one of hundreds of similar mounds. Surely the Beni did not generate more waste than Rome—the ceramics in Ibibate, Erickson argues, indicate that large numbers of people, many of them skilled laborers, lived for a long time on these mounds, feasting and drinking exuberantly all the while. The number of potters necessary to make the heaps of crockery, the time required for labor, the number of people needed to provide food and shelter for the potters, the organization of large-scale destruction and burial—all of it is evidence, to Erickson’s way of thinking, that a thousand years ago the Beni was the site of a highly structured society, one that through archaeological investigation was just beginning to come into view.

  Accompanying us that day were two Sirionó Indians, Chiro Cuéllar and his son-in-law Rafael. The two men were wiry, dark, and nearly beardless; walking beside them on the trail, I had noticed small nicks in their earlobes. Rafael, cheerful almost to bumptiousness, peppered the afternoon with comments; Chiro, a local figure of authority, smoked locally made “Marlboro” cigarettes and observed our progress with an expression of amused tolerance. They lived about a mile away, in a little village at the end of a long, rutted dirt road. We had driven there earlier in the day, parking in the shade of a tumbledown school and some old missionary buildings. The structures were clustered near the top of a small hill—another ancient mound. While Newell and I waited by the truck, Erickson and Balée went inside the school to obtain permission from Chiro and the other members of the village council to tramp around. Noticing that we were idle, a couple of Sirionó kids tried to persuade Newell and me to look at a young jaguar in a pen, and to give them money for this thrill. After a few minutes, Erickson and Balée emerged with the requisite permission—and two chaperones, Chiro and Rafael. Now, climbing up Ibibate, Chiro observed that I was standing by the devil tree. Keeping his expression deadpan, he suggested that I climb it. Up top, he said, I would find some delicious jungle fruit. “It will be like nothing you have experienced before,” he promised.

  From the top of Ibibate we were able to see the surrounding savanna. Perhaps a quarter mile away, across a stretch of yellow, waist-high grass, was a straight line of trees—an ancient raised causeway, Erickson said. Otherwise the countryside was so flat that we could see for miles in every dir
ection—or, rather, we could have seen for miles, if the air in some directions had not been filled with smoke.

  Afterward I wondered about the relationship of our escorts to this place. Were the Sirionó like contemporary Italians living among the monuments of the Roman Empire? I asked Erickson and Balée that question during the drive back.

  Their answer continued sporadically through the rest of the evening, as we rode to our lodgings in an unseasonable cold rain and then had dinner. In the 1970s, they said, most authorities would have answered my question about the Sirionó in one way. Today most would answer it in another, different way. The difference involves what I came to think of, rather unfairly, as Holmberg’s Mistake.

  Although the Sirionó are but one of a score of Native American groups in the Beni, they are the best known. Between 1940 and 1942 a young doctoral student named Allan R. Holmberg lived among them. He published his account of their lives, Nomads of the Longbow, in 1950. (The title refers to the six-foot bows the Sirionó used for hunting.) Quickly recognized as a classic, Nomads remains an iconic and influential text; as filtered through countless other scholarly articles and the popular press, it became one of the main sources for the outside world’s image of South American Indians.

  The Sirionó, Holmberg reported, were “among the most culturally backward peoples of the world.” Living in constant want and hunger, he said, they had no clothes, no domestic animals, no musical instruments (not even rattles and drums), no art or design (except necklaces of animal teeth), and almost no religion (the Sirionó “conception of the universe” was “almost completely uncrystallized”). Incredibly, they could not count beyond three or make fire (they carried it, he wrote, “from camp to camp in a [burning] brand”). Their poor lean-tos, made of haphazardly heaped palm fronds, were so ineffective against rain and insects that the typical band member “undergoes many a sleepless night during the year.” Crouched over meager campfires during the wet, buggy nights, the Sirionó were living exemplars of primitive humankind—the “quintessence” of “man in the raw state of nature,” as Holmberg put it. For millennia, he thought, they had existed almost without change in a landscape unmarked by their presence. Then they encountered European society and for the first time their history acquired a narrative flow.