1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus Read online

  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. And because these people lived seven thousand miles south of the Bering Strait, a distance that presumably would have taken a long time to traverse, they almost certainly arrived before the ice-free corridor opened up. (In any case, new research had cast doubt on the existence of that corridor.) Given the near impossibility of surpassing the glaciers without the corridor, some archaeologists suggested that the first Americans must have arrived twenty thousand years ago, when the ice pack was smaller. Or even earlier than that—the Chilean site had suggestive evidence of artifacts more than thirty thousand years old. 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. “We’re in a state of turmoil,” the consulting archaeologist Stuart Fiedel told me. “Everything we knew is now supposed to be wrong,” he added, exaggerating a little for effect.

  No consensus has emerged, but a growing number of researchers believe that the New World was occupied by a single small group that crossed the Bering Strait, got stuck on the Alaska side, and trickled to the rest of the Americas in several separate groups, very possibly in boats along the Pacific coast. Researchers differ on the details; some scientists have theorized that the Americas may have been hit with as many as five waves of settlement before Columbus, with the earliest occurring as much as fifty thousand years ago. In many versions, though, today’s Indians are seen as relative latecomers.

  Indian activists dislike this line of reasoning. “I can’t tell you how many white people have told me that ‘science’ shows that Indians were just a bunch of interlopers,” Vine Deloria Jr., a political scientist at the University of Colorado at Boulder, said to me in a conversation before his death in 2005. Deloria was the author of many books, including Red Earth, White Lies, a critique of mainstream archaeology. The book’s general tenor is signaled by its index; under “science,” the entries include “corruption and fraud and,” “Indian explanations ignored by,” “lack of proof for theories of,” “myth of objectivity of,” and “racism of.” In Deloria’s opinion, archaeology was mainly about easing white guilt. Determining that Indians superseded other people fit neatly into this plan. “If we’re only thieves who stole our land from someone else,” Deloria said, “then they can say, ‘Well, we’re just the same. We’re all immigrants here, aren’t we?’ ”

  The moral logic of the we’re-all-immigrants argument that Deloria cites is difficult to parse; it seems to be claiming that two wrongs make a right. Moreover, there’s no evidence that the first “wrong” was a wrong—nothing is known about the contacts among the various waves of paleo-Indian migration. But in any case whether most of today’s Native Americans actually arrived first or second is irrelevant to an assessment of their cultural achievements. In every imaginable scenario, they left Eurasia before the first whisper of the Neolithic Revolution.

  The Neolithic Revolution is the invention of farming, an event whose significance can hardly be overstated. “The human career,” wrote the historian Ronald Wright, “divides in two: everything before the Neolithic Revolution and everything after it.” It began in the Middle East about eleven thousand years ago, in the western half of the Fertile Crescent, which arcs between southern Iraq and Israel, reaching into southern Turkey along the way. Foraging societies there grouped into permanent villages and learned to cultivate and breed the area’s wild wheat and barley. In the next few millennia the wheel and the metal tool sprang up in the same area. The Sumerians put these inventions together, added writing, and in the third millennium B.C. created the first great civilization. Every European and Asian culture since, no matter how disparate in appearance, stands in Sumer’s shadow. Native Americans, who left Asia long before agriculture, missed out on the bounty. “They had to do everything on their own,” Crosby said to me. Remarkably, they succeeded.

  Researchers have long known that a second, independent Neolithic Revolution occurred in Mesoamerica. The exact timing is uncertain—archaeologists keep pushing back the date—but it is now thought to have occurred about ten thousand years ago, not long after the Middle East’s Neolithic Revolution. 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. This Neolithic Revolution probably led, among many other things, to the cultures in the Beni. The two American Neolithics spread more slowly than their counterpart in Eurasia, possibly because Indians in many places had not had the time to build up the requisite population density, and possibly because of the extraordinary nature of the most prominent Indian crop, maize.*

  The ancestors of wheat, rice, millet, and barley look like their domesticated descendants; because they are both edible and highly productive, one can easily imagine how the idea of planting them for food came up. 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. Its closest genetic relative is a mountain grass called teosinte that looks strikingly different—for one thing, its “ears” are smaller than the baby corn served in Chinese restaurants. No one eats teosinte, because it produces too little grain to be worth harvesting. In creating modern maize from this unpromising plant, Indians performed a feat so improbable that archaeologists and biologists argued for decades over how it was achieved. Coupled with squash, beans, and avocados, maize provided Mesoamerica with a balanced diet, one arguably more nutritious than its Middle Eastern or Asian equivalent. (Andean agriculture, based on potatoes and beans, and Amazonian agriculture, based on manioc [cassava], had wide impact but on a global level were less important than maize.)

  About seven thousand years elapsed between the dawn of the Middle Eastern Neolithic and the establishment of Sumer. Indians navigated the same path in somewhat less time (the data are too sketchy to be more precise). Pride of place must go to the Olmec, the first technologically complex culture in the hemisphere. Appearing in the narrow “waist” of Mexico about 1800 B.C., they lived in cities and towns centered on temple mounds. Strewn among them were colossal male heads of stone, many six feet tall or more, with helmet-like headgear, perpetual frowns, and somewhat African features, the last of which has given rise to speculation that Olmec culture was inspired by voyagers from Africa. The Olmec were but the first of many societies that arose in Mesoamerica in this epoch. Most had religions that focused on human sacrifice, dark by contemporary standards, but their economic and scientific accomplishments were bright. They invented a dozen different systems of writing, established widespread trade networks, tracked the orbits of the planets, created a 365-day calendar (more accurate than its contemporaries in Europe), and recorded their histories in accordion-folded “books” of fig tree bark paper.

  Arguably their greatest intellectual feat was the invention of zero. In his classic account Number: The Language of Science, the mathematician Tobias Dantzig called the discovery of zero “one of the greatest single accomplishments of the human race,” a “turning point” in mathematics, science, and technology. The first whisper of zero in the Middle East occurred about 600 B.C. When tallying numbers, the Babylonians arranged them into columns, as children learn to do today. To distinguish between their equivalents to 11 and 101, they placed two triangular marks between the digits: 1ΔΔ1, so to speak. (Because Babylonian mathematics was based on 60, rather than 10, the example is correct only in principle.) Curiously, though, they did not use the symbol to distinguish among their versions of 1, 10, and 100. Nor could the Babylonians add or subtract with zero, let alone use zero to enter the realm of negative numbers. Mathematicians in India first used zero in its contemporary sense—a number, not a placeholder—s
ometime in the first few centuries A.D. It didn’t appear in Europe until the twelfth century, when it came in with the Arabic numerals we use today (fearing fraud, some European governments banned the new numbers). Meanwhile, the first recorded zero in the Americas occurred in a Maya carving from 357 A.D., possibly before the Sanskrit. And there are monuments from before the birth of Christ that do not bear zeroes themselves but are inscribed with dates in a calendrical system based on the existence of zero.

  Does this mean that the Maya were then more advanced than their counterparts in, say, Europe? Social scientists flinch at this question, and with good reason. 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. Those looking for a tale of cultural superiority can find it in zero; those looking for failure can find it in the wheel. Neither line of argument is useful, though. What is most important is that by 1000 A.D. Indians had expanded their Neolithic revolutions to create a panoply of diverse civilizations across the hemisphere.

  Five hundred years later, when Columbus sailed into the Caribbean, the descendants of the world’s Neolithic Revolutions collided, with overwhelming consequences for all.

  A GUIDED TOUR

  Imagine, for a moment, an impossible journey: taking off in a plane from eastern Bolivia as I did, but doing so in 1000 A.D. and flying a surveillance mission over the rest of the Western Hemisphere. What would be visible from the windows? Fifty years ago, most historians would have given a simple answer to this question: two continents of wilderness, populated by scattered bands whose ways of life had changed little since the Ice Age. The sole exceptions would have been Mexico and Peru, where the Maya and the ancestors of the Inka were crawling toward the foothills of Civilization.

  Today our understanding is different in almost every perspective. Picture the millennial plane flying west, from the lowlands of the Beni to the heights of the Andes. On the ground beneath as the journey begins are the causeways and canals one sees today, except that they are now in good repair and full of people. (Fifty years ago, the earthworks were almost completely unknown, even to those living nearby.) After a few hundred miles the plane ascends to the mountains—and again the historical picture has changed. Until recently, researchers would have said the highlands in 1000 A.D. were occupied by scattered small villages and one or two big towns with some nice stonework. But recent archaeological investigations have revealed that at this time the Andes housed two mountain states, each much larger than previously appreciated.

  (Map credit 1.1)

  The state closest to the Beni was based around Lake Titicaca, the 120-mile-long alpine lake that crosses the Peru-Bolivia border. Most of this region has an altitude of twelve thousand feet or more. Summers are short; winters are correspondingly long. This “bleak, frigid land,” wrote the adventurer Victor von Hagen, “seemingly was the last place from which one might expect a culture to develop.” But in fact the lake is comparatively warm, and so the land surrounding it is less beaten by frost than the surrounding highlands. Taking advantage of the better climate, the village of Tiwanaku, one of many settlements around the lake, began after about 800 B.C. to drain the wetlands around the rivers that flowed into the lake from the south. A thousand years later the village had grown to become the center of a large polity, also known as Tiwanaku.

  Less a centralized state than a clutch of municipalities under the common religio-cultural sway of the center, Tiwanaku took advantage of the extreme ecological differences among the Pacific coast, the rugged mountains, and the altiplano (the high plains) to create a dense web of exchange: fish from the sea; llamas from the altiplano; fruits, vegetables, and grains from the fields around the lake. Flush with wealth, Tiwanaku city swelled into a marvel of terraced pyramids and grand monuments. Stone breakwaters extended far out into Lake Titicaca, thronged with long-prowed boats made of reeds. With its running water, closed sewers, and gaudily painted walls, Tiwanaku was among the world’s most impressive cities.

  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. Other researchers believe this population estimate is too high. Twenty or thirty thousand in the central city is more likely, according to Nicole Couture, a University of Chicago archaeologist who helped edit the definitive publication of Kolata’s work in 2003. An equal number, she said, occupied the surrounding countryside.

  Which view is right? Although Couture was confident of her ideas, she thought it would be “another decade” before the matter was settled. And in any case the exact number does not affect what she regards as the key point. “Building this enormous place up here is really remarkable,” she said. “I realize that again every time I come back.”

  North and west of Tiwanaku, in what is now southern Peru, was the rival state of Wari, which then ran for almost a thousand miles along the spine of the Andes. More tightly organized and military minded than Tiwanaku, the rulers of Wari stamped out cookie-cutter fortresses and stationed them all along their borders. The capital city—called, eponymously, Wari—was in the heights, near the modern city of Ayacucho. Housing perhaps seventy thousand souls, Wari was a dense, alley-packed craze of walled-off temples, hidden courtyards, royal tombs, and apartments up to six stories tall. Most of the buildings were sheathed in white plaster, making the city sparkle in the mountain sun.

  In 1000 A.D., at the time of our imaginary overflight, both societies were reeling from a succession of terrible droughts. Perhaps eighty years earlier, dust storms had engulfed the high plains, blackening the glaciers in the peaks above. (Ice samples, dug out in the 1990s, suggest the assault.) Then came a run of punishing dry spells, many more than a decade in duration, interrupted by gigantic floods. (Sediment and tree-ring records depict the sequence.) The disaster’s cause is still in dispute, but some climatologists believe that the Pacific is subject to “mega-Niño events,” murderously strong versions of the well-known El Niño patterns that play havoc with American weather today. Mega-Niños occurred every few centuries between 200 and 1600 A.D. In 1925 and 1926, a strong El Niño—not a mega-Niño, but one that was bigger than usual—blasted Amazonia with so much dry heat that sudden fires killed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people in the forest. Rivers dried up, their bottoms carpeted with dead fish. A mega-Niño in the eleventh century may well have caused the droughts of those years. But whatever the cause of the climatic upheaval, it severely tested Wari and Tiwanaku society.

  Here, though, one must be careful. Europe was racked by a “little ice age” of extreme cold between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries, yet historians rarely attribute the rise and fall of European states in that period to climate change. Fierce winters helped drive the Vikings from Greenland and led to bad harvests that exacerbated social tensions in continental Europe, but few would claim that the little ice age caused the Reformation. Similarly, the mega-Niños were but one of many stresses on Andean civilizations at the time, stresses that in their totality neither Wari nor Tiwanaku had the political resources to survive. Soon after 1000 A.D. Tiwanaku split into flinders that would not be united for another four centuries, when the Inka swept them up. Wari also fell. It was succeeded and perhaps taken over by a state called Chimor, which oversaw an empire that sprawled over central Peru until it, too, was absorbed by the Inka.

  Such newly discovered histories appear everywhere in the Americas. Take the plane north, toward Central America and southern Mexico, into the bulge of the Yucatán Peninsula, homeland of the Maya. Maya ruins were well known forty years ago, to be sure, but among them, too, many new things have been discovered. Cons
ider Calakmul, the ruin that Peter Menzel and I visited in the early 1980s. Almost wholly unexcavated since its discovery, the Calakmul we came to lay swathed in dry, scrubby vegetation that crawled like a swarm of thorns up its two huge pyramids. When Peter and I spoke to William J. Folan of the Universidad Autónoma de Campeche, who was just beginning to work at the city, he recommended that we not try going to the ruin unless we could rent a heavy truck, and not even to try with the truck if it had rained. Our visit to Calakmul did nothing to suggest that Folan’s advice was wrong. Trees enveloped the great buildings, their roots slowly ripping apart the soft limestone walls. Peter photographed a monument with roots coiled around it, boa constrictor style, five or six feet high. So overwhelming was the tropical forest that I thought Calakmul’s history would remain forever unknown.

  Happily, I was wrong. By the early 1990s Folan’s team had learned that this long-ignored place covered as much as twenty-five square miles and had thousands of buildings and dozens of reservoirs and canals. It was the biggest-ever Maya polity. Researchers cleaned and photographed its hundred-plus monuments—and just in time, for epigraphers (scholars of ancient writing) had in the meantime deciphered Maya hieroglyphics. In 1994 they identified the city-state’s ancient name: Kaan, the Kingdom of the Snake. Six years later they discovered that Kaan was the focus of a devastating war that convulsed the Maya city-state for more than a century. And Kaan is just one of the score of Maya settlements that in the last few decades have been investigated for the first time.