…North America before Columbus’s arrival was a vast, grassy expanse teeming with game and all but empty of people. Those who did live here were nomads who left few marks on the land. South America, too, or at least the Amazon rain forest, was thought of as almost an untouched Eden, now suffering from modern depredations.
Isn’t that what we were taught in school? Well recently, researchers have started to develop a completely different idea of America before Columbus. In this new theory, America may have had more inhabitants than Europe, living in larger and more splendid cities. Instead of a “forest primeval,” the New World landscape may have been more like gardens and orchards, its fields and forests planted and managed by humans.
Remember those stories we used to hear about vast swarms of passenger pigeons, and huge herds of buffalo? Actually, they may not have existed until after the white man arrived. Could be they were a symptom of an environment that had gone out of control, when the caretakers of the garden suddenly disappeared.
What happened to all these people? Turns out most Indians probably died of European diseases with which they had no immunity. Some evidence points to epidemics spreading across the continents, wiping out whole populations.
I first heard these ideas a couple years ago in an Atlantic article. Now I’ve just finished reading a further elaboration of the ideas in 1491, a new book by Charles Mann. The author is a reporter himself, but he has spent enough time with researchers to understand their ideas. He is also a good writer and the book is entertaining. You can also still find the original Atlantic article on-line as well as an interview with the author (you might have to register).
Comments (4)
Now that sounds interesting!
Have you ever been to Chaco Canyon or Mesa Verde?
There were some magnificent cities, especially in Central America.
As far as the buffalo herds I will have to read the article but it seems counter intuitive that there were not huge herds dating back to pre-history. The buffalo range, from Montana to W. Texas was not effectively transgressed/changed by white peoples until the 1850′s and some of the fur trapper stories I have read, circa 1820′s, provide accounts of huge herds. The one artifact of white civilization that did appear in the buffalo range early on was the horse which made the native peoples more effective hunters [even turning some subsistance tribes like the Comanches into hunters]. Being more effective would mean smaller herds.
I heard this, too. And there’s evidence in the records of the DeSoto expedition which tramped through the Southeast, meeting some splendid peoples who bathed and had better medicine than we did except on one point: they thought sweat lodges could cure European diseases.
DeSoto is said, at one point, to have stood on a hilltop in Kentucky, looked around, and seen miles and miles of farms stretching out in all directions.
No one saw a buffalo in the Midwest until a few decades before the major settlement of that region began: where there were no farmers to fend them off with sticks, the buffalo roamed.
I don’t subscribe either to the low or to the high estimate of native population. It is obvious they had to be more than initially stated, but if they were so many, they should have left more traces and more descendants despite the catastrophes, as in Mexico or Peru. I think there were areas with dense habitat and areas with almost no inhabitants. After all, many lands are workable only with iron tools.
As for the splendidness of their cultures, I’m not a believer in the “noble exotic” either. All human cultures have both good and gruesome aspects. Besides, they have been defeated mostly by the colonizers encouraging intertribal warfare – see tlaxcalans against aztecs – which means there was not that much harmony in paradise.