In another
thread, I asserted that contrary to a stereotypically macho, conquest-by-superior-might view that still dominates American primary and secondary eduction, Native American populations were large rather than small, that European pathogens swept the continent so swiftly there was little actual conquest involved, and that the "seas of bison" and "skies of passenger pigeons" were a direct result, a consequence that encouraged a European view of "limitless bounty" in the New World with tragic results still unfolding today.
I ascribed the resistance to these ideas as an instance of nation-founding mythos defying a more accurate history grounded in science: in short, without smallpox, hepatitis, typhus, and measles, a hardy Native American warrior culture might well have repulsed the invaders despite the technological disadvantages.
Holmes expressed interest in the sources of these ideas. To explore those, I'd like to address the Precolumbian population of the Americas, their keystone predator species status, and their aggressive land mangement practices.
My ideas were first impacted by work done in the 1960s and 1970s by a younger generation of scholars, work whose credibility I found reaffirmed by Jared Diamond's
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies published in 1999, and further strengthened by more rigorous studies in recent years.
Diamond's work excited a great deal of controversy, but even on first principles his hypothesis held great power: given that human cultures show similar stages in their development of agriculture, technology, and power, and given that we see no genetic explanation for one culture arriving at a "more advanced" stage before another, we should look for explanations in the natural resource contexts of those cultures: the relative wealth of readily domesticated plants and animals here vs. their paucity there, the history of animal husbandry in close proximity to livestock which act as disease vectors to humans and thus well established resistance there vs. near-total vulnerability here, etc.
I would like to first address the devastatingly rapid impact of European-borne pathogens on Native American populations. Later, I'd like to move on to the consequences of nearly extinguishing this keystone predator species and the consequent impact on colonial attitudes about the apparently inexhaustible floral and faunal wealth of the New World--and, of course, to explore whatever avenues to which discussion leads. For example, this newer view of the precontact Americas has profound implications for the "pristine wilderness" ideal which has shaped much of modern U.S. conservation efforts, but I hope to defer that discussion until later.
A new book by Charles C. Mann,
1491, published in August 2005 by Random House, summarizes many of the new conclusions and the work that produced them. From the publisher's web page:
” In 1491 there were probably more people living in the Americas than in Europe.
” Certain cities-such as Tenochtitlán, the Aztec capital-were far greater in population than any contemporary European city. Furthermore, Tenochtitlán, unlike any capital in Europe at that time, had running water, beautiful botanical gardens, and immaculately clean streets.
” The earliest cities in the Western Hemisphere were thriving before the Egyptians built the great pyramids.
” Pre-Columbian Indians in Mexico developed corn by a breeding process so sophisticated that the journal Science recently described it as “man’s first, and perhaps the greatest, feat of genetic engineering.”
” Amazonian Indians learned how to farm the rain forest without destroying it-a process scientists are studying today in the hope of regaining this lost knowledge.
” Native Americans transformed their land so completely that Europeans arrived in a hemisphere already massively “landscaped” by human beings.
A few years earlier, in 2002, Mann published a piece in The Atlantic Monthly based on his ongoing work on
1491. Here are some quotes concerning the role of pathogens, and a link to an archive of that
article at UCLA. The text in this link helps introduce not only the ideas but the controversies, and contains a plethora of links to other relevant books and studies.
The Plymouth Colony settlers as corn cache thieves and grave-robbers:
The Mayflower first hove to at Cape Cod. An armed company staggered out. Eventually it found a recently deserted Indian settlement. The newcomers”hungry, cold, sick”dug up graves and ransacked houses, looking for underground stashes of corn. "And sure it was God's good providence that we found this corn," Bradford wrote, "for else we know not how we should have done." (He felt uneasy about the thievery, though.) When the colonists came to Plymouth, a month later, they set up shop in another deserted Indian village. All through the coastal forest the Indians had "died on heapes, as they lay in their houses," the English trader Thomas Morton noted. "And the bones and skulls upon the severall places of their habitations made such a spectacle" that to Morton the Massachusetts woods seemed to be "a new found Golgotha"”the hill of executions in Roman Jerusalem.
To the Pilgrims' astonishment, one of the corpses they exhumed on Cape Cod had blond hair. A French ship had been wrecked there several years earlier. The Patuxet Indians imprisoned a few survivors. One of them supposedly learned enough of the local language to inform his captors that God would destroy them for their misdeeds. The Patuxet scoffed at the threat. But the Europeans carried a disease, and they bequeathed it to their jailers. The epidemic (probably of viral hepatitis, according to a study by Arthur E. Spiess, an archaeologist at the Maine Historic Preservation Commission, and Bruce D. Spiess, the director of clinical research at the Medical College of Virginia) took years to exhaust itself and may have killed 90 percent of the people in coastal New England. It made a huge difference to American history. "The good hand of God favored our beginnings," Bradford mused, by "sweeping away great multitudes of the natives ... that he might make room for us."
The seminal work that reevalauted the precontact populations of the Americas began in the southern hemisphere, work done by Henry F. Dobyns and published as "Estimating Aboriginal American Population: An Appraisal of Techniques With a New Hemispheric Estimate," in the journal Current Anthropology in 1966.
Mann writes of Dobyns work:
The Indians in Peru, Dobyns concluded, had faced plagues from the day the conquistadors showed up”in fact, before then: smallpox arrived around 1525, seven years ahead of the Spanish. Brought to Mexico apparently by a single sick Spaniard, it swept south and eliminated more than half the population of the Incan empire. Smallpox claimed the Incan dictator Huayna Capac and much of his family, setting off a calamitous war of succession. So complete was the chaos that Francisco Pizarro was able to seize an empire the size of Spain and Italy combined with a force of 168 men.
Smallpox was only the first epidemic. Typhus (probably) in 1546, influenza and smallpox together in 1558, smallpox again in 1589, diphtheria in 1614, measles in 1618”all ravaged the remains of Incan culture. Dobyns was the first social scientist to piece together this awful picture, and he naturally rushed his findings into print. Hardly anyone paid attention. But Dobyns was already working on a second, related question: If all those people died, how many had been living there to begin with? Before Columbus, Dobyns calculated, the Western Hemisphere held ninety to 112 million people. Another way of saying this is that in 1491 more people lived in the Americas than in Europe.
That's enough for now, I think.
I dunno, AdminAvatars: too much for a discussion thread? Maybe Columnist's Corner or The Book Nook? I don't want to subvert the original thread with this tangent, but otherwise I am content with your placement wishes.
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