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b34bc31
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many of the racial alarmists were also leaders in the nation's new conservation movement. The blue-blooded toffs who feared that the noble and superior white race was menaced by unwashed rabble also saw wild landscapes as noble and superior wildernesses menaced by the same rabble. Prizing the expert governance of resources, they found little difference between protecting forests and cleaning up the human gene pool.
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Charles C. Mann |
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a9c0adf
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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 to Nee England. All of this was absent not only from my high school textbooks, but from the academic acc..
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Charles C. Mann |
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1b04e9c
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According to Peter Stahl, an anthropologist at the State University of New York in Binghamton, "lots" of researchers believe that "what the eco-imagery would like to picture as a pristine, untouched Urwelt [primeval world] in fact has been managed by people for millennia."
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Charles C. Mann |
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62309a2
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The chronological list of rulers differs on different lists, some lists do not include known kings, and some include kings who probably were mythological--as if a tally of English rulers matter-of-factly included King Arthur and his father, Uther Pendragon. The
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Charles C. Mann |
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b103ca8
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By mining the forests upstream for firewood and floating the logs downriver to the city, they were removing ground cover and increasing the likelihood of catastrophic floods. When these came, as they later did, kings who gained their legitimacy from their claims to control the weather would face angry questioning from their subjects.
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Charles C. Mann |
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ce51cff
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Having grown separately for millennia, the [orginal] Americans were a boundless sea of novel ideas, drea,s, stories, philosophies, religions, ,oralities, discoveries, and all other products of the mind....Here and there we see clues of what might have been. Pacific Northwest Indian artists carved beautiful masks, boxes, bas-relief S, and totem poles within the dictates of an elaborate aesthetic syste, based on an ovoid shapes that has no n..
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Charles C. Mann |
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9cf83dd
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By the eve of the American Revolution, a third of the native people in Rhode Island were enslaved. Indian bondage was more common still in the southern colonies.
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Charles C. Mann |
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81b6344
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mounting a sustained war. Unhappily, these intriguing speculations
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Charles C. Mann |
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6d3c7ae
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Beavers the size of armchairs; turtles that weighed almost as much as cars; sloths able to reach tree branches twenty feet high; huge, flightless, predatory birds like rapacious ostriches--the tally of Pleistocene monsters is long and alluring.
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Charles C. Mann |
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2920d73
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Inside the settlement was a world of warmth, family, and familiar custom. But the world outside, as Thomas put it, was "a maze of confusing actions and individuals fighting to maintain an existence in the shadow of change." And that was before the Europeans showed up."
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Charles C. Mann |
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60bf2f9
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In Deloria's opinion, archaeology is mainly about easing white guilt. Determining that Indians superseded other people fits 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?"
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Charles C. Mann |
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b08879a
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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 r..
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Charles C. Mann |
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6f392b0
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Valencia's plan was conversion by proxy: he and the rest of the twelve would open the eyes of the Indian priesthood to the beauties of the true faith, gaining their adherence by reasoned theological discussion, and then the priests would fan out and spread the Gospel in their native tongue.
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Charles C. Mann |
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faf9547
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Planting their orchards for millennia, the first Amazonians slowly transformed large swaths of the river basin into something more pleasing to human beings. In the country inhabited by the Ka'apor, on the mainland southeast of Marajo, centuries of tinkering have profoundly changed the forest community. In Ka'apor-managed forests, according to Balee's plant inventories, almost half of the ecologically important species are those used by huma..
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Charles C. Mann |
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574b722
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That was why archaeologists and anthropologists had come across the ruins of complex societies throughout Mesoamerica and the Andes, but saw only hunter-gatherers and slash-and-burners in Amazonia.
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Charles C. Mann |
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6f6da7f
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he argued, was not perfectly round but "in the shape of a pear,"
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Charles C. Mann |
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d3cc54a
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What happened in 1518 and 1519 is not. In those years, according to Bartolome de Las Casas, a missionary priest who lived through the incident, Spanish orange, pomegranate, and cassia plantations were destroyed "from the root up." Thousands of acres of orchards were "all scorched and dried out, as though flames had fallen from the sky and burned them." The actual culprit, Wilson argued, was the sap-sucking scale insects. But what the Spania..
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Charles C. Mann |
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3f0bf0b
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The viruses that cause smallpox, influenza, hepatitis, measles, encephalitis, and viral pneumonia; the bacteria that cause tuberculosis, diphtheria, cholera, typhus, scarlet fever, and bacterial meningitis--by a quirk of evolutionary history, all were unknown in the Western Hemisphere.
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Charles C. Mann |
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5b8ad45
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of venereal soldiers along the way. A more effective
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Charles C. Mann |
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f88fb1f
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By the eve of the American Revolution, a third of the native people in Rhode Island were enslaved. Indian bondage was more common still in the southern
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Charles C. Mann |
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388b41b
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Holmberg's Mistake.
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Charles C. Mann |
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e8c8428
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Like most Maya rulers, Chak Tok Ich'aak spent a lot of his time luxuriating in his court while dwarf servants attended to his whims and musicians played conch shells and wooden trumpets in the background. But
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Charles C. Mann |
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710bf41
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Inka satrapies;
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Charles C. Mann |
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36a3621
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At Marajo, Meggers and Evans soon noticed an oddity: the earliest traces of Marajoara culture were the most elaborate. As the centuries advanced, the quality of the ceramics inexorably declined.
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Charles C. Mann |
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0ac6f7a
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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.
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Charles C. Mann |
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b922efd
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the Inka style was severe, abstract, stripped down to geometric forms--startlingly contemporary, in fact. (According to the Peruvian critic Cesar Paternosto, such major twentieth-century painters as Josef Albers, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko were inspired by Inka art.)
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Charles C. Mann |
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c602f94
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Monte Alban is today a decorous sprawl of walls and pyramids enveloped by a lush lawn (this last is an import from Europe; lawn grass did not exist in the Americas prior to Columbus).
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Charles C. Mann |
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375a06e
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the king was talking with Bartolome de las Casas, a fiery Dominican priest who had just completed Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies, an indictment of Spanish conduct that remains a landmark both in the history of human-rights activism and in the literature of sustained invective. Reading his first draft before the shocked court, Las Casas branded the conquest of Mexico as "the climax of injustice and violence and tyranny commit..
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Charles C. Mann |
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45e51e3
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Smoke rose into the sky in great, juddering pillars. In
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Charles C. Mann |
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e98530d
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Recounted in numberless articles and books, the Maya collapse has become an ecological parable for green activists; along with Pleistocene overkill, it is a favorite cautionary tale about surpassing the limits of Nature. The Maya "were able to build a complex society capable of great cultural and intellectual achievements, but they ended up destroying what they created," Clive Ponting wrote in his influential Green History of the World (199..
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Charles C. Mann |
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8cc1a39
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That one's as much Master as another, and since Men are all made of the same Clay there should be no Distinction or Superiority among them. [Emphasis
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Charles C. Mann |
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56ad7e0
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How could these hierarchical, acquisitive, market-oriented, monotheistic, ethnocentric newcomers have absorbed ideas and customs from the egalitarian, reciprocal, noncapitalistic, pantheistic, ethnocentric natives? The
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Charles C. Mann |
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11d8355
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Look to the Southeast, where, as Taylor has noted, "colonial societies sustained a slave system more oppressive than anything practiced in Europe" and "the slave-owners relied on Indians to catch runaways." There, too, the native groups, descended from Mississippian societies, were far more hierarchical and autocratically ruled than the Algonkian- and Iroquoian-speaking groups in the Northeast. As Gallay has documented, indigenous societies..
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Charles C. Mann |
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a4e2e61
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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, if "stable" is the appropriate word for a regime that involves routinely enshrouding miles of countryside in smoke and ash. And"
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Charles C. Mann |
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61ccfd7
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More than a hundred sets of casta paintings are known. Many are beautifully crafted. Some were painted by mixed people themselves. Looking
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Charles C. Mann |
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fdc1edf
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Where does government come from?" Haas asked. "What makes people decide to surrender some of their personal liberty to it? What did they gain from it? Philosophers have been asking this question for centuries. But archaeology should have something to contribute. In the Norte Chico, we may be able to provide some answers. It's one of only two places on earth--three, if you count Mesoamerica--where government was an invention. Everywhere else..
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Charles C. Mann |
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e46cd20
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In all of history, humankind has been able to domesticate only twenty-five mammals, a dozen or so birds, and, possibly, a lizard.
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Charles C. Mann |
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1987699
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In Mesoamerica, timekeeping provided the stimulus that accounting gave to the Middle East. Like contemporary astrologers, the Olmec, Maya, and Zapotec believed that celestial phenomena like the phases of the moon and Venus affect daily life. To measure and predict these portents requires careful sky watching and a calendar. Strikingly, Mesoamerican societies developed three calendars: a 365-day secular calendar like the contemporary calenda..
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Charles C. Mann |
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682b61f
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Colon's signal accomplishment was, in the phrase of historian Alfred W. Crosby, to reknit the seams of Pangaea.
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Charles C. Mann |
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e184ff7
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In a letter to Thomas Jefferson, the aging John Adams recalled the Massachusetts of his youth as a multiracial society. "Aaron Pomham the Priest and Moses Pomham the Kind of the Punkapaug and Neponsit Tribes were frequent Visitors at my Father's House ...," he wrote nostalgically."
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Charles C. Mann |
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94a3174
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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, if "stable" is the appropriate word for a regime that involves routinely enshrouding miles of countryside in smoke and ash. And it was a system that I..
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Charles C. Mann |
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5e701bd
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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--the Haudenosaunee especially, but many others, too. ("Their whole constitution breathes nothing but liberty," said colonist James Adair of the Ani Yun Wiya [Cherokee].) Important historically, these were the free people encountered by France and Britain--pers..
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Charles C. Mann |
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0c14e94
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In the classic successional course, each suite of plants replaces its predecessor, until the arrival of the final, "climax" ecosystem, usually tall forest."
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Charles C. Mann |
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d528c35
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With its federal government that can supersede state and local law, its dependence on rule by the majority rather than consensus, its bicameral legislature (members of one branch being elected at fixed intervals), and its denial of suffrage to women, slaves, and the unpropertied, the Constitution as originally enacted was sharply different from the Great Law. In addition, the Constitution's emphasis on protecting private property runs contr..
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Charles C. Mann |