|
708796c
|
To we moderns the sensation of being in a constructed environment is so ubiquitous as to be invisible--in the cocoon of our strip malls and automobiles, we are like the fish that cannot feel the water through which they swim. In Cahokia's day it was different. A thousand years ago it was the only place for a thousand miles in which one could be completely enveloped in an artificial landscape.
|
|
|
Charles C. Mann |
|
e90278c
|
In the first two centuries of colonization, the border between natives and newcomers was porous, almost nonexistent. The two societies mingled in a way that is difficult to imagine now. 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 ...,"
|
|
|
Charles C. Mann |
|
3209133
|
Every society, big or little, misses out on "obvious" technologies. The lacunae have enormous impact on people's lives--imagine Europe with efficient plows or the Maya with iron tools--but not much effect on the scale of a civilization's endeavors, as shown by both European and Maya history."
|
|
|
Charles C. Mann |
|
2e04c13
|
The staple crop of the highlands was the potato, which unlike maize regularly grows at altitudes of 14,000 feet; the tubers, cultivated in hundreds of varieties, can be left in the ground for as long as a year (as long as the soil stays above 27degF), to be dug up and cooked when needed. Even frozen potatoes could be used. After letting freezing night temperatures break down the tubers' cell walls, Andean farmers stomped out the water conte..
|
|
|
Charles C. Mann |
|
ee15811
|
Chestnut was especially popular--not the imported European chestnut roasted on Manhattan street corners in the fall, but the smaller, soft-shelled, deeply sweet native American chestnut, now almost extinguished by chestnut blight. In colonial times, as many as one out of every four trees in between southeastern Canada and Georgia was a chestnut--partly the result, it would seem, of Indian burning and planting.
|
|
|
Charles C. Mann |
|
a169486
|
At the same time, Wari and Tiwanaku kept themselves separate. Although they shared resources, there is little evidence that people from one culture visited the other often, or had friendships across the political lines. Wari homes were furnished with Wari goods; Tiwanaku homes, Tiwanaku goods. Despite living next to each other, people continued to speak their different languages and wear their different clothing and look for inspiration and..
|
|
|
Charles C. Mann |
|
76914b5
|
Most of the salt occurred in the sediments on the swamp bottoms. To make the water potable, the Maya laid a layer of crushed limestone atop the sediments, effectively paving over the salt. As the researchers noted, the work had to be done before the Maya could move in and set up their milpas and gardens.
|
|
|
Charles C. Mann |
|
4ff790c
|
Because they did not burn the land with the same skill and frequency as its previous occupants, the forests grew thicker. Left untended, maize fields filled in with weeds, then bushes and trees. My ancestor Billington's great-grandchildren may not have realized it, but the impenetrable sweep of dark forest admired by Thoreau was something that Billington never saw. Later, of course, Europeans stripped New England almost bare of trees.
|
|
|
Charles C. Mann |
|
65301f4
|
Drought indeed stressed the system, but the societal disintegration in the south was due not to surpassing inherent ecological limits but the political failure to find solutions.
|
|
|
Charles C. Mann |
|
05fb4a5
|
glottochronology,
|
|
|
Charles C. Mann |
|
7a42ff1
|
The monks explain that they have been sent by "the one who on the earth is the greater speaker of divine things," the pope, to bring the "venerable word / of the One Sole True God" to New Spain. By worshipping at false altars, the friars say, "you cause Him an injured heart, / by which you live in His anger, His ire." So infuriated was the Christian God by the Indians' worship of idols and demons that he sent out "the Spaniards, / ... those..
|
|
|
Charles C. Mann |
|
60c959e
|
By 1700, English colonies were studded along the Atlantic shore from what would become Maine to what would become South Carolina. Northern colonies coexisted with Algonkian-speaking Indian societies that had few slaves and little interest in buying and selling captives; southern colonies coexisted with former Mississippian societies with many slaves and considerable experience in trading them. Roughly speaking, the boundary between these tw..
|
|
|
Charles C. Mann |
|
e2aa618
|
The varieties are not like islands, carefully apart," Perales explained. "They are more like gentle hills in a landscape--you see them, they are clearly present, but you cannot specify precisely where they start."
|
|
|
Charles C. Mann |
|
1572b74
|
Like a painting, we will be erased. Like a flower, we will dry up here on earth. Like plumed vestments of the precious bird, That precious bird with the agile neck, We will come to an end.
|
|
|
Charles C. Mann |
|
d09efc6
|
A milpa is a field, usually but not always recently cleared, in which farmers plant a dozen crops at once, including maize, avocados, multiple varieties of squash and bean, melon, tomatoes, chilis, sweet potato, jicama (a tuber), amaranth (a grain-like plant), and mucuna (a tropical legume).
|
|
|
Charles C. Mann |
|
f0b8510
|
Half of the 102 people on the Mayflower made it through the first winter, which to me seemed amazing. How did they survive? In his history of Plymouth colony, Governor Bradford himself provides one answer: robbing Indian houses and graves.
|
|
|
Charles C. Mann |
|
e5b4476
|
Likely the milpa cannot be replicated on an industrial scale. But by studying its essential features, researchers may be able to smooth the rough ecological edges of conventional agriculture. "Mesoamerica still has much to teach us," Wilkes said."
|
|
|
Charles C. Mann |
|
ee22d31
|
American history is often described in terms of Europeans entering a nearly empty wilderness. For centuries, though, most of the newcomers were African and the land was not empty, but filled with millions of indigenous people. Much of the great encounter between the two separate halves of the world thus was less a meeting of Europe and America than a meeting of Africans and Indians--a relationship forged both in the cage of slavery and in t..
|
|
|
Charles C. Mann |
|
7bfe75c
|
Criminals beheaded in Palermo, heretics burned alive in Toledo, assassins drawn and quartered in Paris--Europeans flocked to every form of painful death imaginable, free entertainment that drew huge crowds. London, the historian Fernand Braudel tells us, held public executions eight times a year at Tyburn, just north of Hyde Park. (The diplomat Samuel Pepys paid a shilling for a good view of a Tyburn hanging in 1664; watching the victim beg..
|
|
history
human-sacrifice
culture
europe
|
Charles C. Mann |
|
daeb732
|
Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European maps proudly depicted Africa's Atlantic coast as bristling with Danish, Dutch, English, French, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish forts, garrisons, and trading posts. But most of the stars on the maps had fewer than ten expatriate residents and many had fewer than five. The principality of Whydah, in today's Benin, exported 400,000 people in the first quarter of the eighteenth century--it was the ..
|
|
|
Charles C. Mann |
|
320035f
|
In this way the sacred mission of the Triple Alliance became translated into a secular mission: to obtain prisoners to sacrifice for the sun, the Alliance had to take over the world.
|
|
|
Charles C. Mann |
|
73ad3ae
|
Many if not most tlamatinime saw existence as Nabokov feared: "a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness."
|
|
|
Charles C. Mann |
|
0b20e4e
|
Having grown separately for millennia, the Americas were a boundless sea of novel ideas, dreams, stories, philosophies, religions, moralities, discoveries, and all the other products of the mind. Few things are more sublime or characteristically human than the cross-fertilization of cultures. The simple discovery by Europe of the existence of the Americas caused an intellectual ferment. How much grander would have been the tumult if Indian ..
|
|
|
Charles C. Mann |
|
11af38f
|
In other words, as one mother-culture advocate put it, I am "swallowing Marcus's [nonsense] whole."
|
|
|
Charles C. Mann |
|
bd5033a
|
The second myth is that in its appetite for death as spectacle the Triple Alliance was fundamentally different from Europe. Criminals beheaded in Palermo, heretics burned alive in Toledo, assassins drawn and quartered in Paris--Europeans flocked to every form of painful death imaginable, free entertainment that drew huge crowds.
|
|
|
Charles C. Mann |
|
f7f0d74
|
In contemporary hunting and gathering societies, anthropologists have learned, gathering by women usually supplies most of the daily diet. The meat provided by male hunters is a kind of luxury, a special treat for a binge and celebration, the Pleistocene equivalent of a giant box of Toblerone.
|
|
|
Charles C. Mann |
|
cd8430b
|
Anything goes now, apparently," Fiedel told me. "The lunatics have taken over the asylum."
|
|
|
Charles C. Mann |
|
53bdf6c
|
Almost everyone agreed that the new name was a big improvement, logically speaking. Unfortunately, nobody used it. Not for the first time in Native American history, the confusing, incorrect name prevailed.
|
|
|
Charles C. Mann |
|
b90ac8d
|
But the new picture doesn't automatically legitimate burning down the forest. Instead it suggests that for a long time clever people who knew tricks that we have yet to learn used big chunks of Amazonia nondestructively. Faced with an ecological problem, the Indians fixed it. Rather than adapt to Nature, they created it. They were in the midst of terra-forming the Amazon when Columbus showed up and ruined everything.
|
|
|
Charles C. Mann |
|
2395cc8
|
After 1492 the world's ecosystems collided and mixed as European vessels carried thousands of species to new homes across the oceans.
|
|
|
Charles C. Mann |
|
d75980e
|
In Mesopotamia, the wheel dates back to at least the time of Sumer. It was a basic part of life throughout Eurasia. Chariot wheels, water wheels, potter's wheels, millstone wheels--one can't imagine Europe or China without them. The only thing more mysterious than failing to invent the wheel would be inventing the wheel and then failing to use it. But that is exactly what the Indians did.
|
|
|
Charles C. Mann |
|
613c9d4
|
Mesoamerica would deserve its place in the human pantheon if its inhabitants had only created maize, in terms of harvest weight the world's most important crop. But the inhabitants of Mexico and northern Central America also developed tomatoes, now basic to Italian cuisine; peppers, essential to Thai and Indian food; all the world's squashes (except for a few domesticated in the United States); and many of the beans on dinner plates around ..
|
|
|
Charles C. Mann |
|
e9cdaa0
|
Smallpox has an incubation period of about twelve days, during which time sufferers, who may not know they are sick, can infect anyone they meet. With its fine roads and great population movements, Tawantinsuyu was perfectly positioned for a major epidemic. Smallpox radiated throughout the empire like ink spreading through tissue paper. Millions of people simultaneously experienced its symptoms: high fever, vomiting, severe pain, oozing bli..
|
|
|
Charles C. Mann |
|
62e8441
|
The twenty-five cities were not sited strategically and did not have defensive walls; no evidence of warfare, such as burned buildings or mutilated corpses, has been found. Instead, he said, the basis of the rulers' power was the collective economic and spiritual good. Norte Chico was the realm of King Cotton.
|
|
|
Charles C. Mann |
|
653c0a8
|
Virgin-soil death rates for smallpox are hard to establish because for the last century most potential research subjects have been vaccinated. But a study in the early 1960s of seven thousand unvaccinated smallpox cases in southern India found that the disease killed 43 percent of its victims. Noting the extreme vulnerability of Andean populations--they would not even have known to quarantine victims, as Europeans had--Dobyns hypothesized t..
|
|
|
Charles C. Mann |
|
6c7de93
|
Amazonians practiced a kind of agro-forestry, farming with trees, unlike any kind of agriculture in Europe, Africa, or Asia.
|
|
|
Charles C. Mann |
|
673a362
|
the destruction of Indian societies by European epidemics both decreased native burning and increased tree growth. Each subtracted carbon dioxide from the air. In 2010 a research team led by Robert A. Dull of the University of Texas estimated that reforesting former farmland in American tropical regions alone could have been responsible for as much as a quarter of the temperature drop--an analysis, the researchers noted, that did not includ..
|
|
|
Charles C. Mann |
|
e929da5
|
In the Norte Chico, in other words, Homo sapiens experienced a phenomenon that at that time had occurred only once before, in Mesopotamia: the emergence, for better or worse, of leaders with enough prestige, influence, and hierarchical position to induce their subjects to perform heavy labor. It was humankind's second experiment with government. "Where does government come from?" Haas asked. "What makes people decide to surrender some of th..
|
|
|
Charles C. Mann |
|
7a73b25
|
One of the French sailors had learned enough Massachusett to inform his captors before dying that God would destroy them for their misdeeds. The Nauset scoffed at the threat. But the Europeans carried a disease, and they bequeathed it to their jailers. Based on accounts of the symptoms, the epidemic was probably of viral hepatitis, according to a study by Arthur E. Spiess, of the Maine Historic Preservation Commission, and Bruce D. Spiess, ..
|
|
|
Charles C. Mann |
|
8f84f64
|
Metal tools largely created slash-and-burn agriculture, William M. Denevan, the Wisconsin geographer, told me. "This picture of swidden as this ancient practice by which Indians kept themselves in a timeless balance with Nature--that is mostly or entirely a myth, I think. At least there's no evidence for it, and a fair amount of evidence against it, including the evidence of simple logic." Slash-and-burn, supposedly a quintessentially Amazo..
|
|
|
Charles C. Mann |
|
0de4791
|
the very existence of so much healthy forest after twelve thousand years of use by large populations suggests that whatever Indians did before swidden must have been ecologically more sustainable.
|
|
|
Charles C. Mann |
|
aa3c9d1
|
Because of their obsession with gold, the conquistadors are often dismissed as "gold crazy." In fact they were not so much gold crazy as status crazy. Like Hernan Cortes, who conquered Mexico, Pizarro was born into the lower fringes of the nobility and hoped by his exploits to earn titles, offices, and pensions from the Spanish crown. To obtain these royal favors, their expeditions had to bring something back for the king. Given the difficu..
|
|
|
Charles C. Mann |
|
d244971
|
The fact is that what scientists call zoonotic disease was little known in the Americas. By contrast, swine, mainstays of European agriculture, transmit anthrax, brucellosis, leptospirosis, trichinosis, and tuberculosis. Pigs breed exuberantly and can pass diseases to deer and turkeys, which then can infect people. Only a few of De Soto's pigs would have had to wander off to contaminate the forest. The calamity wreaked by the De Soto expedi..
|
|
|
Charles C. Mann |
|
e1107da
|
Technologically speaking, China was so far ahead of the rest of Eurasia that foreign lands had little to offer except raw materials, which could be obtained without going to the bother of dispatching gigantic flotillas on lengthy journeys. Beijing easily could have sent Zheng past Africa to Europe, observed the George Mason University political scientist Jack Goldstone. But the empire stopped long-range exploration "for the same reason the ..
|
|
|
Charles C. Mann |