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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 574b722 | 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. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 6f6da7f | he argued, was not perfectly round but "in the shape of a pear," | Charles C. Mann | ||
| d3cc54a | 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.. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 3f0bf0b | 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. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 5b8ad45 | of venereal soldiers along the way. A more effective | Charles C. Mann | ||
| f88fb1f | 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 | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 388b41b | Holmberg's Mistake. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| e8c8428 | 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 | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 710bf41 | Inka satrapies; | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 36a3621 | 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. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 0ac6f7a | 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. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| b922efd | 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.) | Charles C. Mann | ||
| c602f94 | 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). | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 375a06e | 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.. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 45e51e3 | Smoke rose into the sky in great, juddering pillars. In | Charles C. Mann | ||
| e98530d | 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.. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 8cc1a39 | 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 | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 56ad7e0 | How could these hierarchical, acquisitive, market-oriented, monotheistic, ethnocentric newcomers have absorbed ideas and customs from the egalitarian, reciprocal, noncapitalistic, pantheistic, ethnocentric natives? The | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 11d8355 | 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.. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| a4e2e61 | 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" | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 61ccfd7 | More than a hundred sets of casta paintings are known. Many are beautifully crafted. Some were painted by mixed people themselves. Looking | Charles C. Mann | ||
| fdc1edf | 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.. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| e46cd20 | In all of history, humankind has been able to domesticate only twenty-five mammals, a dozen or so birds, and, possibly, a lizard. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 1987699 | 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.. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 682b61f | Colon's signal accomplishment was, in the phrase of historian Alfred W. Crosby, to reknit the seams of Pangaea. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| e184ff7 | 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." | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 94a3174 | 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.. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 5e701bd | 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.. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 0c14e94 | In the classic successional course, each suite of plants replaces its predecessor, until the arrival of the final, "climax" ecosystem, usually tall forest." | Charles C. Mann | ||
| d528c35 | 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.. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 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 |