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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 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 | ||
| 884e1af | who held title to all the land and its produce, could vote down decisions by the male leaders of the League and demand that an issue be reconsidered. Under this regime women were so much better off than their counterparts in Europe that nineteenth-century U.S. feminists like Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, all of whom lived in Haudenosaunee country, drew inspiration from their lot. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 7170e99 | Europeans won military victories in New England, historians say, partly because they were divided among themselves. Indians were unwilling, too, to match the English tactic of massacring whole villages. But another, bigger part of the reason for the foreigners' triumph was that by the 1670s the newcomers outnumbered the natives. Groups like the Narragansett, which had been spared by the epidemic of 1616, were crushed by a smallpox epidemic .. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 29c89db | The Haudenosaunee thus would have the second oldest continuously existing representative parliaments on earth. Only Iceland's Althing, founded in 930 A.D., is older. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 0f234fd | 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." | Charles C. Mann | ||
| e1b3052 | Cahokia was one big piece in the mosaic of chiefdoms that covered the lower half of the Mississippi and the Southeast at the end of the first millennium A.D. Known collectively as "Mississippian" cultures, these societies arose several centuries after the decline of the Hopewell culture, and probably were its distant descendants. At any one time a few larger polities dominated the dozens or scores of small chiefdoms. Cahokia, biggest of all.. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 509a129 | Think of the fruitful impact on Europe and its descendants from contacting Asia. Imagine the effect on these places and people from a second Asia. Along with the unparalleled loss of life, that is what vanished when smallpox came ashore. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 10594a5 | On October 7 the cormorants abruptly came back, hundreds of thousands of them, only to disappear after a week. On the 20th the birds returned, then vanished on the 24th. By November 7 they were back--only to bolt a few days later. In 1940 the warm waters came again. And in 1941. And they showed up earlier, at the beginning of nesting, so the birds then fled their nesting grounds and didn't reproduce. Entire generations were not being born. .. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| dbe264e | Vogt was unable to test this hypothesis until late in 1940, when he persuaded the guano company to measure plankton abundance by dragging the sea at multiple locations with a fine silk net. He examined the samples with the sole tool available, a magnifying glass he had managed to acquire on a trip to Lima. Despite the crude equipment he was able to gather enough data to see what was happening. The "general tendency," he wrote, was for "fall.. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 8b87799 | As any biologist would predict, this success led to an increase in human numbers--slow at first, then rapid, tracing Gause's S-shaped curve. We began rising up the steepest part of the slope in the sixteenth or seventeenth century. If we follow Gause's pattern, growth will continue at delirious speed until the second inflection point, when we have exhausted the global petri dish. After that, human life will be, briefly, a Hobbesian nightmar.. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| b8cdcab | The conflict between these visions is not between good and evil, but between different ideas of the good life, between ethical orders that give priority to personal liberty and those that give priority to what might be called connection. To Borlaug, the landscape of late-twentieth-century capitalism, with its teeming global markets dominated by big corporations, was morally acceptable, though ever in need of repair. Its emphasis on personal.. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 51b4384 | Vogt spent ten months in Mexico, much of it with Juana, at the behest of the Mexican agricultural ministry, writing a guide to conservation for Mexican schoolchildren, and struggling with his cane and braces through twenty-six national parks. Although statistics showed that the country was Latin America's wealthiest, its landscapes were enshrouded by suffering: impoverished subsistence farmers, scratching at depleted soils, taking down the .. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| d9c2cdf | humankind, though "apt to forget it, is a creature of the earth. 'Dust thou art' and 'All flesh is grass' were not said by scientists, but they are sound biology." When lower creatures exhaust their resources, Vogt argued, bad things happen. Exactly the same is true for Homo sapiens. The article tallied example after example of overreaching, most drawn from Vogt's travels in Latin America. But then, provocatively, he switched to the United .. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| f1e3da1 | Homo sapiens, she once told me, is an unusually successful species. And it is the fate of every successful species to wipe itself out--that is the way things work in biology. By "wipe itself out" Margulis didn't necessarily mean extinction--just that something comprehensively bad would happen, wrecking the human enterprise. Borlaug and Vogt might have wanted to stop us from destroying ourselves, she would have said, but they were kidding th.. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| d3b714f | For almost five centuries, Holmberg's Mistake--the supposition that Native Americans lived in an eternal, unhistoried state--held sway in scholarly work, and from there fanned out to high school textbooks, Hollywood movies, newspaper articles, environmental campaigns, romantic adventure books, and silk-screened T-shirts. It existed in many forms and was embraced both by those who hated Indians and those who admired them. Holmberg's Mistake .. | Charles C. Mann |