Aztec empire

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The World of Inner Africa Geography, Race, and Language The World’s Three Transformations in Africa Humans, Farmers, and States The Nile Connection The Saharan Separation The Bantu Migrations Words, Seeds, and Iron A Common Culture? Empires, States, and Stateless Societies Politics, Population, and Climate Lots of Land West Africa Stateless Societies Kingdoms for Horses East and South Africa Cattle and Colonization Great Zimbabwe Inner Africa and the World The World of the Americas States and Empires of Middle America Before the Aztecs Classical Mayan A Theoretical Interlude: Priests and Soldiers Toltecs and Aztecs States and Empires of South America

Before the Incas Classical Chavin Moche Warrior Priests and Divine Emperors Incas and Their Ancestors States and Peoples of North America Peoples and Places Rich Pacific Fisheries Pueblos of the Southwest Eastern Woodland Farmers Americas and the World The World of the Pacific Islands and Settlers Islands First Wave Australia Austronesian and Polynesian Migrations Austronesian Migrations Polynesian Migrations Language and Culture Ecology and Colonization The Advantages of Parallel Worlds The Lessons of Parallel Worlds Lessons of Similarities Similarities or Connections Lessons of Differences The Strength of Parallel Worlds

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Parallel Worlds of Inner Africa, the Americas, and Oceania

Before 1450

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Figure 6.1 Time line.

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WHILE THE Afro-Eurasian world came together as a single system between the classical age 2,000 years ago and the rise of the West 500 years ago, other parts of the world carried out their own traditions, established their own networks of interaction, and experienced their own arcs of change. We turn in this chapter to these “parallel worlds” in inner Africa, the Ameri- cas, and the Pacific Ocean because their stories are as compelling as they are separate. Indeed, their very separateness gives us a greatly ex- panded field of evidence and example to help us understand the human condition and his- torical change. To focus only on the dominant trend is very much like telling only the history of the victors. In either case, we end with a lesser sense of who we are and an even lesser sense of who we could be.

The World of Inner Africa

“Outer” Africa—the Nile, the Red Sea and Indian Ocean ports, North Africa along the Mediterranean, and the kingdoms of West Africa—was an intrinsic part of the Afro- Eurasian world of the first millennium CE. The Nile valley was a creator of that world. The Red Sea and Mediterranean were early participants. By 1000 CE, a single zone of communication extended across the western Sahara as well, to the border of tropical rain forests just north of the equator.

Inner Africa was the interior African world that was not swept up into the Afro-Eurasian network before 1450. It constituted a large part of the African continent below the Sahara Desert. It includes all of Africa south of the equator, all of the equatorial rain forests, and the dry lands and savanna that pushed into the Sahara in central Africa.

Geography, Race, and Language

Inner Africa had not been integrated into the Afro-Eurasian network because it was remote from the rest of Eurasia. In addition to the almost 1,000-mile width of the Sahara Desert, the rivers of Africa made contact difficult. The rivers of West Africa like the Niger and Congo flowed from uplands across cataracts and waterfalls to the Atlantic Ocean, making it difficult for outsiders to enter. In addition, the maritime path from the northern Atlantic was blocked by prevailing currents that inhib- ited easy access. From Asia, East Africa was easier to reach across the Red Sea and Indian Ocean. Contacts between the Arab world and the Swahili cities of the East African coast were extensive as far south as modern Mozambique.

Inner Africa was the larger part of a huge continent. The perpendicular grid of popular Mercator world maps, which magnify po- lar areas and reduce areas near the equator, makes it look as if Africa is about the size of Greenland. In fact, Africa is 15 times larger: 12 million square miles, compared to Green- land’s total area of 840,000 square miles. By comparison, all of Eurasia amounts to 21 mil- lion square miles. Africa is larger than China, India, the continental United States, and the entire continent of Australia combined.

Africa is also far more diverse than most people imagine. Geographically, Africa contains some of the wettest and driest places on earth, snowcapped mountains, dense rain forests, and open fields as well as deserts. Biologically, Af- ricans are more diverse than the people of any other continent. This physical diversity (mea- sured by DNA) stems from the long period of human development in Africa before mankind populated the rest of the planet. When Europe- ans began classifying humans into “races,” they failed to recognize this diversity. In the interest

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of seeing the African as dark skinned or black, they failed to recognize that they were creating a particular stereotype—based mainly on people who came from West Africa. Consequently, they missed the differences in appearance of not only the Berbers and Arabs of North Africa but also the taller people of the Nile valley, the shorter people of the Congo rain forest, and the lighter-complexioned people of the southern African desert. Europeans also failed to recognize the social and cultural diversity of Africans. They failed to recognize that even in- ner Africa contained empires, various kinds of states, village-based societies (without states), cities, and pastoral and agricultural societies as well as hunter-gatherers.

Today, biologists and anthropologists are not inclined to use the word race in classifying peoples, in part because of the tortured history of the term but also because of its lack of preci- sion in a world shaped more by culture than biology and by intermixing more than isolation. Rather, we might see the mixtures of African peoples coming from regions of relative separa- tion, speaking different languages, and prac- ticing different cultures. By that measure, we might distinguish five major groups of African language and culture systems. These would be the Afro-Asian peoples of the north (including ancient Egyptians, Berbers, and, more recently, Arabs), the Nilotic-Sudanic peoples (mainly herders, often tall and thin in stature) from the Nile valley, the Niger-Congo peoples of West Africa (including speakers of the Bantu lan- guages), the Pygmy peoples of Central Africa, and the Khoisan people in the Kalahari Desert.

The World’s Three Transformations in Africa

Humans, Farmers, and States. In the begin- ning, of course, we were all Africans. The

first transformation began when some of our ancestors started moving out of Africa about a million years ago. The next transformation occurred with the development of agriculture, but since Africans were among the first to plant and domesticate crops, the only diver- gence between Africa and the rest of Afro- Eurasia was in the particular crops that were domesticated. The third global transformation centered on the revolution in social organiza- tion that led to cities and states. The North Af- rican Egyptian state was one of the leaders in that revolution. Here, too, African Egyptians developed their own civilization, one that they shared with neighbors to the south.

The Nile Connection. During the Egyptian period, contact between northern and central Africa continued as state societies were created up the Nile in Kush, Meroe, and Nubia (in what is today Sudan). About 750 BCE, a Kushite king conquered Egypt and established a dynasty that ruled the two kingdoms for 100 years. From about 590 BCE to 350 CE, the successor state of Meroe remained independent of Egypt and its various occupiers (Persian, Greek, and Ro- man), and cultivated a way of life that included a centralized state, pyramids, irrigation, hiero- glyphic writing, and iron smelting. They were finally conquered not by the Romans but by the Christian Axumite kingdom of Ethiopia. After Meroe, Nubian kings ruled the upper Nile. They converted to the Coptic Christianity of Egypt, reestablishing close contact with Egypt between 350 and 700 CE. The patriarch in Al- exandria appointed bishops and trained clergy, and Nubians studied the Coptic rite, developed an alphabetical script based on Coptic Greek and old Meroitic, and traveled back and forth frequently. Nubian inscriptions indicate knowl- edge of Greek as late as the twelfth century.

The flow between northern and central Africa that had continued for millennia was

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interrupted by two factors, one ephemeral and the other climatic. The ephemeral interrup- tion was the Arab conquest of Egypt around 700. Sudan broke into the Arabic and Muslim north and a largely Christian south. But the Nile remained the main link between northern and central Africa because a more fundamen- tal barrier had arisen between the Mediter- ranean and central Africa since the time of the first pharaohs: the Sahara Desert.

The Saharan Separation. The Sahara Des- ert is a formidable barrier today. A modern jet takes several hours to fly the more than 1,000 miles from north to south, and all you can see is sand. On the ground, the shifting hills of sand and rock outcroppings are both more treacherous and more interesting. Nothing, however, is more striking to the modern ar- chaeologist than the appearance, hundreds of miles from the nearest water hole, of vivid and colorful rock paintings of flowers, birds, herds of antelope, cattle grazing, and humans farm- ing and hunting. These paintings are evidence that the Sahara was at one time a garden of life, a lush environment crowded with animals and people. On the ground, geologists can see evi- dence that almost 10,000 years ago Lake Chad, on the southwestern border of the Sahara, was 25 times its current size.

We now realize that the Sahara has gone through alternating wet and dry stages over hundreds of thousands of years. The most recent wet period was at the end of the last gla- cial period and lasted from about 11,000 years ago until 5,000 years ago. The current desert dates from about 3000 BCE, the beginning of the Egyptian Old Kingdom. Egyptian culture may be descended from these Neolithic rock painters of the Sahara in some ways: there is evidence, for instance, of mummification and cattle burial in the Sahara. But the larger point about the history of Africa is that a huge

barrier appeared between the Mediterranean and the rest of Africa, just at the moment that the world was embarking on the great Bronze Age transformation. Thus, while only Africans participated in the first transformation into humans and many Africans, north and south, participated in the second transformation into plant and animal domestication, an enormous barrier separated the participants in the third transformation from the rest of Africa.

The history of Sudan shows that the sepa- ration was by no means complete. But the Nile River was the only route that ran from the north to the African interior. When the Arabs conquered Egypt, that connection was interrupted. Initially, the Arabs directed their attention and trade north to Syria and Iraq rather than west across the Red Sea, but even- tually Arab, Indian, and even Chinese ships added the Swahili ports of East Africa to their itineraries. Still, these contacts were limited to the coast. Africans controlled the internal trade. Similarly, in West Africa, trans-Saharan trade routes integrated the cities of the King- dom of Mali into the Dar al-Islam, but much of the hugeness of Africa was invisible to the travelers, sheiks, and salt sellers, exhausted after weeks on a camel in driving sand, having finally reached their destination near the Niger at Jenne or Timbuktu.

The Bantu Migrations

There is a simple principle for figuring where something came from. The original site of something always has the greatest variety. Thus, Africa has the greatest variety of hu- mans; Morocco has a greater variety of Ar- abs than Jenne or Timbuktu. In the same way, Niger-Congo languages and specifically the subgroup of Bantu languages are spoken over much of Africa, but they are densely

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concentrated in the high grasslands of Camer- oon. You can travel today in Cameroon a few miles from one village to the next and hear people speaking a different Bantu language. There are, in fact, more than 200 languages spoken in the Cameroon grasslands, an area smaller than the state of New Jersey. This fact shows us that the Bantu languages spoken throughout Africa south of the Sahara origi- nated there.

Words, Seeds, and Iron. About 3,000 years ago, Bantu-speaking people from this

area began a series of migrations that spread their descendants into East Africa and south through much of the rest of the continent by about 1000 CE. With their language, they brought their culture and tools. They brought agriculture—their knack for raising yams and palm oil trees, guinea hens, and goats. From people in central Africa, they picked up the ability to smelt iron in a furnace with bel- lows. From the Nilotic-Sudanic people, they borrowed the ability to raise sheep, pigs, and cattle that had been bred to survive the tsetse

Map 6.1 From 2000 BCE to 1000 CE, Bantu-speaking peoples moved out of the grasslands of Cameroon west and south to eventually become the dominant linguistic and ethnic group in central and southern Africa. Their expansion was aided by their agriculture (in relation to forest foragers), skill with canoes, and, after 1000 BCE, their ability to make iron tools and weapons.

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Parallel Worlds of Inner Africa, the Americas, and Oceania 193

fly of the tropics. Their diet also expanded as they picked up the cultivation of African grains like millet and sorghum. On the east coast of Africa, they added bananas and chick- ens brought from Indonesia. Some of their descendants became the Swahili merchants of East African cities. Others moved into the rain forests and grasslands of southern Africa. In the mountains and tropical rain forests of central Africa, they met the Batwa (or Twa) people (sometimes called pygmies because of their small stature), who were hunter- gatherers. They exchanged their agricultural products and tools (first polished stone and then iron) for the forest products of the Batwa, especially honey, ivory, and wild animal skins. Farther south, in what is today the Kalahari Desert, they encountered the Khoisan people, who were herders and hunter-gatherers; these lighter-complexioned people spoke a “click language,” so called because of its use of dif- ferent dental sounds.

As Bantu speakers encountered hunting- gathering peoples in places like the Congo rain forest and the Kalahari, different things hap- pened. In some cases, the agricultural Bantu took over the best lands, pushing the hunting- gathering people into more remote areas. The original crops of the grasslands did not grow in the rain forest, but bananas turned out to be extravagantly successful in the rain forest (as was the brewing of banana beer). In some cases, the two groups mixed together, although usually at the cost of the traditions and cul- ture of the hunter-gatherers, who ultimately adopted the Bantu language and culture. Still, in some cases, the forest dwellers were able to use their commercial importance to achieve a certain degree of leverage in trading with the Bantu while keeping to their traditional ways.

A Common Culture? The spread of Bantu peoples provided a broadly common cultural

background for much of inner Africa. In ad- dition to the Bantu language family, this com- mon culture included a set of domesticated crops and animals, iron metallurgy, and a ten- dency to figure inheritance from the mother but give maternally connected men important roles in councils of elders and kingship. Bantu religious beliefs generally accepted a supreme being, but most religious practices were de- voted to ancestors and nature spirits. Masks were used in religious rituals, and drumming and dance were central in festive and solemn rituals.

It would be a mistake, however, to see Bantu culture as changeless. As new genera- tions and branches of Bantu-speaking peoples migrated east and south, they adopted and added new cultural characteristics, such as a variety of round conical and rectangular hous- ing, descent through the male as well as the female line, and a wide range of political and social institutions.

Empires, States, and Stateless Societies

Inner Africa contained states as well as vil- lage or lineage-based societies, but clearly states were larger and more pronounced in the areas of outer Africa that were part of the Afro-Eurasian network. Why, then, were cities, states, and empires concentrated in some areas, like the Nile, and not in others areas, like central and southern Africa?

Politics, Population, and Climate. The long-term drying of the climate may contain part of the answer. Recent studies of ice cores from the top of Africa’s largest mountain, Kilimanjaro, confirm that the cycle of drying that began about 5,300 years ago and created the Sahara extended throughout the continent (and probably into the Middle East and west- ern Asia).1

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Reductions in rainfall may have had op- posite effects in northern and central Africa, increasing population centers in the north and reducing density in the south. In the north, the drying of the Sahara pushed agricultural- ists and herders into the Nile valley (as well as north and south), forcing more people to con- tend with scarce resources. Population con- centration likely resulted in state formation. Those who already enjoyed status increased their dominance in chiefdoms, kingdoms, and state societies. Kings and leading social classes formed states and systems of law to en- sure their political dominance and economic expropriation.

Lots of Land. The impact of climatic dry- ing in central tropical Africa was to reduce the rain forests and increase the grasslands. This was the background of the expansion

of Bantu agriculturalists. Climate desicca- tion opened sparsely populated forests areas into new arable grasslands, attracting just the sorts of people who were looking to expand their agricultural way of life. Bantu farmers and herders “had so much more country into which they could expand,” the historian Christopher Ehret points out. As West Afri- can peoples spread out

across the immense reaches of East and southeast Africa, their settlement densi- ties would have been very low indeed, much lower than in the western Great Lakes region from which their expansions stemmed. . . . Not until later centuries, by which time their population densities would have considerably increased, did larger chiefdoms and eventually, [after 1000] kingdoms evolve in such places.2

Figure 6.2 This bronze plaque shows a king of Benin flanked by warriors and attendants. Art Resource, NY. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, USA.

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West Africa

Virtually every political structure that emerged in inner Africa could be found in the areas of West Africa that grew in the wake of the great drying up of the Sahara after 3000 BCE. From about 300 CE to 1000 CE, West Africa enjoyed substantial rainfall, and the population grew considerably. The densest area was probably the high grasslands of Cameroon, which pro- vided an especially healthy climate since it was above the altitude at which mosquitoes carry- ing malaria could flourish.

Stateless Societies. Nevertheless, even in these highly populated areas, West Africans (Bantu speakers and others) favored small com- munities without states or hierarchies. Typi- cally, a group of 5 to 15 villages formed a kafu, a sort of confederation with a big man or chief. This preference for autonomy and the great availability of unoccupied lands contributed to make the Bantu and other West Africans such great migrants and colonists. A tradition whereby the eldest son inherited the family land also encouraged other sons to clear their own land from the nearby woodlands or forest. In addition, the West African custom of polygyny created families in which the men with the most land had the most wives and the most sons, all of whom had to fend for themselves.

Sometimes, a particularly ambitious chief would combine a cluster of kafus and create a state, declaring himself king. The great West African state of the thirteenth to fifteenth cen- turies, Mali, was founded this way, according to the great epic of Sundiata Keita. “From be- ing village chiefs, the Keitas have become tribal chiefs and then kings,” the poet of Sundiata recalled.3 The epic also underlines the link be- tween agricultural colonization and kingship: “Cut the trees, turn the forests into fields, for then only will you become a true king.”

Kingdoms for Horses. We have noticed in previous chapters the close connection between state formation and horses. What role did horses play in West African state formation? We know through Saharan paintings that small horses were in North Africa before the camel was domesticated about the fourth century CE. They likely came south as well as north before the first millennium. The Epic of Sundiata tells us that Sundiata forged a kingdom in the 1230s with an army of free archers and cavalry forces. But the cavalries of the thirteenth cen- tury rode ponies without saddles or stirrups. By the 1330s, the time of Mansa Musa, Mali em- ployed the heavy cavalry of Mamluk Egypt and the Islamic world. Horses were difficult to breed near the equator, and their life expectancies were shortened by tropical diseases, but these new large imported horses changed the balance between stateless peoples and states.

Equipped with saddles and stirrups, they were a formative force against standing bow- men. Introduced by the Muslim kingdom of Kanem about 1250, the combination of large horses and Islam created one kingdom after another in sub-Saharan West Africa. But the large horses had to be imported. An armed heavy cavalry was expensive, requiring heavy expropriation of settled farming populations. Since farmers could easily migrate to new lands, cavalries turned to raiding and capturing them, making them slaves and forcing them to farm for the king or his cavalry aristocracy.

The kingdoms of West Africa between 1250 and 1450 (Kanem, Bornu, Mali, and Songhai) were based on the simultaneous growth of cavalry and slaves. Slaves paid for horses, and cavalries could capture the slaves. By 1450, a large warhorse cost between 9 and 14 slaves. It is estimated that 4,000 to 7,000 slaves per year were taken up the trans-Sahara routes (including that from Darfur in East

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Africa) to be exchanged for horses. Even if many died during the crossing, the value of each survivor increased five to eight times from below the Sahara to the Mediterranean coast.4

Stateless communities still thrived where horses could not go: in the tropical rain forests and beyond—along the coasts of West Africa. Lineage societies functioned with the aid of various strategies to maintain their autonomy: clan loyalties, councils of elders, initiation “secret societies,” “age sets” of male contem- poraries, systems of mediation by outsiders, ritualized war games to resolve conflicts, and communal “palaver” discussions to mediate internal disputes. Cities and ministates added more complex social institutions in places like Benin. Some were commercial centers, others the center of rituals or artistic expression. The city of Ife, on the forest border, produced glass beads, terracotta, and brass statues. Similar brass sculptures were later produced by court metalworkers in the kingdom of Benin.

East and South Africa

Most political institutions in West Africa could also be found in East and South Africa. There were empires, kingdoms, city-states, and state- less societies. But geography and the timing of major population movements like the Bantu migration accounted for certain differences.

Cattle and Colonization. Perhaps the most important difference was the greater role of herders in East Africa. Bantu agriculturalists added animals to their mixed economy in central and East Africa. Cattle were intro- duced into East Africa by the more indigenous Nilotic-Sudanic speakers. Cattle herders like the Fulani people were common in West Af- rica too, but they generally remained north of the more tropical areas of agriculturalists. By

contrast, the land of East Africa is slashed by dramatic north–south rifts of mountains and deep valleys, enabling herders to introduce cattle much farther south on high plains over- looking the valleys of agriculturalists.

As a consequence, East African economies were more frequently pastoral and mixed and rarely (as was the case in West Africa) purely agricultural. In tropical regions of East Africa, the mix of herding and farming peoples in lands formerly occupied by hunter-gatherers created sharply different, often antagonistic economies side by side. Sometimes this caste- like separation had dramatic consequences, as in Rwanda and Burundi, where Tutsi herd- ers, Hutu agriculturalists, and Twa hunter- gatherers were incorporated into single states.

In southern Africa, cattle raising took precedence over farming. Herders can form states, but their need for extensive pastureland generally means lower population densities and fewer villages or cities. In southern Africa, cattle raising tended to form chiefdoms rather than states or stateless societies. The house- hold was the principal unit. Households gath- ered their round dwellings around an enclosed central cattle pen, a design less likely to lead to towns and cities than the West African shape of rectangular houses on grids of streets. These chiefdoms did sometimes coalesce into states, however, often with central cities studded with royal palaces.

Great Zimbabwe. The largest of these states in southern Africa between 1000 and 1450 was Great Zimbabwe, which transformed itself from a local chiefdom in the twelfth century to the leading power of southern Africa in the fourteenth. Even today, the ruins of Great Zimbabwe are impressive. The city dominates various levels of pasture from a high plateau. Building materials were stone blocks tightly placed together without mortar. The city, which

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contains the large royal palace, is surrounded by a huge wall that had an iron gate. In its heyday, the city probably numbered 15,000 to 18,000 people, many living inside the high walls:

It was a city closely integrated with its sur- rounding countryside. Narrow pathways, dusty in the dry season and muddy in the wet, would have led in intricate ways among the crowded houses. Wandering dogs nobody much cared for, chickens scavenging in the walkways between the houses, and goats tethered at doorways would have been among the sights and background noisemakers of city life. In the later afternoon, hundreds of cooking fires would have added to the mélange of strong smells that filled the air and, if the air was still, would have created some- thing much like smog.5

The fortunes of Great Zimbabwe were built on more than cattle raising and agriculture. Its chiefs learned to control and tax trade just as they had traditionally demanded cattle. First ivory and beads but eventually gold from far- ther up the Limpopo River valley made Great Zimbabwe the largest city of southern Africa and an empire of the Shona people. Zimbabwe traded the gold farther north, ultimately to the city of Kilwa and the Swahili cities on the coast of the Indian Ocean, where inner Africa con- nected to the Afro-Eurasian network.

Inner Africa and the World

During the first millions of years of our spe- cies, inner Africa was the world. Only in the past few thousand years did inner Africa take an independent but parallel path, and in the past few hundred years our paths have merged again. Yet, even as inner Africa followed a course separate from that of Afro-Eurasia, its

fortunes were connected to developments in the larger world. The Bantu migration began in an area of West Africa that had grown steeply after the desiccation of the Sahara. West Africans later connected with the people north of the Sahara who introduced domes- ticated camels and horses and brought salt and Mediterranean products across the desert. Later still, West Africa met bearers of the Islamic faith and founded states and empires rich in horses and gold. But by then, Bantu- speaking peoples had colonized much of the rest of Africa, bringing their crops and iron east and south. In the process, they encoun- tered and incorporated other peoples: cattle herders of the central sub-Saharan region, farmers of Malayan and Indonesian crops like bananas and yams in East Africa, and city peo- ples along the East African coast who traded in the Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean.

Still, the Bantu travelers, the hunter-gatherers of tropical rain forests, and the cattle herders of South Africa created their own networks, some independent and others attached to those of the larger world. They created their own systems of social and political organiza- tion, all without writing6 and most without the apparatus of state administration and control. The village-based societies, hunter-gatherers, and pastoral peoples of inner Africa invented a range of voluntary, lineage- and family-based, age- and gender-related institutions that of- fered an alternative model to the state-based societies that were increasingly shaping the world—even in outer Africa.

The World of the Americas

The variety of the Americas before 1450 was almost as great as the variety of Africa. As in Africa, there were hunter-gatherers, part-time

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and full-time agriculturalists, villages, cities, states, and empires. The great empires are best known; we have already discussed some of them in the chapter on city and state formation.

States and Empires of Middle America

The great empires of the early 1400s were the Aztec Empire of central Mexico and the Inca Empire of Peru. But these were relatively recent arrivals at locations in which previous states and empires had ruled for centuries.

Before the Aztecs. The Aztecs came down from northern Mexico only about a century earlier to the large lake on the high central Mexican plateau. Viewed as crude newcom- ers, they established themselves as successors to the Toltecs, who, in turn, claimed descent from the classical rulers of nearby Teotihua- can. From 400 to 600, Teotihuacan had domi- nated central Mexico politically and culturally. Its city by the same name was not only the largest in the Americas but also one of the larg- est cities in the world at the time, numbering possibly 200,000 inhabitants. The Teotihuaca- nos passed on a tradition of pyramid building that stretched back to the first Mexican states, the Zapotecs and the Olmecs.

At the time of Teotihuacan, the Mayan cul- ture encompassed a huge area that stretched from the northern Yucatan Peninsula of east- ern Mexico deep into Central America. The Mayans had no single city approaching the population of Teotihuacan, but they had many cities, some with as many as tens of thousands of inhabitants. The remains of Mayan cities like Tikal, Uxmal, Palenque, and Chichen Itza suggest a layout like the cities of central Mexico. They have central open spaces flanked by pyramids and other public buildings. But the Mayan cities do not seem to extend beyond such ceremonial centers. Most Mayan cities

were carved out of dense jungle, which has since returned to strangle the ruins, so it is dif- ficult, without further archaeological work, to determine what may lie under the surround- ing jungle. Central Mexican cities like Teo- tihuacan and the Zapotec’s Monte Alban, by contrast, lie in open areas, and the excavated central plazas and pyramids are surrounded by mounds that are beginning to reveal the many homes of city inhabitants. The absence of ex- tensive residential areas around Mayan cities leads to the conclusion that they were, at least in their early stages, purely ceremonial: places for rulers and priests, an idea that also fits what we know about Mayan culture.

Classical Mayan. Mayan writing was a colorful combination of pictures and syllable symbols that has only recently been deci- phered. It reveals a culture in which priests played a major role in ensuring the proper balance of natural forces. Mayan cities contain astronomical observatories in which priests learned to predict solar and lunar eclipses and mark the changing seasons and the times for planting, burning, and harvesting. The Mayans used a 365-day calendar and figured the length of the year to within 17 seconds of modern calculations. They invented the concept of zero independently of the classi- cal mathematicians of India, and they used a 20-base computation system (like our 10- base system). They built high step pyramids in stone, decorated with vivid sculptures of gods, jaguars, and serpents, and they painted on bark and stone walls in dazzling color. All this they accomplished with stone tools before metals came to Middle America around 900.

Recently, another side to Mayan life has come to light. Mayan rulers and priests prac- ticed a ritualistic bloodletting in the belief that it would ensure the necessary rain for the crops. When, for instance, King Pacal died in 683, his

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son and successor, Chan Bahlum, presided at funeral services by cutting three slits into his penis with a sharp obsidian knife and inserting bark paper into the wounds so that the blood would flow copiously. His younger brother and other family members followed suit.

Mayan culture was otherwise not very dif- ferent from that of others in Mexico. They shared many of the same gods; Tlaloc, the rain god, and Quetzacoatl, the feathered serpent, were particularly important. In addition to pyr- amid temples, all of them had ball courts where they played a ball game similar to that played by the Taino and ancestral to modern soccer. Competing teams could hit the small ball made of local rubber with anything but their hands. The game must have served some kind of dispute resolution function because the losers sometimes were executed, their heads displayed on spikes near the court. The idea that humans had to shed blood or give their lives to appease the gods was common in Mexican societies, though the Aztecs raised it to a new level.

A Theoretical Interlude: Priests and Soldiers. A modern world historian has an interesting theory that might help explain the bloodletting and human sacrifice that we frequently find in ancient civilizations. Johan Goudsblom7 notes that many ancient agricultural civiliza- tions give enormous power over life and death to priests. In earliest Mesopotamian urban society, for instance, priests supervised the planting and distribution of food as part of the feeding of the gods. Agriculture-based cities were highly vulnerable creations, Goudsblom argues: first vulnerable to the forces of nature and then, if successful, vulnerable to other peoples. Therefore, it should not surprise us to find cases in which priests are given inordinate powers to ensure the land is properly prepared for planting and that all the necessary rituals of farming are carried out to the letter. This

would be especially important where nature was unpredictable, like the floods of the Eu- phrates. The people of Middle America faced the unpredictability of the rains. Rains that came too early or too late or that were too light or too heavy could disastrously limit the crops.

As city societies became larger, their depen- dence on reliable agriculture became greater. Priests who bled themselves and urged others to do the same might have been responding to what they perceived to be a very delicate balance between the efforts of humans and na- ture. In fact, the decline of Mayan society after 900 might be an indicator of how vulnerable it was. From around 800 to 1000, a number of American societies suffered from the lack of rainfall and collapsed. Mayan society was, in fact, able to reorganize along the northern Yucatan after the collapse of cities in the south, but it was never as extensive as in the earlier classical era. Similarly, Teotihuacan collapsed around 800, as did Monte Alban (and, we shall see, one of the great South American states).

Goudsblom points out that agriculture- based urban civilizations also rely heavily on soldiers but that the role of soldiers often eclipses that of priests at a later stage in their history. He suggests that this occurred after the society had some success in overcom- ing the threats of nature, achieved a certain level of abundance in crops and populations, and therefore confronted another level of vulnerability—the threat of outside forces, such as brigands, popular uprisings, or other societies. This would account for the rise of military regimes after priestly states in the ancient Near East. It might also explain the rise of soldiers over priests in the Toltec and Aztec states after the decline of Mayan society and Teotihuacan.

Toltecs and Aztecs. When the Aztecs mod- eled themselves on the Toltecs, they chose

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a military rather than a cultural power. The Toltec city Tula displayed symbols of a con- quest state: friezes of soldiers, skulls on a rack, roaming jaguars, and eagles eating hearts. These symbols were replicated in Chichen Itza after the Toltec conquest of that Mayan city and in the Aztec capital. Toltec Tula created a large empire based on trade as well as con- quest. It was the Toltec who introduced metals and metalworking to Mexico (in copper, silver, and gold), probably from their expeditions into Central America (where metals probably arrived from Peru). Although these were not durable metals, capable of being molded into tools or weapons, they encouraged trade and the making of fine art and jewelry. Toltec

state traders also founded settlements as far north as modern Arizona, bringing the Me- soamerican ball game to Phoenix (where a 900-year-old rubber ball was recently discov- ered) though evidently without the element of human sacrifice.

The Toltec told a story of their origins in Tula that later became an important part of Aztec lore. They told of a cultural hero or king called Topilzin Quetzalcoatl, who was a peace- maker forced out of the country (promising to return) by another powerful person, Tezcatli- poca, who became a sort of god of war and sacrifice. This conflict between Quetzalcoatl’s peaceful, nurturing force and that of the god of war, conquest, bloodletting, and human

Figure 6.3 Aztec tribute lists like this itemized the goods that a subject town would have to pay the Aztecs two or four times a year. This list includes two strings of jadite stone, 4,000 handfuls of colored feathers, 160 blue-feathered birds, two gold lip piercings, 40 jaguar hides, 200 loads of cacao beans, 800 cups for drinking chocolate, and two amber bricks. Gianni Dagli Orti/The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY. National Anthropological Museum Mexico.

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sacrifice surfaced in Aztec society and was re- solved in favor of the Aztec version of the god of war, Huitzilopochtli.

The followers of Huitzilopochtli believed that their god of war was also responsible for bringing the sun up every morning. To accom- plish this monumental task, the god required regular sacrifices of human blood. This doc- trine fueled a centuries-long Aztec expansion throughout central Mexico. The Aztec state of the fifteenth century was first and foremost dependent on the regular collection of prison- ers at the ceremonial pyramids, most notably the Major Temple in Tenochtitlan (modern Mexico City), where their hearts were cut out and offered to Huitzilopochtli.

It was one of the great coincidences of history that, when the Spanish arrived in Mexico in 1519 at the end of a long religious crusade, they met an American empire driven by its own ideas of sacred warfare. The quick Spanish conquest of Mexico owed much to European “guns, germs, and steel,”8 but the Aztecs also had many enemies in Mexico who joined the conquistadores in their march on Tenochtitlan. The Aztecs ran an empire struc- tured in ways that made rebellion by Mexican peoples almost inevitable. It was an empire of military conquest that attempted little by way of cultural or bureaucratic integration (in con- trast to the Inca, as we will see). The tentacles that stretched from Tenochtitlan to the other

Figure 6.4 Mexican peoples believed bloodletting or human sacrifice was necessary to sustain life and agriculture. Under the direction of the war god Huitzilopochtli, the Aztecs took this belief the furthest. They brought warriors of enemies and dependent towns to their capital, where their hearts were cut out and offered to the god. Scala/Art Resource, NY. Biblioteca Nazionale, Florence, Italy.

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cities of Mexico were mainly military. It was an empire on the cheap, run as was its capital by a military aristocracy that left much of the economy to markets and merchants. Long- distance merchants (pocheteca) were the only other important social class at home. They also created the only alternate arteries throughout the empire along which they traded and spied for the military rulers.

The conquered peoples of Mexico and parts of what is today Central America were treated as military dependencies each required by treaty to supply stipulated amounts of raw and finished products as well as young men to be sacrificed. Without any stake in or affilia- tion with an Aztec society that literally bled them dry, many threw in their lot with foreign invaders who ended up taking over everything.

States and Empires of South America

The South American Inca Empire that fell to the Spanish conquistador Pizarro in 1534 was very much like the Aztec in its origins. Like the Aztecs, the Incas were recent conquerors of other kingdoms. Like the Aztecs, they had come from obscurity in the early 1400s to rule a vast area—the four parts of the world, they called it, and it extended from Ecuador to Bolivia and from the Andes to the Pacific coast of South America. Like the Aztecs, the Inca invented ancestry from a previous power to suggest their importance. They came, they said, from Tiwanaku, the state that ruled the highlands of the Andes from around 400 to 1000. In fact, they borrowed ideas and institu- tions from a number of earlier states of the Andes highlands and the Pacific coast.

Before the Incas. Glancing at a map, it might seem strange that all the cities and states of South America before 1500 developed in the same section of the continent—along the

Pacific coast and in the Andes mountains. To- day, for instance, the largest cities are along the Atlantic coast, and the largest modern states, Brazil and Argentina, were not even part of these pre-1500 states. It might seem even stranger from ground level. The Pacific coast has some of the driest, most desolate deserts on the planet, and the city sites in the Andes Mountains are in such high and forbidding places that entire cities are still being discov- ered in dense jungle at very high altitudes.

The earliest dense settlements in South America were along the Pacific coast in what is today northern Peru. There coastal areas were dry (though not as dry as southern Peru and northern Chile), but rivers cascading down from the high Andes provided abundant water for irrigated farming. Nevertheless, farming may have encouraged dense human settlement only after the teeming coastal fisheries had begun the process. The waters off the coast of northern Peru offered the most abundant harvests of small fish, like anchovies, and the larger fish and birds that fed on them found anywhere in the world. This was a result of the cold waters of the Humboldt Current flowing north from Antarctica along the Pacific coast, where they met the warm equatorial waters. This area may have been one of the few in the world where fisheries were abundant enough to allow dense and permanent human settle- ment before agriculture.9 (The Pacific North- west was another, as we shall see.)

If early settlements could be formed by groups of villagers who lived by fishing, hunt- ing, and gathering, the first states and king- doms depended on agriculture and often grazing animals as well. Even more than the pastoral societies of East Africa, the early states and kingdoms of South America were multilevel societies that took advantage of the different resources of widely varying altitudes.

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Cotton and corn (after it arrived from Middle America) could be grown at low altitudes. The numerous tubers that were domesticated into potatoes and yams grew more easily at higher altitudes in the Andes. Even higher on plateaus of short grasses, llamas and alpacas were raised and grazed. In this way, compact Andean states grew vertically over desert, grasslands, lush valleys, and rugged mountains in irri- gated layers of settlement.

Andean civilization seemed to climb up from the shores of the Pacific to the mountain ridges 20,000 feet above sea level. If so, it was not a straight climb, and it was not only on- ward and upward. First, there are two or more Andean ridges stretching north and south with large tropical rain forests in between. Second, the culture of Andean civilization shows the unmistakable stamp of peoples of eastern trop- ical rain forests. Places like the Amazon jungle may not have produced highly concentrated settlements, but some of their habitations may have been among the oldest on the continent, and their descendants must have helped shape Andean civilization.

Classical Chavin. The classical, some would even say “mother,” culture of Andean civilization was centered at Chavin de Huantar (around 800–200 BCE). Some of the cultural elements of later Andean life developed ear- lier, but at Chavin they came together in a formative mix. The site, halfway between sea and mountaintops, at the 10,000-foot-level crossroads of ancient trade routes, was con- sidered especially sacred. The main temple, a U shape of raised platforms with the opening facing east, uphill, and toward the mountain waters, became a model for Andean temples. At Chavin de Huantar, the temple contained secret chambers, tunnels, and a central niche with a totemlike stone pillar that contained the face of the god and imagery connected sea

and mountains and earth and sky. The role of forest peoples could be seen in the sacred depiction of jaguars, caiman crocodiles, and snakes, images replicated on stone and pot- tery for the following millennia that seemed to suggest that the fears and fascinations of the jungle were those of the desert and mountains as well. From the desert came a hallucinatory cactus that, according to friezes on the temple wall, would put the shaman into a sacred trance. Underneath the lower-level garden in the center of the U, one heard the rushing roar of water, the sound of the god’s energy and a reminder of the miracle of irrigation that con- nected wet and dry and high and low.

Moche Warrior Priests and Divine Emper- ors. Beginning around 200 BCE, the Andes witnessed a series of ever-larger empires that combined the culture and religious ideas of Chavin with the techniques of military expan- sion and political domination. The first of these empires, the Moche (200–700), united not only upper and lower realms of the moun- tains but also entire valleys between mountain ridges. If Chavin was run by priests, the Moche Empire was run by warrior priests and a king who styled himself as a god, demanded hu- man sacrifices, and commanded the work of all and the lives of some to magnify his realm and accompany him after death. Here we also see the first cases of burial distinctions in An- dean society. Mummified Moche aristocrats, like the Lords of Sipan, wrapped in clothing that took another’s lifetime to produce and crowned with gold-plated crescent moons, also demanded llamas, wives, and helpers in their tombs. The Moche may have initiated the mit’a system of forced labor for state building projects, especially the pyramid-like tombs of the rulers. They also developed metallurgy in the Americas; they did not smelt ores, but they hammered and soldered gold, silver, and

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copper into jewelry and ritual objects that would be imitated for millennia afterward.

The end of the Moche came with a series of what we have since recognized as El Niños— sudden warming of the nearby ocean water that drastically reduced the harvests of anchovies and caused extreme conditions of drought (not incidentally causing a series of climatic changes around the world). In addition, the Andes were struck by a major earthquake sometime be- tween 650 and 700. The Moche was not the only civilization destroyed by the desiccation and dust. The Nazca people on the coastal plains of southern Peru, known for their miles-long sand images of hummingbirds, monkeys, whales, and spiders, also disappeared.

Incas and Their Ancestors. When the Incas traced their ancestry back to Tiwanaku, they

identified themselves with a state that had dominated the highlands of southern Peru and Bolivia from Lake Titicaca (in modern Bolivia) from around 400 to 1000. This association also meant a declaration of loyalty to Viracocha, the creator god, and to an extensive empire based on further irrigation, widespread mit’a service, U-shaped steppe temples that demon- strated the control of water, human sacrifice, and the imagery of jaguar and evil. In other words, Tiwanaku continued many of the ele- ments of Andean culture from the time of the Moche and even the Chavin.

Yet each new kingdom controlled a larger area than its predecessor. One of the tech- niques that made this possible was an institu- tion anthropologists call “split inheritance,” which operated like a 100 percent inheritance tax each time a king died. As developed by the Chimu state (1100–1400), the immediate predecessor of the Inca, split inheritance was a system by which all mit’a, taxes, and tribute paid to a particular king, was channeled to his estate and the upkeep of his temple after his death. This meant that whatever son became his successor had to find entirely new sources of revenue. In other words, he had to conquer his own kingdom, adding it to his father’s and those of his predecessors, thus creating his own empire. The capital of the Chimu state, Chan Chan, had 9 or 10 separate enclosed dis- tricts, each containing the temple grounds and resources of a departed king. And with each new conquest came new subsidiary cities, pro- vincial capitals with their own local subordi- nates, and new aristocrats. It was an extremely effective system of imperial expansion as long as there were new lands to conquer.

The Incas used the tool of split inheritance to create an empire more than double the size of the Chimu. It encompassed all the coast and the uplands from southern Ecuador to

Figure 6.5 The early Peruvian Moche culture left not writing but an abundance of pottery and art. Here a priest or shaman, with feline headdress, heals or prays for someone. Werner Forman/Art Resource, NY. Ethnologisches Museum, Staatliche Museen, Berlin, Germany.

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northern Chile and Bolivia. The Inca proved particularly adept at administering such a vast empire on a shoestring. Messengers ran from one station to another throughout the empire, carrying their messages on khipus of knotted string and sometimes (according to an older custom) engraved on lima beans.

If their technology was lean, the Inca compensated with a passion for organiza- tion. They created a system in which state sovereignty overrode kinship by dividing the empire into quarters, halves, and provinces. Then they created groups of 10,000, 5,000, 1,000, 500, and 100 taxpayers. Foremen were put in charge of groups of 50 and 10 taxpayers.

An annual census ensured proper records for taxation and military service.10 Without wheeled vehicles, writing, or iron metallurgy, the Inca governed an empire that—because of its slopes, terraces, mountains, and valleys— covered far greater distances than the condor flies. It is estimated that the Inca built about 25,000 miles of roads.

Inca taste for organization and centraliza- tion contrasts with the loosely organized con- quest states of Middle America. The Mayan civilization actually comprised a number of relatively independent cities or city-states sep- arated by jungle and distance. The Aztec state was intentionally not integrated since Aztec

Figure 6.6 In the absence of other forms of writing, Inca officials communicated by means of colored strings. Here a string, or quipu, reader “translates” for an official. John Meek/The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY.

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sacrificial rites required a continual source of captives from nearby enemies.

States and Peoples of North America

There were no large Native American em- pires in the area of what is today the United States and Canada—no large bureaucracies or militaristic imperial states on the scale of the Aztec or Inca. There were states, however, and chiefdoms, and there were abundant forms of political and social organization, including stateless societies and alliances of independent states.

The smaller size of North American politi- cal units was due in part to a lower population

density. Population figures for the Americas before 1500 are largely guesswork, but esti- mates for North America vary from 2 million to 18 million. The entire Western Hemisphere (North, Middle, and South America) con- tained 40 million to 100 million people. The lower population density in North America corresponded to the widespread use of slash- and-burn agriculture, especially in the vast woodlands east of the Mississippi and to the limits of the dry and desert lands of the west. Nevertheless, there were areas where hunter- gatherers created large, settled tribal com- munities of significant sophistication (most notably along the rich fisheries of the Pa- cific coast) as well as agricultural areas where

Figure 6.7 Cahokia, on the Mississippi River opposite modern St. Louis, was the center of a North American society. This painting shows what the city might have looked like at its height around 1200. The temple of the Great Sun sits atop a palace mound surrounded by a wall that also encloses the palaces of nobility and a ball court, common in American societies. Outside the wall are numerous homes of commoners and a wooden sun calendar on the far left. Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, painting by William R. Iseminger.

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people created cities without irrigation or plows and draught animals.

Peoples and Places. One of the reasons why it is difficult to know the size of the precontact American populations is that many Native Americans were wiped out by European dis- eases after 1492. North American estimates pose an additional problem. English colo- nists in North America created a mythology that they had come to an empty or “virgin land,” largely because they wanted to settle their families permanently in the “new world.” Spaniards in Middle and South America were generally more interested in converting souls and exploiting labor. North American settlers had a greater interest in removing the Indian population—physically and mentally—mak- ing later accountings more difficult.

Compared to Middle and South America, North America, at least east of the Mississippi, is a land where the original people are neither seen nor heard. In Mexico, Central America, and most of South America, Indian peoples are everywhere. In much of the United States, outside of Indian reservations, most Indian faces are those of Mexican or Central and South American immigrants. But the signs of a previ- ous habitation line every street and highway as if they were still the Indian trails they frequently trace. The names of 23 states, four Great Lakes, and thousands of rivers, lakes, mountains, and cities in the United States and thousands more in Canada (named after kanata, an Iroquoian word for “settlement”) are Indian words. Doz- ens of the hundreds of Indian languages once spoken are still in use. Among those that are extinct, many of their words are still used without any idea of their origins. In much of North America, we build our lives in a haunted landscape.

Rich Pacific Fisheries. The first Americans probably settled along the Pacific coast of what

is today Canada and the United States after crossing the frozen Bering Strait from Asia. There they encountered the same sort of ideal conditions that others were soon to find farther south along the Pacific coast of Peru. Ocean currents ensured moderate temperatures and abundant fish and wildlife. Salmon (rather than anchovies), seals, and whales provided an almost unlimited source of protein, and (unlike Peru) the banks of the Pacific were rich in ani- mals and plants. Women harvested pine nuts and acorns and ground them into meal. Men harvested abundant forests to build wooden houses and canoes. These peoples enjoyed a comfortable material life, with specialists and chiefs and even slaves who were captured from foreign tribes and used for household duties. Although they grew no crops (except for to- bacco), the hunter-gatherers of the Pacific coast reached population sizes and densities that were normally possible only with agriculture. Before 1500, the population of the California coast alone was about 300,000. In Santa Barbara, Chu- mash villages numbered more than 1,000.

Farther north on the Pacific coast, the Chi- nook, Kwakiutl, Nootka, and other Wakashan speakers enjoyed such affluence that they gave it away in a festival called the potlatch. To mark important events, like the erection of a totem pole or the death of an important elder, the host built a special house for the event. He designed his guest list with special care not to embarrass or slight. Guests of highest rank might be given slaves or large copper shields (each worth five slaves). Those of less rank might receive carved boxes, utensils, tools, or the valuable blankets made of mountain goat hair acquired in trade from the Athabaskan Indians of the northern interior. Hundreds of clan members would enjoy the feast: salmon, haddock, and shellfish, all dipped in the ever- present smelt sauce, and numerous varieties

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of berries. Following the meal, they would share tobacco, sing songs, dance, and receive the gifts. Sometimes the host ceremonially destroyed some of his wealth as a sign of his generosity (and power). Many guests stayed overnight before returning home in their ca- noes, which the host had loaded with more food for the journey.11

Pueblos of the Southwest. Nature was not as kind to the dry lands of what became the southwestern United States. Nevertheless, the Indians of New Mexico, Arizona, and south- ern Colorado developed agriculture about 3,000 years ago as the northern area of a zone of farmers that stretched deep into Mexico. They channeled light rain and generous rivers into irrigation canals where they grew beans, squash, and corn. During the relatively well watered period between 500 and 1200, the ancestors of today’s Navaho, the Anasazi, cre- ated dense, well-protected pueblo settlements on highlands like Mesa Verde (Colorado) and veritable “apartment houses” for cliff dwellers at places like Chaco Canyon (New Mexico). From there, they traded with the Great Plains Indians, who hunted bison (without horses), and with Indian miners of turquoise. Some- time after 1200, however, these pueblos were abandoned. There may have been conflict with new migrants from the north (where the Ana- sazi had themselves originated), but the causes probably had more to do with the return of dry climate conditions. As pueblos were abandoned, the descendants of the Anasazi moved, many to the Rio Grande valley, where they became part of new communities like the Hopi. A Spanish expedition to a Hopi town in 1582 found that the Indians of the Southwest had reclaimed a satisfying standard of living:

A thousand Indians greeted us with fine earthen jars full of water, and with rabbits,

venison, tortillas, beans, cooked cala- bashes, corn and pine nuts, so that heaps of food were left over.12

Eastern Woodland Farmers. From the east- ern edge of the Great Plains to the Allegheny Mountains, vast watered woodlands with nu- merous rivers and streams created a riot of plant and animal life. Much of this area from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico drained into the Mississippi River, bringing melted mountain snows and light loam silt soil to the fertile American Bottom of the Mississippi valley. The Mississippi drainage, including its tributaries like the Ohio and Missouri, covered almost a million and a quarter square miles (about the size of India).13 The Mississippi alone extended almost 4,000 miles, about the length of the Amazon and the Nile, but since it ran almost entirely through a temperate climate zone and woodlands (instead of tropi- cal forest or desert), the entire drainage could support a large population. The numbers elude us, but certainly the majority of Indians north of the Rio Grande lived in this area. Spaniards who accompanied Hernando De Soto’s expe- dition from Florida to Tennessee to Arkansas and Texas in the 1540s described thousands of towns and villages.

The “Great River,” as the Indian name accurately labeled it, provided for permanent human settlements, fishing, hunting, and gath- ering as early as 4,500 years ago, not too long after permanent settlements were established in the other great river valley civilizations on the Euphrates, Nile, Indus, and Yellow riv- ers. The Mississippian culture that developed in North America was, in fact, the only river valley civilization in the Americas. Whereas the other great river valleys of the world grew by domesticating plants and animals, the Americans of the Mississippi woodlands (like

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their settled cousins on the Pacific coast) were settled hunter-gatherers. They domesticated local grasses and gourds (mainly for the con- tainers) and sometime after 400 began to plant Mexican corn, but not until after around 900 did corn and beans become a staple in their diet and the yeast for their population growth.

We might even speak of an urban revolu- tion as early as 4,500 years ago, although some historians are hesitant to use the term without evidence of bronze or written languages. The earliest Indian settlement, dating from about 2500 BCE, already contained the distinctive feature of Mississippian settlements for the next 4,000 years: earthen mounds built as platforms for elite residences, temples, cer- emonies, or animal-shaped mounds that com- municated some sort of collective identity to strangers or the gods. At least 10,000 of these mounds could be found in the Ohio River drainage from the classical age of 500 BCE to 400 CE. All these communities displayed the elements of advanced chiefdoms. There were significant class differences between elites and commoners and a number of artisans and spe- cialists who made pottery, hammered copper sheets, sewed clothing and wove baskets

The greatest distribution of mound-building settlements was created between 700 and 1200. The most important of these, Cahokia, near modern St. Louis, had many of the character- istics of cities despite the absence of writing or bronze. Cahokia contained 10,000 to 30,000 people and was larger than medieval London, the equivalent of Toltec Tula in Mexico. It was the largest city north of the Rio Grande before the eighteenth century. Cahokia had almost a continental trading reach, bringing it shells from Florida, copper from the Great Lakes, metals from the Appalachian and Rockies, ocean fish from the Gulf of Mexico, and bison from the Great Plains. In addition to corn and

various kinds of beans from Mexico, Cahokia adopted Mexican ball games and astronomical interests. A ring of poles organized to chart the position of the sun, chart the seasons, and predict eclipses occupied a sacred site near the most important mounds and central plaza of Cahokia: “the American Woodhenge,” ar- chaeologists call it, because of its similarity to the ancient “Stonehenge” monolith of Britain.

Americas and the World

The history of the Americas offers a pristine parallel to the history of the Afro-Eurasian world. The peopling of the Americas was a much longer process than the repeopling of inner Africa, which occurred only in the past 2,000 years. By 2,000 years ago, some Ameri- can civilizations were already able to point to distant ancestors, but none of those had experienced contact with the Old World in thousands of years.

In the Americas, the agricultural and the urban revolutions occurred independently of the Eastern Hemisphere. They produced dif- ferent crops, raised fewer animals, and were limited by less adaptable technologies of writ- ing, metalworking, and transportation. Yet the people of the Americas repeated some of the same processes that the peoples of Afro- Eurasia experienced.

Americans also developed their own net- works of interaction. The use of bows and ar- rows came from the north to Middle America, where the Aztecs rejected them since they needed to take live captives for sacrificial rites. Middle American corn spread south and north. South American copper, silver, and gold traveled up the Pacific coast to Central America, where it was adopted by the Toltec and later Middle American states. People from the Amazon sailed into the open sea and

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colonized the islands of the Caribbean. The great number of American languages under- scores the diversity of peoples, the remote- ness of some settlements, and the huge size of the Western Hemisphere. Nevertheless, crops, cultures, deities, social systems, and ball games spread far from home.

The World of the Pacific

The Pacific Ocean covers a third of the world. For most of history, its 10,000 islands were unoccupied, but human settlement of Austra- lia and New Guinea began soon after humans began to migrate out of Africa. Most of the further islands were colonized in a final wave of human settlement that began about 3,500 years ago.

Islands and Settlers

Recently, a team of anthropologists on the Indonesian island of Flores startled the world with the discovery of the skeletons of what ap- pears to be an entirely different human species, which they are calling Homo florensis. At this writing, scientists disagree as to whether these three-foot-tall people, who lived on Flores as recently as 13,000 years ago, are descendants of Homo erectus who traveled from Africa to Asia over a million years ago, arriving on Flores about 840,000 years ago, or the descen- dants of later Homo sapiens. In either case, however, all the adult skeletons of H. florensis are much smaller than their African ancestors.

Islands. Scientists explain this apparent shrinking of H. florensis—at the same time they were getting smarter, learning to make stone tools—as a process of evolution that sometimes takes place on islands. Given a lim- ited environment, as the human population

on the isolated island grew to the carrying capacity of the island, nature selected down- sizing as a coping mechanism. The same thing happened to the large elephants that swam to the island: their descendants reduced to the size of cows.

Islands do not always induce shrinking, however. Sometimes an enclosed environment that offers abundant food and no natural pred- ators can induce a species to become giants. This explains how the carnivorous lizards that came on natural rafts to the neighboring island of Komodo attained the size to be known as the Komodo dragons.

Islands are natural laboratories that stretch the boundaries of more interactive worlds. As such, they can sometimes tell us more than vast continents about what nature and hu- mans can do.

First Wave. If H. erectus ventured into the Pacific or Flores a million years ago, we have no other evidence. The first wave of H. sapiens did not arrive before the last 100,000 to 50,000 years. This was the period of the last ice-age glaciation when the thickening ice re- duced ocean levels as much as 100 yards below today’s. As a result, Southeast Asia was con- nected to most of Indonesia; Australia, which was not too far away, was connected to New Guinea and Tasmania. The settlement of this island continent would have required migra- tion by sea from the Afro-Eurasian landmass (or Indonesian islands). In fact, there is some evidence on islands off the coast of India that Africans used rafts or boats even before getting to Southeast Asia and Australia.

After the glaciers melted and the oceans rose, these first modern human settlers be- came three different peoples on New Guinea, Australia, and Tasmania. The people of Austra- lia and Tasmania remained hunter-gatherers. The Tasmanians seem to have lost the ability

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Parallel Worlds of Inner Africa, the Americas, and Oceania 211

to make rafts or canoes with their Stone Age tools. New Guinea also lacked animals that could be domesticated for food, but the people of the world’s second-largest island, alone of the three first-wave settlers, became farmers. Their most important crop turned out to be domesticated sugar, which is today the world’s largest crop by tonnage (more than the next two—wheat and corn—combined). The peo- ple of New Guinea also raised banana and co- conut trees and two root crops: yams and taro. We do not know if these staples of the Pacific were first domesticated in New Guinea or in Southeast Asia. In any case, this New Guinean cultural complex, along with the domesticated chicken, pig, and dog that Austronesian trav- elers brought from Southeast Asia, nurtured a large and dense population in New Guinea, especially in highland areas where seafood was less available.

Australia. Australia was a less suitable candidate for domestication, especially after the first settlers killed off the large birds and mammals (including the many marsupials or pouched mammals related to the kangaroo). No native plants or animals were domesticated by the Australians (although sometime after 1500 BCE they adopted the Austronesian dog, or “dingo”). Australian soils were not very fer- tile, and much of the continent was dry desert. Australian aborigines hunted and gathered because few native plants were edible or easy to domesticate. Even today, modern scientific methods have led to the domestication of only one native plant—the macadamia nut. Nev- ertheless, Australian hunter-gatherers devel- oped certain sophisticated ways of increasing the yield of their environment. Periodically, they would burn off thickets and underbrush, stampeding available animals to be captured but also, after the burn-off, reviving grasses that would attract future prey. In addition,

Australians were one of the hunting-gathering people in the world to make use of water ir- rigation in ways that increased the food sup- ply but did not yield to agriculture or settled villages. In this case, they channeled water to raise and capture eels. Still, they never de- veloped agriculture despite the fact that they traded with the agriculturalists of New Guinea and the agriculturalists of the Indonesian is- land of Sulawesi (Celebes), some of whom even had iron after 600 CE.

Austronesian and Polynesian Migrations

Austronesian Migrations. Long after the first settlers arrived 30,000 to 50,000 years ago, their descendants were joined by a much later second wave of agriculturalists. Around 4,000 years ago, these people came from China to Taiwan and the Philippines and then to Southeast Asia, where they cultivated coconut and banana trees, yams, and taro root and domesticated chickens, pigs, and dogs. After 1600 BCE, these Austronesian peoples brought their tropical plants, domesticated animals, sailing skills, and pottery to Indo- nesia, New Guinea, and the nearby islands of the Pacific. Over the next 2,000 years, their descendants, whom we call the Polynesians, ventured out to colonize the unoccupied is- lands of the deep Pacific: the island groups of Fiji, Samoa, Tahiti, then north to the Hawaiian Islands, southwest to New Zealand (and later Madagascar), and as far east as Easter Island. This was one of the epic migrations of world history. Once they were east of the islands near New Guinea, they traveled in open waters to unknown islands where, presumably, no hu- mans had been before.

Polynesian Migrations. Like the Bantu, the Polynesians used a system of primogeniture, by which only first sons inherited land and

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authority and encouraged younger sons to strike out on their own in search of new land to grow crops and raise their families. Tradi- tions of seafaring, honed by generations of short voyages, enabled them to break out into the open ocean. From their Austronesian an- cestors, they had learned to attach two or three canoes to a single platform, making it less likely to be capsized by heavy winds or waves. They learned how to sail against the prevailing easterly winds of the southern side of the equa- tor by waiting for the occasional gust from the west. They read the dazzling nighttime sky like a road map. They learned to spot land birds far from shore and interpret clouds, debris, and the color of the water to find islands too distant to be seen.

Centuries later, a European sailor mar- veled at their ability to sail the open ocean without compass or charts:

He sees whether he has the wind aft, or on one or other beam, or on the quarter, or is close-hauled: he knows, further, whether

there is a following sea, a head sea, a beam sea, or if it is on the bow or the quarter. . . . Should the night be cloudy as well, they regulate their course by the same signs; and, since the wind is apt to vary in direc- tion more than the swell does, they have their pennants, made of feathers and pal- metto bark, to watch its changes and trim sail. . . . What impressed me most in two Polynesians whom I carried from Tahiti to Raiatea was that every evening or night, they predicted the weather we should ex- perience on the following day, as to wind, calms, rainfall, sunshine, sea, and other points, about which they never turned out to be wrong: a foreknowledge worthy to be envied, for, in spite of all that our naviga- tors and cosmographers have observed and written about the subject, they have not mastered this accomplishment.14

The Polynesians had been farmers be- fore they were sailors, so they loaded their boats with the seeds they would need in their new homes—breadfruit, coconut palms, taro,

Map 6.2 The Polynesian migrations covered a greater area than any before modern times, and they were carried out without a knowledge of their destinations.

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yam, and banana—and their domesticated animals—chickens, pigs, and dogs. As each generation sailed farther, they adapted to new environments and domesticated new foods. In New Zealand, only the northern tip had a tropical climate similar to that of equatorial is- lands. They were able to move south to cooler areas when they learned to plant the South American sweet potato, which had crossed the Pacific either on natural rafts or on Polynesian ships.15

Language and Culture

Austronesian-Polynesian colonization repre- sented the greatest expansion of a people, cul- ture, and language family until the expansion of the Europeans that began 500 years ago. The Polynesian stage of this migration into the far Pacific (unlike the later Europeans or the Polynesians’ Bantu contemporaries in Africa) was to unoccupied lands. Consequently, they could transplant their culture intact. They confronted no alternatives and did not have to meld, compromise, or adapt their own ways

with those of others. One result is the striking similarities of Polynesian language and mate- rial culture across the vast Pacific, from Tonga to Tahiti and New Zealand to Hawaii. Some of their words and customs—like tattoo and taboo—have since entered the common cul- ture of humanity. Their common culture was a testament to the swiftness of their colonization of truly virgin lands.

The first inhabitants of the Western Hemi- sphere also colonized an unoccupied land,16 but the land itself was enormous, the tools of these ancient hunters were less sophisticated, and the process of settlement took much lon- ger. Consequently, the Americas were more culturally diverse; there were far more lan- guages, especially in mountain areas like west- ern Mexico and remote areas like the southern tip of South America.

The degree to which the Polynesians cre- ated a single cultural sphere can be seen by comparing their achievement in the Pacific with their own roots. There had been many different cultures and languages in the Austro- nesian homelands—Taiwan, the Philippines,

Figure 6.8 Austronesian mariners used double-hulled ships like this, drawn by a European artist in the Pacific in 1769. The Granger Collection, New York.

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Malaya, and Indonesia. Indeed, the areas that Polynesians did not settle remained highly di- verse. New Guinea alone had 700 languages, a significant portion of the world’s total.

Expansions like the Bantu and Austrone- sian created common cultures very much the way the expansion of Indo-Europeans and Eurasian steppe nomads had. Austronesian peoples shared a common table of foods, simi- lar double-hulled canoes, a pantheon of gods, rituals of harvest, sailing, sacrifice, tattooing, and an architectural style of stilt houses and outdoor platform altars. But Austronesians lacked horses (or other draft or transporta- tion animals), and they lacked writing. Their Polynesian descendants lacked iron as well. The daring catamarans of the Pacific carried a limited range of plants and animals to is- lands already limited to the flotsam seedlings of Asia. Unlike the other great migrations of the world, the Polynesian adventurers sailed to a world of diminished variety. They found islands of paradise, but as history was increas- ingly shaped by interaction, they sailed away from the main event. They conquered the world’s greatest sea but with a ticket stamped “One Way: Pacific Only.”

Ecology and Colonization

The colonization of new ecological environ- ments created special challenges. The ocean did not contain an inexhaustible number of uninhabited islands. The limits of settlement were reached in Hawaii in the north, Easter Island in the east, New Zealand in the south, and Madagascar in the west. To travel farther meant open ocean or settled continents. How did the colonizers adapt to limits? Inevitably, populations increased, especially on the outer islands of Polynesian seafaring. Lean boat

crews of discoverers matured into complex, stratified societies of settlers. On the Hawaiian Islands, the descendants of the first settlers created complicated hierarchies of common- ers, nobles, and royals. Complex chiefdoms, imperial ambitions, and religious rites created levels of interisland contact and organization that ran counter to the initial impulse of sail- ing off to the sunrise for new beginnings.

Hawaii, Tahiti, and Tonga were probably the most stratified complex chiefdoms, espe- cially after the thirteenth century. Typically in Hawaii, chiefs claimed descent from one of the “first-boat” founding settlers, exercised both political and religious authority, and enjoyed privileges that were “taboo” for lesser nobility or commoners. Lesser-stratified societies, like that of the Maori of New Zealand (Aoteoroa), were governed by the leaders of subtribes who also traced their ancestry to first-boat arrivals but did not always combine political and reli- gious authority and made decisions in consul- tation with the rest of the subtribe assembled in the sacred square, the marae.

With the growth of populations and more complex societies, the balance between people and nature tipped precariously. In the Maori colony that became New Zealand, species of flightless birds were hunted to extinction by people (and stowaway rats) who found them easy prey. Some societies achieved a better balance. The settlers of two of the Cook Is- lands, Manihiki and Rakahanga, lived together on one of the islands while they let the other remain fallow in order to replenish vegetation and fisheries. Then, after a certain number of years, they moved together to the other island and reversed the process.17

The story of Easter Island bodes less well.18 Rapa Nui (Easter Island was the name given by the Europeans to mark the day of their

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Parallel Worlds of Inner Africa, the Americas, and Oceania 215

discovery) lies 2,300 miles off the coast of South America. It is 1,500 miles from the nearest Polynesian island. It was the end of the great migration across the Pacific. An is- land full of palm trees waved to the first Poly- nesians 1,500 years ago. Rapa Nui offered the colonists a feast of nature—abundant vegeta- tion and wildlife and a rich soil for Polynesian crops. The population grew to about 10,000, but as islanders cut down trees for farming and housing, the rootless soil washed into the sea, and eventually farming was limited to the areas where a few remaining trees broke the wind. Settlers cut trees for rollers so that they could move the huge sculptured heads that served as sentinels from quarry to cliff. The heads can still be seen peering out into the sea, but the people of Rapa Nui sculpted themselves into a corner from which they could not escape. Fifteen hundred miles from anywhere, in one of the most isolated parts of the planet, they managed to destroy the last tree and, with it, their food and even the material to build a raft to leave. The popula- tion crashed in famine and war. Today, the last sculptured heads still lie near the quarry, ancient stone glyphs and a system of writing that developed at the time of first European contact cry out for interpretation, and the last inhabitants survive on food and tourists flown in fresh daily.

The Advantages of Parallel Worlds

The tragedy of Rapa Nui was that the last Polynesians inhabited but one world. At the easternmost tip of the Pacific triangle of settle- ment, there seemed to be no place else to go. Of course, we all inhabit only one world, and (at least given foreseeable technology) there is

nowhere else for us to go (in any significant numbers).

The Lessons of Parallel Worlds

Even when we cannot go elsewhere, we can still learn from others who have. The Polyne- sians who settled closest to their Asian origins had far more opportunity to learn from others than did the people of Rapa Nui. A richly stud- ied Polynesian people on one of the Solomon Islands, which was populated mainly by other descendants of their mutual Austronesian an- cestors, proudly proclaimed “we the Tiko- pia”19 do things this way at every opportunity, but only when they became aware that other people did things differently.

The opportunity to learn that there are other worlds where people do things differ- ently is one of the great advantages of studying history. What the Tikopia could do face-to- face we can do from a distance.

What are the lessons we can draw from the three worlds that ran independent of but par- allel to the world of Afro-Eurasia in the thou- sands of years before the world became one?

Lessons of Similarities. That there were parallel worlds at all is a lesson in how humans share the same variety of possibilities and move along similar paths. The parallel worlds of inner Africa, the Americas, and the Pacific display the same range of activities, institu- tions, and ideas that we found in Afro-Eurasia during the same period. The processes of change were also similar. In all “four worlds,” hunter-gatherers increasingly became farmers and farmers learned to be more productive, usually choosing to live in more complex and densely populated societies. Everyone did not develop cities, writing, and bronze or iron metallurgy, but generally when people became

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aware of these developments, they sought them out and adopted them for themselves.

We have reflected on the similarities in the growth of social classes, elites, chiefdoms, monarchies, and empires. Kings became more powerful as their realms expanded. They took more wives, humiliated more subjects, de- manded more grave mates, and rationalized more sacrificial offerings to more demand- ing gods (often themselves). Whether or not soldiers replaced priests as the dominant class entrusted with preserving the material advan- tage of the privileged, both classes prospered in complex societies. So did fathers. City- and state-based societies tended to be more patriarchal than agricultural societies. West African and American agriculturalists were often matrilineal. In the process of the Bantu expansion, inner African societies become more patrilineal. Native American city societ- ies were more patrilineal. In the Pacific, the early inhabitants of Southeast Asia, including Malaya, and the Austronesian ancestors of the Polynesians tended to be matrilineal. Polyne- sian society was patrilineal.

Similarities or Connections. Travelers and amateur archaeologists have frequently specu- lated on the similarity of Egyptian and Mayan pyramids, a resemblance that has led some to imagine ancient travels across the Atlantic or Pacific. But similarity does not mean con- nection. We know that Egyptian and Meso- potamian societies were closely linked, but the Mesopotamian step pyramid, or ziggurat, was different from the Egyptian pyramid, and it performed a different function: temple rather than tomb. Mayan pyramids were also temples, as were those of the Aztecs and Incas. Ancient peoples built templelike structures for other purposes as well. Nor were they limited to city societies. North American farmers

from the Mississippi to Georgia built pyramid- shaped earthen mounds, although most built rounded mounds. Polynesians built pyramid structures, although most built simple plat- form altars. Rather than assume connections where no evidence of contacts exists, we might see the building of temples, tombs, mounds, platforms, and pyramids as efforts to com- municate with sky gods, exalt certain elites, or reflect the power, shape, or ideals of the build- ers and benefactors of urban and complex societies.

Lessons of Differences. The differences that occurred within these broad similarities can tell us even more. The fishing villages of the Pacific coast show that even hunter-gatherers can establish settled sophisticated societies. The people of the American Southwest and Mississippi show the upper limits of social or- ganization possible without writing and met- als. The Pacific Islanders show how much can be done with only a few seeds and a shipload of grit.

The forceful role that pastoralists played in Eurasia is echoed by the Nilotic peoples of Africa but absent from the Americas and Poly- nesia. The almost complete absence of animals for transportation in the Americas and Poly- nesia prevented the dynamic synthesis we see from the clash of the two lifestyles elsewhere. But it does not seem to have prevented the development of patriarchy or military powers in the Americas or Pacific islands.

If one conclusion seems inescapable, it is that these parallel worlds were not ignited by clashes with others—pastoralists or settled people—the way the people of central Eurasia were. The fact that they went their own way, colonizing empty or underpopulated lands, allowed them to develop the unique propensi- ties of their own cultures but kept them away

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Parallel Worlds of Inner Africa, the Americas, and Oceania 217

from center stage. But there is a profound irony here. The separate development that was their historical weakness when Eurasia came calling is also what makes them so valu- able to the rest of the world today. Just as plants that exist nowhere else can provide the world with a cure to a global scourge, the va- riety of human cultures testify to the breadth of our possibilities. Recently, for instance, linguistic scholars recognized that, probably uniquely in the world, the Aymara speakers of the Andes think of the past as in front of them and the future (since it is unknown) as behind them.20 Thus, a presumed human universal can be put to rest because a parallel world is around to tell us it need not be so. Who knows what possibilities such new ideas could help us back into?

The Strength of Parallel Worlds

We have seen how the story of human his- tory might be summarized as 100,000 years of global dispersal followed by 1,000 or 2,000 years of reconnection. That reconnection and even reintegration has been especially pro- found in the past few hundred years, increas- ing in intensity even in recent decades. The benefits in communication, coordination, and innovation are enormous. But one result is increasing sameness. Like the early agricultur- alists who chose a few wild plants from hun- dreds of thousands of candidates in the wild, we throw off old cultures, languages, ancient beliefs, and customs like old clothes. And once they are discarded, they cannot be retrieved. We lose the capacity to try on alternatives. Parallel worlds provide alternatives at virtually every step. The irony, of course, is that their value is in their accessibility, and that is also the cause of their demise.

Suggested Readings

Adams, Richard, E. W. Ancient Civilizations of the New World. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997. A good introduction to the Americas.

Diamond, Jared. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. New York: Viking, 2005. Good popular discussion of the environmental theme, including an Easter Island case study.

Ehret, Christopher. The Civilizations of Africa: A History to 1800. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2002. Good introduction to history of inner Africa.

Finney, Ben R. Voyage of Rediscovery: A Cultural Odyssey through Polynesia. Berkeley: Univer- sity of California Press, 1994. Great read that shows how Polynesians sailed from Hawaii to New Zealand—by doing it.

Niane, D. T. Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali. Trans- lated by G. D. Pickett. London: Longman, 1965. The great West African classic.

Shaffer, Lynda Norene. Native Americans before 1492: The Moundbuilding Centers of the Eastern Woodlands. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1992. Excellent introduction to Native Americans of the eastern United States before Columbus.

Notes

1. Lonnie G. Thompson et al., “Kilimanjaro Ice Core Records: Evidence of Holocene Climate Change in Tropical Africa,” Science 298 (October 18, 2002): 591, http://www-bprc.mps.ohio-state .edu/Icecore/589.pdf.

2. Christopher Ehret, An African Classical Age: Eastern and Southern Africa in World His- tory 1000 B.C to A.D. 400 (Charlottesville: Uni- versity Press of Virginia, 1998), 296–97.

3. D. T. Niane, Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali, trans. G. D. Pickett (London: Longman, 1965), 62.

4. John Iliffe, Africans: The History of a Con- tinent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 75.

Reilly, K. (2018). The human journey : A concise introduction to world history, prehistory to 1450. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Created from nu on 2021-11-15 03:45:35.

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218 Chapter 6

5. Christopher Ehret, The Civilizations of Africa: A History to 1800 (Charlottesville: Univer- sity Press of Virginia, 2002), 255.

6. Swahili was a written language using an Arabic orthography with the earliest extant writ- ings dating to the eighteenth century.

7. Johan Goudsblom, Eric Jones, and Ste- phen Mennell, The Course of Human History: Economic Growth, Social Process, and Civilization (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe), 1996, esp. 31–62.

8. The phrase is the title of Jared Diamond’s popular work about Western dominance gener- ally. See Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (New York: Viking, 2005). Of course Spanish iron was not steel.

9. This “maritime foundations” hypothesis was presented in Michael Mosely, The Maritime Foundations of Andean Civilization (Menlo Park, CA: Cummings, 1975). See also the author’s The Incas and Their Ancestors (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2000).

10. The system is described in Richard E. W. Adams, Ancient Civilizations of the New World (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997), 120.

11. Mary Giraudo Beck, Potlatch: Native Cere- mony and Myth on the Northwest Coast (Anchor- age: Alaska Northwest Books, 1993).

12. Adapted from Stephen Plog, Ancient Peo- ples of the American Southwest (London: Thames and Hudson, 1997), 170–71.

13. Lynda Norene Shaffer, Native Americans before 1492: The Moundbuilding Centers of the Eastern Woodlands (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1992).

14. B. G. Corney, ed., The Quest and Occupa- tion of Tahiti by Emissaries of Spain during the Years 1772–6, 3 vols. (London: Hakluyt Society, 1913–1919), 2:284–87. The account is from the journal of Andia Y. Varela, who visited in Tahiti in 1774, and is slightly modernized.

15. D. E. Yen, in The Sweet Potato and Oceania, Bernice P. Bishop Museum Bulletin, 236 (Hono- lulu: Bishop Museum Press, 1974), argues that Polynesians sailed to South America about 1000 CE and brought the sweet potato back.

16. Silvia Gonzalez, a Mexican anthropologist at John Moores University in Liverpool, England, most recently argued that early Australians sailed across the Pacific and were the first settlers in the Americas, citing stories of a “long-faced” people on the Pacific coast of Mexico who were wiped out by the Spanish conquest (Reuters, September 6, 2004).

17. Ben Finney, “The Other One-Third of the Globe,” Journal of World History 5, no. 2 (1994): 284.

18. See Diamond, Collapse, 79–119. 19. “We the Tikopia” is the title of Raymond

Firth’s classic study of this people. Published in 1936, it was one of nine books he wrote on the Tikopia.

20. James Gorman, “Does This Mean People Turned Off, Tuned Out and Dropped In?,” New York Times, June 27, 2006, F3, commenting on Ra- fael E. Nunez and Eve Sweetser, “With the Future behind Them: Convergent Evidence from Aymara Language and Gesture in the Crosslinguistic Com- parison of Spatial Construals of Time,” Cognitive Science 30 (2006): 401–50.

Reilly, K. (2018). The human journey : A concise introduction to world history, prehistory to 1450. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Created from nu on 2021-11-15 03:45:35.

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