Hi. I'd like to have a critical book review written for this book, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann. I attached a pdf copy of the book for you to read. I need 1
2 For the woman in the next-door office— Cloudlessly, like everything else —CCM NATIVE AMERICA, 1491 A.D.
3 Native America, 1491 A.D. Native America, 1000 A.D.
Massachusett Alliance, 1600 A.D. Peoples of the Dawnland, 1600 A.D. Tawantinsuyu: Land of the Four Quarters, 1527 A.D . Tawantinsuyu: Expansion of the Inka Empire, 1438– 1527 A.D. Triple Alliance, 1519 A.D. Paleo-Indian Migration Routes: North America, 10, 000 B.C. Norte Chico: The Americas’ First Urban Complex, 3 000–1800 B.C. Mesoamerica, 1000 B.C.–1000 A.D. Wari and Tiwanaku, 700 A.D. Moundbuilders, 3400 B.C.–1400 A.D. The American Bottom, 1300 A.D. The Hundred Years’ War: Kaan and Mutal Battle to Control the Maya Heartland, 526–682 A.D. Amazon Basin Humanized Landscapes, 1491 A.D. 4 The seeds of this book date back, at least in part , to 1983, when I wrote an article for Science about a NASA program that was monitoring atmospher ic ozone levels. In the course of learning about the program, I flew with a research team in a NASA plane equipped to sample and analyze the atmosphere at th irty thousand feet. At one point the group landed in Mérida, in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsu la. For some reason the scientists had the next day off, and we all took a decrepit Vo lkswagen van to the Maya ruins of Chichén Itzá. I knew nothing about Mesoamerican cul ture—I may not even have been familiar with the term “Mesoamerica,” which encompa sses the area from central Mexico to Panama, including all of Guatemala and Belize, a nd parts of El Salvador, Honduras, Costa Rica, and Nicaragua, the homeland of the Maya , the Olmec, and a host of other indigenous groups. Moments after we clambered out o f the van I was utterly enthralled.
On my own—sometimes for vacation, sometimes on ass ignment—I returned to Yucatán five or six times, three times with my frie nd Peter Menzel, a photojournalist. For a German magazine, Peter and I made a twelve-hour d rive down a terrible dirt road (thigh-deep potholes, blockades of fallen timber) t o the then-unexcavated Maya metropolis of Calakmul. Accompanying us was Juan de la Cruz Briceño, Maya himself, caretaker of another, smaller ruin. Juan had spent twenty years as a chiclero, trekking the forest for weeks on end in search of chicle trees, which have a gooey sap that Indians have dried and chewed for millennia and that in the late nineteenth century became the base of the chewing-gum industry. Around a night fi re he told us about the ancient, vine-shrouded cities he had stumbled across in his rambles, and his amazement when scientists informed him that his ancestors had buil t them. That night we slept in hammocks amid tall, headstone-like carvings that ha d not been read for more than a thousand years. My interest in the peoples who walked the Americas before Columbus only snapped into anything resembling focus in the fall of 1992. By chance one Sunday afternoon I came across a display in a college libr ary of the special Columbian quincentenary issue of the Annals of the Association of American Geographers. Curious, I picked up the journal, sank into an armchair, and began to read an article by William Denevan, a geographer at the University of Wisconsi n. The article opened with the question, “What was the New World like at the time of Columbus?” Yes, I thought, what was it like? Who lived here and what could have passed through their minds when European sails first appeared on the horizon? I fin ished Denevan’s article and went on to others and didn’t stop reading until the librarian flicked the lights to signify closing time.
I didn’t know it then, but Denevan and a host of f ellow researchers had spent their careers trying to answer these questions. The pictu re they have emerged with is quite different from what most Americans and Europeans th ink, and still little known outside specialist circles.
A year or two after I read Denevan’s article, I at tended a panel discussion at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Called something like “New Perspectives on the Amazon,” th e session featured William Balée of Tulane University. Balée’s talk was about “anthr opogenic” forests—forests created by Indians centuries or millennia in the past—a concep t I’d never heard of before. He also mentioned something that Denevan had discussed: man y researchers now believe their 5 predecessors underestimated the number of people in the Americas when Columbus arrived. Indians were more numerous than previously thought, Balée said—much more numerous. Gee, someone ought to put all this stuff together, I thought. It would make a fascinating book. I kept waiting for that book to appear. The wait g rew more frustrating when my son entered school and was taught the same things I had been taught, beliefs I knew had long been sharply questioned. Since nobody else app eared to be writing the book, I finally decided to try it myself. Besides, I was cu rious to learn more. The book you are holding is the result.
Some things this book is not. It is not a systemat ic, chronological account of the Western Hemisphere’s cultural and social developmen t before 1492. Such a book, its scope vast in space and time, could not be written— by the time the author approached the end, new findings would have been made and the begi nning would be outdated. Among those who assured me of this were the very research ers who have spent much of the last few decades wrestling with the staggering diversity of pre-Columbian societies.
Nor is this book a full intellectual history of th e recent changes in perspective among the anthropologists, archaeologists, ecologis ts, geographers, and historians who study the first Americans. That, too, would be impo ssible, for the ramifications of the new ideas are still rippling outward in too many di rections for any writer to contain them in one single work.
Instead, this book explores what I believe to be t he three main foci of the new findings: Indian demography (Part I), Indian origin s (PartII), and Indian ecology (Part III). Because so many different societies illustrat e these points in such different ways, I could not possibly be comprehensive. Instead, I cho se my examples from cultures that are among the best documented, or have drawn the most r ecent attention, or just seemed the most intriguing.
Throughout this book, as the reader already will h ave noticed, I use the term “Indian” to refer to the first inhabitants of the A mericas. No question about it, Indian is a confusing and historically inappropriate name. Prob ably the most accurate descriptor for the original inhabitants of the Americas is America ns. Actually using it, though, would be risking worse confusion. In this book I try to refe r to people by the names they call themselves. The overwhelming majority of the indige nous peoples whom I have met in both North and South America describe themselves as Indians. (For more about nomenclature, see Appendix A, “Loaded Words.”) In the mid-1980s I traveled to the village of Haze lton, on the upper Skeena River in the middle of British Columbia. Many of its inha bitants belong to the Gitksan (or Gitxsan) nation. At the time of my visit, the Gitks an had just lodged a lawsuit with the governments of both British Columbia and Canada. Th ey wanted the province and the nation to recognize that the Gitksan had lived ther e a long time, had never left, had never agreed to give their land away, and had thus retain ed legal title to about eleven thousand square miles of the province. They were very willin g to negotiate, they said, but they were not willing to not be negotiated with.
Flying in, I could see why the Gitksan were attach ed to the area. The plane swept past the snowy, magnificent walls of the Rocher de Boule Mountains and into the 6 confluence of two forested river valleys. Mist stea med off the land. People were fishing in the rivers for steelhead and salmon even though they were 165 miles from the coast.
The Gitanmaax band of the Gitksan has its headquar ters in Hazelton, but most members live in a reserve just outside town. I drov e to the reserve, where Neil Sterritt, head of the Gitanmaax council, explained the litiga tion to me. A straightforward, level-voiced man, he had got his start as a mining engineer and then come back home with his shirtsleeves rolled up, ready for a length y bout of legal wrangling. After multiple trials and appeals, the Supreme Court of Canada rul ed in 1997 that British Columbia had to negotiate the status of the land with the Gitksa n. Talks were still ongoing in 2005, two decades after the lawsuit first began. After a while Sterritt took me to see ‘Ksan, a his torical park and art school created in 1970. In the park were several re-created longho uses, their facades covered in the forcefully elegant, black-and-red arcs of Northwest Coast Indian art. The art school trained local Indians in the techniques of translat ing traditionally derived designs into silk-screen prints. Sterritt left me in a back room of the schoolhouse and told me to look around. There was more in the room than he may have realized, for I quickly found what looked like storage boxes for a number of old and b eautiful masks. Beside them was a stack of modern prints, some of which used the same designs. And there were boxes of photographs, old and new alike, many of splendid ar tworks.
In Northwest Coast art the subjects are flattened and distorted—it’s as if they’ve been reduced from three dimensions to two and then folded like origami. At first I found all the designs hard to interpret, but soon some se emed to pop right out of the surface.
They had clean lines that cut space into shapes at once simple and complex: objects tucked into objects, creatures stuffed into their o wn eyes, humans who were half beast and beasts who were half human—all was metamorphosi s and surreal commotion.
A few of the objects I looked at I understood imme diately, many I didn’t understand at all, some I thought I understood but probably didn’t, and some maybe even the Gitksan didn’t understand, in the way that most Europeans today can’t truly understand the effect of Byzantine art on the spiri ts of the people who saw it at the time of its creation. But I was delighted by the boldly graphic lines and dazzled by the sense that I was peeking into a vibrant past that I had n ot known existed and that continued to inform the present in a way I had not realized. For an hour or two I went from object to object, always eager to see more. In assembling thi s book, I hope to share the excitement I felt then, and have felt many times since. 7 INTRODUCTION Holmberg’s Mistake A View from Above IN THE BENI The plane took off in weather that was surprisingl y cool for central Bolivia and flew east, toward the Brazilian border. In a few mi nutes the roads and houses disappeared, and the only traces of human settlemen t were the cattle scattered over the savanna like sprinkles on ice cream. Then they, too , disappeared. By that time the archaeologists had their cameras out and were click ing away in delight.
Below us lay the Beni, a Bolivian province about t he size of Illinois and Indiana put together, and nearly as flat. For almost half t he year rain and snowmelt from the mountains to the south and west cover the land with an irregular, slowly moving skin of water that eventually ends up in the province’s nor thern rivers, which are upper tributaries of the Amazon. The rest of the year the water dries up and the bright green vastness turns into something that resembles a dese rt. This peculiar, remote, often watery plain was what had drawn the researchers’ attention , and not just because it was one of the few places on earth inhabited by some people wh o might never have seen Westerners with cameras.
Clark Erickson and William Balée, the archaeologis ts, sat up front. Erickson, based at the University of Pennsylvania, worked in concert with a Bolivian archaeologist, who that day was elsewhere, freeing up a seat in th e plane for me. Balée, of Tulane, is actually an anthropologist, but as scientists have come to appreciate the ways in which past and present inform each other, the distinction between anthropologists and archaeologists has blurred. The two men differ in b uild, temperament, and scholarly proclivity, but they pressed their faces to the win dows with identical enthusiasm.
Scattered across the landscape below were countles s islands of forest, many of them almost-perfect circles—heaps of green in a sea of yellow grass. Each island rose as much as sixty feet above the floodplain, allowing t rees to grow that otherwise could not endure the water. The forests were bridged by raise d berms, as straight as a rifle shot and up to three miles long. It is Erickson’s belief tha t this entire landscape—thirty thousand square miles or more of forest islands and mounds l inked by causeways—was constructed by a technologically advanced, populous society more than a thousand years ago. Balée, newer to the Beni, leaned toward this v iew but was not yet ready to commit himself.
Erickson and Balée belong to a cohort of scholars that in recent years has radically challenged conventional notions of what t he Western Hemisphere was like 8 before Columbus. When I went to high school, in the 1970s, I was taught that Indians came to the Americas across the Bering Strait about thirteen thousand years ago, that they lived for the most part in small, isolated groups, and that they had so little impact on their environment that even after millennia of habitation the continents remained mostly wilderness. Schools still impart the same ideas tod ay. One way to summarize the views of people like Erickson and Balée would be to say that they regard this picture of Indian life as wrong in almost every aspect. Indians were here far longer than previously thought, these researchers believe, and in much greater numb ers. And they were so successful at imposing their will on the landscape that in 1492 C olumbus set foot in a hemisphere thoroughly marked by humankind. Given the charged relations between white societie s and native peoples, inquiry into Indian culture and history is inevitably conte ntious. But the recent scholarship is especially controversial. To begin with, some resea rchers—many but not all from an older generation—deride the new theories as fantasi es arising from an almost willful misinterpretation of data and a perverse kind of po litical correctness. “I have seen no evidence that large numbers of people ever lived in the Beni,” Betty J. Meggers, of the Smithsonian Institution, told me. “Claiming otherwi se is just wishful thinking.” Indeed, two Smithsonian-backed archaeologists from Argentin a have argued that many of the larger mounds are natural floodplain deposits; a “s mall initial population” could have built the remaining causeways and raised fields in as little as a decade. Similar criticisms apply to many of the new scholarly claims about Ind ians, according to Dean R. Snow, an anthropologist at Pennsylvania State University. Th e problem is that “you can make the meager evidence from the ethnohistorical record tel l you anything you want,” he says.
“It’s really easy to kid yourself.” And some have c harged that the claims advance the political agenda of those who seek to discredit Eur opean culture, because the high numbers seem to inflate the scale of native loss.
Disputes also arise because the new theories have implications for today’s ecological battles. Much of the environmental movem ent is animated, consciously or not, by what geographer William Denevan calls “the prist ine myth”—the belief that the Americas in 1491 were an almost untouched, even Ede nic land, “untrammeled by man,” in the words of the Wilderness Act of 1964, a U.S. law that is one of the founding documents of the global environmental movement. To green activists, as the University of Wisconsin historian William Cronon has written, restoring this long-ago, putatively natural state is a task that society is morally bou nd to undertake. Yet if the new view is correct and the work of humankind was pervasive, wh ere does that leave efforts to restore nature?
The Beni is a case in point. In addition to buildi ng roads, causeways, canals, dikes, reservoirs, mounds, raised agricultural fiel ds, and possibly ball courts, Erickson has argued, the Indians who lived there before Colu mbus trapped fish in the seasonally flooded grassland. The trapping was not a matter of a few isolated natives with nets, but a society-wide effort in which hundreds or thousands of people fashioned dense, zigzagging networks of earthen fish weirs (fish-cor ralling fences) among the causeways.
Much of the savanna is natural, the result of seaso nal flooding. But the Indians maintained and expanded the grasslands by regularly setting huge areas on fire. Over the centuries the burning created an intricate ecosyste m of fire-adapted plant species dependent on indigenous pyrophilia. The Beni’s curr ent inhabitants still burn, although 9 now it is mostly to maintain the savanna for cattle . When we flew over the region, the dry season had just begun, but mile-long lines of flame were already on the march. Smoke rose into the sky in great, juddering pillars. In t he charred areas behind the fires were the blackened spikes of trees, many of them of species that activists fight to save in other parts of Amazonia. The future of the Beni is uncertain, especially it s most thinly settled region, near the border with Brazil. Some outsiders want to deve lop the area for ranches, as has been done with many U.S. grasslands. Others want to keep this sparsely populated region as close to wilderness as possible. Local Indian group s regard this latter proposal with suspicion. If the Beni becomes a reserve for the “n atural,” they ask, what international organization would let them continue setting the pl ains afire? Could any outside group endorse large-scale burning in Amazonia? Instead, I ndians propose placing control of the land into their hands. Activists, in turn, regard t hat idea without enthusiasm—some indigenous groups in the U.S. Southwest have promot ed the use of their reservations as repositories for nuclear waste. And, of course, the re is all that burning.
HOLMBERG’S MISTAKE “Don’t touch that tree,” Balée said.
I froze. I was climbing a low, crumbly hill and ha d been about to support myself by grasping a scrawny, almost vine-like tree with s played leaves. “Triplaris americana, ” said Balée, an expert in forest botany. “You have t o watch out for it.” In an unusual arrangement, he said, T. americana plays host to colonies of tiny red ants—indeed, it has trouble surviving without them. The ants occupy min ute tunnels just beneath the bark. In return for shelter, the ants attack anything that t ouches the tree—insect, bird, unwary writer. The venom-squirting ferocity of their attac k gives rise to T. americana’s local nickname: devil tree.
At the base of the devil tree, exposing its roots, was a deserted animal burrow.
Balée scraped out some dirt with a knife, then wave d me over, along with Erickson and my son Newell, who were accompanying us. The depres sion was thick with busted pottery. We could see the rims of plates and what l ooked like the foot of a teakettle—it was shaped like a human foot, complete with painted toenails. Balée plucked out half a dozen pieces of ceramic: shards of pots and plates, a chipped length of cylindrical bar that may have been part of a pot’s support leg. As much as an eighth of the hill, by volume, was composed of such fragments, he said. You could dig almost anywhere on it and see the like. We were clambering up an immense pile of broken crockery.
The pile is known as Ibibate, at fifty-nine feet o ne of the tallest known forested mounds in the Beni. Erickson explained to me that t he pieces of ceramic were probably intended to help build up and aerate the muddy soil for settlement and agriculture. But though this explanation makes sense on engineering grounds, he said, it doesn’t make the long-ago actions of the moundbuilders any less myst erious. The mounds cover such an enormous area that they seem unlikely to be the byp roduct of waste. Monte Testaccio, the hill of broken pots southeast of Rome, was a garbag e dump for the entire imperial city.
Ibibate is larger than Monte Testaccio and but one of hundreds of similar mounds. Surely the Beni did not generate more waste than Rome—the ceramics in Ibibate, Erickson argues, indicate that large numbers of people, many of them skilled laborers, lived for a 10 long time on these mounds, feasting and drinking ex uberantly all the while. The number of potters necessary to make the heaps of crockery, the time required for labor, the number of people needed to provide food and shelter for the potters, the organization of large-scale destruction and burial—all of it is evi dence, to Erickson’s way of thinking, that a thousand years ago the Beni was the site of a highly structured society, one that through archaeological investigation was just begin ning to come into view.
Accompanying us that day were two Sirionó Indians, Chiro Cuéllar and his son-in-law Rafael. The two men were wiry, dark, and nearly beardless; walking beside them on the trail, I had noticed small nicks in the ir earlobes. Rafael, cheerful almost to bumptiousness, peppered the afternoon with comments ; Chiro, a local figure of authority, smoked locally made “Marlboro” cigarettes and obser ved our progress with an expression of amused tolerance. They lived about a mile away, in a little village at the end of a long, rutted dirt road. We had driven ther e earlier in the day, parking in the shade of a tumbledown school and some old missionary buil dings. The structures were clustered near the top of a small hill—another anci ent mound. While Newell and I waited by the truck, Erickson and Balée went inside the sc hool to obtain permission from Chiro and the other members of the village council to tra mp around. Noticing that we were idle, a couple of Sirionó kids tried to persuade Newell a nd me to look at a young jaguar in a pen, and to give them money for this thrill. After a few minutes, Erickson and Balée emerged with the requisite permission—and two chape rones, Chiro and Rafael. Now, climbing up Ibibate, Chiro observed that I was stan ding by the devil tree. Keeping his expression deadpan, he suggested that I climb it. U p top, he said, I would find some delicious jungle fruit. “It will be like nothing yo u have experienced before,” he promised.
From the top of Ibibate we were able to see the su rrounding savanna. Perhaps a quarter mile away, across a stretch of yellow, wais t-high grass, was a straight line of trees—an ancient raised causeway, Erickson said. Ot herwise the countryside was so flat that we could see for miles in every direction—or, rather, we could have seen for miles, if the air in some directions had not been filled with smoke.
Afterward I wondered about the relationship of our escorts to this place. Were the Sirionó like contemporary Italians living among the monuments of the Roman Empire? I asked Erickson and Balée that question during the d rive back.
Their answer continued sporadically through the re st of the evening, as we rode to our lodgings in an unseasonable cold rain and then had dinner. In the 1970s, they said, most authorities would have answered my question ab out the Sirionó in one way. Today most would answer it in another, different way. The difference involves what I came to think of, rather unfairly, as Holmberg’s Mistake. Although the Sirionó are but one of a score of Nat ive American groups in the Beni, they are the best known. Between 1940 and 194 2 a young doctoral student named Allan R. Holmberg lived among them. He published hi s account of their lives, Nomads of the Longbow, in 1950. (The title refers to the six-foot bows th e Sirionó use for hunting.) Quickly recognized as a classic, Nomads remains an iconic and influential text; as filtere d through countless other scholarly articles and the popular press, it became one of the main sources for the outside world’s image of South American Indians.
The Sirionó, Holmberg reported, were “among the mo st culturally backward peoples of the world.” Living in constant want and hunger, he said, they had no clothes, no domestic animals, no musical instruments (not ev en rattles and drums), no art or 11 design (except necklaces of animal teeth), and almo st no religion (the Sirionó “conception of the universe” was “almost completely uncrystallized”). Incredibly, they could not count beyond three or make fire (they car ried it, he wrote, “from camp to camp in a [burning] brand”). Their poor lean-tos, made o f haphazardly heaped palm fronds, were so ineffective against rain and insects that t he typical band member “undergoes many a sleepless night during the year.” Crouched o ver meager campfires during the wet, buggy nights, the Sirionó were living exemplars of primitive humankind—the “quintessence” of “man in the raw state of nature,” as Holmberg put it. For millennia, he thought, they had existed almost without change in a landscape unmarked by their presence. Then they encountered European society an d for the first time their history acquired a narrative flow. Holmberg was a careful and compassionate researche r whose detailed observations of Sirionó life remain valuable today. And he bravely surmounted trials in Bolivia that would have caused many others to give up. During his months in the field he was always uncomfortable, usually hungry, and often sick. Blinded by an infection in both eyes, he walked for days through the forest to a clinic, holding the hand of a Sirionó guide. He never fully recovered his health. After h is return, he became head of the anthropology department at Cornell University, from which position he led its celebrated efforts to alleviate poverty in the Andes.
Nonetheless, he was wrong about the Sirionó. And h e was wrong about the Beni, the place they inhabited—wrong in a way that is ins tructive, even exemplary.
Before Columbus, Holmberg believed, both the peopl e and the land had no real history. Stated so baldly, this notion—that the ind igenous peoples of the Americas floated changelessly through the millennia until 1492—may s eem ludicrous. But flaws in perspective often appear obvious only after they ar e pointed out. In this case they took decades to rectify.
The Bolivian government’s instability and fits of anti-American and anti-European rhetoric ensured that few foreign ant hropologists and archaeologists followed Holmberg into the Beni. Not only was the g overnment hostile, the region, a center of the cocaine trade in the 1970s and 1980s, was dangerous. Today there is less drug trafficking, but smugglers’ runways can still be seen, cut into remote patches of forest. The wreck of a crashed drug plane sits not far from the airport in Trinidad, the biggest town in the province. During the drug wars “the Beni was neglected, even by Bolivian standards,” according to Robert Langstroth , a geographer and range ecologist in Wisconsin who did his dissertation fieldwork there. “It was a backwater of a backwater.” Gradually a small number of scientists ventured int o the region. What they learned transformed their understanding of the place and it s people.
Just as Holmberg believed, the Sirionó were among the most culturally impoverished people on earth. But this was not beca use they were unchanged holdovers from humankind’s ancient past but because smallpox and influenza laid waste to their villages in the 1920s. Before the epidemics at leas t three thousand Sirionó, and probably many more, lived in eastern Bolivia. By Holmberg’s time fewer than 150 remained—a loss of more than 95 percent in less than a generat ion. So catastrophic was the decline that the Sirionó passed through a genetic bottlenec k. (A genetic bottleneck occurs when a population becomes so small that individuals are fo rced to mate with relatives, which can produce deleterious hereditary effects.) The effect s of the bottleneck were described in 12 1982, when Allyn Stearman of the University of Cent ral Florida became the first anthropologist to visit the Sirionó since Holmberg. Stearman discovered that the Sirionó were thirty times more likely to be born with clubf eet than typical human populations.
And almost all the Sirionó had unusual nicks in the ir earlobes, the traits I had noticed on the two men accompanying us. Even as the epidemics hit, Stearman learned, the g roup was fighting the white cattle ranchers who were taking over the region. Th e Bolivian military aided the incursion by hunting down the Sirionó and throwing them into what were, in effect, prison camps. Those released from confinement were forced into servitude on the ranches. The wandering people Holmberg traveled wit h in the forest had been hiding from their abusers. At some risk to himself, Holmbe rg tried to help them, but he never fully grasped that the people he saw as remnants fr om the Paleolithic Age were actually the persecuted survivors of a recently shattered cu lture. It was as if he had come across refugees from a Nazi concentration camp, and conclu ded that they belonged to a culture that had always been barefoot and starving.
Far from being leftovers from the Stone Age, in fa ct, the Sirionó are probably relative newcomers to the Beni. They speak a langua ge in the Tupí-Guaraní group, one of the most important Indian language families in Sout h America but one not common in Bolivia. Linguistic evidence, first weighed by anth ropologists in the 1970s, suggests that they arrived from the north as late as the seventee nth century, about the time of the first Spanish settlers and missionaries. Other evidence s uggests they may have come a few centuries earlier; Tupí-Guaraní–speaking groups, po ssibly including the Sirionó, attacked the Inka empire in the early sixteenth century. No one knows why the Sirionó moved in, but one reason may be simply that the Beni then was little populated. Not long before, the previous inhabitants’ society had disintegrated.
To judge by Nomads of the Longbow, Holmberg did not know of this earlier culture—the culture that built the causeways and mo unds and fish weirs. He didn’t see that the Sirionó were walking through a landscape t hat had been shaped by somebody else. A few European observers before Holmberg had remarked upon the earthworks’ existence, though some doubted that the causeways a nd forest islands were of human origin. But they did not draw systematic scholarly attention until 1961, when William Denevan came to Bolivia. Then a doctoral student, h e had learned of the region’s peculiar landscape during an earlier stint as a cub reporter in Peru and thought it might make an interesting topic for his thesis. Upon arrival he d iscovered that oil-company geologists, the only scientists in the area, believed the Beni was thick with the remains of an unknown civilization.
Convincing a local pilot to push his usual route w estward, Denevan examined the Beni from above. He observed exactly what I saw fou r decades later: isolated hillocks of forest; long raised berms; canals; raised agricultu ral fields; circular, moat-like ditches; and odd, zigzagging ridges. “I’m looking out of one of these DC-3 windows, and I’m going berserk in this little airplane,” Denevan sai d to me. “I knew these things were not natural. You just don’t have that kind of straight line in nature.” As Denevan learned more about the landscape, his amazement grew. “It’s a completely humanized landscape,” he said. “To me, it was clearly the mos t exciting thing going on in the Amazon and adjacent areas. It may be the most impor tant thing in all of South America, I think. Yet it was practically untouched” by scienti sts. It is still almost untouched—there 13 aren’t even any detailed maps of the earthworks and canals.
Beginning as much as three thousand years ago, thi s long-ago society—Erickson believes it was probably founded by the ancestors o f an Arawak-speaking people now called the Mojo and the Bauré—created one of the la rgest, strangest, and most ecologically rich artificial environments on the pl anet. These people built up the mounds for homes and farms, constructed the causeways and canals for transportation and communication, created the fish weirs to feed thems elves, and burned the savannas to keep them clear of invading trees. A thousand years ago their society was at its height.
Their villages and towns were spacious, formal, and guarded by moats and palisades. In Erickson’s hypothetical reconstruction, as many as a million people may have walked the causeways of eastern Bolivia in their long cotton t unics, heavy ornaments dangling from their wrists and necks.
14 Flying over eastern Bolivia in the early 1960s, th e young geographer William Denevan was amazed to see that the landscape (botto m)—home to nothing but cattle ranches for generations—still bore evidence that it had once been inhabited by a large, prosperous society, one whose very existence had be en forgotten. Incredibly, such discoveries are still being made. In 2002 and 2003, Finnish and Brazilian researchers revealed the remains of dozens of geometrical earth works (top) in the western Brazilian state of Acre where the forest had just been cleare d for cattle ranches.
Today, hundreds of years after this Arawak culture passed from the scene, the forest on and around Ibibate mound looks like the c lassic Amazon of conservationists’ dreams: lianas thick as a human arm, dangling blade -like leaves more than six feet long, smooth-boled Brazil nut trees, thick-bodied flowers that smell like warm meat. In terms of species richness, Balée told me, the forest isla nds of Bolivia are comparable to any place in South America. The same is true of the Ben i savanna, it seems, with its different complement of species. Ecologically, the region is a treasure, but one designed and executed by human beings. Erickson regards the land scape of the Beni as one of humankind’s greatest works of art, a masterpiece th at until recently was almost completely unknown, a masterpiece in a place with a name that few people outside Bolivia would recognize.
“EMPTY OF MANKIND AND ITS WORKS” The Beni was no anomaly. For almost five centuries , Holmberg’s Mistake—the supposition that Native Americans lived in an etern al, unhistoried state—held sway in scholarly work, and from there fanned out to high s chool textbooks, Hollywood movies, newspaper articles, environmental campaigns, romant ic adventure books, and silk-screened T-shirts. It existed in many forms an d was embraced both by those who hated Indians and those who admired them. Holmberg’ s Mistake explained the colonists’ view of most Indians as incurably vicious barbarian s; its mirror image was the dreamy stereotype of the Indian as a Noble Savage. Positiv e or negative, in both images Indians lacked what social scientists call agency—they were not actors in their own right, but passive recipients of whatever windfalls or disaste rs happenstance put in their way.
The Noble Savage dates back as far as the first fu ll-blown ethnography of American indigenous peoples, Bartolomé de Las Casas ’s Apologética Historia Sumaria, written mainly in the 1530s. Las Casas, a conquista dor who repented of his actions and became a priest, spent the second half of his long life opposing European cruelty in the Americas. To his way of thinking, Indians were natu ral creatures who dwelt, gentle as cows, in the “terrestrial paradise.” In their prela psarian innocence, he believed, they had been quietly waiting—waiting for millennia—for Chri stian instruction. Las Casas’s contemporary, the Italian commentator Pietro Martir e d’Anghiera, shared these views.
Indians, he wrote (I quote the English translation from 1556), “lyve in that goulden world of whiche owlde writers speake so much,” existing “ simplye and innocentlye without inforcement of lawes.” In our day, beliefs about Indians’ inherent simpli city and innocence refer mainly to their putative lack of impact on the environment . This notion dates back at least to Henry David Thoreau, who spent much time seeking “I ndian wisdom,” an indigenous 15 way of thought that supposedly did not encompass me asuring or categorizing, which he viewed as the evils that allowed human beings to ch ange Nature. Thoreau’s ideas continue to be influential. In the wake of the firs t Earth Day in 1970, a group named Keep America Beautiful, Inc., put up billboards tha t portrayed an actor in Indian dress quietly weeping over polluted land. The campaign wa s enormously successful. For almost a decade the image of the crying Indian appe ared around the world. Yet though Indians here were playing a heroic role, the advert isement still embodied Holmberg’s Mistake, for it implicitly depicted Indians as peop le who never changed their environment from its original wild state. Because h istory is change, they were people without history. Las Casas’s anti-Spanish views met with such harsh attacks that he instructed his executors to publish the Apologética Historia forty years after his death (he died in 1566). In fact, the book did not appear in complete form until 1909. As the delay suggests, polemics for the Noble Savage tended to m eet with little sympathy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Emblematic was the U.S. historian George Bancroft, dean of his profession, who argued in 1834 that bef ore Europeans arrived North America was “an unproductive waste…Its only inhabitants wer e a few scattered tribes of feeble barbarians, destitute of commerce and of political connection.” Like Las Casas, Bancroft believed that Indians had existed in societies with out change—except that Bancroft regarded this timelessness as an indication of slot h, not innocence.
In different forms Bancroft’s characterization was carried into the next century.
Writing in 1934, Alfred L. Kroeber, one of the foun ders of American anthropology, theorized that the Indians in eastern North America could not develop—could have no history—because their lives consisted of “warfare t hat was insane, unending, continuously attritional.” Escaping the cycle of co nflict was “well-nigh impossible,” he believed. “The group that tried to shift its values from war to peace was almost certainly doomed to early extinction.” *1 Kroeber conceded that Indians took time out from fighting to grow crops, but insisted that agricultu re “was not basic to life in the East; it was an auxiliary, in a sense a luxury.” As a result , “Ninety-nine per cent or more of what [land] might have been developed remained virgin.” Four decades later, Samuel Eliot Morison, twice a Pulitzer Prize winner, closed his two-volume European Discovery of America with the succinct claim that Indians had created no lasting monuments or institutions. Impri soned in changeless wilderness, they were “pagans expecting short and brutish lives, voi d of any hope for the future.” Native people’s “chief function in history,” the British h istorian Hugh Trevor-Roper, Baron Dacre of Glanton, proclaimed in 1965, “is to show t o the present an image of the past from which by history it has escaped.” Textbooks reflected academic beliefs faithfully. I n a survey of U.S. history schoolbooks, the writer Frances Fitzgerald conclude d that the characterization of Indians had moved, “if anything, resolutely backward” betwe en the 1840s and the 1940s. Earlier writers thought of Indians as important, though unc ivilized, but later books froze them into a formula: “lazy, childlike, and cruel.” A mai n textbook of the 1940s devoted only a “few paragraphs” to Indians, she wrote, “of which t he last is headed ‘The Indians Were Backward.’” These views, though less common today, continue to appear. The 1987 edition of American History: A Survey, a standard high school textbook by three well-know n 16 historians, summed up Indian history thusly: “For t housands of centuries—centuries in which human races were evolving, forming communitie s, and building the beginnings of national civilizations in Africa, Asia, and Europe— the continents we know as the Americas stood empty of mankind and its works.” The story of Europeans in the New World, the book informed students, “is the story of the creation of a civilization where none existed.” It is always easy for those living in the present to feel superior to those who lived in the past. Alfred W. Crosby, a University of Texa s historian, noted that many of the researchers who embraced Holmberg’s Mistake lived i n an era when the driving force of events seemed to be great leaders of European desce nt and when white societies appeared to be overwhelming nonwhite societies everywhere. T hroughout all of the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century, nationalism was asce ndant, and historians identified history with nations, rather than with cultures, re ligions, or ways of life. But the Second World War taught the West that non-Westerners—the J apanese, in this instance—were capable of swift societal change. The rapid disinte gration of European colonial empires further adumbrated the point. Crosby likened the ef fects of these events on social scientists to those on astronomers from “the discov ery that the faint smudges seen between stars on the Milky Way were really distant galaxies.” Meanwhile, new disciplines and new technologies we re creating new ways to examine the past. Demography, climatology, epidemio logy, economics, botany, and palynology (pollen analysis); molecular and evoluti onary biology; carbon-14 dating, ice-core sampling, satellite photography, and soil assays; genetic microsatellite analysis and virtual 3-D fly-throughs—a torrent of novel per spectives and techniques cascaded into use. And when these were employed, the idea th at the only human occupants of one-third of the earth’s surface had changed little for thousands of years began to seem implausible. To be sure, some researchers have vigo rously attacked the new findings as wild exaggerations. (“We have simply replaced the o ld myth [of untouched wilderness] with a new one,” scoffed geographer Thomas Vale, “t he myth of the humanized landscape.”) But after several decades of discovery and debate, a new picture of the Americas and their original inhabitants is emerging .
Advertisements still celebrate nomadic, ecological ly pure Indians on horseback chasing bison in the Great Plains of North America, but at the time of Columbus the great majority of Native Americans could be found south o f the Río Grande. They were not nomadic, but built up and lived in some of the worl d’s biggest and most opulent cities.
Far from being dependent on big-game hunting, most Indians lived on farms. Others subsisted on fish and shellfish. As for the horses, they were from Europe; except for llamas in the Andes, the Western Hemisphere had no beasts of burden. In other words, the Americas were immeasurably busier, more diverse , and more populous than researchers had previously imagined.
And older, too.
THE OTHER NEOLITHIC REVOLUTIONS For much of the last century archaeologists believ ed that Indians came to the Americas through the Bering Strait about thirteen t housand years ago at the tail end of the last Ice Age. Because the sheets of polar ice locke d up huge amounts of water, sea levels 17 around the world fell about three hundred feet. The shallow Bering Strait became a wide land bridge between Siberia and Alaska. In theory, paleo-Indians, as they are called, simply walked across the fifty-five miles that now separate the continents. C. Vance Haynes, an archaeologist at the University of Arizo na, put the crowning touches on the scheme in 1964, when he noted evidence that at just the right time—that is, about thirteen thousand years ago—two great glacial sheets in nort hwest Canada parted, leaving a comparatively warm, ice-free corridor between them. Down this channel paleo-Indians could have passed from Alaska to the more habitable regions in the south without having to hike over the ice pack. At the time, the ice pac k extended two thousand miles south of the Bering Strait and was almost devoid of life. Wi thout Haynes’s ice-free corridor, it is hard to imagine how humans could have made it to th e south. The combination of land bridge and ice-free corridor occurred only once in the last twenty thousand years, and lasted for just a few hundred years. And it happene d just before the emergence of what was then the earliest known culture in the Americas , the Clovis culture, so named for the town in New Mexico where its remains were first def initely observed. Haynes’s exposition made the theory seem so ironclad that it fairly flew into the textbooks. I learned it when I attended high school. So did my s on, thirty years later.
In 1997 the theory abruptly came unglued. Some of its most ardent partisans, Haynes among them, publicly conceded that an archae ological dig in southern Chile had turned up compelling evidence of human habitation m ore than twelve thousand years ago. And because these people lived seven thousand miles south of the Bering Strait, a distance that presumably would have taken a long ti me to traverse, they almost certainly arrived before the ice-free corridor opened up. (In any case, new research had cast doubt on the existence of that corridor.) Given the near impossibility of surpassing the glaciers without the corridor, some archaeologists suggested that the first Americans must have arrived twenty thousand years ago, when the ice pac k was smaller. Or even earlier than that—the Chilean site had suggestive evidence of ar tifacts more than thirty thousand years old. Or perhaps the first Indians traveled by boat, and didn’t need the land bridge.
Or maybe they arrived via Australia, passing the So uth Pole. “We’re in a state of turmoil,” the consulting archaeologist Stuart Fiede l told me. “Everything we knew is now supposed to be wrong,” he added, exaggerating a lit tle for effect.
No consensus has emerged, but a growing number of researchers believe that the New World was occupied by a single small group that crossed the Bering Strait, got stuck on the Alaska side, and straggled to the rest of th e Americas in two or three separate groups, with the ancestors of most modern Indians m aking up the second group.
Researchers differ on the details; some scientists have theorized that the Americas may have been hit with as many as five waves of settlem ent before Columbus, with the earliest occurring as much as fifty thousand years ago. In most versions, though, today’s Indians are seen as relative latecomers. Indian activists dislike this line of reasoning. “ I can’t tell you how many white people have told me that ‘science’ shows that India ns were just a bunch of interlopers,” Vine Deloria Jr., a political scientist at the Univ ersity of Colorado at Boulder, said to me.
Deloria is the author of many books, including Red Earth, White Lies, a critique of mainstream archaeology. The book’s general tenor is signaled by its index; under “science,” the entries include “corruption and frau d and,” “Indian explanations ignored by,” “lack of proof for theories of,” “myth of obje ctivity of,” and “racism of.” In 18 Deloria’s opinion, archaeology is mainly about easi ng white guilt. Determining that Indians superseded other people fits neatly into th is plan. “If we’re only thieves who stole our land from someone else,” Deloria said, “then th ey can say, ‘Well, we’re just the same. We’re all immigrants here, aren’t we?’” The moral logic of the we’re-all-immigrants argume nt that Deloria cites is difficult to parse; it seems to be claiming that tw o wrongs make a right. Moreover, there’s no evidence that the first “wrong” was a wrong—noth ing is known about the contacts among the various waves of paleo-Indian migration. But in any case whether most of today’s Native Americans actually arrived first or second is irrelevant to an assessment of their cultural achievements. In every imaginable sc enario, they left Eurasia before the first whisper of the Neolithic Revolution.
The Neolithic Revolution is the invention of farmi ng, an event whose significance can hardly be overstated. “The human career,” wrote the historian Ronald Wright, “divides in two: everything before the Neolithic Re volution and everything after it.” It began in the Middle East about eleven thousand year s ago. In the next few millennia the wheel and the metal tool sprang up in the same area . The Sumerians put these inventions together, added writing, and in the third millenniu m B.C. created the first great civilization. Every European and Asian culture sinc e, no matter how disparate in appearance, stands in Sumer’s shadow. Native Americ ans, who left Asia long before agriculture, missed out on the bounty. “They had to do everything on their own,” Crosby said to me. Remarkably, they succeeded.
Researchers have long known that a second, indepen dent Neolithic Revolution occurred in Mesoamerica. The exact timing is uncert ain—archaeologists keep pushing back the date—but it is now thought to have occurre d about ten thousand years ago, not long after the Middle East’s Neolithic Revolution. In 2003, though, archaeologists discovered ancient seeds from cultivated squashes i n coastal Ecuador, at the foot of the Andes, which may be older than any agricultural rem ains in Mesoamerica—a third Neolithic Revolution. This Neolithic Revolution pro bably led, among many other things, to the cultures in the Beni. The two American Neoli thics spread more slowly than their counterpart in Eurasia, possibly because Indians in many places had not had the time to build up the requisite population density, and poss ibly because of the extraordinary nature of the most prominent Indian crop, maize. *2 The ancestors of wheat, rice, millet, and barley l ook like their domesticated descendants; because they are both edible and highl y productive, one can easily imagine how the idea of planting them for food came up. Mai ze can’t reproduce itself, because its kernels are securely wrapped in the husk, so Indian s must have developed it from some other species. But there are no wild species that r esemble maize. Its closest genetic relative is a mountain grass called teosinte that l ooks strikingly different—for one thing, its “ears” are smaller than the baby corn served in Chinese restaurants. No one eats teosinte, because it produces too little grain to b e worth harvesting. In creating modern maize from this unpromising plant, Indians performe d a feat so improbable that archaeologists and biologists have argued for decad es over how it was achieved. Coupled with squash, beans, and avocados, maize provided Me soamerica with a balanced diet, one arguably more nutritious than its Middle Eastern or Asian equivalent. (Andean agriculture, based on potatoes and beans, and Amazo nian agriculture, based on manioc [cassava], had wide impact but on a global level we re less important than maize.) 19 About seven thousand years elapsed between the daw n of the Middle Eastern Neolithic and the establishment of Sumer. Indians n avigated the same path in somewhat less time (the data are too sketchy to be more prec ise). Pride of place must go to the Olmec, the first technologically complex culture in the hemisphere. Appearing in the narrow “waist” of Mexico about 1800 B.C., they live d in cities and towns centered on temple mounds. Strewn among them were colossal male heads of stone, many six feet tall or more, with helmet-like headgear, perpetual frown s, and somewhat African features, the last of which has given rise to speculation tha t Olmec culture was inspired by voyagers from Africa. The Olmec were but the first of many societies that arose in Mesoamerica in this epoch. Most had religions that focused on human sacrifice, dark by contemporary standards, but their economic and scie ntific accomplishments were bright.
They invented a dozen different systems of writing, established widespread trade networks, tracked the orbits of the planets, create d a 365-day calendar (more accurate than its contemporaries in Europe), and recorded th eir histories in accordion-folded “books” of fig tree bark paper. Arguably their greatest intellectual feat was the invention of zero. In his classic account Number: The Language of Science, the mathematician Tobias Dantzig called the discovery of zero “one of the greatest single accom plishments of the human race,” a “turning point” in mathematics, science, and techno logy. The first whisper of zero in the Middle East occurred about 600 B.C. When tallying n umbers, the Babylonians arranged them into columns, as children learn to do today. T o distinguish between their equivalents to 11 and 101, they placed two triangul ar marks between the digits: 1 1, so to speak. (Because Babylonian mathematics was based on 60, rather than 10, the example is correct only in principle.) Curiously, t hough, they did not use the symbol to distinguish among their versions of 1, 10, and 100. Nor could the Babylonians add or subtract with zero, let alone use zero to enter the realm of negative numbers.
Mathematicians in India first used zero in its cont emporary sense—a number, not a placeholder—sometime in the first few centuries A.D . It didn’t appear in Europe until the twelfth century, when it came in with the Arabic nu merals we use today (fearing fraud, some European governments banned the new numbers). Meanwhile, the first recorded zero in the Americas occurred in a Maya carving fro m 357 A.D., possibly before the Sanskrit. And there are monuments from before the b irth of Christ that do not bear zeroes themselves but are inscribed with dates in a calend rical system based on the existence of zero. Does this mean that the Maya were then more advanc ed than their counterparts in, say, Europe? Social scientists flinch at this quest ion, and with good reason. The Olmec, Maya, and other Mesoamerican societies were world p ioneers in mathematics and astronomy—but they did not use the wheel. Amazingly , they had invented the wheel but did not employ it for any purpose other than childr en’s toys. Those looking for a tale of cultural superiority can find it in zero; those loo king for failure can find it in the wheel.
Neither line of argument is useful, though. What is most important is that by 1000 A.D.
Indians had expanded their Neolithic revolutions to create a panoply of diverse civilizations across the hemisphere.
Five hundred years later, when Columbus sailed int o the Caribbean, the descendants of the world’s Neolithic Revolutions co llided, with overwhelming consequences for all. 20 A GUIDED TOUR Imagine, for a moment, an impossible journey: taki ng off in a plane from eastern Bolivia as I did, but doing so in 1000 A.D. and fly ing a surveillance mission over the rest of the Western Hemisphere. What would be visible fr om the windows? Fifty years ago, most historians would have given a simple answer to this question: two continents of wilderness, populated by scattered bands whose ways of life had changed little since the Ice Age. The sole exceptions would have been Mexico and Peru, where the Maya and the ancestors of the Inka were crawling toward the foot hills of Civilization.
Today our understanding is different in almost eve ry perspective. Picture the millennial plane flying west, from the lowlands of the Beni to the heights of the Andes.
On the ground beneath as the journey begins are the causeways and canals one sees today, except that they are now in good repair and full of people. (Fifty years ago, the earthworks were almost completely unknown, even to those living nearby.) After a few hundred miles the plane ascends to the mountains—an d again the historical picture has changed. Until recently, researchers would have sai d the highlands in 1000 A.D. were occupied by scattered small villages and one or two big towns with some nice stonework.
But recent archaeological investigations have revea led that at this time the Andes housed two mountain states, each much larger than previous ly appreciated.
The state closest to the Beni was based around Lak e Titicaca, the 120-mile-long alpine lake that crosses the Peru-Bolivia border. M ost of this region has an altitude of twelve thousand feet or more. Summers are short; wi nters are correspondingly long. This “bleak, frigid land,” wrote the adventurer Victor v on Hagen, “seemingly was the last place from which one might expect a culture to deve lop.” But in fact the lake is comparatively warm, and so the land surrounding it is less beaten by frost than the surrounding highlands. Taking advantage of the bett er climate, the village of Tiwanaku, one of many settlements around the lake, began afte r about 800 B.C. to drain the wetlands around the rivers that flowed into the lak e from the south. A thousand years later the village had grown to become the center of a large polity, also known as Tiwanaku. 21 NATIVE AMERICA, 1000 A.D. Less a centralized state than a clutch of municipa lities under the common religio-cultural sway of the center, Tiwanaku took advantage of the extreme ecological differences among the Pacific coast, the rugged mou ntains, and the altiplano (the high plains) to create a dense web of exchange: fish fro m the sea; llamas from the altiplano; fruits, vegetables, and grains from the fields arou nd the lake. Flush with wealth, Tiwanaku city swelled into a marvel of terraced pyr amids and grand monuments. Stone breakwaters extended far out into Lake Titicaca, th ronged with long-prowed boats made of reeds. With its running water, closed sewers, an d gaudily painted walls, Tiwanaku was among the world’s most impressive cities. 22 University of Chicago archaeologist Alan L. Kolata excavated at Tiwanaku during the 1980s and early 1990s. He has written th at by 1000 A.D. the city had a population of as much as 115,000, with another quar ter million in the surrounding countryside—numbers that Paris would not reach for another five centuries. The comparison seems fitting; at the time, the realm of Tiwanaku was about the size of modern France. Other researchers believe this popul ation estimate is too high. Twenty or thirty thousand in the central city is more likely, according to Nicole Couture, a University of Chicago archaeologist who helped edit the definitive publication of Kolata’s work in 2003. An equal number, she said, o ccupied the surrounding countryside.
Which view is right? Although Couture was confiden t of her ideas, she thought it would be “another decade” before the matter was set tled. And in any case the exact number does not affect what she regards as the key point. “Building this enormous place up here is really remarkable,” she said. “I realize that again every time I come back.” North and west of Tiwanaku, in what is now souther n Peru, was the rival state of Wari, which then ran for almost a thousand miles al ong the spine of the Andes. More tightly organized and military minded than Tiwanaku , the rulers of Wari stamped out cookie-cutter fortresses and stationed them all alo ng their borders. The capital city—called, eponymously, Wari—was in the heights, near the modern city of Ayacucho.
Housing perhaps seventy thousand souls, Wari was a dense, alley-packed craze of walled-off temples, hidden courtyards, royal tombs, and apartments up to six stories tall.
Most of the buildings were sheathed in white plaste r, making the city sparkle in the mountain sun. In 1000 A.D., at the time of our imaginary overfli ght, both societies were reeling from a succession of terrible droughts. Perhaps eig hty years earlier, dust storms had engulfed the high plains, blackening the glaciers i n the peaks above. (Ice samples, dug out in the 1990s, suggest the assault.) Then came a run of punishing dry spells, many more than a decade in duration, interrupted by giga ntic floods. (Sediment and tree-ring records depict the sequence.) The disaster’s cause is still in dispute, but some climatologists believe that the Pacific is subject to “mega-Niño events,” murderously strong versions of the well-known El Niño patterns that play havoc with American weather today. Mega-Niños occurred every few centur ies between 200 and 1600 A.D. In 1925 and 1926, a strong El Niño—not a mega-Niño, bu t one that was bigger than usual—blasted Amazonia with so much dry heat that s udden fires killed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people in the forest. Rivers dried up, their bottoms carpeted with dead fish. A mega-Niño in the eleventh century may well have caused the droughts of those years. But whatever the cause of the climatic upheaval, it severely tested Wari and Tiwanaku society.
Here, though, one must be careful. Europe was rack ed by a “little ice age” of extreme cold between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries, yet historians rarely attribute the rise and fall of European states in t hat period to climate change. Fierce winters helped drive the Vikings from Greenland and led to bad harvests that exacerbated social tensions in continental Europe, but few woul d claim that the little ice age caused the Reformation. Similarly, the mega-Niños were but one of many stresses on Andean civilizations at the time, stresses that in their t otality neither Wari nor Tiwanaku had the political resources to survive. Soon after 1000 A.D . Tiwanaku split into flinders that would not be united for another four centuries, whe n the Inka swept them up. Wari also 23 fell. It was succeeded and perhaps taken over by a state called Chimor, which oversaw an empire that sprawled over central Peru until it, to o, was absorbed by the Inka.
Such newly discovered histories appear everywhere in the Americas. Take the plane north, toward Central America and southern Me xico, into the bulge of the Yucatán Peninsula, homeland of the Maya. Maya ruins were we ll known forty years ago, to be sure, but among them, too, many new things have bee n discovered. Consider Calakmul, the ruin that Peter Menzel and I visited in the ear ly 1980s. Almost wholly unexcavated since its discovery, the Calakmul we came to lay sw athed in dry, scrubby vegetation that crawled like a swarm of thorns up its two huge pyra mids. When Peter and I spoke to William J. Folan of the Universidad Autónoma de Cam peche, who was just beginning to work at the city, he recommended that we not try go ing to the ruin unless we could rent a heavy truck, and not even to try with the truck if it had rained. Our visit to Calakmul did nothing to suggest that Folan’s advice was wrong. T rees enveloped the great buildings, their roots slowly ripping apart the soft limestone walls. Peter photographed a monument with roots coiled around it, boa constrictor style, five or six feet high. So overwhelming was the tropical forest that I thought Calakmul’s h istory would remain forever unknown.
Happily, I was wrong. By the early 1990s Folan’s t eam had learned that this long-ignored place covered as much as twenty-five s quare miles and had thousands of buildings and dozens of reservoirs and canals. It w as the biggest-ever Maya polity.
Researchers cleaned and photographed its hundred-pl us monuments—and just in time, for epigraphers (scholars of ancient writing) had i n the meantime deciphered Maya hieroglyphics. In 1994 they identified the city-sta te’s ancient name: Kaan, the Kingdom of the Snake. Six years later they discovered that Kaan was the focus of a devastating war that convulsed the Maya city-state for more than a century. And Kaan is just one of the score of Maya settlements that in the last few deca des have been investigated for the first time. A collection of about five dozen kingdoms and city -states in a network of alliances and feuds as convoluted as those of seven teenth-century Germany, the Maya realm was home to one of the world’s most intellect ually sophisticated cultures. About a century before our imaginary surveillance tour, tho ugh, the Maya heartland entered a kind of Dark Ages. Many of the greatest cities empt ied, as did much of the countryside around them. Incredibly, some of the last inscripti ons are gibberish, as if scribes had lost the knowledge of writing and were reduced to meanin gless imitation of their ancestors.
By the time of our overflight, half or more of what once had been the flourishing land of the Maya was abandoned.
Some natural scientists attribute this collapse, c lose in time to that of Wari and Tiwanaku, to a massive drought. The Maya, packed by the millions into land poorly suited to intensive farming, were dangerously close to surpassing the capacity of their ecosystems. The drought, possibly caused by a mega- Niño, pushed the society, already so close to the edge, over the cliff.
Such scenarios resonate with contemporary ecologic al fears, helping to make them popular outside the academy. Within the academ y skepticism is more common. The archaeological record shows that southern Yucatán w as abandoned, while Maya cities in the northern part of the peninsula soldiered on or even grew. Peculiarly, the abandoned land was the wettest—with its rivers, lakes, and ra inforest, it should have been the best place to wait out a drought. Conversely, northern Y ucatán was dry and rocky. The 24 question is why people would have fled from drought to lands that would have been even more badly affected. And what of the rest of Mesoamerica? As the flight continues north, look west, at the hills of what are now the Mexican states of Oax aca and Guerrero. Here are the quarrelsome city-states of the N˜ udzahui (Mixtec), finally overwhelming the Zapotec, their ancient rivals based in the valley city of Mo nte Albán. Further north, expanding their empire in a hot-brained hurry, are the Toltec , sweeping in every direction from the mile-high basin that today houses Mexico City. As i s often the case, the Toltec’s rapid military success led to political strife. A Shakesp earian struggle at the top, complete with accusations of drunkenness and incest, forced out t he long-ruling king, Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl, in (probably) 987 A.D. He fled with b oatloads of loyalists to the Yucatán Peninsula, promising to return. By the time of our plane trip, Quetzalcoatl had apparently conquered the Maya city of Chichén Itzá and was reb uilding it in his own Toltec image.
(Prominent archaeologists disagree with each other about these events, but the murals and embossed plates at Chichén Itzá that depict a Tolte c army bloodily destroying a Maya force are hard to dismiss.) Continue the flight to what is now the U.S. Southw est, past desert farms and cliff dwellings, to the Mississippian societies in the Mi dwest. Not long ago archaeologists with new techniques unraveled the tragedy of Cahoki a, near modern St. Louis, which was once the greatest population center north of the Rí o Grande. Construction began in about 1000 A.D. on an earthen structure that would eventu ally cover fifteen acres and rise to a height of about a hundred feet, higher than anythin g around it for miles. Atop the mound was the temple for the divine kings, who arranged f or the weather to favor agriculture. As if to lend them support, fields of maize rippled ou t from the mound almost as far as the eye could see. Despite this apparent evidence of th eir power, Cahokia’s rulers were setting themselves up for future trouble. By mining the forests upstream for firewood and floating the logs downriver to the city, they were removing ground cover and increasing the likelihood of catastrophic floods. When these c ame, as they later did, kings who gained their legitimacy from their claims to contro l the weather would face angry questioning from their subjects.
Continue north, to the least settled land, the rea lm of hunters and gatherers.
Portrayed in countless U.S. history books and Holly wood westerns, the Indians of the Great Plains are the most familiar to non-scholars. Demographically speaking, they lived in the hinterlands, remote and thinly settled; thei r lives were as far from Wari or Toltec lords as the nomads of Siberia were from the grande es of Beijing. Their material cultures were simpler, too—no writing, no stone plazas, no m assive temples—though Plains groups did leave behind about fifty rings of rock t hat are reminiscent of Stonehenge. The relative lack of material goods has led some to reg ard these groups as exemplifying an ethic of living lightly on the land. Perhaps, but N orth America was a busy, talkative place. By 1000 A.D., trade relationships had covere d the continent for more than a thousand years; mother-of-pearl from the Gulf of Me xico has been found in Manitoba, and Lake Superior copper in Louisiana.
Or forgo the northern route altogether and fly the imaginary plane east from the Beni, toward the mouth of the Amazon. Immediately a fter the Beni, one encounters, in what is now the western Brazilian state of Acre, an other society: a network of small villages associated with circular and square earthw orks in patterns quite unlike those 25 found in the Beni. Even less is known about these p eople; the remains of their villages were discovered only in 2003, after ranchers cleari ng the tropical forest uncovered them.
According to the Finnish archaeologists who first d escribed them, “it is obvious” that “relatively high population densities” were “quite common everywhere in the Amazonian lowlands.” The Finns here are summing up the belief of a new generation of researchers into the Amazon: the river was much more crowded in 1000 A.D. than it is now, especially in its lower half. Dense collections of villages thronged the bluffs that line the shore, with their people fishing in the river and f arming the floodplains and sections of the uplands. Most important were the village orchar ds that marched back from the bluffs for miles. Amazonians practiced a kind of agro-fore stry, farming with trees, unlike any kind of agriculture in Europe, Africa, or Asia. Not all the towns were small. Near the Atlantic wa s the chiefdom of Marajó, based on an enormous island at the mouth of the riv er. Marajó’s population, recently estimated at 100,000, may have been equaled or even surpassed by a still-nameless agglomeration of people six hundred miles upstream, at Santarém, a pleasant town that today is sleeping off the effects of Amazonia’s pas t rubber and gold booms. The ancient inhabitation beneath and around the modern town has barely been investigated. Almost all that we know is that it was ideally located on a high bluff overlooking the mouth of the Tapajós, one of the Amazon’s biggest tributarie s. On this bluff geographers and archaeologists in the 1990s found an area more than three miles long that was thickly covered with broken ceramics, much like Ibibate. Ac cording to William I. Woods, an archaeologist and geographer at the University of K ansas, the region could have supported as many as 400,000 inhabitants, at least in theory, making it one of the bigger population centers in the world.
And so on. Western scholars have written histories of the world since at least the twelfth century. As children of their own societies , these early historians naturally emphasized the culture they knew best, the culture their readership most wanted to hear about. But over time they added the stories of othe r places in the world: chapters about China, India, Persia, Japan, and other places. Rese archers tipped their hats to non-Western accomplishments in the sciences and art s. Sometimes the effort was grudging or minimal, but the vacant reaches in the human tale slowly contracted.
One way to sum up the new scholarship is to say th at it has begun, at last, to fill in one of the biggest blanks in history: the Western H emisphere before 1492. It was, in the current view, a thriving, stunningly diverse place, a tumult of languages, trade, and culture, a region where tens of millions of people loved and hated and worshipped as people do everywhere. Much of this world vanished a fter Columbus, swept away by disease and subjugation. So thorough was the erasur e that within a few generations neither conqueror nor conquered knew that this worl d had existed. Now, though, it is returning to view. It seems incumbent on us to take a look. 26 PART ONE Numbers from Nowhere? 27 Why Billington Survived THE FRIENDLY INDIAN On March 22, 1621, an official Native American del egation walked through what is now southern New England to negotiate with a gro up of foreigners who had taken over a recently deserted Indian settlement. At the head of the party was an uneasy triumvirate:
Massasoit, the sachem (political-military leader) o f the Wampanoag confederation, a loose coalition of several dozen villages that cont rolled most of southeastern Massachusetts; Samoset, sachem of an allied group t o the north; and Tisquantum, a distrusted captive, whom Massasoit had reluctantly brought along as an interpreter.
Massasoit was an adroit politician, but the dilemm a he faced would have tested Machiavelli. About five years before, most of his s ubjects had fallen before a terrible calamity. Whole villages had been depopulated—indee d, the foreigners ahead now occupied one of the empty sites. It was all he coul d do to hold together the remnants of his people. Adding to his problems, the disaster ha d not touched the Wampanoag’s longtime enemies, the Narragansett alliance to the west. Soon, Massasoit feared, they would take advantage of the Wampanoag’s weakness an d overrun them.
Desperate threats require desperate countermeasure s. In a gamble, Massasoit intended to abandon, even reverse, a long-standing policy. Europeans had been visiting New England for at least a century. Shorter than th e natives, oddly dressed, and often unbearably dirty, the pallid foreigners had peculia r blue eyes that peeped out of the masks of bristly, animal-like hair that encased their fac es. They were irritatingly garrulous, prone to fits of chicanery, and often surprisingly incompetent at what seemed to Indians like basic tasks. But they also made useful and bea utiful goods—copper kettles, glittering colored glass, and steel knives and hatchets—unlike anything else in New England.
Moreover, they would exchange these valuable items for cheap furs of the sort used by Indians as blankets. It was like happening upon a d ingy kiosk that would swap fancy electronic goods for customers’ used socks—almost a nyone would be willing to overlook the shopkeeper’s peculiarities.
Over time, the Wampanoag, like other native societ ies in coastal New England, had learned how to manage the European presence. Th ey encouraged the exchange of goods, but would only allow their visitors to stay ashore for brief, carefully controlled excursions. Those who overstayed their welcome were forcefully reminded of the limited duration of Indian hospitality. At the same time, t he Wampanoag fended off Indians from the interior, preventing them from trading directly with the foreigners. In this way the shoreline groups put themselves in the position of classic middlemen, overseeing both European access to Indian products and Indian acces s to European products. Now Massasoit was visiting a group of British with the intent of changing the rules. He would permit the newcomers to stay for an unlimited time— provided they formally allied with the Wampanoag against the Narragansett.
Tisquantum, the interpreter, had shown up alone at Massasoit’s home a year and a half before. He spoke fluent English, because he ha d lived for several years in Britain. 28 But Massasoit didn’t trust him. He seems to have be en in Massasoit’s eyes a man without anchor, out for himself. In a conflict, Tisquantum might even side with the foreigners.
Massasoit had kept Tisquantum in a kind of captivit y since his arrival, monitoring his actions closely. And he refused to use him to negot iate with the colonists until he had another, independent means of communication with th em.
That March Samoset—the third member of the triumvi rate—appeared, having hitched a ride from his home in Maine on an English ship that was plying the coast. Not known is whether his arrival was due to chance or i f Massasoit had asked him to come down because he had picked up a few English phrases by trading with the British. In any case, Massasoit first had sent Samoset, rather than Tisquantum, to the foreigners.
Samoset had walked unaccompanied and unarmed into the circle of rude huts in which the British were living on March 17, 1621. Th e colonists saw a robust, erect-postured man wearing only a loincloth; his st raight black hair was shaved in front but flowed down his shoulders behind. To their furt her amazement, this almost naked man greeted them in broken but understandable Engli sh. He left the next morning with a few presents. A day later he came back, accompanied by five “tall proper men”—the phrase is the colonist Edward Winslow’s—with three- inch black stripes painted down the middle of their faces. The two sides talked inconcl usively, each warily checking out the other, for a few hours. Now, on the 22nd, Samoset s howed up again at the foreigners’ ramshackle base, this time with Tisquantum in tow. Meanwhile Massasoit and the rest of the Indian company waited out of sight. Samoset and Tisquantum spoke with the colonists fo r about an hour. Perhaps they then gave a signal. Or perhaps Massasoit was simply following a prearranged schedule.
In any case, he and the rest of the Indian party ap peared without warning at the crest of a hill on the south bank of the creek that ran throug h the foreigners’ camp. Alarmed by Massasoit’s sudden entrance, the Europeans withdrew to the hill on the opposite bank, where they had emplaced their few cannons behind a half-finished stockade. A standoff ensued.
Finally Winslow exhibited the decisiveness that la ter led to his selection as colony governor. Wearing a full suit of armor and carrying a sword, he waded through the stream and offered himself as a hostage. Tisquantum , who walked with him, served as interpreter. Massasoit’s brother took charge of Win slow and then Massasoit crossed the water himself, followed by Tisquantum and twenty of Massasoit’s men, all ostentatiously unarmed. The colonists took the sachem to an unfini shed house and gave him some cushions to recline on. Both sides shared some of t he foreigners’ homemade moonshine, then settled down to talk, Tisquantum translating.
To the colonists, Massasoit could be distinguished from his subjects more by manner than by dress or ornament. He wore the same deerskin shawls and leggings and like his fellows had covered his face with bug-repe lling oil and reddish-purple dye.
Around his neck hung a pouch of tobacco, a long kni fe, and a thick chain of the prized white shell beads called wampum. In appearance, Win slow wrote afterward, he was “a very lusty man, in his best years, an able body, gr ave of countenance, and spare of speech.” The Europeans, who had barely survived the previous winter, were in much worse shape. Half of the original colony now lay un derground beneath wooden markers painted with death’s heads; most of the survivors w ere malnourished.
Their meeting was a critical moment in American hi story. The foreigners called 29 their colony Plymouth; they themselves were the fam ous Pilgrims. *3 As schoolchildren learn, at that meeting the Pilgrims obtained the se rvices of Tisquantum, usually known as “Squanto.” In the 1970s, when I attended high schoo l, a popular history text was America: Its People and Values, by Leonard C. Wood, Ralph H. Gabriel, and Edward L .
Biller. Nestled among colorful illustrations of col onial life was a succinct explanation of Tisquantum’s role: A friendly Indian named Squanto helped the colonis ts. He showed them how to plant corn and how to live on the edge of the wilde rness. A soldier, Captain Miles Standish, taught the Pilgrims how to defend themsel ves against unfriendly Indians.
My teacher explained that maize was unfamiliar to the Pilgrims and that Tisquantum had demonstrated the proper maize-planti ng technique—sticking the seed in little heaps of dirt, accompanied by beans and squa sh that would later twine themselves up the tall stalks. And he told the Pilgrims to fer tilize the soil by burying fish alongside the maize seeds, a traditional native technique for producing a bountiful harvest.
Following this advice, my teacher said, the colonis ts grew so much maize that it became the centerpiece of the first Thanksgiving. In our s lipshod fashion, we students took notes.
The story in America: Its People and Values isn’t wrong, so far as it goes. But the impression it gives is entirely misleading.
Tisquantum was critical to the colony’s survival, contemporary sc holars agree. He moved to Plymouth after the meeting and spent the r est of his life there. Just as my teacher said, Tisquantum told the colonists to bury several small fish in each maize hill, a procedure followed by European colonists for two ce nturies. Squanto’s teachings, Winslow concluded, led to “a good increase of India n corn”—the difference between success and starvation.
Winslow didn’t know that fish fertilizer may not h ave been an age-old Indian custom, but a recent invention—if it was an Indian practice at all. So little evidence has emerged of Indians fertilizing with fish that some archaeologists believe that Tisquantum actually picked up the idea from European farmers. The notion is not as ridiculous as it may seem. Tisquantum had learned English because Br itish sailors had kidnapped him seven years before. To return to the Americas, he i n effect had to escape twice—once from Spain, where his captors initially sold him in to slavery, and once from England, to which he was smuggled from Spain, and where he serv ed as a kind of living conversation piece at a rich man’s house. In his travels, Tisqua ntum stayed in places where Europeans used fish as fertilizer, a practice on the Continen t since medieval times.
Skipping over the complex course of Tisquantum’s l ife is understandable in a textbook with limited space. But the omission is sy mptomatic of the complete failure to consider Indian motives, or even that Indians might have motives. The alliance Massasoit negotiated with Plymouth was successful from the Wa mpanoag perspective, for it helped to hold off the Narragansett. But it was a disaster from the point of view of New England Indian society as a whole, for the alliance ensured the survival of Plymouth colony, which spearheaded the great wave of British immigra tion to New England. All of this was absent not only from my high school textbooks, but from the academic accounts they 30 were based on. This variant of Holmberg’s Mistake dates back to t he Pilgrims themselves, who ascribed the lack of effective native resistance to the will of God. “Divine providence,” the colonist Daniel Gookin wrote, favored “the quie t and peaceable settlement of the English.” Later writers tended to attribute Europea n success not to European deities but to European technology. In a contest where only one side had rifles and cannons, historians said, the other side’s motives were irre levant. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Indians of the Northeast were thought of as rapidly fading background details in the saga of the rise of the United States—“margi nal people who were losers in the end,” as James Axtell of the College of William and Mary dryly put it in an interview.
Vietnam War–era denunciations of the Pilgrims as im perialist or racist simply replicated the error in a new form. Whether the cause was the Pilgrim God, Pilgrim guns, or Pilgrim greed, native losses were foreordained; Indians cou ld not have stopped colonization, in this view, and they hardly tried.
Beginning in the 1970s, Axtell, Neal Salisbury, Fr ancis Jennings, and other historians grew dissatisfied with this view. “India ns were seen as trivial, ineffectual patsies,” Salisbury, a historian at Smith College, told me. “But that assumption—a whole continent of patsies—simply didn’t make sense.” The se researchers tried to peer through the colonial records to the Indian lives beneath. T heir work fed a tsunami of inquiry into the interactions between natives and newcomers in t he era when they faced each other as relative equals. “No other field in American histor y has grown as fast,” marveled Joyce Chaplin, a Harvard historian, in 2003.
The fall of Indian societies had everything to do with the natives themselves, researchers argue, rather than being religiously or technologically determined. (Here the claim is not that indigenous cultures should be bla med for their own demise but that they helped to determine their own fates.) “When you loo k at the historical record, it’s clear that Indians were trying to control their own desti nies,” Salisbury said. “And often enough they succeeded”—only to learn, as all people s do, that the consequences were not what they expected.
This chapter and the next will explore how two dif ferent Indian societies, the Wampanoag and the Inka, reacted to the incursions f rom across the sea. It may seem odd that a book about Indian life before contact should devote space to the period after contact, but there are reasons for it. First, colon ial descriptions of Native Americans are among the few glimpses we have of Indians whose liv es were not shaped by the presence of Europe. The accounts of the initial encounters b etween Indians and Europeans are windows into the past, even if the glass is smeared and distorted by the chroniclers’ prejudices and misapprehensions.
Second, although the stories of early contact—the Wampanoag with the British, the Inka with the Spanish—are as dissimilar as thei r protagonists, many archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians have recently come to believe that they have deep commonalities. And the tales of other Indians’ enco unters with the strangers were alike in the same way. From these shared features, researche rs have constructed what might be thought of as a master narrative of the meeting of Europe and America. Although it remains surprisingly little known outside specialis t circles, this master narrative illuminates the origins of every nation in the Amer icas today. More than that, the effort to understand events after Columbus shed unexpected li ght on critical aspects of life before 31 Columbus. Indeed, the master narrative led to such surprising conclusions about Native American societies before the arrival of Europeans that it stirred up an intellectual firestorm.
COMING OF AGE IN THE DAWNLAND Consider Tisquantum, the “friendly Indian” of the textbook. More than likely Tisquantum was not the name he was given at birth. In that part of the Northeast, tisquantum referred to rage, especially the rage of manitou, the world-suffusing spiritual power at the heart of coastal Indians’ religious be liefs. When Tisquantum approached the Pilgrims and identified himself by that sobriquet, it was as if he had stuck out his hand and said, Hello, I’m the Wrath of God. No one would lightly adopt such a name in contemporary Western society. Neither would anyone in seventeenth-century indigenous society. Tisquantum was trying to project something .
Tisquantum was not an Indian. True, he belonged to that category of people whose ancestors had inhabited the Western Hemispher e for thousands of years. And it is true that I refer to him as an Indian, because the label is useful shorthand; so would his descendants, and for much the same reason. But “Ind ian” was not a category that Tisquantum himself would have recognized, any more than the inhabitants of the same area today would call themselves “Western Hemispher eans.” Still less would Tisquantum have claimed to belong to “Norumbega,” the label by which most Europeans then referred to New England. (“New England” was coined only in 1616.) As Tisquantum’s later history made clear, he regarded himself first and foremost as a citizen of Patuxet, a shoreline settlement halfway between what is now Bo ston and the beginning of Cape Cod.
Patuxet was one of the dozen or so settlements in what is now eastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island that comprised the W ampanoag confederation. In turn, the Wampanoag were part of a tripartite alliance wi th two other confederations: the Nauset, which comprised some thirty groups on Cape Cod; and the Massachusett, several dozen villages clustered around Massachusetts Bay. All of these people spoke variants of Massachusett, a member of the Algonquian language f amily, the biggest in eastern North America at the time. (Massachusett thus was the nam e both of a language and of one of the groups that spoke it.) In Massachusett, the nam e for the New England shore was the Dawnland, the place where the sun rose. The inhabit ants of the Dawnland were the People of the First Light. 32 MASSACHUSETT ALLIANCE, 1600 A.D.
Ten thousand years ago, when Indians in Mesoameric a and Peru were inventing agriculture and coalescing into villages, New Engla nd was barely inhabited, for the excellent reason that it had been covered until rel atively recently by an ice sheet a mile thick. People slowly moved in, though the area long remained cold and uninviting, especially along the coastline. Because rising sea levels continually flooded the shore, marshy Cape Cod did not fully lock into its contemp orary configuration until about 1000 B.C. By that time the Dawnland had evolved into som ething more attractive: an ecological crazy quilt of wet maple forests, shellf ish-studded tidal estuaries, thick highland woods, mossy bogs full of cranberries and orchids, fractally complex snarls of sandbars and beachfront, and fire-swept stands of p itch pine—“tremendous variety even within the compass of a few miles,” as the ecologic al historian William Cronon put it.
In the absence of written records, researchers hav e developed techniques for teasing out evidence of the past. Among them is “gl ottochronology,” the attempt to estimate how long ago two languages separated from a common ancestor by evaluating their degree of divergence on a list of key words. In the 1970s and 1980s linguists applied glottochronological techniques to the Algonquian di ctionaries compiled by early colonists. However tentatively, the results indicat ed that the various Algonquian 33 languages in New England all date back to a common ancestor that appeared in the Northeast a few centuries before Christ. The ancestral language may derive from what is kno wn as the Hopewell culture.
Around two thousand years ago, Hopewell jumped into prominence from its bases in the Midwest, establishing a trade network that covered most of North America. The Hopewell culture introduced monumental earthworks a nd, possibly, agriculture to the rest of the cold North. Hopewell villages, unlike their more egalitarian neighbors, were stratified, with powerful, priestly rulers commandi ng a mass of commoners.
Archaeologists have found no evidence of large-scal e warfare at this time, and thus suggest that Hopewell probably did not achieve its dominance by conquest. Instead, one can speculate, the vehicle for transformation may h ave been Hopewell religion, with its intoxicatingly elaborate funeral rites. If so, the adoption of Algonquian in the Northeast would mark an era of spiritual ferment and heady co nversion, much like the time when Islam rose and spread Arabic throughout the Middle East.
Hopewell itself declined around 400 A.D. But its t rade network remained intact.
Shell beads from Florida, obsidian from the Rocky M ountains, and mica from Tennessee found their way to the Northeast. Borrowing technol ogy and ideas from the Midwest, the nomadic peoples of New England transformed their so cieties. By the end of the first millennium A.D., agriculture was spreading rapidly and the region was becoming an unusual patchwork of communities, each with its pre ferred terrain, way of subsistence, and cultural style. Scattered about the many lakes, ponds, and swamps of the cold uplands were small, mobile groups of hunters and gatherers—“coll ectors,” as researchers sometimes call them. Most had recently adopted agriculture or were soon to do so, but it was still a secondary source of food, a supplement to the wild products of the land. New England’s major river valleys, by contrast, held large, perma nent villages, many nestled in constellations of suburban hamlets and hunting camp s. Because extensive fields of maize, beans, and squash surrounded every home, these sett lements sprawled along the Connecticut, Charles, and other river valleys for m iles, one town bumping up against the other. Along the coast, where Tisquantum and Massas oit lived, villages often were smaller and looser, though no less permanent.
Unlike the upland hunters, the Indians on the rive rs and coastline did not roam the land; instead, most seem to have moved between a su mmer place and a winter place, like affluent snowbirds alternating between Manhattan an d Miami. The distances were smaller, of course; shoreline families would move a fifteen-minute walk inland, to avoid direct exposure to winter storms and tides. Each vi llage had its own distinct mix of farming and foraging—this one here, adjacent to a r ich oyster bed, might plant maize purely for variety, whereas that one there, just a few miles away, might subsist almost entirely on its harvest, filling great underground storage pits each fall. Although these settlements were permanent, winter and summer alike , they often were not tightly knit entities, with houses and fields in carefully demar cated clusters. Instead people spread themselves through estuaries, sometimes grouping in to neighborhoods, sometimes with each family on its own, its maize ground proudly se parate. Each community was constantly “joining and splitting like quicksilver in a fluid pattern within its bounds,” wrote Kathleen J. Bragdon, an anthropologist at the College of William and Mary—a type of settlement, she remarked, with “no name in the archaeological or anthropological 34 literature.” In the Wampanoag confederation, one of these quick silver communities was Patuxet, where Tisquantum was born at the end of th e sixteenth century.
Tucked into the great sweep of Cape Cod Bay, Patux et sat on a low rise above a small harbor, jigsawed by sandbars and shallow enou gh that children could walk from the beach hundreds of yards into the water before the w aves went above their heads. To the west, maize hills marched across the sandy hillocks in parallel rows. Beyond the fields, a mile or more away from the sea, rose a forest of oa k, chestnut, and hickory, open and park-like, the underbrush kept down by expert annua l burning. “Pleasant of air and prospect,” as one English visitor described the are a, Patuxet had “much plenty both of fish and fowl every day in the year.” Runs of spawn ing Atlantic salmon, short-nose sturgeon, striped bass, and American shad annually filled the harbor. But the most important fish harvest came in late spring, when th e herring-like alewives swarmed the fast, shallow stream that cut through the village. So numerous were the fish, and so driven, that when mischievous boys walled off the s tream with stones the alewives would leap the barrier—silver bodies gleaming in the sun— and proceed upstream.
Tisquantum’s childhood wetu (home) was formed from arched poles lashed together into a dome that was covered in winter by tightly woven rush mats and in summer by thin sheets of chestnut bark. A fire burn ed constantly in the center, the smoke venting through a hole in the center of the roof. E nglish visitors did not find this arrangement peculiar; chimneys were just coming int o use in Britain, and most homes there, including those of the wealthy, were still h eated by fires beneath central roof holes.
Nor did the English regard the Dawnland wetu as primitive; its multiple layers of mats, which trapped insulating layers of air, were “warme r than our English houses,” sighed the colonist William Wood. The wetu was less leaky than the typical English wattle-and-daub house, too. Wood did not conceal hi s admiration for the way Indian mats “deny entrance to any drop of rain, though it come both fierce and long.” Around the edge of the house were low beds, someti mes wide enough for a whole family to sprawl on them together; usually raised a bout a foot from the floor, platform-style; and always piled with mats and furs . Going to sleep in the firelight, young Tisquantum would have stared up at the diddering sh adows of the hemp bags and bark boxes hanging from the rafters. Voices would skirl up in the darkness: one person singing a lullaby, then another person, until everyone was asleep. In the morning, when he woke, big, egg-shaped pots of corn-and-bean mash would be on the fire, simmering with meat, vegetables, or dried fish to make a slow-cooked din ner stew. Outside the wetu he would hear the cheerful thuds of the large mortars and pe stles in which women crushed dried maize into nokake, a flour-like powder “so sweet, toothsome, and hear ty,” colonist Gookin wrote, “that an Indian will travel many days with no other but this meal.” Although Europeans bemoaned the lack of salt in Ind ian cuisine, they thought it nourishing. According to one modern reconstruction, Dawnland diets at the time averaged about 2,500 calories a day, better than th ose usual in famine-racked Europe. 35 In the wetu, wide strips of bark are clamped between arched inn er and outer poles.
Because the poles are flexible, bark layers can be sandwiched in or removed at will, depending on whether the householder wants to incre ase insulation during the winter or let in more air during the summer. In its elegant s implicity, the wetu’s design would have pleased the most demanding modernist architect.
Pilgrim writers universally reported that Wampanoa g families were close and loving—more so than English families, some thought. Europeans in those days tended to view children as moving straight from infancy to ad ulthood around the age of seven, and often thereupon sent them out to work. Indian paren ts, by contrast, regarded the years before puberty as a time of playful development, an d kept their offspring close by until marriage. (Jarringly, to the contemporary eye, some Pilgrims interpreted this as sparing the rod.) Boys like Tisquantum explored the country side, swam in the ponds at the south end of the harbor, and played a kind of soccer with a small leather ball; in the summer and fall they camped out in huts in the fields, wee ding the maize and chasing away birds.
Archery practice began at age two. By adolescence b oys would make a game of shooting at each other and dodging the arrows.
The primary goal of Dawnland education was molding character. Men and women were expected to be brave, hardy, honest, and uncomplaining. Chatterboxes and gossips were frowned upon. “He that speaks seldom a nd opportunely, being as good as his word, is the only man they love,” Wood explaine d. Character formation began early, with family games of tossing naked children into th e snow. (They were pulled out quickly and placed next to the fire, in a practice reminiscent of Scandinavian saunas.) When Indian boys came of age, they spent an entire winter alone in the forest, equipped only with a bow, a hatchet, and a knife. These meth ods worked, the awed Wood reported.
“Beat them, whip them, pinch them, punch them, if [ the Indians] resolve not to flinch for it, they will not.” 36 Tisquantum’s regimen was probably tougher than tha t of his friends, according to Salisbury, the Smith College historian, for it seem s that he was selected to become a pniese, a kind of counselor-bodyguard to the sachem. To ma ster the art of ignoring pain, future pniese had to subject themselves to such miserable experi ences as running barelegged through brambles. And they fasted often, to learn self-discipline. After spending their winter in the woods, pniese candidates came back to an additional test:
drinking bitter gentian juice until they vomited, r epeating this bulimic process over and over until, near fainting, they threw up blood. Patuxet, like its neighboring settlements, was gov erned by a sachem, who upheld the law, negotiated treaties, controlled foreign co ntacts, collected tribute, declared war, provided for widows and orphans, and allocated farm land when there were disputes over it. (Dawnlanders lived in a loose scatter, but they knew which family could use which land—“very exact and punctuall,” Roger Williams, fo under of Rhode Island colony, called Indian care for property lines.) Most of the time, the Patuxet sachem owed fealty to the great sachem in the Wampanoag village to the so uthwest, and through him to the sachems of the allied confederations of the Nauset in Cape Cod and the Massachusett around Boston. Meanwhile, the Wampanoag were rivals and enemies of the Narragansett and Pequots to the west and the many groups of Aben aki to the north. As a practical matter, sachems had to gain the consent of their pe ople, who could easily move away and join another sachemship. Analogously, the great sac hems had to please or bully the lesser, lest by the defection of small communities they lose stature.
Sixteenth-century New England housed 100,000 peopl e or more, a figure that was slowly increasing. Most of those people lived in sh oreline communities, where rising numbers were beginning to change agriculture from a n option to a necessity. These bigger settlements required more centralized admini stration; natural resources like good land and spawning streams, though not scarce, now n eeded to be managed. In consequence, boundaries between groups were becomin g more formal. Sachems, given more power and more to defend, pushed against each other harder. Political tensions were constant. Coastal and riverine New England, accordi ng to the archaeologist and ethnohistorian Peter Thomas, was “an ever-changing collage of personalities, alliances, plots, raids and encounters which involved every In dian [settlement].” Armed conflict was frequent but brief and mild by European standards. The casus belli was usually the desire to avenge an insult or gain status, not the wish for conquest.
Most battles consisted of lightning guerrilla raids by ad hoc companies in the forest: flash of black-and-yellow-striped bows behind trees, hiss and whip of stone-tipped arrows through the air, eruption of angry cries. Attackers slipped away as soon as retribution had been exacted. Losers quickly conceded their loss of status. Doing otherwise would have been like failing to resign after losing a major pi ece in a chess tournament—a social irritant, a waste of time and resources. Women and children were rarely killed, though they were sometimes abducted and forced to join the winning group. Captured men were often tortured (they were admired, though not neces sarily spared, if they endured the pain stoically). Now and then, as a sign of victory, sla in foes were scalped, much as British skirmishes with the Irish sometimes finished with a parade of Irish heads on pikes. In especially large clashes, adversaries might meet in the open, as in European battlefields, though the results, Roger Williams noted, were “far re less bloudy, and devouring then the cruell Warres of Europe.” Nevertheless, by Tisquant um’s time defensive palisades were 37 increasingly common, especially in the river valley s.
Inside the settlement was a world of warmth, famil y, and familiar custom. But the world outside, as Thomas put it, was “a maze of con fusing actions and individuals fighting to maintain an existence in the shadow of change.” And that was before the Europeans showed up.
TOURISM AND TREACHERY British fishing vessels may have reached Newfoundl and as early as the 1480s and areas to the south soon after. In 1501, just nine y ears after Columbus’s first voyage, the Portuguese adventurer Gaspar Corte-Real abducted fi fty-odd Indians from Maine.
Examining the captives, Corte-Real found to his ast onishment that two were wearing items from Venice: a broken sword and two silver ri ngs. As James Axtell has noted, Corte-Real probably was able to kidnap such a large number of people only because the Indians were already so comfortable dealing with Eu ropeans that big groups willingly came aboard his ship. *4 The earliest written description of the People of the First Light was by Giovanni da Verrazzano, an Italian mariner-for-hire commissi oned by the king of France in 1523 to discover whether one could reach Asia by rounding t he Americas to the north. Sailing north from the Carolinas, he observed that the coas tline everywhere was “densely populated,” smoky with Indian bonfires; he could so metimes smell the burning hundreds of miles away. The ship anchored in wide Narraganse tt Bay, near what is now Providence, Rhode Island. Verrazzano was one of the first Europeans the natives had seen, perhaps even the first, but the Narragansett were not intimidated. Almost instantly, twenty long canoes surrounded the visitors. Cocksur e and graceful, the Narragansett sachem leapt aboard: a tall, longhaired man of abou t forty with multicolored jewelry dangling about his neck and ears, “as beautiful of stature and build as I can possibly describe,” Verrazzano wrote. His reaction was common. Time and time again Europ eans described the People of the First Light as strikingly healthy specimens. Eating an incredibly nutritious diet, working hard but not broken by toil, the people of New England were taller and more robust than those who wanted to move in—“as proper men and women for feature and limbes as can be founde,” in the words of the rebel lious Pilgrim Thomas Morton.
Because famine and epidemic disease had been rare i n the Dawnland, its inhabitants had none of the pox scars or rickety limbs common on th e other side of the Atlantic. Native New Englanders, in William Wood’s view, were “more amiable to behold (though [dressed] only in Adam’s finery) than many a compou nded fantastic [English dandy] in the newest fashion.” The Pilgrims were less sanguine about Indians’ mul ticolored, multitextured mode of self-presentation. To be sure, the newcomers acc epted the practicality of deerskin robes as opposed to, say, fitted British suits. And the colonists understood why natives’ skin and hair shone with bear or eagle fat (it ward ed off sun, wind, and insects). And they could overlook the Indians’ practice of letting pre pubescent children run about without a stitch on. But the Pilgrims, who regarded personal adornment as a species of idolatry, were dismayed by what they saw as the indigenous pe nchant for foppery. The robes were adorned with animal-head mantles, snakeskin belts, and bird-wing headdresses. Worse, 38 many Dawnlanders tattooed their faces, arms, and le gs with elaborate geometric patterns and totemic animal symbols. They wore jewelry made of shell and swans’-down earrings and chignons spiked with eagle feathers. If that we ren’t enough, both sexes painted their faces red, white, and black—ending up, Gookin sniff ed, with “one part of their face of one color; and another, of another, very deformedly .” In 1585–86 the artist John White spent fifteen mon ths in what is now North Carolina, returning with more than seventy watercol ors of American people, plants, and animals. White’s work, later distributed in a serie s of romanticized engravings (two of which are shown here), was not of documentary quali ty by today’s standards—his Indians are posed like Greek statues. But at the sa me time his intent was clear. To his eye, 39 the people of the Carolinas, cultural cousins to th e Wampanoag, were in superb health, especially compared to poorly nourished, smallpox-s carred Europeans. And they lived in what White viewed as well-ordered settlements, with big, flourishing fields of maize.
And the hair! As a rule, young men wore it long on one side, in an equine mane, but cropped the other side short, which prevented i t from getting tangled in their bow strings. But sometimes they cut their hair into suc h wild patterns that attempting to imitate them, Wood sniffed, “would torture the wits of a curious barber.” Tonsures, pigtails, head completely shaved but for a single f orelock, long sides drawn into a queue with a raffish short-cut roach in the middle—all of it was prideful and abhorrent to the Pilgrims. (Not everyone in England saw it that way. Inspired by asymmetrical Indian coiffures, seventeenth-century London blades wore l ong, loose hanks of hair known as “lovelocks.”) As for the Indians, evidence suggests that they te nded to view Europeans with disdain as soon as they got to know them. The Wenda t (Huron) in Ontario, a chagrined missionary reported, thought the French possessed “ little intelligence in comparison to themselves.” Europeans, Indians told other Indians, were physically weak, sexually untrustworthy, atrociously ugly, and just plain sme lly. (The British and French, many of whom had not taken a bath in their entire lives, we re amazed by the Indian interest in personal cleanliness.) A Jesuit reported that the “ savages” were disgusted by handkerchiefs: “They say, we place what is unclean in a fine white piece of linen, and put it away in our pockets as something very precious, while they throw it upon the ground.” The Mi’kmaq in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia scoffe d at the notion of European superiority. If Christian civilization was so wonde rful, why were its inhabitants all trying to settle somewhere else?
For fifteen days Verrazzano and his crew were the Narragansett’s honored guests—though the Indians, Verrazzano admitted, kep t their women out of sight after hearing the sailors’ “irksome clamor” when females came into view. Much of the time was spent in friendly barter. To the Europeans’ con fusion, their steel and cloth did not interest the Narragansett, who wanted to swap only for “little bells, blue crystals, and other trinkets to put in the ear or around the neck .” On Verrazzano’s next stop, the Maine coast, the Abenaki did want steel and cloth—demanded them, in fact. But u p north the friendly welcome had vanished. The Indians denied t he visitors permission to land; refusing even to touch the Europeans, they passed g oods back and forth on a rope over the water. As soon as the crew members sent over th e last items, the locals began “showing their buttocks and laughing.” Mooned by th e Indians! Verrazzano was baffled by this “barbarous” behavior, but the reason for it seems clear: unlike the Narragansett, the Abenaki had long experience with Europeans. 40 PEOPLES OF THE DAWNLAND, 1600 A.D. During the century after Verrazzano Europeans were regular visitors to the Dawnland, usually fishing, sometimes trading, occas ionally kidnapping natives as souvenirs. (Verrazzano had grabbed one himself, a b oy of about eight.) By 1610 Britain alone had about two hundred vessels operating off N ewfoundland and New England; hundreds more came from France, Spain, Portugal, an d Italy. With striking uniformity, these travelers reported that New England was thick ly settled and well defended. In 1605 and 1606 Samuel de Champlain, the famous explorer, visited Cape Cod, hoping to establish a French base. He abandoned the idea. Too many people already lived there. A year later Sir Ferdinando Gorges—British, despite t he name—tried to found a community in Maine. It began with more people than the Pilgri ms’ later venture in Plymouth and was better organized and supplied. Nonetheless, the loc al Indians, numerous and well armed, 41 killed eleven colonists and drove the rest back hom e within months.
Many ships anchored off Patuxet. Martin Pring, a B ritish trader, camped there with a crew of forty-four for seven weeks in the su mmer of 1603, gathering sassafras—the species was common in the cleared, bu rned-over areas at the edge of Indian settlements. To ingratiate themselves with t heir hosts, Pring’s crew regularly played the guitar for them (the Indians had drums, flutes, and rattles, but no string instruments). Despite the entertainment, the Patuxe t eventually got tired of the foreigners camping out on their land. Giving their guests a su btle hint that they should be moving on, 140 armed locals surrounded their encampment. N ext day the Patuxet burned down the woodlands where Pring and his men were working. The foreigners left within hours.
Some two hundred Indians watched them from the shor e, politely inviting them to come back for another short visit. Later Champlain, too, stopped at Patuxet, but left before wearing out his welcome. Tisquantum probably saw Pring, Champlain, and othe r European visitors, but the first time Europeans are known to have affected his life was in the summer of 1614. A small ship hove to, sails a-flap. Out to meet the c rew came the Patuxet. Almost certainly the sachem would have been of the party; he would h ave been accompanied by his pniese, including Tisquantum. The strangers’ leader was a sight beyond belief: a stocky man, even shorter than most foreigners, with a volu minous red beard that covered so much of his face that he looked to Indian eyes more beast than human. This was Captain John Smith of Pocahontas fame. According to Smith, he had lived an adventurous and glamorous life. As a youth, he claimed, he had serv ed as a privateer, after which he was captured and enslaved by the Turks. He escaped and awarded himself the rank of captain in the army of Smith. *5 Later he actually became captain of a ship and tra veled to North America several times. On this occasion he had sail ed to Maine with two ships, intending to hunt whales. The party spent two months chasing the beasts but failed to catch a single one. Plan B, Smith wrote later, was “Fish and Furs. ” He assigned most of the crew to catch and dry fish in one ship while he puttered up and down the coast with the other, bartering for furs. In the middle of this perambula ting he showed up in Patuxet.
Despite Smith’s peculiar appearance, Tisquantum an d his fellows treated him well. They apparently gave him a tour, during which he admired the gardens, orchards, and maize fields, and the “great troupes of well-pr oportioned people” tending them. At some point a quarrel occurred and bows were drawn, Smith said, “fortie or fiftie” Patuxet surrounding him. His account is vague, but one imag ines that the Indians were hinting at a limit to his stay. In any case, the visit ended c ordially enough, and Smith returned to Maine and then England. He had a map drawn of what he had seen, persuaded Prince Charles to look at it, and curried favor with him b y asking him to award British names to all the Indian settlements. Then he put the maps in the books he wrote to extol his adventures. In this way Patuxet acquired its Englis h name, Plymouth, after the city in England (it was then spelled “Plimoth”). Smith left his lieutenant, Thomas Hunt, behind in Maine to finish loading the other ship with dried fish. Without consulting Smit h, Hunt decided to visit Patuxet.
Taking advantage of the Indians’ recent good experi ence with English visitors, he invited people to come aboard. The thought of a summer day on the foreigners’ vessel must have been tempting. Several dozen villagers, Tisquantum among them, canoed to the ship.
Without warning or pretext the sailors tried to sho ve them into the hold. The Indians 42 fought back. Hunt’s men swept the deck with small-a rms fire, creating “a great slaughter.” At gunpoint, Hunt forced the survivors belowdecks. With Tisquantum and at least nineteen others, he sailed to Europe, stoppin g only once, at Cape Cod, where he kidnapped seven Nauset. In Hunt’s wake the Patuxet community raged, as did the rest of the Wampanoag confederacy and the Nauset. The sachems vowed not t o let foreigners rest on their shores again. Because of the “worthlesse” Hunt, lamented G orges, the would-be colonizer of Maine, “a warre [was] now new begunne between the i nhabitants of those parts, and us.” Despite European guns, the Indians’ greater numbers , entrenched positions, knowledge of the terrain, and superb archery made them formidabl e adversaries. About two years after Hunt’s offenses, a French ship wrecked at the tip o f Cape Cod. Its crew built a rude shelter with a defensive wall made from poles. The Nauset, hidden outside, picked off the sailors one by one until only five were left. They captured the five and sent them to groups victimized by European kidnappers. Another F rench vessel anchored in Boston Harbor at about the same time. The Massachusett kil led everyone aboard and set the ship afire.
Tisquantum was away five years. When he returned, everything had changed—calamitously. Patuxet had vanished. The Pil grims had literally built their village on top of it.
THE PLACE OF THE SKULL According to family lore, my great-grandmother’s g reat-grandmother’s great-grandfather was the first white person hanged in North America. His name was John Billington. He emigrated aboard the Mayflower, which anchored off the coast of Massachusetts on November 9, 1620. Billington was n ot among the company of saints, to put it mildly; within six months of arrival he beca me the first white person in America to be tried for sassing the police. His two sons were no better. Even before landing, one nearly blew up the Mayflower by shooting a gun at a keg of gunpowder while insi de the ship. After the Pilgrims landed the other son ran o ff to live with some nearby Indians, leading to great consternation and an expedition to fetch him back. Meanwhile Billington père made merry with other non-Puritan lowlifes and haphazardly plotted against authority. The family was “one of the profanest” in Plymouth colony, complained William Bradford, its long-serving governor. Billin gton, in his opinion, was “a knave, and so shall live and die.” What one historian call ed Billington’s “troublesome career” ended in 1630 when he was hanged for shooting someb ody in a quarrel. My family has always claimed that he was framed—but we would say that, wouldn’t we?
Growing up, I was always tickled by this raffish p ersonal connection to history:
part of the Puritans, but not actually puritanical. As an adult, I decided to learn more about Billington. A few hours at the library suffic ed to convince me that some aspects of our agreeable family legend were untrue. Although B illington was in fact hanged, at least two other Europeans were executed in North America before him. And one of them was convicted for the much more interesting offense of killing his pregnant wife and eating her. My ancestor was probably only No. 3, and there is a whisper of scholarly doubt about whether he deserves to be even that high on t he list.
I had learned about Plymouth in school. But it was not until I was poking through 43 the scattered references to Billington that it occu rred to me that my ancestor, like everyone else in the colony, had voluntarily enlist ed in a venture that had him arriving in New England without food or shelter six weeks befor e winter. Not only that, he joined a group that, so far as is known, set off with little idea of where it was heading. In Europe, the Pilgrims had refused to hire the experienced Jo hn Smith as a guide, on the theory that they could use the maps in his book. In consequence , as Smith later crowed, the hapless Mayflower spent several frigid weeks scouting around Cape Co d for a good place to land, during which time many colonists became sick and di ed. Landfall at Patuxet did not end their problems. The colonists had intended to produ ce their own food, but inexplicably neglected to bring any cows, sheep, mules, or horse s. To be sure, the Pilgrims had intended to make most of their livelihood not by fa rming but by catching fish for export to Britain. But the only fishing gear the Pilgrims brought was useless in New England.
Half of the 102 people on the Mayflower made it through the first winter, which to me seemed amazing. How did they survive? In his history of Plymouth colony, Governor Bradfo rd himself provides one answer: robbing Indian houses and graves. The Mayflower hove to first at Cape Cod. An armed company of Pilgrims staggered out. Eventually they found a deserted Indian habitation. The newcomers—hungry, cold, sick—dug op en burial sites and ransacked homes, looking for underground stashes of food. Aft er two days of nervous work the company hauled ten bushels of maize back to the Mayflower, carrying much of the booty in a big metal kettle the men had also stolen. “And sure it was God’s good providence that we found this corn,” Winslow wrote, “for else we know not how we should have done.” The Pilgrims were typical in their lack of prepara tion. Expeditions from France and Spain were usually backed by the state, and gen erally staffed by soldiers accustomed to hard living. English voyages, by contrast, were almost always funded by venture capitalists who hoped for a quick cash-out. Like Si licon Valley in the heyday of the Internet bubble, London was the center of a specula tive mania about the Americas. As with the dot-com boom, a great deal of profoundly f ractured cerebration occurred.
Decades after first touching the Americas, London’s venture capitalists still hadn’t figured out that New England is colder than Britain despite being farther south. Even when they focused on a warmer place like Virginia, they persistently selected as colonists people ignorant of farming; multiplying the difficu lties, the would-be colonizers were arriving in the middle of a severe, multiyear droug ht. As a result, Jamestown and the other Virginia forays survived on Indian charity—th ey were “utterly dependent and therefore controllable,” in the phrase of Karen Ord ahl Kuppermann, a New York University historian. The same held true for my anc estor’s crew in Plymouth.
Inexperienced in agriculture, the Pilgrims were al so not woods-people; indeed, they were so incurious about their environment that Bradford felt obliged to comment in his journal when Francis Billington, my ancestor’s son, climbed to the top of a tall tree to look around. As Thoreau noted with disgust, the col onists landed at Plymouth on December 16, but it was not until January 8 that on e of them went as far away as two miles—and even then the traveler was, again, Franci s Billington. “A party of emigrants to California or Oregon,” Thoreau complained, 44 with no less work on their hands,—and more hostile Indians,—would do as much exploring in the first afternoon, and the Sieur de Champlain would have sought an interview with the savages, and examined the countr y as far as the Connecticut [River, eighty miles away], and made a map of it, before Bi llington had climbed his tree.
Huddled in their half-built village that first ter rible winter, the colonists rarely saw the area’s inhabitants, except for the occasional s hower of brass- or claw-tipped arrows.
After February, glimpses and sightings became more frequent. Scared, the Pilgrims hauled five small cannons from the Mayflower and emplaced them in a defensive fortification. But after all the anxiety, their fir st contact with Indians went surprisingly easily. Within days Tisquantum came to settle among them. And then they heard his stories.
No record survives of Tisquantum’s first journey a cross the Atlantic, but arithmetic gives some hint of the conditions in Hun t’s ship. John Smith had arrived with two ships and a crew of forty-five. If the two ship s had been of equal size, Hunt would have sailed with a crew of about twenty-two. Becaus e Hunt, Smith’s subordinate, had the smaller of the two vessels, the actual number was s urely less. Adding twenty or more captured Indians thus meant that the ship was saili ng with at least twice its normal complement. Tisquantum would have been tied or chai ned, to prevent rebellion, and jammed into whatever dark corner of the hull was av ailable. Presumably he was fed from the ship’s cargo of dried fish. Smith took six week s to cross the Atlantic to England.
There is no reason to think Hunt went faster. The o nly difference was that he took his ship to Málaga, on Spain’s Mediterranean coast. The re he intended to sell all of his cargo, including the human beings.
The Indians’ appearance in this European city sure ly caused a stir. Not long before, Shakespeare had griped in The Tempest that the populace of the much bigger city of London “would not give a doit [a small coin] to a lame beggar, [but] will lay out ten to see a dead Indian.” Hunt managed to sell only a few of his captives before local Roman Catholic priests seized the rest—the Spanish Church vehemently opposed brutality toward Indians. (In 1537 Pope Paul III proclaimed t hat “Indians themselves indeed are true men” and should not be “deprived of their libe rty” and “reduced to our service like brute animals.”) The priests intended to save both Tisquantum’s body, by preventing his enslavement, and his soul, by converting him to Chr istianity. It is unlikely that Tisquantum was converted, though it’s possible that he allowed the friars to think he had been. In any case, this resourceful man convinced t hem to let him return home—or, rather, to try to return. He got to London, where h e stayed with John Slany, a shipbuilder with investments in Newfoundland. Slany apparently taught Tisquantum English while maintaining him as a curiosity in his townhouse. Me anwhile, Tisquantum persuaded him to arrange for passage to North America on a fishin g vessel. He ended up in a tiny British fishing camp on the southern edge of Newfoundland. It was on the same continent as Patuxet, but between them were a thousand miles of rocky coastline and the Mi’Kmac and Abenaki alliances, which were at war with one a nother.
Because traversing this unfriendly territory would be difficult, Tisquantum began looking for a ride to Patuxet. He extolled the boun ty of New England to Thomas Dermer, one of Smith’s subordinates, who was then staying i n the same camp. Dermer, excited by 45 Tisquantum’s promise of easy wealth, contacted Ferd inando Gorges. Gorges, a longtime, slightly dotty enthusiast about the Americas, promi sed to send over a ship with the men, supplies, and legal papers necessary for Dermer to take a crack at establishing a colony in New England. Dermer, with Tisquantum, was supposed to meet the ship when it arrived in New England. One Edward Rowcraft captained the ship sent by Gor ges from England.
According to Gorges’s principal biographer, Rowcraf t “appears to have been unfit for such an enterprise.” This was an understatement. In a bizarre episode, Rowcraft sailed to the Maine coast in early 1619; promptly spotted a F rench fishing boat; seized it for supposedly trespassing on British property (North A merica); placed its crew in chains aboard his own ship; sent that ship back to Gorges with the prisoners; continued his journey on the smaller French vessel, which led to a mutiny; quelled the mutiny; stranded the mutineers on the Maine coast; discovered that a ) without the mutineers he didn’t have enough people to operate the captured ship and b) i t was slowly filling up with water from leaks; and decided to sail immediately for Bri tain’s colony in Jamestown, Virginia, which had the facilities to repair the hull—a cours e that entailed skipping the promised rendezvous with Dermer. At Jamestown, Rowcraft mana ged, through inattentiveness, to sink his ship. Not long afterward he was killed in a brawl.
Incredibly, Dermer failed to execute his part of the plan, too. In orthodox comedy-of-errors style, he did not wait for Rowcraf t in Maine, as he was supposed to, but sailed back to England, Tisquantum in tow. (The two ships more or less crossed paths in the Atlantic.) Dermer and Tisquantum met personally with Gorges. *6 Evidently they made an excellent impression, for despite Dermer’s proven inability to follow instructions Gorges sent him back with Tisquantum a nd a fresh ship to meet Rowcraft, who was supposed to be waiting for them in New Engl and. Dermer touched land in Maine and discovered that Rowcraft had already left . On May 19, 1619, still accompanied by Tisquantum, he set out for Massachus etts, hoping to catch up with Rowcraft (he didn’t know that Rowcraft had sunk his own ship).
What Tisquantum saw on his return home was unimagi nable. From southern Maine to Narragansett Bay, the coast was empty—“utt erly void,” Dermer reported. What had once been a line of busy communities was now a mass of tumbledown homes and untended fields overrun by blackberries. Scattered among the houses and fields were skeletons bleached by the sun. Slowly Dermer’s crew realized they were sailing along the border of a cemetery two hundred miles long and for ty miles deep. Patuxet had been hit with special force. Not a single person remained. T isquantum’s entire social world had vanished. Looking for his kinsfolk, he led Dermer on a melan choly march inland. The settlements they passed lay empty to the sky but fu ll of untended dead. Tisquantum’s party finally encountered some survivors, a handful of families in a shattered village.
These people sent for Massasoit, who appeared, Derm er wrote, “with a guard of fiftie armed men”—and a captive French sailor, a survivor of the shipwreck on Cape Cod.
Massasoit asked Dermer to send back the Frenchman. And then he told Tisquantum what had happened.
One of the French sailors had learned enough Massa chusett to inform his captors before dying that God would destroy them for their misdeeds. The Nauset scoffed at the threat. But the Europeans carried a disease, and th ey bequeathed it to their jailers. Based 46 on accounts of the symptoms, the epidemic was proba bly of viral hepatitis, according to a study by Arthur E. Spiess, of the Maine Historic Pr eservation Commission, and Bruce D.
Spiess, of the Medical College of Virginia. (In the ir view, the strain was, like hepatitis A, probably spread by contaminated food, rather than b y sexual contact, like hepatitis B or C.) Whatever the cause, the results were ruinous. T he Indians “died in heapes as they lay in their houses,” the merchant Thomas Morton observ ed. In their panic, the healthy fled from the sick, carrying the disease with them to ne ighboring communities. Behind them remained the dying, “left for crows, kites, and ver min to prey upon.” Beginning in 1616, the pestilence took at least three years to exhaust itself and killed as much as 90 percent of the people in coastal New England. “And the bone s and skulls upon the severall places of their habitations made such a spectacle,” Morton wrote, that the Massachusetts woodlands seemed to be “a new-found Golgotha,” the Place of the Skull, where executions took place in Roman Jerusalem. The religious overtones in Morton’s metaphor are w ell placed. Neither the Indians nor the Pilgrims had our contemporary understanding of infectious disease. Each believed that sickness reflected the will of celestial force s. As the writer and historian Paula Gunn Allen put it, The idea that the realm of the spirits or the supe rnatural was powerfully engaged in the day-to-day life of nations as well as of vil lagers was commonly held on both sides of the Atlantic…. Both [Indians and Europeans] pred icted events by the position of certain stars on the ecliptic plane around earth as much as by visionary techniques, and both assumed the reality of malicious as well as be neficent supernaturals.
The only real question in the minds of either side was whether Indian spiritual forces could affect Europeans, and vice versa. (As an experiment, Cotton Mather, a celebrated New England minister, tried to exorcise the “daemons in a possessed young woman” with incantations in Massachusett. To his sa tisfaction, the results demonstrated empirically that Indian magic had no effect on Chri stian devils.) Until the sickness Massasoit had directly ruled a community of several thousand and held sway over a confederation of as many as twenty thousand. Now hi s group was reduced to sixty people and the entire confederation to fewer than a thousa nd. The Wampanoag, wrote Salisbury, the Smith historian, came to the obvious logical co nclusion: “their deities had allied against them.” The Pilgrims held similar views. Governor Bradford is said to have attributed the plague to “the good hand of God,” which “favored ou r beginnings” by “sweeping away great multitudes of the natives…that he might make room for us.” Indeed, more than fifty of the first colonial villages in New England were located on Indian communities emptied by disease. The epidemic, Gorges said, left the land “without any [people] to disturb or appease our free and peaceable possessio n thereof, from when we may justly conclude, that GOD made the way to effect his work. ” Much as the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which kille d tens of thousands in one of Europe’s richest cities, prompted spiritual malaise across Europe, the New England epidemic shattered the Wampanoag’s sense that they lived in balance with an intelligible 47 world. On top of that, the massive death toll creat ed a political crisis. Because the hostility between the Wampanoag and the neighboring Narragansett had restricted contact between them, the disease had not spread to the latter. Massasoit’s people were not only beset by loss, they were in danger of subj ugation.
In this engraving taken from a John White watercol or of an East Coast village, the palisaded wall suggests that warfare was common eno ugh to merit the considerable labor of cutting down many trees with stone tools, but th e forces were not large enough to require moats, stone walls, earthen embankments, or any other big defensive fortification.
After learning about the epidemic, the distraught Tisquantum first returned with Dermer to southern Maine. Apparently concluding he was never going to meet Rowcraft, Dermer decided in 1620 to make another pass at New England. Tisquantum returned, too, but not with Dermer. Instead he walked home—the lon g, risky journey he had wanted to 48 avoid. In the interim, yet another English expediti on had attacked the Wampanoag, killing several without apparent provocation. Under standably enraged, Indians attacked Dermer several times on his journey south; he was e ventually slain on Martha’s Vineyard by another former Indian abductee. For his part, Ti squantum was seized on his journey home, perhaps because of his association with the h ated English, and sent to Massasoit as a captive. As he had before, Tisquantum talked his way out of a jam. This time he extolled the English, filling Massasoit’s ears with tales of their cities, their great numbers, their powerful technology. Tisquantum said, according to a colonist who knew him, that if the sachem “Could make [the] English his Friends then [ any] Enemies yt weare to[o] strong for him”—in other words, the Narragansett—“would be Constrained to bowe to him.” The sachem listened without trust. Within a few mon ths, word came that a party of English had set up shop at Patuxet. The Wampanoag o bserved them suffer through the first punishing winter. Eventually Massasoit conclu ded that he possibly should ally with them—compared to the Narragansett, they were the le sser of two evils. Still, only when the need for a translator became unavoidable did he allow Tisquantum to meet the Pilgrims. Massasoit had considerable experience with Europea ns—his father had sent Martin Pring on his way seventeen years before. But that was before the epidemic, when Massasoit had the option of expelling them. Now he told the Pilgrims that he was willing to leave them in peace (a bluff, one assumes, since driving them away would have taxed his limited resources). But in return he wanted the colonists’ assistance with the Narragansett. To the Pilgrims, the Indians’ motives for the deal were obvious. They wanted European technology on their side. In particular, t hey wanted guns. “He thinks we may be [of] some strength to him,” Winslow said later, “for our pieces [guns] are terrible to them.” In fact Massasoit had a subtler plan. It is true t hat European technology dazzled Native Americans on first encounter. But the relati ve positions of the two sides were closer than commonly believed. Contemporary researc h suggests that indigenous peoples in New England were not technologically inferior to the British—or, rather , that terms like “superior” and “inferior” do not readily apply to the relationship between Indian and European technology.
Guns are an example. As Chaplin, the Harvard histo rian, has argued, New England Indians were indeed disconcerted by their f irst experiences with European guns:
the explosion and smoke, the lack of a visible proj ectile. But the natives soon learned that most of the British were terrible shots, from lack of practice—their guns were little more than noisemakers. Even for a crack shot, a seventee nth-century gun had fewer advantages over a longbow than may be supposed. Colonists in J amestown taunted the Powhatan in 1607 with a target they believed impervious to an a rrow shot. To the colonists’ dismay, an Indian sank an arrow into it a foot deep, “which was strange, being that a Pistoll could not pierce it.” To regain the upper hand, the Engli sh set up a target made of steel. This time the archer “burst his arrow all to pieces.” Th e Indian was “in a great rage”; he realized, one assumes, that the foreigners had chea ted. When the Powhatan later captured John Smith, Chaplin notes, Smith broke his pistol r ather than reveal to his captors “the awful truth that it could not shoot as far as an ar row could fly.” 49 At the same time, Europeans were impressed by Amer ican technology. The foreigners, coming from a land plagued by famine, w ere awed by maize, which yields more grain per acre than any other cereal. Indian m occasins were so much more comfortable and waterproof than stiff, moldering En glish boots that when colonists had to walk for long distances their Indian companions often pitied their discomfort and gave them new footwear. Indian birchbark canoes were fas ter and more maneuverable than any small European boat. In 1605 three laughing Ind ians in a canoe literally paddled circles round the lumbering dory paddled by travele r George Weymouth and seven other men. Despite official disapproval, the stunned Brit ish eagerly exchanged knives and guns for Indian canoes. Bigger European ships with sails had some advantages. Indians got hold of them through trade and shipwreck, and train ed themselves to be excellent sailors.
By the time of the epidemic, a rising proportion of the shipping traffic along the New England coast was of indigenous origin. Reading Massasoit’s motives at this distance is a chancy business. But it seems likely that he did not want to ally with the foreig ners primarily for their guns, as they believed. Although the sachem doubtless relished th e possibility of additional firepower, he probably wanted more to confront the Narraganset t with the unappetizing prospect of attacking one group of English people at the same t ime that their main trading partners were other English people. Faced with the possibili ty of disrupting their favored position as middlemen, the Narragansett might think twice be fore staging an incursion. Massasoit, if this interpretation is correct, was trying to in corporate the Pilgrims into the web of native politics. Not long before Massasoit had expe lled foreigners who stayed too long in Wampanoag territory. But with the entire confederat ion now smaller than one of its former communities, the best option seemed to be al lowing the Pilgrims to remain. It was a drastic, even fatal, decision.
MACHINATIONS Tisquantum worked to prove his value to the Pilgri ms. He was so successful that when some anti-British Indians abducted him the col onists sent out a military expedition to get him back. They did not stop to ask themselve s why he might be making himself essential, given how difficult it must have been to live in the ghost of his childhood home. In retrospect, the answer seems clear: the al ternative to staying in Plymouth was returning to Massasoit and renewed captivity.
Recognizing that the Pilgrims would be unlikely to keep him around forever, Tisquantum decided to gather together the few survi vors of Patuxet and reconstitute the old community at a site near Plymouth. More ambitio us still, he hoped to use his influence on the English to make this new Patuxet t he center of the Wampanoag confederation, thereby stripping the sachemship fro m Massasoit, who had held him captive. To accomplish these goals, he intended to play the Indians and English against each other.
The scheme was risky, not least because the ever-s uspicious Massasoit sent one of his pniese, Hobamok, to Plymouth as a monitor. (Hobamok, like Tisquantum, apparently adopted a new name in his dealings with the British ; “Hobamok” was the source of evil in Wampanoag cosmology.) Sometimes the two men were able to work together, as when Hobamok and Tisquantum helped the Pilgrims negotiat e a treaty with the Massachusett to 50 the north. They also helped establish a truce with the Nauset of Cape Cod after Bradford promised to pay back the losses caused by their ear lier grave robbing.
By fall the settlers’ situation was secure enough that they held a feast of thanksgiving. Massasoit showed up with ninety peopl e, most of them young men with weapons. The Pilgrim militia responded by marching around and firing their guns in the air in a manner intended to convey menace. Gratifie d, both sides sat down, ate a lot of food, and complained about the Narragansett. Ecce Thanksgiving.
All the while, Tisquantum covertly tried to persua de other Wampanoag that he was better able to protect them against the Narraga nsett than Massasoit. In case of attack, Tisquantum claimed, he could respond with an equal number of Indian troops—and the Pilgrims, who might be able to intimidate the enemy . He evidently believed that the Narragansett did not have enough experience with Eu ropean guns to know that they were not as fearsome as they first appeared. To advance his case, Tisquantum told other Indians that the foreigners had hidden away caseful s of the agent that caused the epidemic, and that he could manipulate them into un leashing it.
Even as Tisquantum attempted to foment Indian dist rust of Massasoit, he told the colonists that Massasoit was going to double-cross them by leading a joint attack on Plymouth with the Narragansett. And he attempted to trick the Pilgrims into attacking the sachem. In the spring of 1622 Tisquantum accompanied a del egation to the Massachusett in Boston Harbor. Minutes after they left, Bradford later recalled, one of the surviving Patuxet “came running in seeming great fear” to inf orm the settlers that the Narragansett “and he thought also Massasoit” were planning to at tack. The idea clearly was that the colonists, enraged by the putative assault, would r ise up and smite Massasoit. Tisquantum would be away, so his hands would seem clean. Inste ad everything went awry. In Indian villages people could only be summoned by shouting; once a canoe had gone a few hundred yards, it could not readily be called back. But when the news came of the impending attack, Bradford ordered the Pilgrims to fire a cannon to order back the expedition and Tisquantum. Meanwhile Hobamok, who h ad acquired some English, indignantly denied the story. In a move that Tisqua ntum apparently had not anticipated, Bradford dispatched Hobamok’s wife to Massasoit’s h ome to find out what the sachem was doing. She reported that “all was quiet.” Actua lly, this wasn’t entirely true.
Massasoit was furious—at Tisquantum. He demanded th at the Pilgrims send their translator to him for a quick execution.
Bradford refused; Tisquantum’s language skills wer e too vital. Tisquantum is one of my subjects, Massasoit said. You Pilgrims have n o jurisdiction over him. And he offered a cache of fur to sweeten the deal. When th e colony still would not surrender Tisquantum, Massasoit sent a messenger with a knife and told Bradford to lop off Tisquantum’s hands and head. To make his displeasur e manifest, he summoned Hobamok home and cut off contact with the Pilgrims. Nervous, the colonists began building defensive fortifications. Worse, almost no rain fell between mid-May and mid-July, withering their crops. Because the Wampan oag had stopped trading with them, the Pilgrims would not be able to supplement their harvest.
Tisquantum, afraid of Massasoit’s wrath, was unabl e to take a step outside of Plymouth without an escort. Nonetheless, he accompa nied Bradford on a trip to southeast Cape Cod to negotiate another pact. They were on th e way home when Tisquantum 51 suddenly became sick. He died in a few days, his ho pes in ruins. In the next decade tens of thousands of Europeans came to Massachusetts. Ma ssasoit shepherded his people through the wave of settlement, and the pact he sig ned with Plymouth lasted for more than fifty years. Only in 1675 did one of his sons, angered at being pushed around by colonists’ laws, launch what was perhaps an inevita ble attack. Indians from dozens of groups joined in. The conflict, brutal and sad, tor e through New England.
The Europeans won. Historians attribute part of th e victory to Indian unwillingness to match the European tactic of massa cring whole villages. Another reason for the newcomers’ triumph was that by that time th ey outnumbered the natives. Groups like the Narragansett, which had been spared by the epidemic of 1616, were crushed by a smallpox epidemic in 1633. A third to half of the r emaining Indians in New England died. The People of the First Light could avoid or adapt to European technology but not European disease. Their societies were destroyed by weapons their opponents could not control and did not even know they had. 52 In the Land of Four Quarters “LIKE A CLUB RIGHT BETWEEN THE EYES” In the early 1960s, Henry F. Dobyns, a young anthr opologist working on a rural-aid project in Peru, dispatched assistants to storehouses of old records throughout the country. Dobyns himself traveled to the central cathedral in Lima. Entering the nave, visitors passed by a chapel on the right-hand side that contained the mummified body of Francisco Pizarro, the romantic, thuggish Spaniard who conquered Peru in the sixteenth century. Or, rather, they passed by a chapel that w as thought to contain the conqueror’s mummified body; the actual remains turned up years later, stashed inside two metal boxes beneath the main altar. Dobyns was not visiti ng the cathedral as a sightseer.
Instead, he descended into the structure’s basement —cold, dank, poorly lighted—to inspect birth and death registers kept there.
Dobyns belonged to a research team led by his doct oral advisor, Allan R.
Holmberg of Cornell, the Holmberg after whom I have unkindly named Holmberg’s Mistake. Holmberg had persuaded Cornell to let him lease an old colonial estate in rural Peru (the Carnegie Corporation, a charitable founda tion despite its name, provided the funds). The estate included an entire village, whos e inhabitants, most of them Indian, were its sharecroppers. “It was really a form of se rfdom,” Dobyns told me. “The villagers were just heartbreakingly poor.” Holmberg planned t o test strategies for raising their incomes. Because land tenure was a contentious issu e in Peru, he had asked Dobyns to finalize the lease and learn more about the estate’ s history. With his adjutants, Dobyns visited a dozen archives, including those in the ca thedral.
Dobyns had been dipping his toe into archival rese arch for more than a decade, with results he found intriguing. His first foray i nto the past occurred in 1953, while he was visiting his parents in Phoenix, Arizona, durin g a school break. A friend, Paul H.
Ezell, asked him for some help with his doctoral th esis. The thesis concerned the adoption of Spanish culture by the Pima Indians, wh o occupy a 372,000-acre reservation south of Phoenix. Many of the region’s colonial-era records survived in the Mexican town of Altar, in the border state of Sonora. Ezell wanted to examine those records, and asked Dobyns to come along. One weekend the two men drove from Phoenix to Nogales, on the border. From Nogales, they went south, west, and up into the highlands, often on dirt roads, to Altar.
Then a huddle of small houses surrounding a dozen little stores, Altar was, Dobyns said, “the end of the earth.” Local women st ill covered their heads with shawls.
Gringo visitors, few in number, tended to be prospe ctors chasing rumors of lost gold mines in the mountains.
After surprising the parish priest by their intere st in his records, the two young men hauled into the church their principal research tool: a Contura portable copier, an ancestor to the Xerox photocopier that required fre shly stirred chemicals for each use.
The machine strained the technological infrastructu re of Altar, which had electricity for only six hours a day. Under flickering light, the t wo men pored through centuries-old 53 ledgers, the pages beautifully preserved by the dry desert air. Dobyns was struck by the disparity between the large number of burials recor ded at the parish and the far smaller number of baptisms. Almost all the deaths were from diseases brought by Europeans. The Spaniards arrived and then Indians died—in huge num bers, at incredible rates. It hit him, Dobyns told me, “like a club right between the eyes .” At first he did nothing about his observation. His torical demography was not supposed to be his field. Six years later, in 1959, he surveyed more archives in Hermosilla and found the same disparity. By this po int he had almost finished his doctorate at Cornell and had been selected for Holm berg’s project. The choice was almost haphazard: Dobyns had never been to Peru. Peru, Dobyns learned, was one of the world’s cultu ral wellsprings, a place as important to the human saga as the Fertile Crescent . Yet the area’s significance had been scarcely appreciated outside the Andes, partly beca use the Spaniards so thoroughly ravaged Inka culture, and partly because the Inka t hemselves, wanting to puff up their own importance, had actively concealed the glories of the cultures before them.
Incredibly, the first full history of the fall of t he Inka empire did not appear until more than three hundred years after the events it chroni cled: William H. Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Peru, published in 1847. Prescott’s thunderous cadences remain a pleasure to read, despite the author’s firmly state d belief, typical for his time, in the moral inferiority of the natives. But the book had no suc cessor. More than a century later, when Dobyns went to Lima, Prescott’s was still the only complete account. (A fine history, John Hemming’s Conquest of the Incas, appeared in 1970. But it, too, has had no successor, despite a wealth of new information.) “T he Inka were largely ignored because the entire continent of South America was largely i gnored,” Patricia Lyon, an anthropologist at the Institute for Andean Studies, in Berkeley, California, explained to me. Until the end of colonialism, she suggested, re searchers tended to work in their own countries’ possessions. “The British were in Africa , along with the Germans and French.
The Dutch were in Asia, and nobody was in South Ame rica,” because most of its nations were independent. The few researchers who did exami ne Andean societies were often sidetracked into ideological warfare. The Inka prac ticed a form of central planning, which led scholars into a sterile Cold War squabble about whether they were actually socialists avant la lettre in a communal Utopia or a dire precursor to Stalin ist Russia.
Given the lack of previous investigation, it may h ave been inevitable that when Dobyns traced births and deaths in Lima he would be staking out new ground. He collected every book on Peruvian demography he coul d find. And he dipped into his own money to pay Cornell project workers to explore the cathedral archives and the national archives of Peru and the municipal archives of Lima . Slowly tallying mortality and natality figures, Dobyns continued to be impressed by what he found. Like any scholar, he eventually wrote an article about what he had le arned. But by the time his article came out, in 1963, he had realized that his findings app lied far beyond Peru.
The Inka and the Wampanoag were as different as Tu rks and Swedes. But Dobyns discovered, in effect, that their separate battles with Spain and England followed a similar biocultural template, one that explained the otherw ise perplexing fact that every Indian culture, large or small, eventually succumbed to Eu rope. (Shouldn’t there have been some exceptions?) And then, reasoning backward in time f rom this master narrative, he proposed a new way to think about Native American s ocieties, one that transformed not 54 only our understanding of life before Columbus arri ved, but our picture of the continents themselves.
TAWANTINSUYU In 1491 the Inka ruled the greatest empire on eart h. Bigger than Ming Dynasty China, bigger than Ivan the Great’s expanding Russi a, bigger than Songhay in the Sahel or powerful Great Zimbabwe in the West Africa table lands, bigger than the cresting Ottoman Empire, bigger than the Triple Alliance (as the Aztec empire is more precisely known), bigger by far than any European state, the Inka dominion extended over a staggering thirty-two degrees of latitude—as if a s ingle power held sway from St.
Petersburg to Cairo. The empire encompassed every i maginable type of terrain, from the rainforest of upper Amazonia to the deserts of the Peruvian coast and the twenty-thousand-foot peaks of the Andes between. “I f imperial potential is judged in terms of environmental adaptability,” wrote the Oxf ord historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto, “the Inka were the most impressi ve empire builders of their day.” The Inka goal was to knit the scores of different groups in western South America—some as rich as the Inka themselves, some p oor and disorganized, all speaking different languages—into a single bureaucratic fram ework under the direct rule of the emperor. The unity was not merely political: the In ka wanted to meld together the area’s religion, economics, and arts. Their methods were a udacious, brutal, and efficient: they removed entire populations from their homelands; sh uttled them around the biggest road system on the planet, a mesh of stone-paved thoroug hfares totaling as much as 25,000 miles; and forced them to work with other groups, u sing only Runa Sumi, the Inka language, on massive, faraway state farms and const ruction projects. *7 To monitor this cyclopean enterprise, the Inka developed a form of writing unlike any other, sequences of knots on strings that formed a binary code reminisc ent of today’s computer languages (see Appendix B, “Talking Knots”). So successful we re the Inka at remolding their domain, according to the late John H. Rowe, an emin ent archaeologist at the University of California at Berkeley, that Andean history “beg ins, not with the Wars of [South American] Independence or with the Spanish Conquest , but with the organizing genius of [empire founder] Pachakuti in the fifteenth century .” 55 TAWANTINSUYU The Land of the Four Quarters, 1527 A.D. Highland Peru is as extraordinary as the Inka them selves. It is the only place on earth, the Cornell anthropologist John Murra wrote, “where millions [of people] insist, against all apparent logic, on living at 10,000 or even 14,000 feet above sea level.
Nowhere else have people lived for so many thousand s of years in such visibly vulnerable circumstances.” And nowhere else have pe ople living at such heights—in places where most crops won’t grow, earthquakes and landslides are frequent, and extremes of weather are the norm—repeatedly created technically advanced, long-lasting civilizations. The Inka homeland, uniquely high, wa s also uniquely steep, with slopes of more than sixty-five degrees from the horizontal. ( The steepest street in San Francisco, famed for its nearly undrivable hills, is thirty-on e-and-a-half degrees.) And it was uniquely narrow; the distance from the Pacific shor e to the mountaintops is in most 56 places less than seventy-five miles and in many les s than fifty. Ecologists postulate that the first large-scale human societies tended to ari se where, as Jared Diamond of the University of California at Los Angeles put it, geo graphy provided “a wide range of altitudes and topographies within a short distance. ” One such place is the Fertile Crescent, where the mountains of western Iran and t he Dead Sea, the lowest place on earth, bracket the Tigris and Euphrates river syste ms. Another is Peru. In the short traverse from mountain to ocean, travelers pass thr ough twenty of the world’s thirty-four principal types of environment. Highland Peru, captured in this image of the Inka ruin Wiñay Wayna by the indigenous Andean photographer Martín Chambi (1891– 1973), is the only place on earth where people living at such inhospitable altitudes repeatedly created materially sophisticated societies.
To survive in this steep, narrow hodgepodge of eco systems, Andean communities usually sent out representatives and colonies to li ve up- or downslope in places with resources unavailable at home. Fish and shellfish f rom the ocean; beans, squash, and cotton from coastal river valleys; maize, potatoes, and the Andean grain quinoa from the foothills; llamas and alpacas for wool and meat in the heights—each area had something to contribute. Villagers in the satellite settlemen ts exchanged products with the center, sending beans uphill and obtaining llama jerky in r eturn, all the while retaining their citizenship in a homeland they rarely saw. Combinin g the fruits of many ecosystems, Andean cultures both enjoyed a better life than the y could have wrested from any single place and spread out the risk from the area’s frequ ent natural catastrophes. Murra 57 invented a name for this mode of existence: “vertic al archipelagoes.” Verticality helped Andean cultures survive but als o pushed them to stay small.
Because the mountains impeded north-south communica tion, it was much easier to coordinate the flow of goods and services east to w est. As a result the region for most of its history was a jumble of small- and medium-scale cultures, isolated from all but their neighbors. Three times, though, cultures rose to do minate the Andes, uniting previously separate groups under a common banner. The first pe riod of hegemony was that of Chavín, which from about 700 B.C. to the dawn of th e Christian era controlled the central coast of Peru and the adjacent mountains. The next, beginning after Chavín’s decline, was the time of two great powers: the technological ly expert empire of Wari, which held sway over the coastline previously under Chavín; an d Tiwanaku, centered on Lake Titicaca, the great alpine lake on the Peru-Bolivia border. (I briefly discussed Wari and Tiwanaku earlier, and will return to them—and to th e rest of the immense pre-Inka tradition—later.) After Wari and Tiwanaku collapsed , at the end of the first millennium, the Andes split into sociopolitical fragments and w ith one major exception remained that way for more than three centuries. Then came the In ka.
The Inka empire, the greatest state ever seen in t he Andes, was also the shortest lived. It began in the fifteenth century and lasted barely a hundred years before being smashed by Spain. As conquerors, the Inka were unlikely. Even in 135 0 they were still an unimportant part of the political scene in the cent ral Andes, and newcomers at that. In one of the oral tales recorded by the Spanish Jesui t Bernabé Cobo, the Inka originated with a family of four brothers and four sisters who left Lake Titicaca for reasons unknown and wandered until they came upon what woul d become the future Inka capital, Qosqo (Cusco, in Spanish). Cobo, who sighed over th e “extreme ignorance and barbarity” of the Indians, dismissed such stories a s “ludicrous.” Nonetheless, archaeological investigation has generally borne th em out: the Inka seem indeed to have migrated to Qosqo from somewhere else, perhaps Lake Titicaca, around 1200 A.D. The colonial account of Inka history closest to in digenous sources is by Juan de Betanzos, a Spanish commoner who rose to marry an I nka princess and become the most prominent translator for the colonial government. B ased on interviews with his in-laws, Betanzos estimated that when the Inka showed up in the Qosqo region “more than two hundred” small groups were already there. Qosqo its elf, where they settled, was a hamlet “of about thirty small, humble straw houses.” Archaeological evidence suggests that the Inka gra dually became more powerful.
The apparent turning point in their fortunes occurr ed when they somehow made enemies of another group, the Chanka, who eventually attack ed them. This unremarkable provincial squabble had momentous consequences.
According to a widely quoted chronology by the six teenth-century cleric Miguel Cabello Balboa, the Chanka offensive took place in 1438. The Inka leader at that time was Wiraqocha Inka. *8 “A valiant prince,” according to Cobo, Wiraqocha I nka had a “warlike” nature even as a young man and vowed that after taking the throne “he would conquer half the world.” Perhaps so, but he fled th e Chanka attack with three of his four sons, including his designated successor, Inka Urqo n. A younger son, Inka Cusi Yupanki, refused to run. Instead he fought the Chanka with s uch bravery that (according to the legend) the very stones rose up to join the fray. I nka Yupanki won the battle, capturing 58 many Chanka leaders. Later he skinned them in celeb ration—Pizarro saw the trophies on display. But first Inka Yupanki presented the capti ves to his father, so that Wiraqocha Inka could perform the victory ritual of wiping his feet on their bodies.
Fearing that Inka Yupanki was becoming too big for his britches, Wiraqocha Inka chose that moment to remind his younger son of his subordinate status. The foot-wiping honor, he proclaimed, actually belonged to the next Inka: Inka Urqon. “To this,” Betanzos wrote, “Inka Yupanki answered that he was begging his father to tread on the prisoners, that he had not won the victory so that such women as Inka Urqon and the rest of his brothers could step on them.” A heated argum ent led to a standoff. In a Shakespearian move, Wiraqocha Inka decided to settl e the issue by murdering his inconvenient younger son. (It was “a crazy impulse, ” one of Wiraqocha Inka’s generals later explained.) Inka Yupanki was tipped off and t he scheme failed. The humiliated Wiraqocha Inka went into exile while Inka Yupanki r eturned in triumph to Qosqo, renamed himself Pachakuti (“World-shaker”), and pro claimed that the ruling Inka families were descended from the sun. Then he went about conquering everything in sight. Hey, wait a minute! the reader may be saying. This family story makes such terrific melodrama that it seems reasonable to wond er whether it actually happened. After all, every known written account of the Inka was se t down after the conquest, a century or more after Pachakuti’s rise. And these differ from each other, sometimes dramatically, reflecting the authors’ biases and ignorance, and t heir informants’ manipulation of history to cast a flattering light on their family lines. F or these reasons, some scholars dismiss the chronicles entirely. Others note that both the Inka and the Spaniards had long traditions of record-keeping. By and large the chroniclers see m to have been conscious of their roles as witnesses and tried to live up to them. Th eir versions of events broadly agree with each other. As a result, most scholars judicio usly use the colonial accounts, as I try to do here.
After taking the reins of state, Pachakuti spent t he next twenty-five years expanding the empire from central highland Peru to Lake Titicaca and beyond. His methods were subtler and more economical with direc t force than one might expect, as exemplified by the slow takeover of the coastal val ley of Chincha. In about 1450 Pachakuti dispatched an army to Chincha under Qhapa q Yupanki (Ka-pok Yu-panki, meaning roughly “Munificent Honored One”), a kind o f adopted brother. Marching into the valley with thousands of troops, Qhapaq Yupanki informed the fearful local gentry that he wanted nothing from Chincha whatsoever. “He said that he was the son of the Sun,” according to the report of two Spanish priest s who investigated the valley’s history in the 1550s. “And that he had come for their good and for everyone’s and that he did not want their silver nor their gold nor their daughter s.” Far from taking the land by force, in fact, the Inka general would give them “all that he was carrying.” And he practically buried the Chincha leadership under piles of valuab les. In return for his generosity, the general asked only for a little appreciation, prefe rably in the form of a large house from which the Inka could operate, and a staff of servan ts to cook, clean, and make the things needed by the outpost. And when Qhapaq Yupanki left , he asked Chincha to keep expressing its gratitude by sending craftspeople an d goods to Qosqo.
A decade later Pachakuti sent out another army to the valley, this one led by his son and heir, Thupa Inka Yupanki (“Royal Honored In ka”). Thupa Inka closeted himself 59 with the local leadership and laid out many inspire d ideas for the valley’s betterment, all of which were gratefully endorsed. Following the In ka template, the local leaders drafted the entire populace into service, dividing househol ds by sex and age into cohorts, each with its own leader who reported to the leader of t he next larger group. “Everything was in order for the people to know who was in control, ” the Spanish priests wrote. Thupa Inka delegated tasks to the mobilized population: h ewing roads to link Chincha to other areas controlled by the Inka, building a new palace for the Inka, and tending the fields set aside for the Inka. Thupa Inka apparently left the area in charge of his brother, who continued managing its gratitude. The next visit came from Pachakuti’s grandson, pro bably in the 1490s. With him came escalating demands for land and service—the ve neer of reciprocity was fading. By that point the Chincha had little alternative but t o submit. They were surrounded by Inka satrapies; their economy was enmeshed with the impe rial machinery; they had hundreds or thousands of people doing the empire’s bidding. The Chincha elite, afraid to take on the Inka army, always chose compliance over valor, and were rewarded with plum positions in the colonial government. But their dom ain had ceased to exist as an independent entity. In 1976 Edward N. Luttwak, now at the Center for S trategic and International Studies, in Washington, D.C., published a short, pr ovocative book about imperial Rome that distinguished between territorial and hegemonic empires. Territorial empires directly occupy territories with their armies, throw out the old rulers, and annex the land. In hegemonic empires, the internal affairs of conquere d areas remain in the hands of their original rulers, who become vassals. Territorial em pires are tightly controlled but costly to maintain; hegemonic empires are inexpensive to m aintain, because the original local rulers incur the costs of administration, but the l oose tie between master and vassal encourages rebellion. Every conquest-minded state i s a mixture of both, but all Native American empires leaned toward the hegemonic. Witho ut horses, Indian soldiers unavoidably traveled slower than European or Asian soldiers. If brigades were tied up as occupiers, they could not be reassigned quickly. As a result, the Inka were almost forced to co-opt local rulers instead of displacing them. They did so with a vengeance.
Pachakuti gave command of the military to his son Thupa Inka in 1463 and turned his attention to totally rebuilding Qosqo in imperi al style, in the process becoming one of history’s great urban planners. Although he drew on Andean aesthetic traditions, Pachakuti put his own stamp on Inka art and archite cture. Whereas the buildings of Sumer and Assyria were covered with brilliant mosai cs and splendid pictorial murals, the Inka style was severe, abstract, stripped down to g eometric forms—startlingly contemporary, in fact. (According to the Peruvian c ritic César Paternosto, such major twentieth-century painters as Josef Albers, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko were inspired by Inka art.) 60 Inka masonry amazed the conquistadors, who could n ot understand how they put together such enormous stones without mortar or dra ft animals. And it was astonishingly durable—the U.S. explorer Hiram Bingham photographe d the citadel of Machu Piqchu in 1913, and found it in near-perfect condition despit e four centuries of neglect.
At the heart of the new Qosqo was the plaza of Awk aypata, 625 feet by 550 feet, carpeted almost in its entirety with white sand car ried in from the Pacific and raked daily by the city’s army of workers. Monumental villas an d temples surrounded the space on three sides, their walls made from immense blocks o f stone so precisely cut and fit that Pizarro’s younger cousin Pedro, who accompanied the conqueror as a page, reported “that the point of a pin could not have been insert ed in one of the joints.” Across their facades ran enormous plates of polished gold. When the alpine sun filled Awkaypata, with its boldly delineated horizontal plain of whit e sand and sloping sheets of gold, the space became an amphitheater for the exaltation of light.
In Pachakuti’s grand design, Awkaypata was the cen ter of the empire—and the cosmos. From the great plaza radiated four highways that demarcated the four asymmetrical sectors into which he divided the empi re, Tawantinsuyu, “Land of the Four Quarters.” To the Inka, the quarters echoed the hea venly order. The Milky Way, a vast celestial river in Andean cosmology, crosses the Pe ruvian sky at an angle of about twenty-eight degrees to the earth’s orbit. For six months the stream of stars slants across the sky from, so to speak, northeast to southwest; the other six months it slants from southeast to northwest. The transition roughly coin cides with the transition between dry and wet seasons—the time when the Milky Way release s life-giving water to PachaMama, Mother Earth—and divides the heavens int o four quarters. Awkaypata, reflecting this pattern, was the axis of the univer se.
Not only that, Qosqo was the center of a second spiritual pattern. Radiating out from Awkaypata was a drunken spiderweb of forty-one crooked, spiritually powerful lines, known as zeq’e, that linked holy features of the landscape: spring s, tombs, caves, shrines, fields, stones. About four hundred of thes e wak’a (shrines, more or less) existed around Qosqo—the landscape around the capital was c harged with telluric power. (The zeq’e also played a role in the Inka calendar, which app arently consisted of forty-one 61 eight-day weeks.) So complexly interrelated was the network of wak’a and zeq’e, Columbia University archaeologist Terence D’Altroy has written, “that many otherwise diligent scholars have been reduced to scratching t heir heads and trusting someone else’s judgement.” Each wak’a had its own meaning, relative status, social affil iation, and set of ceremonial uses. One big stone outside town was bel ieved to be the petrified body of one of the original Inka brothers; Inka armies often ca rried it with them, dressed in fine togs, as a kind of good-luck talisman. To keep track of t he florid abundance of shrines and lines, Cobo observed, the empire “had more than a t housand men in the city of Qosqo who did nothing but remember these things.” Around the Inka capital of Qosqo (modern Cusco) we re more than four hundred wak’a, places in the landscape charged with spiritual pow er. Many of these were stones, some carved in elaborate representations, perhaps o f the areas they influenced.
Not only did Pachakuti reconfigure the capital, he laid out the institutions that characterized Tawantinsuyu itself. For centuries, v illagers had spent part of their time working in teams on community projects. Alternately bullying and cajoling, Pachakuti expanded the service obligation unrecognizably. In Tawantinsuyu, he decreed, all land and property belonged to the state (indeed, to the Inka himself). Peasants thus had to work periodically for the empire as farmers, herder s, weavers, masons, artisans, miners, or soldiers. Often crews spent months away from hom e. While they were on the road, the state fed, clothed, and housed them—all from goods supplied by other work crews.
Conscripts built dams, terraces, and irrigation can als; they grew crops on state land and raised herds on state pastures and made pots in sta te factories and stocked hundreds of state warehouses; they paved the highways and suppl ied the runners and llamas carrying messages and goods along them. Dictatorially extend ing Andean verticality, the imperium shuttled people and materiel in and out of every Andean crevice.
Not the least surprising feature of this economic system was that it functioned without money. True, the lack of currency did not s urprise the Spanish invaders—much of Europe did without money until the eighteenth ce ntury. But the Inka did not even have markets. Economists would predict that this nonmarket econo my—vertical socialism, it has been called—should produce gross inefficiencies . These surely occurred, but the errors were of surplus, not want. The Spanish invad ers were stunned to find warehouses overflowing with untouched cloth and supplies. But to the Inka the brimming coffers signified prestige and plenty; it was all part of t he plan. Most important, Tawantinsuyu “managed to eradicate hunger,” the Peruvian novelis t Mario Vargas Llosa noted. Though 62 no fan of the Inka, he conceded that “only a very s mall number of empires throughout the whole world have succeeded in achieving this feat.” When Tawantinsuyu swallowed a new area, the Inka f orcibly imported settlers from other, faraway areas, often in large numbers, and gave them land. The newcomers were encouraged to keep their own dress and customs rather than integrate into the host population. To communicate, both groups were forced to use Ruma Suni, the language of their conquerors. In the short run this practice cr eated political tensions that the Inka manipulated to control both groups. In the long ter m it would have (if successful) eroded the distinctions among cultures and forged a homoge neous new nation in the imprint of Tawantinsuyu. Five centuries later the wholesale re shuffling of populations became an infamous trademark of Stalin and Mao. But the scale on which the Inka moved the pieces around the ethnic checkerboard would have excited t heir admiration. Incredibly, foreigners came to outnumber natives in many places . It is possible that ethnic clashes would eventually have caused Tawantinsuyu to implod e, Yugoslavia-style. But if Pizarro had not interrupted, the Inka might have created a monolithic culture as enduring as China.
THE GILDED LITTER OF THE INKA How did Pizarro do it? Sooner or later, everyone w ho studies the Inka confronts this question. Henry Dobyns wondered about it, too. The empire was as populous, rich, and well organized as any in history. But no other fell before such a small force: Pizarro had only 168 men and 62 horses. Researchers have of ten wondered whether the Inka collapse betokens a major historical lesson. The an swer is yes, but the lesson was not grasped until recently.
The basic history of the empire was known well eno ugh by the time Dobyns began reading the old colonial accounts. According to Cabello Balboa’s chronology, Pachakuti died peacefully in 1471. His son Thupa In ka, long the military commander, now took the imperial “crown”—a multicolored braid, twisted around the skull like a headband, from which hung a red tasseled fringe tha t fell across the forehead. Carried on a golden litter—the Inka did not walk in public—Thu pa Inka appeared with such majesty, according to the voyager Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, that “people left the roads along which he had to pass and, ascending the hills on ei ther side, worshipped and adored” him by “pulling out their eyebrows and eyelashes.” Mini ons collected and stored every object he touched, food waste included, to ensure that no lesser persons could profane these objects with their touch. The ground was too dirty to receive the Inka’s saliva so he always spat into the hand of a courtier. The courti er wiped the spittle with a special cloth and stored it for safekeeping. Once a year everythi ng touched by the Inka—clothing, garbage, bedding, saliva—was ceremonially burned.
Thupa Inka inaugurated the Inka custom of marrying his sister. In fact, Thupa Inka may have married two of his sisters. The practice was genetically unsou nd but logically consistent. Only close relatives of the I nka were seen as of sufficient purity to produce his heir. As Inkas grew in grandeur, more p urity was required. Finally only a sister would do. The Inka’s sister-wives accompanie d him on military forays, along with a few hundred or thousand of his subordinate wives. The massive scale of these domestic arrangements seems not to have impeded his imperial progress. By his death in 1493, 63 Thupa Inka had sent his armies deep into Ecuador an d Chile, doubling the size of Tawantinsuyu again. In terms of area conquered duri ng his lifetime, he was in the league of Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan.
TAWANTINSUYU Expansion of the Inka Empire, 1438–1527 A.D. Tawantinsuyu is known to have risen and fallen wit h breathtaking rapidity, but the exact chronology of its trajectory is disputed. Most rese archers regard the account of Miguel Cabello Balboa as approximately correct. It is the source for this map, though the reader is cautioned against regarding it as either exact o r universally accepted.
Thupa Inka’s death set off a fight for the royal f ringe. Tawantinsuyu did not have strict succession rules. Instead the Inka selected the son he thought most qualified. Thupa Inka had more than sixty sons from all of his wives , according to Sarmiento de Gamboa, 64 so he had a lot of choice. Alas, Thupa Inka apparen tly selected one son but then changed his mind on his deathbed and selected another. Fact ions formed around each son, leading to a melée. The first son was banished or killed an d the second took the name Wayna Qhapaq ( Why-na Ka -pok) and became the Inka. Because the new Inka was sti ll a teenager (his name means “Munificent Youth”), two of his unc les served as regents. One uncle tried to usurp power but was killed by the other. E ventually the Inka grew old enough to take the reins. Among his first official acts was k illing two of his own brothers to avoid future family problems. Then he, like his father, m arried his sister.
Wayna Qhapaq was not a military adventurer like hi s father. He initially seems to have viewed his role mainly as one of consolidation , rather than conquest, perhaps because Tawantinsuyu was approaching the geographic limits of governability—communication down the long north-sou th spine of the empire was stretched to the limit. Much of Wayna Qhapaq’s time was devoted to organizing the empire’s public works projects. Often these were mo re political than practical. Because the Inka believed that idleness fomented rebellion, the Spanish traveler Pedro Cieza de León reported, he ordered unemployed work brigades “to move a mountain from one spot to another” for no practical purpose. Cieza de León once came upon three different highways running between the same two towns, each b uilt by a different Inka.
Consolidation was completed in about 1520. Wayna Q hapaq then marched to Ecuador at the head of an army, intending to expand the empire to the north. It was a journey of return: he had been born in southern Ecu ador during one of his father’s campaigns. He himself brought with him one of his t eenage sons, Atawallpa. When Wayna Qhapaq came to his birthplace, the city now c alled Cuenca, Cobo reported, “he commanded that a magnificent palace be constructed for himself.” Wayna Qhapaq liked his new quarters so much that he stayed on while At awallpa and his generals went out to subjugate a few more provinces. 65 In 1615, the Inka writer Felipe Guamán Poma de Aya la presented his life’s work, a massive history of Inka society with four hundred drawings, to King Philip II of Spain, hoping that the king would use it to learn more abo ut his new subjects. Whether Philip ever saw the manuscript is unknown, but Poma de Aya la’s work—one of the few non-European accounts of Inka life—is now a fundame ntal scholarly source. Although the portraits here are not taken from life, they hi nt at how the Inka viewed and remembered their leaders.
They did not meet with success. The peoples of the wet equatorial forests did not belong to the Andean culture system and were not in terested in joining. They fought ferociously. Caught by an ambush, Atawallpa was for ced to retreat. Enraged by this failure, Cobo wrote, Wayna Qhapaq “prepared himself as quickly as possible to go in person and avenge this disgrace.” He left his pleas ure palace and publicly berated Atawallpa at the front. In a renewed offensive, the army advanced under the Inka’s personal command. Bearing clubs, spears, bows, lanc es, slings, and copper axes, brilliant in cloaks of feathers and silver breastplates, thei r faces painted in terrifying designs, the Inka army plunged into the forests of the northern coast. They sang and shouted in unison as they fought. The battle seesawed until a sudden counterattack knocked Wayna Qhapaq out of his litter—a humiliation. Nearly captured by his foes, he was forced to walk like a plebe back to his new palace. The Inka army regroup ed and returned. After prolonged 66 struggle it subjugated its foes. Finding the warm Ecuadorian climate more to his li king than that of chilly Qosqo, Wayna Qhapaq delayed his triumphal return for six y ears. Wearing soft, loose clothing of vampire-bat wool, he swanned around his palaces wit h a bowl of palm wine or chicha, a sweet, muddy, beer-like drink usually made from cru shed maize. “When his captains and chief Indians asked him how, though drinking so muc h, he never got intoxicated,” reported Pizarro’s younger cousin and page, Pedro, “they say that he replied that he drank for the poor, of whom he supported many.” In 1525 Wayna Qhapaq suddenly got sick and expired in his Ecuadorian retreat.
Once again the succession was contested and bloody. Details are murky, but on his deathbed the Inka seems to have passed over Atawall pa, who had not distinguished himself, and designated as his heir a son named Nin an K’uychi. Unluckily, Ninan K’uychi died of the same illness right before Wayna Qhapaq. The Inka’s next pick was a nineteen-year-old son who had stayed behind in Qosq o. As was customary, high priests subjected this choice to a divination. They learned that this son would be dreadfully unlucky. The priest who reported this unhappy resul t to Wayna Qhapaq found him dead.
In consequence, the court nobles were left to choos e the emperor. They settled on the teenager who had been the Inka’s final choice.
The teenager’s principal qualification for the pos t was that his mother was Wayna Qhapaq’s sister. Nonetheless, he had no doubts abou t crowning himself immediately—he didn’t even wait to find out if Wayna Qhapaq had le ft any instructions or last wishes. The new Inka took the name Washkar Inka (“Golden Chain Inka”). Atawallpa remained in Ecuador, ostensibly because he was unable to show h is face after being berated by his father, but presumably also because he knew that th e life expectancy of Inka brothers tended to be short.
Meanwhile, Wayna Qhapaq’s mummified body was dress ed in fine clothing and taken back to Qosqo on a gold litter bedecked with feathers. Along the way, the dead emperor’s executors, four high-ranking nobles, sche med to depose and murder Washkar and install yet another son in his place. Something aroused Washkar’s suspicions as the party neared Qosqo—perhaps his discovery that Atawa llpa had stayed in Ecuador with most of the Inka army, perhaps a tipoff from a loya l uncle whom the conspirators had approached. After staging a grand funeral for his f ather, Washkar ordered the executors to meet him one at a time, which provided the occas ion to arrest them. Torture and execution followed.
The plot circumvented, Washkar went to work elimin ating any remaining objections to his accession. Because Wayna Qhapaq h ad not actually married Washkar’s mother—the union was properly incestuous but not pr operly legitimate—the new Inka demanded that his mother participate ex post facto in a wedding ceremony with his father’s mummy. Even for the Andes this was an unus ual step. Washkar further solidified his credentials as ruler by marrying his sister. Ac cording to the unsympathetic account of Cabello Balboa, Washkar’s mother, who was apparentl y willing to marry her dead brother, objected to her son’s plan to marry her da ughter. The ceremony took place only after “much begging and supplication.” Civil war was probably unavoidable. Egged on by sc heming courtiers and generals, relations between Atawallpa and Washkar s pent several years swinging through the emotional valence from concealed suspicion to o vert hostility. Washkar, in Qosqo, 67 had the machinery of the state at his disposal; in addition, his claim to the fringe was generally accepted. Atawallpa, in Ecuador, had a wa r-tested army and the best generals but a weaker claim to the throne (his mother was me rely his father’s cousin, not his sister). The war lasted for more than three years, seesawed across the Andes, and was spectacularly brutal. Washkar’s forces seized the i nitial advantage, invading Ecuador and actually capturing Atawallpa, almost tearing off on e of his ears in the process. In a sequence reminiscent of Hollywood, one of Atawallpa ’s wives supposedly smuggled a crowbar-like tool into his improvised battlefield p rison (his intoxicated guards permitted a conjugal visit). Atawallpa dug his way out, escap ed to Ecuador, reassembled his army, and drove his foes south. On a plateau near today’s Peru-Ecuador border the northern forces personally led by Atawallpa shattered Washka r’s army. A decade later Cieza de León saw the battleground and from the wreckage and unburied remains thought the dead could have numbered sixteen thousand. The victors c aptured and beheaded Washkar’s main general. Atawallpa mounted a bowl atop the sku ll, inserted a spout between the teeth, and used it as a cup for his chicha. With the momentum of war turning against him, Wash kar left Qosqo to lead his own army. Atawallpa sent his forces ahead to meet i t. After a horrific battle (Cieza de León estimated the dead at thirty-five thousand), W ashkar was captured in an ambush in the summer of 1532. Atawallpa’s generals took the I nka as a captive to Qosqo and executed his wives, children, and relatives in fron t of him. Meanwhile, Atawallpa’s triumphant cavalcade, perhaps as many as eighty tho usand strong, slowly promenaded to Qosqo. In October or November 1532, the victors sto pped outside the small city of Cajamarca, where they learned that pale, hairy peop le who sat on enormous animals had landed on the coast. No matter how many times what happened next has be en recounted, it has not lost its power to shock: how the curious Atawallpa decid ed to wait for the strangers’ party to arrive; how Pizarro, for it was he, persuaded Atawa llpa to visit the Spaniards in the central square of Cajamarca, which was surrounded o n three sides by long, empty buildings (the town apparently had been evacuated f or the war); how on November 16, 1532, the emperor-to-be came to Cajamarca in his gi lded and feather-decked litter, preceded by a squadron of liveried men who swept th e ground and followed by five or six thousand troops, almost all of whom bore only ornam ental, parade-type weapons; how Pizarro hid his horses and cannons just within the buildings lining the town square, where the 168 Spanish awaited the Inka with such fear, Pe dro Pizarro noted, that many “made water without knowing it out of sheer terror”; how a Spanish priest presented Atawallpa with a travel-stained Christian breviary, which the Inka, to whom it literally meant nothing, impatiently threw aside, providing the Spa nish with a legal fig leaf for an attack (desecrating Holy Writ); how the Spanish, firing ca nnons, wearing armor, and mounted on horses, none of which the Indians had ever seen, suddenly charged into the square; how the Indians were so panicked by the smoke and f ire and steel and charging animals that in trying to flee hundreds trampled each other to death (“they formed mounds and suffocated one another,” one conquistador wrote); h ow the Spanish took advantage of the soldiers’ lack of weaponry to kill almost all the r est; how the native troops who recovered from their initial surprise desperately clustered a round Atawallpa, supporting his litter with their shoulders even after Spanish broadswords sliced off their hands; how Pizarro personally dragged down the emperor-to-be and hustl ed him through the heaps of bodies 68 on the square to what would become his prison. Pizarro exulted less in victory than one might ima gine. A self-made man, the illiterate, illegitimate, neglected son of an army captain, he ached with dreams of wealth and chivalric glory despite the fortune he had alre ady acquired in the Spanish colonies.
After landing in Peru he realized that his tiny for ce was walking into the maw of a powerful empire. Even after his stunning triumph in Cajamarca he remained torn between fear and ambition. For his part, Atawallpa observed the power of Inka gold and silver to cloud European minds. *9 Precious metals were not valuable in the same way in Tawantinsuyu, because there was no currency. To the Inka ruler, the foreigners’ fascination with gold apparently represented his be st chance to manipulate the situation to his advantage. He offered to fill a room twenty-two feet by seventeen feet full of gold objects—and two equivalent rooms with silver—in exc hange for his freedom. Pizarro quickly agreed to the plan. Atawallpa, still in command of the empire, ordered his generals to strip Qosqo of its silver and gold. Not having lived in the city s ince childhood, he had little attachment to it. He also told his men to slay Washkar, whom t hey still held captive; all of Washkar’s main supporters; and, while they were at it, all of Atawallpa’s surviving brothers. After his humiliating captivity ended, Atawallpa seems to have believed, the ground would be clear for his rule.
Between December 1532 and May 1533, caravans of pr ecious objects—jewelry, fine sculptures, architectural ornamentation—wended on llama-back to Cajamarca. As gold and silver slowly filled the rooms, all of Taw antinsuyu seemed frozen. It was as if someone had slipped into the Kremlin in 1950 and he ld Stalin at gunpoint, leaving the nation, accustomed to obeying a tyrant, utterly rud derless. Meanwhile, the waiting Spanish, despite their unprecedented success, grew increasingly fearful and suspicious.
When Atawallpa fulfilled his half of the bargain an d the ransom was complete Pizarro melted everything into ingots and shipped them to S pain. The conquistadors did not follow through on their part of the deal. Rather th an releasing Atawallpa, they garroted him. Then they marched to Qosqo.
Almost at a stroke, just 168 men had dealt a devas tating blow to the greatest empire on earth. To be sure, their victory was nowh ere near complete: huge, bloody battles still lay ahead. Even after the conquistado rs seized Qosqo, the empire regrouped in the hinterlands, where it fought off Spanish for ces for another forty years. Yet the scale of Pizarro’s triumph at Cajamarca cannot be gainsai d. He had routed a force fifty times larger than his own, won the greatest ransom ever s een, and vanquished a cultural tradition that had lasted five millennia—all withou t suffering a single casualty.
VIRGIN SOIL I have just pulled a fast one. The Inka history ab ove is as contemporary scholars understand it. They disagree on which social factor s to emphasize and on how much weight to assign individual Spanish chronicles, but the outline seems not in serious dispute. The same is not true of my rendering of Pi zarro’s conquest. I presented what is more or less the account current when Dobyns arrive d in Peru. But in his reading he discovered a hole in this version of events—a facto r so critical that it drastically changed Dobyns’s view of native America. 69 Why did the Inka lose? The usual answer is that Pi zarro had two advantages: steel (swords and armor, rifles and cannons) and horses. The Indians had no steel weapons and no animals to ride (llamas are too small to carry g rown men). They also lacked the wheel and the arch. With such inferior technology, Tawant insuyu had no chance. “What could [the Inka] offer against this armory?” asked John H emming, the conquest historian.
“They were still fighting in the bronze age.” The I nka kept fighting after Atawallpa’s death. But even though they outnumbered the Europea ns by as much as a hundred to one, they always lost. “No amount of heroism or discipli ne by an Inka army,” Hemming wrote, “could match the military superiority of the Spaniards.” But just as guns did not determine the outcome of conflict in New England, steel was not the decisive factor in Peru. True, anthropo logists have long marveled that Andean societies did not make steel. Iron is plenti ful in the mountains, yet the Inka used metal for almost nothing useful. In the late 1960s, Heather Lechtman, an archaeologist at the MIT Center for Materials Research in Archaeolog y and Ethnology, suggested to “an eminent scholar of Andean prehistory that we take a serious and careful look at Andean metallurgy.” He responded, “But there wasn’t any.” Lechtman went and looked anyway.
She discovered that Inka metallurgy was, in fact, a s refined as European metallurgy, but that it had such different goals that academic expe rts had not even recognized it.
According to Lechtman, Europeans sought to optimiz e metals’ “hardness, strength, toughness, and sharpness.” The Inka, by c ontrast, valued “plasticity, malleability, and toughness.” Europeans used metal for tools. Andean societies primarily used it as a token of wealth, power, and community affiliation. European metalworkers tended to create metal objects by pouring molten al loys into shaped molds. Such foundries were not unknown to the Inka, but Andean societies vastly preferred to hammer metal into thin sheets, form the sheets around mold s, and solder the results. The results were remarkable by any standard—one delicate bust t hat Lechtman analyzed was less than an inch tall but made of twenty-two separate g old plates painstakingly joined.
If a piece of jewelry or a building ornament was t o proclaim its owner’s status, as the Inka desired, it needed to shine. Luminous gold and silver were thus preferable to dull iron. Because pure gold and silver are too soft to hold their shape, Andean metalworkers mixed them with other metals, usually copper. This strengthened the metal but turned it an ugly pinkish-copper color. To create a lustrous gold surface, Inka smiths heated the copper-gold alloy, which increases the rate at whic h the copper atoms on the surface combine with oxygen atoms in the air—it makes the m etal corrode faster. Then they pounded the hot metal with mallets, making the corr osion flake off the outside. By repeating this process many times, they removed the copper atoms from the surface of the metal, creating a veneer of almost pure gold. Ultim ately the Inka ended up with strong sheets of metal that glittered in the sun. Andean cultures did make tools, of course. But rat her than making them out of steel, they preferred fiber. The choice is less odd than it may seem. Mechanical engineering depends on two main forces: compression and tension. Both are employed in European technology, but the former is more common— the arch is a classic example of compression. By contrast, tension was the Inka way. “Textiles are held together by tension,” William Conklin, a research associate at the Textile Museum in Washington, D.C., told me. “And they exploited that tension wit h amazing inventiveness and precision.” 70 In the technosphere of the Andes, Lechtman explain ed, “people solved basic engineering problems through the manipulation of fi bers,” not by creating and joining hard wooden or metal objects. To make boats, Andean cultures wove together reeds rather than cutting up trees into planks and nailin g them together. Although smaller than big European ships, these vessels were not puddle-m uddlers; Europeans first encountered Tawantinsuyu in the form of an Inka ship sailing ne ar the equator, three hundred miles from its home port, under a load of fine cotton sai ls. It had a crew of twenty and was easily the size of a Spanish caravelle. Famously, t he Inka used foot-thick cables to make suspension bridges across mountain gorges. Because Europe had no bridges without supports below, they initially terrified Pizarro’s men. Later one conquistador reassured his countrymen that they could walk across these In ka inventions “without endangering themselves.” Andean textiles were woven with great precision—el ite garments could have a thread count of five hundred per inch—and structure d in elaborate layers. Soldiers wore armor made from sculpted, quilted cloth that was al most as effective at shielding the body as European armor and much lighter. After tryi ng it, the conquistadors ditched their steel breastplates and helmets wholesale and dresse d like Inka infantry when they fought.
Although Andean troops carried bows, javelins, mac es, and clubs, their most fearsome weapon, the sling, was made of cloth. A sl ing is a woven pouch attached to two strings. The slinger puts a stone or slug in the po uch, picks up the strings by the free ends, spins them around a few times, and releases one of the strings at the proper moment.
Expert users could hurl a stone, the Spanish advent urer Alonso Enríquez de Guzmán wrote, “with such force that it will kill a horse…. I have seen a stone, thus hurled from a sling, break a swordin two pieces when it was held in a man’s hand at a distance of thirty paces.” (Experimenting with a five-foot-long, Andea n-style sling and an egg-sized rock from my garden, I was able, according to my rough c alculation, to throw the stone at more than one hundred miles per hour. My aim was te rrible, though.) In a frightening innovation, the Inka heated stone s in campfires until they were red hot, wrapped them in pitch-soaked cotton, and h urled them at their targets. The cotton caught fire in midair. In a sudden onslaught the sk y would rain burning missiles. During a counterattack in May 1536 an Inka army used these m issiles to burn Spanish-occupied Qosqo to the ground. Unable to step outside, the co nquistadors cowered in shelters beneath a relentless, weeks-long barrage of flaming stone. Rather than evacuate, the Spanish, as brave as they were greedy, fought to th e end. In a desperate, last-ditch counterattack, the Europeans eked out victory.
More critical than steel to Pizarro’s success was the horse. The biggest animal in the Andes during Inka times was the llama, which ty pically weighs three hundred pounds. Horses, four times as massive, were profoun dly, terribly novel. Add to this the shock of observing humans somehow astride their bac ks like half-bestial nightmare figures and it is possible to imagine the dismay pr ovoked by Pizarro’s cavalry. Not only did Inka infantrymen have to overcome their initial stupefaction, their leaders had to reinvent their military tactics while in the midst of an invasion. Mounted troops were able to move at rates never encountered in Tawantinsuyu. “Even when the Indians had posted pickets,” Hemming observed, “the Spanish cavalry co uld ride past them faster than the sentries could run back to warn of danger.” In clas h after clash, “the dreaded horses proved invincible.” But horses are not inherently unbeatable; the Inka simply did not 71 discover quickly enough where they had an advantage : on their roads.
The conquistadors disparaged steep Inka highways b ecause they had been designed for sure-footed llamas rather than horses. But they were beautifully made—this road, photographed in the 1990 s, had lasted more t han five hundred years without maintenance.
European-style roads, constructed with horses and cars in mind, view flatness as a virtue; to go up a steep hill, they use switchbacks to make the route as horizontal as possible. Inka roads, by contrast, were built for l lamas. Llamas prefer the coolness of high altitudes and, unlike horses, readily go up an d down steps. As a result, Inka roads eschewed valley bottoms and used long stone stairwa ys to climb up steep hills directly—brutal on horses’ hooves, as the conquista dors often complained. Traversing the foothills to Cajamarca, Francisco Pizarro’s younger brother Hernando lamented that the route, a perfectly good Inka highway, was “so bad” that the Spanish “could not use horses on the roads, not even with skill.” Instead the conquistadors had to dismount and lead their reluctant animals through the steps. At that point they were vulnerable. Late in the day, Inka soldiers learned to wait above and ro ll boulders on their foes, killing some of the animals and frightening others into running away. Men left behind could be picked off at leisure. Multiple ambushes cost the lives of many Spanish troops and animals.
To be sure, horses confer an advantage on flat gro und. But even on the plains the 72 Inka could have won. Foot soldiers have often drubb ed mounted troops. At the battle of Marathon in 490 B.C., the outnumbered, outarmored A thenian infantry destroyed the cavalry of the Persian emperor Darius I. More than six thousand Persians died; the Greeks lost fewer than two hundred men. So dire had the situation initially appeared that before the fight Athens sent a messenger to Sparta, its hated rival, to beg for aid. In the original marathon, the courier ran more than a hund red miles in two days to deliver his message. But by the time the Spartan reinforcements arrived, there was nothing to see but dead Persians. The Inka losses were not foreordained. Their milit ary was hampered by the cult of personality around its deified generals, which mean t both that leaders were not easily replaced when they were killed or captured and that innovation in the lower ranks was not encouraged. And the army never learned to bunch its troops into tight formations, as the Greeks did at Marathon, forming human masses th at can literally stand up to cavalry.
Nonetheless, by the time of the siege of Qosqo the Inka had developed an effective anti-cavalry tactic: bolas. The Inka bola consisted of three stones tied to lengths of llama tendon. Soldiers threw them, stones a-whirl, at cha rging horses. The weapons wrapped themselves around the animals’ legs and brought the m down to be killed by volleys of sling missiles. Had the bolas come in massed, coord inated onslaughts instead of being wielded by individual soldiers as they thought oppo rtune, Pizarro might well have met his match.
If not technology or the horse, what defeated the Inka? As I said, some of the blame should be heaped on the overly centralized In ka command structure, a problem that has plagued armies throughout time. But anothe r, much larger part of the answer was first stated firmly by Henry Dobyns. During his ext racurricular reading about Peru, he came across a passage by Pedro Cieza de León, the S panish traveler who observed three roads between the same two cities. Entranced by the first exhibition of Inka booty in Spain, Cieza de León had crossed the Atlantic as a teenager and spent fifteen years in Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Colombia, traveling, fi ghting, and taking notes for what would become a massive, three-volume survey of the region. Only the first part was printed in his lifetime, but by the twentieth centu ry historians had found and published most of the rest. Dobyns learned something from Cie za de León that was not mentioned in Prescott’s history, in the Smithsonian’s officia l Handbook of South American Indians, or in any of the then-standard descriptions of Tawa ntinsuyu. According to Cieza de León, Wayna Qhapaq, Atawallpa’s father, died when “a grea t plague of smallpox broke out [in 1524 or 1525], so severe that more than 200,000 die d of it, for it spread to all parts of the kingdom.” Smallpox not only killed Wayna Qhapaq, it killed h is son and designated heir—and his brother, uncle, and sister-wife. The m ain generals and much of the officer corps died, wrote the Inka chronicler Santacruz Pac hacuti Yamqui Salcamayhua, “all their faces covered with scabs.” So did the two reg ents left in Qosqo by Wayna Qhapaq to administer the empire. After the dying Wayna Qha paq locked himself away so that nobody could see his pustulous face, Salcamayhua re ported, he was visited by a terrifying midnight vision. Surrounding him in his dream were “millions upon millions of men.” The Inka asked who they were. “Souls of the lost,” the multitude told him. All of them “would die from the pestilence,” each and every one .
The story is probably apocryphal, but its import i sn’t. Smallpox has an incubation 73 period of about twelve days, during which time suff erers, who may not know they are sick, can infect anyone they meet. With its fine ro ads and great population movements, Tawantinsuyu was perfectly positioned for a major e pidemic. Smallpox radiated throughout the empire like ink spreading through ti ssue paper. Millions of people simultaneously experienced its symptoms: high fever , vomiting, severe pain, oozing blisters everywhere on the body. Unable to number t he losses, the Jesuit Martín de Murúa said only that the toll was “infinite thousands.” The smallpox virus is thought to have evolved from a cattle virus that causes cowpox; a now-extinct equine virus responsible for horsepox; or, perhaps most likely, the camelpox virus, which affects camels, as the name s uggests. People who survive the disease become immune to it. In Europe, the virus w as such a constant presence that most adults were immune. Because the Western Hemisphere had no cows, horses, or camels, smallpox had no chance to evolve there. Indians had never been exposed to it—they were “virgin soil,” in epidemiological jargon.
Virgin-soil death rates for smallpox are hard to e stablish because for the last century most potential research subjects have been vaccinated. But a study in the early 1960s of seven thousand unvaccinated smallpox cases in southern India found that the disease killed 43 percent of its victims. Noting th e extreme vulnerability of Andean populations—they would not even have known to quara ntine victims, as Europeans had—Dobyns hypothesized that the empire’s populatio n “may well have been halved during this epidemic.” In about three years, that i s, as many as one out of two people in Tawantinsuyu died.
The human and social costs are beyond measure. Suc h overwhelming traumas tear at the bonds that hold cultures together. The epide mic that struck Athens in 430 B.C., Thucydides reported, enveloped the city in “a great degree of lawlessness.” The people “became contemptuous of everything, both sacred and profane.” They joined ecstatic cults and allowed sick refugees to desecrate the gr eat temples, where they died untended.
A thousand years later the Black Death shook Europe to its foundations. Martin Luther’s rebellion against Rome was a grandson of the plague , as was modern anti-Semitism.
Landowners’ fields were emptied by death, forcing t hem either to work peasants harder or pay more to attract new labor. Both choices led to social unrest: the Jacquerie (France, 1358), the Revolt of Ciompi (Florence, 1378), the P easants’ Revolt (England, 1381), the Catalonian Rebellion (Spain, 1395), and dozens of f lare-ups in the German states. Is it necessary to spell out that societies mired in frat ricidal chaos are vulnerable to conquest?
To borrow a trope from the historian Alfred Crosby, if Genghis Khan had arrived with the Black Death, this book would not be written in a European language.
As for Tawantinsuyu, smallpox wiped out Wayna Qhap aq and his court, which led to civil war as the survivors contested the spo ils. The soldiers who died in the battle between Atawallpa and Washkar were as much victims of smallpox as those who died from the virus itself.
The ferocity of the civil war was exacerbated by t he epidemic’s impact on a peculiarly Andean institution: royal mummies. Peopl e in Andean societies viewed themselves as belonging to family lineages. (Europe ans did, too, but lineages were more important in the Andes; the pop-cultural comparison might be The Lord of the Rings, in which characters introduce themselves as “X, son of Y” or “A, of B’s line.”) Royal lineages, called panaqa, were special. Each new emperor was born in one panaqa but 74 created a new one when he took the fringe. To the n ew panaqa belonged the Inka and his wives and children, along with his retainers and ad visers. When the Inka died his panaqa mummified his body. Because the Inka was believed t o be an immortal deity, his mummy was treated, logically enough, as if it were still living. Soon after arriving in Qosqo, Pizarro’s companion Miguel de Estete saw a parade o f defunct emperors. They were brought out on litters, “seated on their thrones an d surrounded by pages and women with flywhisks in their hands, who ministered to them wi th as much respect as if they had been alive.” Because the royal mummies were not considered dead , their successors obviously could not inherit their wealth. Each Inka’s panaqa retained all of his possessions forever, including his palaces, residences, and shrines; all of his remaining clothes, eating utensils, fingernail parings, and hair clippings; and the tri bute from the land he had conquered. In consequence, as Pedro Pizarro realized, “the greate r part of the people, treasure, expenses, and vices [in Tawantinsuyu] were under th e control of the dead.” The mummies spoke through female mediums who represente d the panaqa ’s surviving courtiers or their descendants. With almost a dozen immortal emperors jostling for position, high-level Inka society was characterized by ramose political intrigue of a scale that would have delighted the Medici. Emblematicall y, Wayna Qhapaq could not construct his own villa on Awkaypata—his undead anc estors had used up all the available space. Inka society had a serious mummy p roblem.
After smallpox wiped out much of the political eli te, each panaqa tried to move into the vacuum, stoking the passions of the civil war. Different mummies at different times backed different claimants to the Inka throne . After Atawallpa’s victory, his panaqa took the mummy of Thupa Inka from its palace and b urned it outside Qosqo—burned it alive, so to speak. And later Atawa llpa instructed his men to seize the gold for his ransom as much as possible from the po ssessions of another enemy panaqa, that of Pachacuti’s mummy.
Washkar’s panaqa kept the civil war going even after his death (or, rather, nondeath). While Atawallpa was imprisoned, Washkar’ s panaqa sent one of his younger brothers, Thupa Wallpa, to Cajamarca. In a surrepti tious meeting with Pizarro, Thupa Wallpa proclaimed that he was Washkar’s legitimate heir. Pizarro hid him in his own quarters. Soon afterward, the lord of Cajamarca, wh o had backed Washkar in the civil war, told the Spanish that Atawallpa’s army was on the move, tens of thousands strong.
Its generals planned to attack Pizarro, he said, an d free the emperor. Atawallpa denied the charge, truthfully. Pizarro nonetheless ordered him to be bound. Some of the Spaniards most sympathetic to Atawallpa asked to investigate. Soon after they left, two Inka ran to Pizarro, claiming that they had just fled from the invading army. Pizarro hurriedly convoked a military tribunal, which quickly sentenc ed the Inka to execution—the theory apparently being that the approaching army would no t attack if its leader were dead. Too late the Spanish expedition came back to report tha t no Inka army was on the move.
Thupa Wallpa emerged from hiding and was awarded th e fringe as the new Inka.
The execution, according to John Rowe, the Berkele y archaeologist, was the result of a conspiracy among Pizarro, Thupa Wallpa, and the lord of Cajamarca. By ridding himself of Atawallpa and taking on Thupa Wa llpa, Rowe argued, Pizarro “had exchanged an unwilling hostage for a friend and all y.” In fact, Thupa Wallpa openly swore allegiance to Spain. To him, the oath was a s mall price to pay; by siding with 75 Pizarro, Washkar’s panaqa, “which had lost everything, had a chance again.” A pparently the new Inka hoped to return with Pizarro to Qosqo, where he might be able to seize the wheel of state. After that, perhaps, he could wipe out the Spaniards.
Although Andean societies have been buffeted by di sease and e