[1990a] (11-7) The First American. Fifty thousand years ago, huge herds of
animals roamed across North and South America. Wild horses, bison, and camels
grazed in vast fields. Jaguars stalked their prey. Woolly mammoths -- large,
shaggy-haired elephants with long, sweeping tusks -- wandered from present-day
Alaska to Texas. Exactly when and how people came to be a part of this
landscape is uncertain, though scientists have a general idea. Peopling a
Continent. Most scientists believe that the first humans crossed into America
during one of the ice ages in prehistoric times. As vast amounts of water froze
into glaciers, the depth of oceans dropped by 200 or 300 feet (60 or 90
meters). Underwater ridges were exposed and formed a land bridge from Asia
across the Bering Strait into presentday Alaska. Scientists believe that when herds of animals
moved eastward across the bridge, Asian hunters followed, tracking them
throughout the Americas. They may have come as early as 60,000 years ago, or as
recently as 12,000 years. Although scientists do not agree when the earliest
inhabitants arrived, most agree that about 10,000 years ago the environment
changed in the Americas. The glaciers retreated, temperatures warmed, lakes
dried up, and many animal species became extinct. The oceans rose and the land
bridge to Asia closed, isolating American cultures from the rest of the world.
The Rise of Agriculture. The changes in climate forced prehistoric peoples to
alter their way of life. As some regions became hot and dry and others warm and
wet, people living in different areas had to develop different skills to
survive. When the huge game animals disappeared, people hunted smaller game.
Groups living near the sea became expert at catching fish. More important for the
development of civilization was the rise of agriculture. Some groups who
gathered wild fruits, roots, and vegetables began raising their own crops. As
the cultivation of crops spread, different groups began experimenting with
varieties of beans, squash, and corn. The first Americans no longer had to move
from place to place in an endless search for food. They were able to settle in
permanent communities. By 1400 A.D., sharp contrasts existed between cultures
in the Americas. Some groups were still hunting and gathering while others
lived in highly organized societies with cities, roads, and taxes. And hundreds
of other cultures fell somewhere in between. Each had its own forms of
government, religion, and art, reflecting its culture. Life in the West. Many
of the early Americans who lived in the western region extending from the
Arctic Circle to the warm Pacific coast of California lived by hunting,
fishing, or gathering plants. Among these groups were the Eskimo, the peoples
of the Northwest Coast and the Great Basin region. Eskimo. The Eskimo lived on
the plains and seacoasts of the Arctic. Bitter cold and heavy snows tested the
skills of these early Americans. Because few plants grow in the frigid climate,
the lives of the Eskimo revolved around hunting and fishing. Animals such as
the seal, walrus, whale, and caribou were a source not only of food but also of
clothing, tools, weapons, boats, and household implements. The successful use
of every bit of these animals often meant the difference between life and
death. Northwest Coast Indians. The mild climate of the northwest Pacific coast
made life easier for the settlers there. Salmon and other fish thrived in the
many streams and rivers. Offshore the seas teemed with seals, whales, and
otters, while on land herds of deer, moose, and elk roamed the thick forests.
The food supply was plentiful. Under these favorable conditions, the people of
the northwest Pacific had time to do something other than search for food. They
built very big, elaborately decorated houses, fashioned striking copper
shields, carved massive totem poles and canoes, and made beautiful wooden
masks, furniture, and utensils. Gradually, they developed a complex society
based on wealth. Each person's status depended on his or her possessions. To
demonstrate their prosperity, people held feasts called potlatches (PAHT latch
ehz). At these ceremonies, the host family entertained guests lavishly for
several days and gave away valuable possessions. Those who received gifts held
their own potlatches in return. Anyone who could not do this lost social
standing in the community. Great Basin Indians. The groups living in the Great
Basin, between the Sierra Nevadas and the Rocky Mountains, had a more difficult
life. The region supports few animals or edible plants. Peoples such as the Ute
and Shoshone were forced to move about in small bands, often no larger than a
single family, in order to gather what food they could. Men dominated the
bands. Women and children held low status. The Desert Tradition. A harsh
environment made survival a struggle in much of the region that is now part of
Arizona, New Mexico, southern Utah, and northern Mexico. In the north, rapidly
flowing rivers had carved steep-walled canyons into the land or washed away the
soil to form huge mesas* thousands of feet high. [*mesa: "mesa,"
which means table in Spanish, is a high, flat plateau or tableland with steep
sides.] In the south, foothills and mountains gave way to flat stretches of
desert. There, summer temperatures reached over 100 Fahrenheit (38 Celsius) and
winter temperatures dropped well below 0 Fahrenheit (-18 Celsius). Anasazi.
Despite these extreme conditions, several imposing civilizations emerged in the
area. One of the earliest groups was the Anasazi (ah nah SAH zee). Skilled
people, they turned the desert into productive farmland with an irrigation
system of dams and canals. Within the remote canyons of much of today's
Southwest, they built cliff dwellings resembling modern high-rise apartments.
On the rock walls of the canyons they drew pictograms, pictures conveying their
ideas about life. The Anasazi were also excellent weavers, basketmakers, and
potters. Pueblo. Although the Anasazi disappeared mysteriously, several later
groups traced their origins to them. One group, the Pueblo,* lived in the area
of present-day Arizona and New Mexico. [*pueblo: "pueblo" (PWEHB
loh), which means town in Spanish, is the name given to these people in the
1500s by Spanish explorers, who thought the settlements looked like European
towns.] The Pueblo were farmers who grew beans, cotton, tobacco, squash, and
gourds -- a difficult task in a region that received so little rain. Like the
Anasazi, the Pueblo often built their dwellings on the mesas or along the sides
of steep cliffs. Made of stone and adobe, sun-dried clay brick, the structures
were several stories high. The Pueblo grouped the buildings around a broad,
open space, forming a kind of town with a main square. At the center of each
town was an underground room called a kiva. Pueblo men met there to conduct
religious ceremonies. Some of their rites were held to bring rain, others to
cure the sick, and still others to please the gods. The kiva societies
emphasized conformity and the importance of society over the individual. A
warrior class enforced the rules of conduct. The Pueblo were a matrilineal
society. In other words, they traced descent within a family through the
mother's line. Women headed the families and held all property rights. A wife
who wanted to divorce her husband merely put his belongings outside her door --
a signal that the husband had to return to his mother's house. Pueblo women
were exceptionally skilled potters and basketweavers -- crafts that were
probably passed down to them from the Anasazi. Navajo. During the 1500s,
another important southwestern group, the Navajo (NAV uh hoh), migrated into
what is now northern New Mexico. There, the Navajo came under the influence of
their Pueblo neighbors, from whom they learned farming and weaving. Navajo
religion, heavily influenced by that of the Pueblo, emphasized that a person's
life should be in harmony with the universe. Immortal beings called Holy
People, who had to be pleased through strict rituals, could affect the lives of
mortals, called Earth Surface People. On the Great Plains. As you have read,
between the Rocky Mountains and the Mississippi River lies a large area of
relatively flat grasslands known today as the Great Plains. For thousands of
years, most inhabitants of the Great Plains lived near rivers so they could be
sure of a water supply for farming. Women were responsible for the farming and plowed
their garden plots with digging sticks and hoes made from large animal bones.
Maize, squash, beans, and sunflowers were the principal crops. For most of the
year, the Plains people lived in fairly permanent villages. There they built
lodges by covering log frames with brush and sod. But during the summer, the
men often left for weeks to hunt buffalo. Sometime in the mid-1500s, most of
the Plains people became more nomadic. Instead of living in permanent villages,
they moved from place to place, building temporary settlements near water and
food supplies. Migrations were on foot. Dogs dragged travois* carrying the
owners' possessions. [*travois (trah VOI): two poles with an animal skin
mounted between them. After the Spanish reintroduced horses to the Americas,
the Plains people used horses rather than dogs during their migrations.] The
nomadic settlements relied on farming for much of their food, but the men often
hunted. On the hunt, they lived in portable teepees made from buffalo hides.
Farther west, Americans who were completely nomadic lived in teepees
year-round. The semiagricultural, seminomadic groups of the Plains included the
Osage, Missouri, Omaha, Kansas, Iowa, Wichita, and Mandan, as well as the
Pawnee. The Blackfeet achieved the greatest power in the western part of the
Great Plains. The Crow hunted the land between the Missouri and Yellowstone
rivers, and the Comanche, Kiowa, and Apache dominated the southern plains. In
the Eastern Woodlands. Three major peoples lived in the woodlands east of the
Mississippi River: the Algonquin (al GAHN kwihn), the Iroquois (IHR uh kwoi),
and the Muskogean (muhs KOH gee ehn). Algonquin. The Algonquin lived in the
dense forests that covered the Northeast from present-day Labrador and Quebec
as far south as Maryland and Virginia. They lived in small bands, hunting deer
and caribou or gathering wild nuts and berries. The Algonquin also used the
resources of the forest to build efficient transportation: snowshoes and
toboggans in the winter, canoes in the summer. Algonquin society was relatively
simple. Families within the band hunted primarily in one area they regarded as
theirs. But they willingly shared their catch with others. Food was often
scarce during the harsh winters, and every family knew that one day it might
have to depend on another's support. Iroquois. The Iroquois were several
related tribes that originally lived in southeastern North America. Around
1300, they migrated north to the area of present-day New York State and drove
out the Algonquin. However, not long after the departure of the Algonquin, the
Iroquois began to feud among themselves. During the 1500s, the warfare became
especially bitter and threatened to undermine the Iroquois people. According to
legend, two reformers, Dekanawidah, a Huron religious leader, and his disciple
Hiawatha, a Mohawk chief, began preaching the idea of a political
confederation, or alliance, of the Iroquois tribes. They believed that such a
union would not only end the bloodshed but would also provide a strong defense
against their enemies. The goal of the two reformers was finally achieved
during the 1500s. Five tribes -- the Mohawk, the Seneca (SEHN ih kuh), the
Cayuga (kay YOO gah), the Oneida (oh NI duh), and the Onondaga (ahn uhn DAH
guh) -- gradually formed a confederation known as the Iroquois League. The
league, whose values were based on those of traditional Iroquois culture,
proved successful. A representative council, consisting of the chiefs of each
tribe and 50 specially chosen leaders called sachems (SAY chehms), governed the
league. The sachems were responsible for regulating relations among the tribes.
Iroquois society, like Pueblo society, was matrilineal. All property passed
from generation to generation on the female side of the family. Women owned the
gardens and the spacious longhouses in which several related families lived.
Although they did not serve on the league council, women who headed the clans
appointed the male sachems. Muskogean. Other eastern woodlands groups also had
complex social and political systems -- the Muskogean, for example. These
farming people had a highly structured class system based on worship of the
sun. At the top was the chief, called the Great Sun. Just below him in status
were the nobles, known as Suns. Below them were the Honored People, and at the
very bottom were the Stinkards. The reigning Great Sun, worshipped as a god,
had the power of life and death over the Muskogean. The group's complicated
marriage rules insured that membership in each class changed over time so that
no one family could hold the position of Great Sun indefinitely. Over several
generations, a Great Sun's descendants would become Stinkards. Empires to the
South. Many scholars believe that the Muskogean and other southeastern peoples
were influenced by cultures that had developed to the southwest of them, in
present-day Mexico. The first of these great civilizations was created by the
Maya, who flourished on the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico and in present-day
Guatemala from about 300 to 900 A.D. Maya. The largest Mayan cities boasted as
many as 40,000 inhabitants. While they were centers of trade, their most
important purpose was religious. Towering over all the other buildings in the
city were huge temple-pyramids covered with carved pictures. Within these
structures, brightly costumed priests conducted religious ceremonies. Aztec.
Farther to the north, in the Valley of Mexico, the Aztec rose to power sometime
after 1200 A.D. As their power grew, they conquered their neighbors and forced
them to pay tribute of food and labor. They erected a spectacular capital city,
Tenochtitlan (tay NOHCH tee TLAHN), on an island in the middle of a large
saltwater lake. An enormous pyramid, the Pyramid of the Sun, dominated the
other structures in the city. Here Aztec priests sacrificed humans to
Huitzilopochtli (WEE tsee loh POHCH tlee), the chief god. Floating artificial
islands, made by piling dirt on log rafts, surrounded Tenochtitlan. Some formed
the foundations for homes; others were cultivated as vegetable gardens. Fresh
water flowed into the city through aqueducts. Several long causeways connected
the island-city to the mainland. Inside the city, paved streets led to the
elaborate homes of the wealthy, to beautiful temples, and to zoos, orchards,
and parks. Even the few surviving remains make it clear that both the Aztec and
Maya were brilliant builders and engineers. The priests of both cultures also
excelled in astronomy. Their calendars were more exact than European systems of
the day, and Aztec and Maya could predict eclipses of the sun and moon. The
Aztec and Mayan religions demanded a precise knowledge of how the stars in the
heavens moved. Inca The engineering feats of another civilization, the Inca,
surpassed even those of the Aztec and Maya. By 1400, the Inca dominated
settlements stretching along a band 1,500 miles (about 2,400 kilometers) long
on the western coast of South America. Incan cities were often constructed on
the tops of mountains or along the faces of steep cliffs. Even today, Incan
buildings survive earthquakes that demolish modern structures. The carefully
fitted stones move apart under stress, then slide back together. The Maya, the
Aztec, and the Inca were among the first Americans to feel the impact of
European exploration in the late 1400s. Although their complex civilizations
fell to invaders, the remains of their huge stone temples and public buildings
have left an indelible imprint on the imagination of the world. (12) [Map]
Hundreds of cultural groups lived in North America in the 1500s. Each had its
own form of government, art, and religion. In the map below, color indicates
groups with similar styles of living. Compare this map with the map of physical
regions on page 7. What conclusions can you draw about the influence of geography
on the way people live? (13) [Picture] Plentiful food along the northwest
Pacific coast allowed early Americans leisure time to develop their crafts.
Blankets that adorned their homes became more than useful objects -- they were
works of art. In this Paul Kane painting, one woman weaves cloth while another
spins wool into yarn. Weavers used wool from mountain goats as well as white
hair from dogs bred especially for their fine coats. (15) [Picture] In this
painting, two young Indians of the eastern woodlands play a game while a third
watches. The Indians made good use of the natural resources of the eastern
woodlands. They stripped bark from birch trees to make sturdy and light canoes,
such as those shown in the painting. (17) [Picture] Great warriors and
builders, the Aztec excelled in many fields. Tenochtitlan was home to many
artisans who worked with gold, silver, and feathers. The artisan at right is
crafting a royal headdress, such as the one shown above. The headdress, more
than four feet high, once belonged to the last ruler of the Aztec nation. It is
a very rare example of this fine art.
[1990b] (6-8) 2. Before discovery. If it hadn't been for Columbus, years
might have passed before the people of Europe "discovered" America.
But it was only for the people of Europe that America had to be
"discovered." Millions
of Native Americans were already here! For them, Columbus, and all the sailors,
explorers, and settlers who came later provided their "discovery" of
Europe! For
Europeans the "discovery" of America offered vast lands, treasures of
gold and silver and timber, places to build cities and places of refuge. For them this was a happy
discovery. In the long run it would be a great discovery for the world. But for
the millions of Native Americans already here their "discovery" of
Europeans was not quite so happy. For some it meant the end of their Native American
civilization. For some it meant slavery. For nearly all of them Europeans
brought shock, disease, and change. The first people to come to America were the ancestors of those
who Columbus by mistake called Indians. No one knows when they came. A widely
held theory is that sometime between 35,000 and 11,500 years ago during the
last great ice age the first small groups arrived. They were people on the
move. They had come from Northern China and Siberia. So much of the sea had
frozen into ice that it lowered the water in the Bering Strait. Then as they
tracked wild game they could walk across the 56 miles from Siberia to Alaska.
Without knowing it, they had discovered two large continents that were
completely empty of people but were full of wild game -- huge mastodons and
mammoths, giant ground sloths, camels, antelopes, and great long-horned bison.
In the thousands of years afterwards many other groups followed. These small
bands spread all across North and South America. The high mountains and broad
rivers separated the communities. There were hundreds of languages and many
different styles of life. Some small bands of people had no fixed homes. They
followed their quarry and lived the wandering life of hunters. Others settled
down and after centuries built vast kingdoms with flourishing cities, temples
and palaces, and lively commerce. Mayas, Incas, and Aztecs. The grandest of
these Native American cultures astonished the Europeans. South of the present
United States-from central Mexico to Peru-they found the Aztecs, the Mayas, and
the Incas. In the mountains, deserts, and rain forests of Guatemala, Belize,
Honduras, and Mexico the Mayas had built temples and pyramids clustered about
broad plazas. We can still climb them. The Mayas invented their own writing.
Although they had no telescope, they built their own kind of observatory and
made accurate calendars. Their "Indian corn" (maize) had never been
seen in Europe. It was originally a wild grass, but would become a staple food
for the world. In Peru the Incas had constructed palaces surrounded by high
walls, and had connected their mountain-towns with a network of roads. To farm
their steep land they had built terraces. Where water was scarce, they had cut
canals and erected stone aqueducts to irrigate their crops. The Incas gave us
the potato and the tomato. When European explorers came to Peru, they were
amazed by the Incan government. They never expected to find such powerful
rulers so well organized in the mountain wilderness. The Incas had succeeded
even without a system of writing. No Americans were richer. In Cuzco, the
mountain capital of the Incan empire, even the buildings were covered with
gold! The Aztecs were a warlike people who lived in central Mexico. They were
clever architects. Like the Mayas, they too built grand temples and high
pyramids. Their capital, where Mexico City is today, was a bustling metropolis.
And they fashioned their gold into jewelry so ornate as to make European kings
jealous. These
peoples had found their own ways of progress -- different from the ways of
Europe. They had
never invented the wheel. They had no iron tools. Their beasts of burden were
the dog and, in Peru, the llama. Unlike the peoples of Europe, they had not
built ships to cross the oceans. They had not reached out to the world. In
their isolation they found it hard to learn new ways. When the Spanish came, it
seemed that the Incas, the Mayas, and the Aztecs had ceased to progress. They
were ripe or conquest. North American Indians. Of course there was no census of
early America. But in 1500 the people in Mexico probably numbered about 12
million. Farther north in what is now the United States and Canada there were
only some 4 million. The great empires of old America-of the Mayas, the Incas,
and the Aztecs-were all in Mexico or south. North of Mexico most of the people
lived in wandering tribes and led a simple life. North American Indians were
mainly hunters and gatherers of wild food. An exceptional few -- in Arizona and
New Mexico-settled in one place and became farmers. The most advanced Indians
of North America lived in the Southwest. The Anasazi came to be known as Pueblo
Indians, after their style of building. A "pueblo" was a kind of
apartment several stories tall, built of stone or adobe. The Anasazi also built
cliff dwellings where they could defend themselves against enemy tribes. They
and their descendants -- the Hopi, Zuni, and Acoma -- made pottery, textiles,
and baskets which we still admire. When the Europeans came, the largest
population of Indians north of Mexico was in California. They were a tenth of
all the Indians in what is now the United States. They and the Indians of the
Northwest lived by hunting and fishing and by gathering the plentiful nuts and
berries. Before Columbus and the Spanish came to America, there were not many
Indians on the Great Plains. They walked for miles in pursuit of the herds of
buffalo. The buffalo supplied them with skins to wear, meat to eat-and even (in
dried buffalo chips) with fuel for their fires. Their only beast of burden was
the dog. There were no horses in America until the Spanish brought them. In the
Eastern Woodlands the many tribes were mainly hunter-food gatherers, but they
also did some farming. Some of them had joined in their own small version of a
United Nations. Five tribes of Huron-Iroquois-speaking people-the Mohawk,
Seneca, Oneida, Onondaga, and Cayuga -- in upper New York State formed the
Iroquois League. The council of chiefs who governed the league was chosen by
certain women of high station. The council had no power to make war but planned
defense. The powerful Chief Powhatan formed his own league (in Virginia), and
there were others. Down south in Mississippi the Natchez Indians seemed more
like the Mexican Indians. Mainly farmers, they were divided into nobles and
commoners, and were ruled by a man they called the Great Sun. The Indians of
North America were as varied as the peoples of Europe. There were countless
tribes and hundreds of languages. Some tribes made elegant gold jewelry, but
others were still in the Stone Age. Some wove handsome rugs and wore textiles
of beautiful design. Others knew only skins and furs. Their meat depended on
the place. Deer were nearly everywhere, and on the plains were herds of
buffalo. The seashores and streams abounded in fish and shell food. The Indians
planted corn, which made their bread, and beans, squashes and many other crops.
They knew where to find, and how to enjoy, the nuts and berries and mushrooms
and other delights of the woods. They raised and smoked tobacco. Because the
Indians lived so close to nature, most of them had religions in which natural
things played a major role. The Indians saw and worshiped Nature. They had
learned to know the stones, the animals, and the plants. They were adept at
using what they found for food, shelter, and clothing.
[1990c] (20-5) The Earliest Americans, 30,000 B.C. - A.D. 1492. Origins of
the Native Americans. A Flight Toward the Rising Sun. Fear of enemies behind
them drove Omuk the Leader and his small band along. Out of the fog these
enemies had come 2 days earlier. They were men and women dressed in furs,
looking much like the people Omuk led. There were at least 100 of these
enemies. But Omuk's band had no more than 20 fit fighters. Omuk and his people
had fled. The enemies had not followed for long. But they had taken over the
good hunting grounds that Omuk and his followers had enjoyed. Now Omuk must
find food for his people, or else they all would die. The flight had led the
band away from familiar landmarks. Now Omuk the Leader was lost. He kept the
open water to the side of him as he moved on. Always he moved in the direction
of the rising sun. Omuk and his band may have been the first people to enter
America. We do not know that there was really a man named Omuk. But we do know
there were people like Omuk in prehistoric times that is, in those early years
before there were written records. Archaeologists (ar ke ol' o jists) say that
the flight of this prehistoric band of people might well have taken place.
Archaeologists study objects, ruins, and other evidence of human life in the
past. A Land Bridge from Asia. Omuk the Leader and others like him lived at a
time known as the Ice Age. Huge sheets of ice called glaciers had pushed down
from the north to cover much of North America. Beneath the ice a narrow strip
of land connected Siberia, in Asia, and Alaska, in North America. As the Ice
Age ended, the glaciers melted. In time, the water from the melting ice covered
the land bridge. Today the land that Omuk and his band walked on is covered by
the waters of the Bering Strait, which separates Siberia and Alaska. Most scholars today accept the
idea that the first people in America came across the land bridge from Asia.
But there are other ideas advanced by some. Some Other Explanations. Some
people believe that these first people in America were descendants of the ten
lost tribes of Israel. Others believe that America's earliest inhabitants were
related to ancient Egyptians or Greeks or perhaps to the Phoenicians or Romans.
Some think that the first Americans crossed the Atlantic by way of a lost
continent called Atlantis. It may be, some have said, that the ancestors of the
American Indians were from Wales or Ireland and were blown in their boats to
North America by an Atlantic storm. Still others think that the first Americans
crossed the Pacific Ocean by boat or raft from China, Japan, or the islands of
Polynesia (pol o ne' zhe). There is indeed some physical evidence that they did
come from an Asian land, whether by boat, by raft, or by the land bridge.
Physical Evidence. The American Indians are of the Mongoloid race. So are the
people of China.
The American Indians and the people of China differ in many ways. Yet in some
ways they are much alike. Most Indians have a fold of skin along the inner edge
of their eyes. So do Asiatic people of the Mongoloid race. This fold probably
developed over thousands of years, passed along from generation to generation.
Such a physical characteristic would help the people having it to survive the
harsh climate. Certainly it would have helped Omuk as he narrowed his eyes to
peer into the fog and snow along the Ice Age bridge. Babies of the first
Americans probably had a bluish-black spot on the lower back. Many American
Indian babies are born with this spot. The spot tends to disappear when they
grow older. The same thing happens to the spot that marks most of the children
of eastern Asia. The mark is called the Mongoloid spot. American Indians vary
in appearance. However, many have straight black hair on their heads but little
hair on the rest of their bodies. Many have dark brown eyes and reddish or
brownish-red skin. These are physical characteristics of the Mongoloid race.
Indian and Chinese babies often resemble each other. This may be one more
indication that the ancestors of the American Indians came from Asia. Life in
the Ice Age. Omuk and his Ice Age descendants lived by hunting. They hunted
animals that are now extinct that is, they hunted kinds of animals that have
died out. Among them were ancient bison and huge elephantlike animals called
mammoths. No doubt the lives of these first Americans were harsh and short.
(See the picture on page 21) Still the number of people increased. The first
group to come across the land bridge was followed by others. However, the main
increase in population came from the children born in the new land. Though many
died young, enough lived to populate hundreds of places. Moving Southward.
Omuk's people and their descendants roamed from place to place, depending on
the climate and food supply. Slowly they spread eastward and southward into the
Yukon River valley, away from the coast. They moved southward from Alaska into
western Canada. Finally they reached lands the glaciers had left uncovered. As
time passed, some small bands joined together and formed larger groups called
tribes. By the time the Ice Age ended, these early Americans had reached at
least as far as present-day New Mexico. How do we know this? We know it partly through a find made by
a black cowhand on a ranch in northeastern New Mexico. His name was George
McJunkin. The Mysterious Buried Bones. One day in the spring of 1926, George
McJunkin was following the trail of some missing cows. The trail led him along
the edge of Dead Horse Gulch. McJunkin saw some bones sticking out of the mud
on the side of the gulch. Being a curious person, he got off his horse to take
a closer look at the bones. The bones were about the size of cow bones and
buried 20 feet (6 m) below the surface. This seemed strange to McJunkin. Even
stranger was the flint spearhead he pried from a bone with his cattle knife. It
had a groove, or channel, on each side and was different from any other
spearhead that George McJunkin had ever seen. Why, he asked himself, were the
animal bones and the flint spearhead buried so deep? This also seemed strange
to the people whom McJunkin told of his discovery. As the news spread, an
expert on animal bones came to have a look. He found that the bones belonged to
a kind of bison that had lived in North America during the last years of the
Ice Age. The spearhead proved that human beings were living in New Mexico thousands
of years ago. Bones of other ancient bison were dug up at the site of
McJunkin's discovery. Several more flint spearheads were found. These
discoveries were all made near the town of Folsom, so whoever made the
spearhead and killed the bison came to be known as the Folsom man. No human
bones were found at the site of McJunkin's discovery. Scholars guessed that the
bison bones might have come from a single hunt. Perhaps a herd of the ancient
bison drank from a pool or lake that no longer exists. The Folsom people might
have surprised the bison, killing them on the spot. They might then have cut up
the dead animals and carried the meat back to their campsite. This would
explain the absence of human bones near the bison bones. How Long in America?
How long have people been in America? Geologists (je ol' o jists) are
scientists who learn about the earth and its history mostly through the study
of rocks. They are able to tell much about the Ice Age but nothing that helps a
great deal in dating the time that Omuk and his people crossed the land bridge
from Asia. Nor are they able to give more than a very rough estimate of the
time when the Folsom people lived. Counting tree rings on the ends of logs or
the stumps of trees is one way of time dating. Each tree ring shows a year's
growth. Another method is counting the layers of soil or gravel laid down at
the bottom of what was once a glacial lake. The most accurate method of time
dating, however, makes use of what scientists have discovered about living
matter and radioactivity. Radioactivity is caused when atoms change and give
off energy. Carbon Dating. Scientists have discovered that all living things
have a radioactive substance called carbon 14. In living matter the amount of
carbon 14 is always the same. But when a living thing dies, the carbon 14 in it
decreases at a fixed rate. Think of a kettle of water boiling dry as the water
evaporates. This is much like the way once-living matter gives off radiation.
It is known that a pound of carbon 14 will be reduced by radioactivity to half
a pound in 5,568 years. In another 5,568 years it will weigh only a quarter of
a pound. Even then it will continue to throw off radiation. Delicate
instruments can measure the amount of carbon 14 in anything that has been
alive. By carbon dating we know that the bison at Dead Horse Gulch died about
10,000 years ago. In Sandia Cave, near Albuquerque, New Mexico, hunters left
the bones of ancient camels, mastodons, and small horses. All these animals
have long been extinct. But by using carbon 14 dating, we find that hunters
killed the camels, mastodons, and small horses about 25,000 years ago. No one
has ever found conclusive evidence of the date when the first people crossed
the Ice Age land bridge from Asia. Probably no one ever will. Nevertheless,
that crossing must have been made more than 25,000 years ago according to the
evidence found in Sandia Cave. Other finds have pushed the date back even
further. For example, mammoth bones found on Santa Rosa Island, off the coast
of California, date back about 30,000 years. The southward journey of the Ice
Age people did not stop in New Mexico or California. They pushed on into Mexico
and South America. In fact, there is proof that humans lived in Fell's Cave,
near the southern tip of South America, from 8,000 to 10,000 years ago. If
prehistoric people had spread so far across the American continents by that
time, their date of entry must have been very early indeed.
[1990d] (6-11) Over a long lifetime, Opechancanough painfully experienced the
meeting of people from three continents. His land was one of many that would be
penetrated by Europeans over the next three centuries, as Christian
civilization girdled the globe. On the Chesapeake Bay, this clash of cultures formed the opening
chapter of what we know as American history. That history, in turn, was one scene in
a much broader drama of European colonization and exploitation of many
indigenous cultures thousands of miles from the Old World. The nature of this
violent intermingling of Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans is an
essential part of early American history. But to understand how the destinies
of red, white, and black people became intertwined in Opechancanough's land, we
must look at the precontact history and cultural foundations of life in the
homelands of each of them. THE PEOPLE OF AMERICA BEFORE COLUMBUS. Thousands of
years before the European voyages of discovery, the history of humankind in
North America began. Nomadic bands from Siberia, hunting big game animals such as
bison, caribou, and reindeer, began to migrate across a land bridge connecting
northeastern Asia with Alaska. Geologists believe that this land bridge existed
most recently between 28,000 and 12,000 years ago, when massive glaciers locked
up much of the earth's moisture and left part of the Bering Sea floor exposed.
Ice-free passage through Canada was possible only briefly at the beginning and
end of this period, however. At other times melting glaciers flooded the land
bridge and blocked foot traffic to Alaska. Paleo-anthropologists remain divided
on the exact timing, but the main migration apparently occurred either about
12,000 to 14,000 or 25,000 to 28,000 years ago. Hunters and Farmers. For
thousands of years, these early hunters trekked southward and eastward,
following vegetation and game. In time, they reached the tip of South America
and the eastern edge of North America, thousands of miles from their Asian
homeland. Thus did people from the "Old World" discover the "New
World" thousands of years before Columbus. Archaeologists have excavated
ancient sites of early life in the Americas, unearthing tools, ornaments, and
skeletal remains that can be scientifically dated. In this way they have
tentatively reconstructed the dispersion of these first Americans over an
immense landmass. Although much remains unknown, this archaeological evidence
suggests that as centuries passed and population increased, the earliest
inhabitants evolved into separate cultures, organizing life and adjusting to a
variety of environments in distinct ways. Europeans who rediscovered the New World
thousands of years later would indiscriminately lump together the myriad
societies they found. But by the 1500s, the "Indians" of the Americas
were enormously diverse in the size and complexity of their societies, the
languages they spoke, and their forms of social organization. Archaeologists and
anthropologists have charted several phases of "Native American"
history. A long Beringian epoch ended about 14,000 years ago. From that time a
rich archaeological record indicates that the hunters had developed a new
technology. Big game hunters now flaked hard stones into spear points and chose
"kill sites" where they slew whole herds of Pleistocene mammals. This
more reliable food source allowed population growth, and nomadism began to give
way to settled habitations or local migration within limited territories. In
another phase of evolution, the Archaic era, from about 10,000 to 2,500 years
ago, great geological changes brought further adaptations to the land. As the
massive glaciers of the Ice Age slowly retreated, a warming trend deprived vast
areas from Utah to the highlands of Central America of sufficient water and
turned them from grasslands into desert. The Pleistocene mammals could not
survive more arid conditions, but human populations ably adapted. They learned
to exploit new sources of food, especially plant life. In time a second
technological breakthrough, the "agricultural revolution," occurred.
When Native Americans learned to "domesticate" plant life, they began
the long process of transforming their relationship to the physical world. To
learn how to harvest, plant, and nurture a seed was to gain partial control
over natural forces that before had been ungovernable. Anthropologists believe
that this process began independently in widely separated parts of the
world-Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas-about 7,000 to 9,000 years ago.
Though agriculture developed very slowly, everywhere it eventually brought
dramatic changes in human societies. Over the millennia, humans progressed from
doorside planting of a few wild seeds to systematic clearing and planting of
bean and maize fields. As the production of domesticated plant food ended
dependence on gathering wild plants and pursuing game, sedentary village life
began to replace nomadic existence. The increase in food supply brought about
by agriculture triggered other major changes. As populations grew, large groups
split off to form separate societies. Greater social and political complexity
developed because not everyone was needed as before to secure the society's
food supply. Men cleared the land and hunted game, while women planted,
cultivated, and harvested crops. Many societies empowered religious figures,
who organized the common followers, directed their work, and exacted tribute as
well as worship from them. In return they were trusted to protect the community
from hostile forces. Everywhere
in the Americas, regional trading networks formed. Along trade routes carrying commodities
such as salt, obsidian rock for projectile points, and copper for jewelry also
traveled technology, religious ideas, and agricultural practices. By the end of the Archaic period,
about 500 B.C. (to use the Christian European method of dating), hundreds of
independent, kin-based groups, like people in other parts of the world, had
learned to exploit the resources of their particular area and to trade with
other groups in their region. Native
Americans in 1600. The last epoch of pre-Columbian development, the
post-Archaic phase, occurred during the 2,000 years before contact with
Europeans. It involved a complex process of growth and environmental adaptation
among many distinct societies-and crisis in some of them. In the American
Southwest, for example, the ancestors of the present-day Hopi and Zuni
developed carefully planned villages composed of large terraced buildings, each
with many rooms. By the time the Spanish arrived in the 1540s, the indigenous
Pueblo people were using irrigation canals, check dams, and hillside terracing
to bring water to their arid maize fields. In their agricultural techniques, their skill
in ceramics, their use of woven textiles for clothing, and their village life,
Pueblo society resembled that of peasant communities in many parts of Europe
and Asia. Far to
the east were the mound-building societies of the Mississippi and Ohio valleys.
When European settlers first crossed the Appalachian Mountains a century and a
half after arriving on the continent, they were amazed to find hundreds of
ceremonial mounds, some of them 70 feet high, and gigantic sculptured
earthworks in geometric designs or in the shapes of huge humans, birds, or
writhing serpents. Believing all "Indians" to be forest primitives,
they reasoned that these were the remains of an ancient civilization that had
found its way to North America-perhaps Phoenicians, survivors of the sunken
islands of Atlantis, or the Lost Tribes of Israel spoken of in European
mythology. The mound-building societies of the Ohio valley declined about 1,000
years before Europeans reached the continent, perhaps because of attacks from
other tribes or severe climatic changes that undermined agriculture. Several
centuries later, another culture, based on intensive cultivation of beans, maize,
and squash, began to flourish in the Mississippi valley. Its center, a city of
perhaps 40,000, stood near present-day St. Louis. Great ceremonial plazas,
flanked by a temple that rose in four terraces to a height of 100 feet, marked
this first metropolis in America. This was the urban center of a far-flung
"Mississippi" culture that radiated out to encompass thousands of
villages from Wisconsin to Louisiana and from Oklahoma to Tennessee. Several
centuries before Europeans arrived in North America, the mound-building
cultures of the continental heartlands began to decline. But their influence
had already passed eastward to transform the woodlands societies along the
Atlantic coastal plain. The numerous small tribes that settled from Nova Scotia
to Florida never equaled the larger societies of the mid-continent in earthwork
sculpture, architectural design, or development of large-scale agriculture. But
they were far from the "savages" that the first European explorers
described. They had added limited agriculture to their skill in exploiting
natural plants for food, medicine, dyes, and flavoring and had developed food
procurement strategies that used all the resources around them -- cleared land,
forests, streams, shore, and ocean. Most of the eastern woodlands tribes lived
in waterside villages. Locating their fields of maize near fishing grounds,
they often migrated seasonally between inland and coastal village sites or
situated themselves astride two ecological zones. In the Northeast, their
birchbark canoes, light enough to be carried by a single man, gave them a means
of trading and communicating over immense territories. In the Southeast,
population was denser and social and political organization more elaborate. As
European exploration of the Americas drew near, the continent north of the Rio
Grande contained perhaps 4 million people, of whom perhaps 500,000 lived along
the eastern coastal plain and in the piedmont region accessible to the early
European settlers. The colonizers were not coming to a "virgin
wilderness," as they often described it, but to a land inhabited for
thousands of years by people whose village existence in many ways resembled
that of the arriving Europeans. Contrasting World Views. Colonizing Europeans
called themselves "civilized" and typically described the people they
met in the Americas as "savage," "heathen " or
"barbarian." But the gulf separating people in Europe and North
America was not defined so much by how the two cultures extracted a food supply
from the land, housed themselves, or organized family life as by how they
viewed their relationship to the environment and defined social relations in
their communities. In these areas, a wide difference in values existed. This
created the potential for a dangerous conflict once the Atlantic Ocean that had
separated two ancient civilizations had been transformed from a barrier to a
bridge by a technological and scientific leap forward by western Europeans in
the fifteenth century. In the view of Europeans, the natural world was a
resource designed for man's use. "Subdue the earth," read the first
book of the Old Testament, "and have dominion over every living thing that
moves on the earth." God ruled the cosmos, bringing floods, droughts, and
earthquakes, but humans could reshape their physical surroundings into a
productive and secure world. Man's relationship to the natural environment was
a secular matter, even if God, in the sacred sphere, sometimes intervened.
Native Americans, in contrast, were "a people that are contented with
Nature as they find her," as one colonist phrased it. In their ethos,
every part of the natural environment was sacred. Rocks, trees, and animals all
possessed spiritual power, and all were linked to form a sacred whole. To
injure the environment, by overfishing or abusing it in any way, was to offend
the spiritual power present throughout nature and hence to risk spiritual
retaliation. In the villages of Europe, peasant people had similarly believed
in spirits residing in trees and rocks, but such "superstition" was
fading. Regarding the
soil as a resource to be exploited for man's benefit, Europeans believed that
land should be privately possessed. Individual ownership of property became a
fundamental concept, and an extensive institutional apparatus grew up to
support it.
Fences symbolized private property, inheritance became the mechanism for
transmitting land from one generation to another within the same family, and
courts gained the power to settle property disputes. Property was the basis not
only of sustenance but also of independence, material wealth, political status,
and personal identity. The social structure directly mirrored patterns of land
ownership, with a land-wealthy elite at the apex of the social pyramid and a
mass of propertyless individuals forming the broad base. Native Americans also had concepts
of property, and tribes recognized territorial boundaries. But they believed
that land was invested with sacred qualities and should be held in common. As one German missionary to
the Delaware Indians explained their view in the eighteenth century, the
Creator "made the Earth and all that it contains for the common good of
mankind. Whatever liveth on the land, whatsoever groweth out of the earth, and
all that is in the rivers and waters . . . was given jointly to all and
everyone is entitled to his share." Communal ownership sharply limited
social stratification in most tribal communities. Accustomed to wide
disparities of wealth, Europeans often found this remarkable. Observing the Iroquois
of the eastern woodlands in 1657, a French Jesuit noted with surprise that they
had no almshouses because "their kindness, humanity and courtesy not only
makes them liberal with what they have, but causes them to possess hardly
anything except in common. A whole village must be without corn, before any
individual can be obliged to endure privation." Not all Europeans were
acquisitive, competitive individuals. The majority were peasants scratching a
subsistence living from the soil, living in kin-centered villages with little
contact with the outside world, and exchanging goods and labor through barter.
But in Europe's urban centers a wealth-conscious, striving individual who
celebrated wider choices and greater opportunities to enhance personal status
was coming to the fore. In contrast, Native American traditions stressed the
group rather than the individual. Holding land and other resources in common,
Indian societies were usually more egalitarian and their members more concerned
with personal valor than personal wealth. Exceptions to this cultural system
occurred in the highly developed and populous Aztec and Inca empires and, in
North America, among a few tribes such as the Natchez. But on the eastern and
western coasts of the continent and in the Southwest-the regions of contact in
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries-the European newcomers encountered a
people whose cultural values differed strikingly from theirs. European
colonizers in North America also found disturbing the matrilineal organization
of many tribal societies. Contrary to European practice, family membership
among the Iroquois, for example, was determined through the female line. A
typical family consisted of an old woman, her daughters with their husbands and
children, and her unmarried granddaughters and grandsons. When a son or
grandson married, he moved from this female-headed household to one headed by
the matriarch of his wife's family. Divorce was also the woman's prerogative.
If she desired it, she merely set her husband's possessions outside their
dwelling door. Clans
were composed of several matrilineal kin groups related by a blood connection
on the mother's side. To Europeans this was a peculiar and dangerous reversal
of their sexual hierarchy in which men, from time immemorial, had been supreme. In Native American societies,
women also held subordinate positions, but not nearly to the extent as among
European women. For example, European women, with rare exceptions, were
entirely excluded from political affairs. By contrast, in Native American
villages, again to take the Iroquois example, designated men sat in a circle to
deliberate and make decisions, but the senior women of the village stood behind
them, lobbying and instructing. The village chiefs were male, but they were named
to their positions by the elder women of their clans. If they moved too far
from the will of the women who appointed them, these chiefs were removed -- or
"dehorned." The role of women in the tribal economy reinforced the
sharing of power between male and female. Men were responsible for hunting,
fishing, and clearing land, but women controlled the cultivation, harvest, and
distribution of food. When the men were away on hunting expeditions, women
directed village life. Europeans, imbued with the idea of male superiority and
female subordination, perceived such a degree of sexual equality as another
mark of the uncivilized nature of tribal society. In the religious beliefs of
Native Americans, the English saw a final cultural defect. Europeans built their
religious life around the belief in a single god, written scriptures, an
organized clergy, and churches. Most Native American societies, sharing no
literary tradition, expressed their religious beliefs in a less structured way.
Animated by a belief in a spirit power dwelling throughout nature (polytheism),
they seemed to Europeans to worship the devil. European settlers, their fear
and hatred of infidels intensified by the Protestant Reformation, saw a holy
necessity to convert-or destroy-these enemies of their God.
[1990e] (162-3) Native American cultures developed over many centuries. When
Christopher Columbus reached the Caribbean islands at the end of the 15th
century, he was under the impression that he had landed in the Indies in Asia.
As a result, he mistakenly called the people he met "Indians." The
lands and people he reached, however, were not a part of the "Old
World," as Columbus had expected. Instead, Columbus had landed in a
"New World" that had experienced a long and complex history of its own.
As you read in the chapter introduction, we know very little of this history
because most of the Native American cultures were destroyed or greatly weakened
by contact with Europeans. For example, Spanish conquerors killed many of the
Indian leaders, tore down their temples, and burned their books because they
were convinced that the idols and writings of the Indians were works of the
devil. As a result, very few Indian writings survived. From these few remaining
texts and from the often sketchy accounts of Indian life written by European
conquerors has come much of our knowledge of 16th-century American cultures.
For the earlier periods, archaeologists are limited to studying the many
artifacts left by early cultures. Of course, archaeologists, in their
continuing study of the region, are still uncovering previously unknown
artifacts. In the process our knowledge of ancient American cultures is
constantly being expanded and revised. The first North Americans probably came from
Asia. Most
scientists now believe the Americas were peopled by nomads who crossed a land
bridge between Alaska and northeastern Asia between 40,000 and 20,000 years
ago. These people followed the migrations of herds of wild animals. At that
time the Ice Age had caused much of the earth's water to be locked up in
glaciers. As a result, waters had receded from the Bering Strait -- the narrow
strip of water that now separates North America from Asia near the Arctic
Ocean. The land beneath the waters of the Bering Strait was exposed above
water, providing a pathway for travel. Throughout the next thousands of years,
many separate migrations of peoples are believed to have crossed over the
strait into the Americas. The prehistoric people of the Americas had a
paleolithic culture. They used stone tools, wore skin clothing, and hunted with
domesticated dogs. Most of these early Americans lived simply as hunters or
gatherers. During the
centuries before the coming of the Europeans, descendants of these people
settled all throughout the Americas, from the Alaskan peninsula in the north to
the tip of South America.
Most evidence indicates that the American Indians were isolated from the
civilizations of the Old World. A few researchers believe that some daring
seafarers crossed the Pacific or Atlantic oceans to reach America centuries
before the Vikings or Columbus. Most scholars believe, however, that the
Indians developed their cultures independently. They maintain that the presence
of similar inventions in the Eastern and Western hemispheres indicate only that
peoples often hit upon similar ideas when they face the same problems. The
development of farming changed North American life. Perhaps as early as 7000
B.C., some Americans learned to grow crops. As time passed, the people
developed new varieties of plant life. The most important of these new crops
was corn, which was developed about 3000 B.C. in Mexico. Corn became as
important in the Western Hemisphere as wheat was in the Eastern Hemisphere. The
development of farming allowed people in the Americas, as it had in the Middle
East, to settle in communities, to develop such skills as weaving and pottery
making, and to set up a division of labor. These skills spread slowly
throughout the Americas. As people all around the world have done, the people
of North America learned to live with the conditions of their natural
environment. Since the climate and geography of the huge North American
continent are so varied, people in different parts of the continent developed
different cultures. Hundreds of distinct groups developed over the centuries,
with different physical characteristics, different languages, and different
customs. The way of life a group followed depended heavily on the land and
other available resources, such as food, water, and shelter. One group, the
Inuit [in'u it], is an example of a people living in an extremely cold
environment. As you can see from the map on page 341, the Inuit lived in the
frozen lands of the extreme north. The short growing season in this northern
region prevented the Inuit from growing crops. Instead, the people fished and
hunted for food, particularly walrus, whales, seals, small fish, and caribou.
They used the bone and ivory of some of these animals to make tools such as
needles, knives, fishhooks, and harpoons, and with the skins they made clothing
and tents. The Inuit also built houses, called igloos, out of snow and ice.
They lived in small family groups since the resources of the extreme north were
not great enough to support a large, centralized population. As a result, the
Inuit never needed to develop a form of central government. (341-2) North
America supported a variety of cultures. As you learned in Chapter 9, the peoples of North America were
a diverse mix of cultures and life-styles. By the 15th century, Indian groups
dominated the coasts, woodlands, and plains. Indians adapted their lives to
their resources. In a heavily forested area that reached from southern Alaska
to the present state of Washington lived the North Pacific Coast Indians. They hunted
and fished for food, gathering wild berries from the forest as well. These
Indians lived in villages and used the plentiful resources of their forested
territory to build wooden houses. The people of the North Pacific groups were
divided into nobles, common people, and slaves, whom they captured from other
groups. One important custom of the nobles, the people of the highest status,
was a ceremony called "potlatch." On special occasions, particularly
those marking events in their children's lives -- such as the day a daughter
gathered her first berries -- noble families would hold a potlatch. This
ceremony would include an elaborate feast put on by the family. At the feast,
the family would give away its most prized and beautiful possessions because these
Indians considered giving to be a greater virtue than receiving. In the eastern
part of the continent, in the northeast woodlands, the Indians were not only
hunters but also farmers. These Woodland Indians lived in villages and built
long, dome-shaped houses called wigwams, which were made out of poles covered
with bark and skins. Around
the year 1400, five Iroquois groups joined together to form a confederation
called the Five Nations. Through this political organization, the five groups
acted together on matters of common interest. Rivalry among the groups was
strong and frequently erupted in war, but the union remained quite powerful
into the 1700s. Some historians believe that this league may have influenced
the political design of the confederation of states that later became the
United States of America.
In the river valleys of central North America, most of the Indians were farmers
until the 1600s. At this time, when the Spanish brought horses to America, some
Indians, such as the Sioux and the Cheyenne, became buffalo hunters. Pueblo
Indians were peaceful farmers. One of the oldest and most complex cultures
north of the Rio Grande was that of the Pueblo, an Indian group that lived in
what is now the southwestern United States. The Pueblo used adobe to build
several-storied houses that have been called the first American apartment
buildings. These adobe houses were grouped into villages. Within the village,
the people chose their own chiefs. Pueblo Indians were master farmers who
developed a system of irrigation canals. Their main crop was corn, but they
also gathered seeds and berries. As a safeguard against drought, each family
built up a supply of food that was held in reserve. In addition, the Pueblo
Indians produced excellent pottery, finely woven cotton cloth, and baskets.
Pueblo Indians, a group that included the Hopi and Zufii, were peaceful people.
They rarely fought wars, and then only when necessary for survival. An example
of their peaceful nature is a long cleansing ritual, intended to get rid of
their "madness," in which warriors returning from battle had to
participate. The religion of the Pueblo Indians taught that people should live
in harmony with nature, that they should respect the life of others and the
traditions of the past, and that they should do things in moderation. Native
Americans made many enduring contributions. All Native American peoples, even
those without writing, had literature. It was passed on by word of mouth from
generation to generation. Most of the literature took the form of poetry and
often expressed religious ideas or group traditions. In arts and crafts,
Indians produced beautiful baskets, weaving, embroidery, metalwork, painting,
sculpture, and architecture. Indians also made fine pottery, especially in what
is now the southwestern United States. Indians also are credited with many
inventions and discoveries still in use today. They invented the snowshoe,
toboggan, and canoe. In medicine, they first used quinine, cocaine, and the
bulb syringe. They first discovered the properties of rubber, developed adobe
for building, and invented the game of lacrosse. Indian ingenuity also provided
such technical contributions as cochineal [koch'e nel'] dye, a red dye made
from the dried bodies of an insect, and henequen [hen'e kin], a fiber from the
leaves of a desert plant used for making rope. The most important contributions
of the early peoples of the Americas, however, were in the field of
agriculture. Although most of the early Europeans who conquered the Indians had
eyes only for the gold and silver they could carry home, it was the humble farm
products they took back that made the most lasting impression on world
civilization. The Indians were the first to grow corn, potatoes, tomatoes,
squash, pumpkins, avocados, and several kinds of beans. From them other peoples
of the world also learned about pineapples, strawberries, vanilla, cinnamon,
tapioca, and chocolate. Indians were also the first to make maple sugar and to
develop chicle [chik'el], the main ingredient in chewing gum. All these
products greatly increased the quantity and variety of the food supply in
Europe and Africa. In Ireland and much of northern Europe, for example, the
white potato became a major food crop. (See the "Mystery in History"
in Chapter 22 for more details.) When Europeans began settling in the New
World, it was these foods, as well as the farming techniques that the Indians
taught them, that made it possible for the European colonists to survive and
flourish.
[1991] (3-6) CHAPTER 1. The First Americans (Beginnings-1500).
1 Peopling the Americas. Section Focus. Key Terms: anthropologist,
archeologist, artifact, Paleo-Indian, hunter-gatherer, domestication, cultural
diffusion. Main Idea: People first arrived in the Americas many thousands of years
ago, developing ways of life as varied as the landscapes they encountered.
Objectives: As you read, look for answers to these questions: 1. How did the
peopling of the Americas take place? 2. What was the cultural significance of
the rise of agriculture? An early scholar to think seriously about the origin
of the Indians was Thomas Jefferson. The man who would become the third
President of the United States had a consuming interest in all things far and
near, past and present. Where, he asked two centuries ago, did America's native
people come from? Jefferson speculated that the eastern inhabitants of Asia had
passed into America across the Bering Strait. The proof, he said, would be
found in the study of languages. But no one 200 years ago, or even 100 years
ago, had the evidence to prove Jefferson right or wrong. Today scientists have
proof. Studies of languages, of blood types, of teeth, of bones, even of
climate, all point to the answer. Jefferson was right. STUDYING THE INDIANS. In
1492, when Christopher Columbus first met the inhabitants of the Caribbean
island of San Salvador, he did not wonder about their origin. He thought he
knew. Believing he had reached the Indies, the fabled spice islands of Asia,
Columbus called the people Indians. The Indians, Columbus reported, were a
simple people who would make good servants and who would benefit from
Christianity, for he thought they had no religion. Columbus, in short, assumed
that Europeans were superior to the Indians. For centuries, arriving Europeans
would share this assumption. Not until this century have people recognized the
achievements of the Native Americans. Much of the groundwork has been done by
anthropologists and archeologists. Anthropologists study human culture and
development, both ancient and modern. Archeologists study artifacts --
human-made objects such as tools and pottery -- to learn about the past. They
often work closely with other experts such as art historians, botanists,
geologists, and linguists. Through their efforts a history of pre-Columbian
(before Columbus) America is emerging. THE PALEO-INDIANS. During the last Ice
Age massive glaciers locked up so much water that the ocean level dropped. When
that happened the Bering Strait between Asia and North America became dry land,
a grassy "bridge" 1,000 miles wide between the two continents. The
first humans in the Americas were probably hunters who wandered across the land
bridge following herds of animals. It is hard to say precisely when the first
Paleo-Indians arrived here from Asia. (Paleo comes from a Greek word meaning
"old.") Some came as early as 20,000 or even 40,000 years ago. Most,
however, moved into North America about 12,000 years ago. At the height of the
Ice Age the Paleo-Indians could go no farther than western Alaska, for walls of
ice blocked their way. But about 12,000 years ago the climate began to warm up.
As the glaciers started melting, great grassy corridors opened up between the
mountains of ice. Bands of hunters migrated south through these corridors. In recent
years scientists have learned much about Indian migration from the study of
teeth. The precise form of human teeth changes little from generation to
generation. Therefore, scientists have compared the teeth of Asian people and
of American Indians. Using dental evidence, scientists have traced the movement
of peoples all the way from southeast Asia around the Pacific Basin to southern
Chile. The waves of immigrants were not all the same. They spoke different
languages and varied physically. In general, however, they shared certain
traits. Their hair was black and straight. They had little facial or body hair.
And their skin color ranged from yellowish brown to light copper. As the
Paleo-Indians moved south, they found a lush land that supported abundant game.
On the whole, rains were heavier than now. The Paleo-Indians survived primarily
by hunting large game -- such as woolly mammoths -- that gathered at water
holes or springs. These animals provided them with food and with skins for
clothing. The Paleo-Indians used tools and weapons made of stone and bone. Some
of these artifacts have been found in grave sites. We can infer from this fact
that the Paleo-Indians believed in an afterlife. HUNTINO AND GATHERING. As the
climate warmed up, North America became drier. Within 2,000 years, the huge
game animals became extinct. No one knows why for certain. Perhaps the
Paleo-Indians killed them all off. Or maybe the climate changed so quickly that
the large animals could not adapt. Whatever happened, about 10,000 years ago
the Paleo-Indians had to change their way of life to survive. Instead of
depending on the meat of the giant mammoth, they had to learn to hunt smaller
animals like deer. Their tools thus changed from huge throwing spears to small
spears, and finally to the bow and arrow. In adapting to a new environment, the
Indians broadened their food-gathering patterns. Some came to depend on
shellfish. Others became skilled at weaving nets to catch fish. People began to
dig roots and gather berries, fruits, nuts, and grass seeds. Among their
artifacts are digging sticks, baskets, fish hooks, and stone mortars for
grinding seeds. Such people who depend for food on the wild plants and animals
of their environment are called , hunter-gatherers. THE RISE OF AGRICULTURE
Successful hunter-gatherers learned from observation. A woman collecting grass
seeds, for instance, would have recognized that seeds germinate and grow in
moist and fertile soil. From that recognition it was but one step to sowing
seeds. Peoples the world over chose to take that step. About 10,000 years ago
agriculture began in the river valleys of the Near East with the domestication
of both plants and animals. (Domestication is breeding plants or animals to
meet specific human needs, such as food and transportation.) People of the Near
East domesticated the wild grasses that became wheat and barley. The first
animal they domesticated was the nimble and hardy goat. By 5,000 years ago
people had begun to cultivate rice in southern China. At about the same time,
people in central Mexico began to sow the seeds of wild corn. The cobs of this
wild corn were tiny, about the size of a strawberry. Through selective
breeding, the Indian farmers developed a corn cob like the one today. The
domesticated corn had a closed husk that prevented birds from eating the
kernels. Dried, the corn would last months and even years. The domestication of
corn thus meant a more stable food supply. Throughout these centuries the
Indians were learning from each other. This process of influencing and being
influenced by neighboring peoples is called cultural diffusion. Thus, although
corn was first developed in central Mexico, its cultivation spread south to
Peru and north to what is now the United States. In time the Indians would
domesticate more than 100 plants. In Mexico people learned to cultivate
pumpkins, peppers, beans, and tomatoes. Indians in Peru domesticated gourds,
lima beans, and potatoes. Other domestic plants once unique to the Western
Hemisphere include pineapple, bananas, peanuts, tobacco, and cacao. (2) The
first Americans migrated to the Western Hemisphere from Asia. This copper
profile of a human head, which comes from the Caddoan culture if present-day
Oklahoma is more than 500 years old. (4) [Pictures] A modern-day artisan shows
how Paleo-Indians made spear points 10,000 years ago. Using stone and bone
tools, skilled workers created the points from chunks of flint. They made a
groove in the point so it could be tied to a shaft. TECHNOLOGY: Judging from
the size of the finished points, what animals might have been hunted with them?
(5) [Picture] By studying artifacts, scientists have been able to reconstruct
ancient settlements. This model shows what a Paleo-Indian settlement in the
American Southwest might have looked like. TECHNOLOGY: Name some of the items
in the picture that the Indians created themselves by hand. What kinds of
materials did they ,use? Where did the materials probably come from? [Picture]
BIOGRAPHY. LUCY M. LEWIS (1900?- ) is a Native American potter from New Mexico.
Lewis follows a pottery-making tradition that is more than 1,000 years old. She
is one of the few Acoma Indians who still dig their own clay, work it by hand,
and fire it using dried cow dung for fuel. Here she coils clay to make a pot.
The Acoma believe that creating pottery is a spiritual process. Lewis says,
"I mix my clay with me." The development of agriculture produced
revolutionary changes in the way people lived. Agricultural peoples, unlike
hunter-gatherers, did not have to move constantly in search of food. Thus they
could stay in one place, building permanent settlements. They also had more
leisure time, since farming allowed people to build up stocks of food. Because
they had increased leisure time, individuals could draw on their creative
energy to develop specialized skills and talents. Arts and crafts flourished.
Living in settled communities, people could afford to own more possessions. As
societies became more complex -- larger, wealthier, more densely populated -- systems
of government became more complex as well. (6-12) 2 Ancient Indian Cultures.
Section Focus. Key Terms: civilization, Mesoamerica, Olmec, glyphic writing,
Maya, Aztec, tribute, Inca, Hohokam, Anasazi, Hopewell culture, Mississippian
culture. Main Idea: Highly advanced Indian societies developed in Middle
America and Peru. Indian cultures of North America included the agricultural
societies of the Southwest and the mound builders of the Eastern Woodlands.
Objectives: As you read, look for answers to these questions: 1. How did great
Indian civilizations develop in Middle America and Peru? 2. What ways of life
did the Hohokam and Anasazi introduce to the Southwest? 3. What kinds of
societies did Indians of the Eastern Woodlands develop? From an agricultural
base, the Indian societies of Middle America and Peru developed distinct and
highly developed cultures, or civilizations. That is, they had complex
political, social, religious, and economic institutions. Their massive public
works are witness to their mathematical knowledge, organizational skill, and
religious devotion. MESOAMERICAN CIVILIZATION. The first Indian civilization in
the Western Hemisphere developed in Mesoamerica, or Middle America. The
"waist" of the Western Hemisphere, this tropical region extends from
central Mexico in the north to Panama in the south. It was here that corn was
first domesticated. The "mother culture" of Mesoamerica was that of
the Olmecs. The Olmec culture developed on the Gulf of Mexico near the present
city of Vera Cruz. It was an unlikely place for a culture to bloom. This was a
rain forest, humid and swampy. Yet, in this area about 1000 B.C. the Olmecs
introduced traditions and skills that would influence Middle America for
centuries. The Olmecs built, not cities, but large religious centers that
featured earthen temple mounds. They were the first in this hemisphere to
devise glyphic writing=the use of symbols and images to express words and
ideas. They may also have been the first to develop a calendar system. The Olmecs
conducted a vigorous commerce by land and sea with other parts of the
hemisphere. In this way their culture spread. Among those who learned from the
Olmecs were the Mayas, a people living in the tropical rain forest of what is
now Guatemala. They too had ceremonial centers, home to the priests and nobles
who controlled the surrounding region. The power of these leaders probably came
from their knowledge of astronomy and the calendar. Maya culture in the
Guatemala lowlands declined starting about A.D. 900. It continued for :several
centuries more, however, at sites in the Yucatan Peninsula. Olmec culture also
influenced people living in the Valley of Mexico, the site of present-day
Mexico City. By A.D. 300 they had built the city of Teotihuacan (tay-oh-tee-wah-KAHN).
This was a ceremonial center, but it was also a true city, with neighborhoods
for both artisans and merchants. Rising above the city was a pyramid 20 stories
high, now called the Pyramid of the Sun. Ranking at the top of the city's
250,000 people were the priest-rulers. One temple within Teotihuacan was
dedicated to the god Quetzalcoatl (ket-sahl-koh-AHT-ul), symbolized by a
feathered serpent. Quetzalcoatl was considered the carrier of civilization and
the defender of good against evil. To keep such gods happy, the people of
Teotihuacan made sacrifices of birds, animals, and, on occasion, humans. THE
AZTECS. No amount of sacrifice, however, could protect the city when waves of
war-loving barbarians began swooping out of the north about A.D. 700. They
burned and plundered Teotihuacan. In time the invaders adopted much of the
culture of the conquered, but warriors replaced priests as rulers. A time of
almost constant warfare began. The last of the barbarian waves from the north
was that of the Aztecs, who moved into the Valley of Mexico about 1325. There
they settled at Tenochtitlan (ten-och-tee-TLAHN), a snake-infested island in
Lake Texcoco (tay-SKOH-koh). A practical people, they ate the snakes. Then they
proceeded to turn the island into a base of operations from which to conquer
neighboring city-states. The conquered peoples were forced to pay the Aztecs
tribute in goods and produce. With tribute flowing in, the Aztecs were free to
develop their army and conquer even more peoples. In this way, the Aztecs came
to control most of central Mexico. They were a warrior people, whose most
important god was the war god Huitzilopochtli (wee-tsee-loh-POHTCH-tlee). This
god, Aztecs believed, had a voracious appetite for human hearts. The Aztecs
believed that as long as they kept their god happy he would reward them with
military victories. One purpose of war, therefore, was to collect captives who
could be sacrificed to the god. It is said that more than 20,000 people were
sacrificed when the temple to Huitzilopochtli was dedicated in 1490. THE INCA
EMPIRE. Along the west coast of South America there arose another great
civilization. Much of that area was either desert or mountains. Yet there, in
what is now Ecuador and Peru, the Indians developed highly efficient farming
communities. To make the best use of their land, they farmed on hillside
terraces. Large-scale aqueducts carried water from the mountains to fields in
the dry coastal valleys. The people also domesticated the llama and the guinea
pig. With time, Peruvian political, social, and religious structures grew in
complexity. Powerful city-states developed that were ruled by a class of nobles
and priests. One of these city-states was that of the Incas, whose capital was
Cuzco. Cuzco, with an altitude of over 11,000 feet, is the oldest continually
inhabited city in the Americas. In 1438 the Incas began to conquer neighboring
states. By 1532 their empire stretched for 2,000 miles between the Pacific
Ocean and the Andes. In area it was larger than California, Oregon, and
Washington combined. Great stone roads knit the empire together. Armies as
large as 30,000 enforced Inca authority Probably about 6 million people lived
in the Inca Empire. CONTACT FROM ACROSS THE OCEANS? How did the Incas develop a
complex society? Did they do it themselves, independent of outside forces? Or
were they influenced by other peoples, far or near? Some anthropologists have
suggested that peoples from across the oceans -- from Asia, Africa, or Europe
-- might have influenced the development of culture in the Western Hemisphere.
This process is known as "transoceanic diffusion." No one doubts that
an occasional boat got blown off course and ended on American shores. Given the
pattern of winds and currents, that is quite possible. But did these outsiders
have an impact? Yes, say the diffusionists. First of all, they point out that
transoceanic migration was possible. To prove it, archeologist Thor Heyerdahl
has crossed both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans in primitive craft. Diffusionists
also point out that the Chinese 2,000 years ago had boats that could sail into
the wind. By the fourth century the Chinese were using a compass. The
Polynesians too were excellent navigators who colonized islands across the
Pacific, including those of Hawaii. To these oceangoing peoples, the ocean was
not a barrier but a highway. Then the diffusionists point to evidence uncovered
in the Americas. The earliest examples of pottery in the Western Hemisphere
have been found at the site of a village in Ecuador. This is not crude pottery
such as one might make accidentally by playing with clay. It reflects a
developed craft tradition. It also is almost identical to pottery then being
made in Japan. Furthermore, some of the cultural traditions of the Olmecs were
similar to those of the Chinese of the same time. These included placing a piece of jade in the
mouth of a dead person to ensure eternal life. Another example of possible
Chinese influence is the pottery of Teotihuacan, which is similar to that found
in China of the same centuries. In general, scholars are willing to accept the
possibility of Asian influences on Western Hemisphere cultures. They are
skeptical, however, about African or European influences because there is less
evidence of these.
What evidence there is, however, is intriguing. The Olmecs carved huge statues
of heads with distinctly Negroid features. West African myths tell about people
going west across the ocean on rafts. Is it possible that the Olmecs were West
African in origin? There is no evidence for this theory; however, other than
the features of the carved heads. Evidence of European influence includes Roman
coins found in Venezuela. And on a wall in the once-buried Roman city of
Pompeii is a painting of a pineapple, a plant native to the Western Hemisphere.
In a twelfth-century tomb in Mexico, archeologists found a clay head that was
made in third-century Rome. Suppose ancient Europeans or Africans did reach the
Americas. Does that mean they influenced the development of Indian cultures?
Most scholars say no, the available evidence does not support such a theory.
THE HOHOKAM AND ANASAZI. Although scholars are still debating transoceanic
diffusion, they do not question that Mesoamerican culture influenced Indian
peoples to the north. The first influence was agriculture. The desert people of
the Southwest began raising corn and squash 4,000 years ago. Later they learned
to grow beans. Over time, they developed distinct farming cultures that
depended on what the Indians called the Three Sisters-corn, squash, and beans.
The Hohokam people may have migrated from Mexico about 300 B.C. to settle in
what is now central Arizona. To get water to their crops, they dug lengthy
canals using only digging sticks as tools. The major canals in this system were
more than 30 miles long. The Hohokam culture broke up in the 1400s, perhaps
because turbulent times in Mexico cut off trade and contact. The Hohokam people
then became more like their neighbors. They survived through hunting,
gathering, and a little farming. During the same centuries, the Anasazi people
of the Colorado Plateau also developed a culture based on agriculture. The
ghost towns of the Anasazi remain in the recesses of canyon walls and in
secluded canyon bottoms. Every village had one or more kivas, large round
chambers partly underground, that the men used for religious ceremonies and as
workshops. The Anasazi were good farmers. Like the Hohokam, they built
irrigation ditches to catch water, and they farmed on terraces to prevent erosion.
To supplement their crops, they hunted game and gathered wild plants and nuts.
The Anasazi were also traders. Roads 30 feet wide radiated out from Pueblo
Bonito in Chaco Canyon. A thousand years ago people traveled these roads
carrying wood from the mountains, along with pottery, cloth, baskets, and
turquoise. Pieces of the turquoise would end up in the markets of faraway
Mexico. By 1300, however, the Anasazi had abandoned their villages. No one
knows exactly why. From the study of tree rings, scientists do know that a
terrible, 25-year drought began in 1275. The drought might have been too much
for these desert farmers to survive. Whatever the cause, the Anasazi moved to
other sites in the Southwest, including the Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico.
Their descendants -- the Pueblo Indians -- live there still. ANCIENT WOODLAND
CULTURES. To the east, meanwhile, complex cultures were emerging in the Eastern
Woodlands -- roughly the region between the Mississippi River and the Atlantic
Coast. People there developed complex cultures based primarily on trade. As
early as 3000 B.C. the Woodland Indians were engaged in long-distance trading
of useful and decorative stones, copper tools, and carved beads. The later
Crystal River culture along Florida's Gulf Coast, for example, carried on an
extensive trade that reached south to the Olmecs of Mexico and north to the
Great Lakes. It is possible that the Crystal River culture was the first
society north of Mexico to build pyramid mounds. Other Woodland cultures north
of Florida also adopted this practice. Perhaps their traders returned home from
Florida not just with beautiful shells but also with ideas -- including the
idea of building a mound. Elaborate burial mounds became the most distinctive
feature of the Hopewell culture, situated in the Ohio Valley. This culture,
which emerged about 500 B.C., would last for about 1,200 years. The religious
energies of the Hopewell culture focused on death rituals. The people buried
their leaders in huge mounds located in ceremonial centers. With the dead, they
buried all the wealth that the deceased would need in the next world. Hopewell
nobles must have dressed in splendid fashion. From one burial site alone,
archeologists recovered thousands of pearl beads, necklaces of grizzly-bear
teeth, copper ear ornaments, bracelets, and breastplates. The Hopewell artists
made beautiful objects of mica and carved stone as well as copper. Many of
their objects were representations of animals and birds. The Hopewell people
began cultivating corn about A.D. 450. With the beginning of agriculture, some
say, their trading activities declined and the communities became more isolated
from each other. About 300 years later they took to the hills, where they built
large defensive earthworks. Obviously there was unrest in the land, perhaps an
invading people. These earthworks are the last evidence of the Hopewell
culture. THE MISSISSIPPIAN CULTURE. About A.D. 900 another mound culture
emerged in the Southeast and Mississippi Valley. This is known as the Mississippian
culture. This culture had clear ties with Mexico. Communities in the
Mississippian culture clustered on the river flood plains. Such locations were
good for farming because floods constantly renewed the fertility of the soil.
Their towns featured large flat-topped mounds on which were built temples,
meeting houses, and residences of chiefs and priests. Common symbols in their
art were the falcon and the jaguar, both of which had long been revered in
Mesoamerica. The crown jewel of the Mississippian culture was Cahokia, in
western Illinois. In its heyday, Cahokia boasted 30,000 residents and more than
1,000 mounds. The tallest mound at Cahokia rises ten stories from a
sixteen-acre base, rivaling Mexico's Pyramid of the Sun in size. Near the mound,
archeologists have discovered a circular pattern of posts. The posts may have
served as a solar calendar, telling farmers when to plant. By the time European
explorers arrived in the region, the Mississippians had abandoned Cahokia.
Though Mississippian culture was fading, explorers caught a glimpse of the
society's splendor. A member of a Spanish expedition described a temple along
the Savannah River in Georgia. Said the chronicler, the "ceiling . . .
from the walls upward, was adorned like the roof outside with designs of shells
interspersed with strands of pearls. Among the decorations were great
headdresses of different colors of feathers. . . . It was an agreeable sight to
behold." The Mississippian culture declined rapidly Later Indians of the region
could not say who had built the mounds. Yet there seems to be little doubt that
the major tribes of the Southeast were descendants of the mound builders. These
include the Cherokees, Catawbas, Creeks, Chickasaws, and Choctaws. (7)
[Picture] During the 1400s, Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital, was larger than
any European city. The Aztecs used canals and causeways for transportation.
GEOGRAPHY: Why does the map show flames in the mountains above the city? (8)
[Pictures] The Incas built stone-walled farming terraces (top) to use their
mountainous land more efficiently. Many of these finely engineered fields are
still in use. Above, Peruvian Indians, descendants of the Incas, travel with
their llamas along a surviving stretch of the Inca highway. CULTURE: How do Inca
building projects provide evidence of a complex, developed society? (9)
[Picture] The mysterious Olmec culture produced colossal stone sculptures. This
helmeted head, which may represent an Olmec ruler, is from a site in southern
Mexico. CULTURE: About how many years ago did Olmec culture develop? (10) The
Anasazi of Mesa Verde in present-day Colorado built the spectacular Cliff
Palace in this canyon's sandstone walls. The settlement, seen here in winter,
contains more than 200 rooms and 23 kivas. GEOGRAPHY: What advantages might
cliff dwellings have had? (11) [Picture] Hopewell artisans created beautiful
objects for use as grave offerings. The mica cutout of a hand and the copper
falcon come from a mound in southern Ohio. The wooden catlike figure was found
in Florida. CULTURE: Why, do you think, did the Hopewell admire the falcon?
(12) [Picture] The largest Mississippian burial mounds may have taken a century
or longer to reach their maximum size. This painting from 1850 shows a cross
section of a mound in Louisiana. RELIGION: Why, do you think, did the Indians
hold religious ceremonies on top of the mounds? (13-7) 3 North American Indians
in 1500. Section Focus. Key Terms: egalitarian, slash-and-burn farming,
ecology, shaman. Main Idea: Indians consumed natural resources, but unlike
Europeans, they stressed a spiritual relationship with the environment. The
coming of the Europeans introduced new attitudes to the environment that
threatened Indian survival. Objectives: As you read, look for answers to these
questions: 1. What differences were there among the Indians of North America?
What similarities? 2. What spiritual views of the earth did most Indians share?
3. What environmental changes did the arrival of Europeans introduce? The first
European explorers and settlers in the Americas left vivid accounts of the
Indians they encountered. Yet these accounts have tended to "freeze"
the Indians in time and place. This is because the Europeans assumed that the
Indians had always lived in the same place and in the same way: But that is not
true. Like peoples the world over, Indian groups moved from one territory to
another. As they did, they changed their way of life when it was necessary to
do so. MOVEMENT AND DIVERSITY. The Cheyenne, for instance, are usually thought
of as Plains Indians who hunted buffalo. Originally, however, they were farmers
in southern Minnesota. Once they migrated to the Plains, the Cheyenne continued
a life that included both farming and hunting-gathering. Then, when the Spanish
brought horses to the Plains in the mid-1500s, the Cheyenne abandoned farming
to rely on hunting. The Indian societies in North America were a diverse lot.
Some devoted themselves to warfare. Others were peaceful, fighting only if
necessary. Some societies were egalitarian. (That is, all members were
considered equal.) Others were organized into social classes, often with slaves
as the lowest class. Some societies emphasized the importance of individual
feats of valor or of possessions to increase status. Others discouraged
individualism and personal status-seeking. Chiefs headed most Indian societies.
The chief, either male or female depending on tradition, had only as much
authority as the group was willing to give. Important decisions were made in
consultation with other village leaders. Sometimes a village chief might bow to
the authority of the chief of a more powerful neighbor. LIVING FROM THE LAND.
Concerned with survival rather than conservation, Indians did not always live
in harmony with the earth. Many scientists, for example, think ancient big-game
hunters may have hunted horses to extinction in the Western Hemisphere. They
also think the Anasazi stripped large areas of forests and ruined the topsoil.
Today there are wooded areas in northern Mexico where one listens and looks in
vain for a squirrel, a bird, or a deer. Such over-hunting, some think, may have
forced Mesoamericans to develop agriculture. A major change in the use of the
American land came with the rise of agriculture. In the Southwest the Indians
adopted methods of irrigation. In the Eastern Woodlands the Indians practiced
slash-and-burn farming. To prepare a field, they slash would kill the trees by
cutting away strips of bark from around their trunks. Then they would burn the
underbrush. The ashes helped fertilize the soil. Between the dead trees, the
Indians used sticks to poke holes in the ground. In the holes they planted
corn, beans, and squash, often mixing the seeds together. It was not unusual to
see vines of beans or squash growing up next to stalks of corn. Whenever the
soil became exhausted, usually after eight years, the Woodland Indians would
move on to clear another plot and build another village. Meanwhile, forests
would retake the old fields, thus renewing the land. The Woodland Indians also
used fire to reshape the forests. When Europeans first looked on the Eastern
Woodlands, they praised the "good ground," the plentiful animal life,
and the park-like woods. They did not realize that the look and abundance of
the woodlands were actually a creation of the Indians. Groups such as the
Algonquin not only lived on the land; they managed it. Their principal tool of
management was fire. They regularly and systematically set fire in the woods to
destroy the underbrush. These were low-heat fires that swept through an area
quickly, not burning well-established trees. One effect of these fires was to
make ashes that added nutrients to the soil. Another effect was that grass and
berries were likely to establish themselves on the fire-cleared ground. The
grass and berries in turn attracted animals such as deer, bears, and wild
turkeys. By firing the woods, therefore, the Indians created an environment
more supportive of wildlife. The cleared woods were also easier to travel
through. The Woodland Indians were not alone in using fire to shape the
environment. This technique was used throughout the continent. In California,
for instance, the Indians set fire to the meadowlands each fall to ensure a
good harvest of grass seed for the coming year. A SPIRITUAL RELATIONSHIP WITH
THE EARTH. "All things are alive in this profound unity in which are all
elements, all animals, all things. . . ." -- Kiowa poet and scholar. N.
Scott Momaday. To live on the earth means to affect and to be affected by it.
This interaction with the land -- its plants, animals, and natural resources --
has been an ongoing theme in the history of what would become the United
States. Scientists call the relationship between living things and their
environment ecology. For Indians, this relationship was spiritual, full of
magic and wonder. In seeking to explain the Indian attitude toward the world,
Kiowa poet and scholar N. Scott Momaday wrote: All things are alive in this
profound unity in which are all elements, all animals, all things. . . . My
father remembered that, as a boy, he had watched . . . the old man
Koi-khan-hole, "Dragonfly," stand in the first light, his arms
outstretched and his painted face fixed on the east, and pray the sun out of
the ground. His voice, for he prayed aloud, struck at the great, misty silence
of the Plains morning, entered into it, carried through it to the rising sun.
His words made one of the sun and earth, one of himself and the boy who
watched, one of the boy and generations to come. The Indians believed that all
things were part of a larger whole. They also believed that each life form had
certain powers. By establishing the right relationship with an animal or plant,
stone or star, storm or cloud, a person could share its spirit or essence. As a
result, even hunting was more than an economic activity. It was also a
spiritual activity. To the Indian, success in the hunt was not a one-sided
affair. It also called for a creature to give up its life. The hunter
acknowledged that gift and thanked the creature's spirit. Because Indians had
strong spiritual beliefs, religious leaders called shaman wielded great
influence. Shamans could, it was said, communicate with the spirit world. They
used their knowledge of curative plants to treat ailments. They also drove evil
spirits -- the cause of sickness, according to Indians -- from the bodies of
the ill. THE CLASH OF CULTURES. The coming of the Europeans introduced new
environmental factors to North America that would change the land and its
people. The Europeans brought deadly new diseases that ravaged the Indians. The
Europeans' attitude toward land use, as well as their technology, destroyed the
hunting-gathering environment on which the Indians depended. Disease was the
silent conqueror. The Indians had had no contact with diseases that were
commonplace in the rest of the world. These included chicken pox, measles,
smallpox, and flu. As a result, what was an ordinary case of flu to a European
meant certain death for an Indian. With death rates as high as 90 percent, the
social and economic foundations of whole tribes were wiped out. Millions died.
The Indian population of North America dropped from about 10 or 12 million in
1500 to about half a million in 1900. This destruction of life was without
precedent. A Kiowa folk story from the 1800s captures some of the horror of the
new diseases. The main character of the story is named Saynday. Off across the
prairie, Saynday saw a dark spot coming toward him from the east, moving very
slowly. . . . After a while , Saynday saw that it was a man on a horse. "Who
are you?" the stranger asked. "I'm Saynday. . . . Who are you?"
"I'm Smallpox. . . . I come from far away, across the eastern ocean. I am
one with the white men -- they are my people as the Kiowas are yours. Sometimes
I travel ahead of them, and sometimes I lurk behind. But I am always their
companion and you will find me in their camps and in their houses." When
Saynday asked Smallpox what he did, the horseman, who was dressed in black and
spotted with red dust, had an answer. "I bring death. My breath causes
children to wither like young plants in spring snow. . . . No people who have
looked on me will ever be the same." CONFLICT OVER LAND USE. Those Indian
communities which survived the initial onslaught of disease were generally
neighborly to the first white settlers. The English settlers on the Atlantic
Coast, however, did not understand the Indians' use of the woods. For the
English, a solidly agricultural people, the best use of land was to improve it by
farming. Rather than getting meat and skins through hunting, they preferred to
raise cattle, sheep, and pigs in enclosed corrals or pastures. Differences over
the meaning of land ownership became a principal source of conflict between the
white and Indian cultures. To a white person, land ownership meant controlling
what happened to the land. For the Indians, land ownership meant having access
to the things on the land during different seasons of the year. No one could
own the land itself, only have rights to its produce. Disagreements between
Indians and white settlers over the use of the land led to war. This is because
the settlers' use of the land threatened the Indian way of life, the very basis
of their culture. In the end, the whites won because of their superior numbers
and superior technology. Technology was the Europeans' trump card against the
Indians. From the beginning of contact the Indians had eagerly traded for such
things as steel knives, guns, and iron kettles. They did not, however, learn to
produce these items themselves. In time they might have done so. If European
technology had changed but slowly, the contact between cultures might have
produced strong and independent Indian nations. By the end of the 1800s,
though, the white invaders were using the telegraph for communication, the
railroad for transportation, and the steel plow for cutting the prairies. The
Indians could not withstand a technology that allowed people to invade and
destroy their hunting grounds. Thus the fast-expanding technology of white
people smashed the last resistance of the Indians. The legacy of the Indians
remains, however. It remains in the names of our states, our rivers, our towns.
It remains among Indians today who seek to transmit their language, their knowledge,
and their world view to their children. It remains in the words of Indians,
past and present, who urge people to re-establish a bond with the earth. The
words of Chief Seattle in 1854 did not die with him. In addressing the
President he said, 'Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth.
Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he
does to the web, he does to himself." (14) [Map] INDIAN CULTURE AREAS IN
1500. MAP SKILLS. Anthropologists group Native American peoples and nations
according to the environments that helped shape their ways of life. These
groupings are called culture areas. To which culture area does the Cherokee
nation belong? Which empires were located in Mexico and Middle America?
CRITICAL THINKING: Row might life among native Americans in the Caribbean
culture area have differed from that in the Great Plains? (15) [Picture]
Woodland Indian women from the Mandan tribe bring firewood to a village on the
Missouri River. Plains Indians moved from their lodges on river bluffs to
tree-protected lodges inland during winter. GEOGRAPHY: Why might Indians have
preferred a riverside location in good weather? (16) [Picture] This painting by
American artist George Catlin shows an Indian shaman in ceremonial dress.
RELIGION: Why did the shaman wear such a frightful costume?
[1992a]
[1992b] −
[1992c] (17) LONG BEFORE THE Vikings arrived in what would come to be called
America, bands of hunters and gatherers from central Asia had entered the area
from Siberia across a land bridge into Alaska, which rising oceans fed by
melting glaciers would later wash away, creating the Bering Strait. Certainly
by 10,000 B.C., and perhaps as much as tens of thousands of years earlier,
these people spread across two continents, slaughtering wooly mammoth and
establishing many and varied cultures. Some, like the Eskimos and Inuits in the
North, continued to hunt and gather in small tribal bands; others, like the
Olmecs and the Chavin in Central and South America, developed complex
societies. By the time Europeans first discovered their "New World,"
millions of those they eventually called "Indians" had occupied the
land for so long that they must be considered a native and indigenous
population.
[1992d] (6-10) 2. Before discovery. If it hadn't been for Columbus, years
might have passed before the people of Europe "discovered" America.
But it was only for the people of Europe that America had to be
"discovered.” Millions of Native Americans were already here! For them,
Columbus, and all the sailors, explorers, and settlers who came later, provided
their "discovery" of Europe! For Europeans the "discovery"
of America offered vast lands, treasures of gold and silver and timber, places
to build cities and places of refuge. For them this was a happy discovery. In
the long run it would be a great discovery for the world. But for the millions
of Native Americans already here their "discovery" of Europeans was
not quite so happy. For some it meant the end of their Native American
civilization. For some it meant slavery. For nearly all of them Europeans
brought shock, disease, and change. The first people to come to America were
the ancestors of those who Columbus by mistake called Indians. No one knows
when they came. A widely held theory is that sometime between 35,000 and 11,500
years ago during the last great ice age the first small groups arrived. They
were people on the move. They had come from northern China and Siberia. So much
of the earth's water had frozen into ice that it lowered the level of the sea
in the Bering Strait. Then as they tracked wild game they could walk across the
56 miles from Siberia to Alaska. Without knowing it, they had discovered two
large continents that were completely empty of people but were full of wild game
-- huge mastodons and mammoths, giant ground sloths, camels, antelopes, and
great long-horned bison. In the thousands of years afterwards many other groups
followed. These small bands spread all across North and South America. The high
mountains and broad rivers separated the communities. There were hundreds of
languages and many different styles of life. Some small bands of people had no
fixed homes. They followed their quarry and lived the wandering life of
hunters. Others settled down and after centuries built vast kingdoms with
flourishing cities, temples and palaces, and lively commerce. Mayas, Incas, and
Aztecs. The grandest of these Native American cultures astonished the
Europeans. South of the present United States-from central Mexico to Peru-they
found the Aztecs, the Mayas, and the Incas. In the mountains, deserts, and rain
forests of Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, and Mexico the Mayas had built temples
and pyramids clustered about broad plazas. We can still climb them. The Mayas
invented their own writing. Although they had no telescope, they built their
own kind of observatory and made accurate calendars. Their "Indian
corn" (maize) had never been seen in Europe. It was originally a wild
grass, but would become a staple food for the world. In Peru the Incas had
constructed palaces surrounded by high walls, and had connected their
mountain-towns with a network of roads. To farm their steep land they had built
terraces. Where water was scarce, they had cut canals and erected stone
aqueducts to irrigate their crops. The Incas gave us the potato and the tomato.
When European explorers came to Peru, they were amazed by the Incan government.
They never expected to find such powerful rulers so well organized in the
mountain wilderness. The Incas had succeeded even without a system of writing.
No Americans were richer. In Cuzco, the mountain capital of the Incan empire,
even the buildings were covered with gold! The Aztecs were a warlike people who
lived in central Mexico. They were clever architects. Like the Mayas, they too
built grand temples and high pyramids. Their capital, where Mexico City is
today, was a bustling metropolis. And they fashioned their gold into jewelry so
ornate as to make European kings jealous. These peoples had found their own ways
of progress -- different from the ways of Europe. They had never invented the
wheel. They had no iron tools. Their beasts of burden were the dog and, in
Peru, the llama. Unlike the peoples of Europe, they had not built ships to
cross the oceans. They had not reached out to the world. In their isolation
they found it hard to learn new ways. When the Spanish came, it seemed that the
Incas, the Mayas, and the Aztecs had ceased to progress. They were ripe for
conquest. North American Indians. Of course there was no census of early
America. But in 1500 the people in Mexico probably numbered about 12 million.
Farther north in what is now the United States and Canada there were only some
4 million. The great empires of old America -- of the Mayas, the Incas, and the
Aztecs -- were all in Mexico or south. North of Mexico most of the people lived
in wandering tribes and led a simple life. North American Indians were mainly
hunters and gatherers of wild food. An exceptional few -- in Arizona and New
Mexico -- settled in one place and became farmers. The most advanced Indians of
North America lived in the Southwest. The Anasazi came to be known as Pueblo
Indians, after their style of building. A "pueblo" was a kind of
apartment several stories tall, built of stone or adobe. The Anasazi also built
cliff dwellings where they could defend themselves against enemy tribes. They
and their descendants -- the Hopi, Zufii, and Acoma -- made pottery, textiles,
and baskets which we still admire. When the Europeans came, the largest population
of Indians north of Mexico was in California. They were a tenth of all the
Indians in what is now the United States. They and the Indians of the Northwest
lived by hunting and fishing and by gathering the plentiful nuts and berries.
Before Columbus and the Spanish came to America, there were not many Indians on
the Great Plains. They walked for miles in pursuit of the herds of buffalo. The
buffalo supplied them with skins to wear, meat to eat -- and even (in dried
buffalo chips) with fuel for their fires. Their only beast of burden was the
dog. There were no horses in America until the Spanish brought them. In the
Eastern Woodlands the many tribes were mainly hunter-food gatherers, but they
also did some farming. Some of them had joined in their own small version of a
United Nations. Five tribes of Huron-Iroquois-speaking people -- the Mohawk,
Seneca, Oneida, Onondaga, and Cayuga -- in upper New York State formed the
Iroquois League. The council of chiefs who governed the league was chosen by
certain women of high station. The council had no power to make war but planned
defense. The powerful Chief Powhatan formed his own league (in Virginia), and
there were others. Down south in Mississippi the Natchez Indians seemed more
like the Mexican Indians. Mainly farmers, they were divided into nobles and
commoners, and were ruled by a man they called the Great Sun. The Indians of
North America were as varied as the peoples of Europe. There were countless
tribes and hundreds of languages. Some tribes made elegant gold jewelry, but
others were still in the Stone Age. Some wove handsome rugs and wore textiles
of beautiful design. Others knew only skins and furs. Their meat depended on
the place. Deer were nearly everywhere, and on the plains were herds of buffalo.
The seashores and streams abounded in fish and shell food. The Indians planted
corn, which made their bread, and beans, squashes, and many other crops. They
knew where to find, and how to enjoy, the nuts and berries and mushrooms and
other delights of the woods. They raised and smoked tobacco. Because the
Indians lived so close to nature, most of them had religions in which natural
things played a major role. The Indians saw and worshiped Nature. They had
learned to know the stones, the animals, and the plants. They were adept at
using what they found for food, shelter, and clothing.
[1992e] (6-10) 2. Before discovery. If it hadn't been for Columbus, years
might have passed before the people of Europe "discovered" America.
But it was only for the people of Europe that America had to be
"discovered." Millions of Native Americans were already here! For
them, Columbus, and all the sailors, explorers, and settlers who came later,
provided their "discovery" of Europe! For Europeans the
"discovery" of America offered vast lands, treasures of gold and
silver and timber, places to build cities and places of refuge. For them this
was a happy discovery. In the long run it would be a great discovery for the
world. But for the millions of Native Americans already here their
"discovery" of Europeans was not quite so happy. For some it meant
the end of their Native American civilization. For some it meant slavery. For
nearly all of them Europeans brought shock, disease, and change. The first
people to come to America were the ancestors of those who Columbus by mistake
called Indians. No one knows when they came. A widely held theory is that
sometime between 35,000 and 11,500 years ago during the last great ice age the
first small groups arrived. They were people on the move. They had come from
northern China and Siberia. So much of the earth's water had frozen into ice
that it lowered the level of the sea in the Bering Strait. Then as they tracked
wild game they could walk across the 56 miles from Siberia to Alaska. Without
knowing it, they had discovered two large continents that were completely empty
of people but were full of wild game -- huge mastodons and mammoths, giant
ground sloths, camels, antelopes, and great long-horned bison. In the thousands
of years afterwards many other groups followed. These small bands spread all
across North and South America. The high mountains and broad rivers separated
the communities. There were hundreds of languages and many different styles of
life. Some small bands of people had no fixed homes. They followed their quarry
and lived the wandering life of hunters. Others settled down and after
centuries built vast kingdoms with flourishing cities, temples and palaces, and
lively commerce. Mayas, Incas, and Aztecs. The grandest of these Native
American cultures astonished the Europeans. South of the present United
States-from central Mexico to Peru-they found the Aztecs, the Mayas, and the
Incas. In the mountains, deserts, and rain forests of Guatemala, Belize,
Honduras, and Mexico the Mayas had built temples and pyramids clustered about
broad plazas. We can still climb them. The Mayas invented their own writing.
Although they had no telescope, they built their own kind of observatory and
made accurate calendars. Their "Indian corn" (maize) had never been
seen in Europe. It was originally a wild grass, but would become a staple food
for the world. In Peru the Incas had constructed palaces surrounded by high
walls, and had connected their mountain-towns with a network of roads. To farm
their steep land they had built terraces. Where water was scarce, they had cut
canals and erected stone aqueducts to irrigate their crops. The Incas gave us
the potato and the tomato. When European explorers came to Peru, they were
amazed by the Incan government. They never expected to find such powerful
rulers so well organized in the mountain wilderness. The Incas had succeeded
even without a system of writing. No Americans were richer. In Cuzco, the
mountain capital of the Incan empire, even the buildings were covered with
gold! The Aztecs were a warlike people who lived in central Mexico. They were
clever architects. Like the Mayas, they too built grand temples and high
pyramids. Their capital, where Mexico City is today, was a bustling metropolis.
And they fashioned their gold into jewelry so ornate as to make European kings
jealous. These peoples had found their own ways of progress -- different from
the ways of Europe. They had never invented the wheel. They had no iron tools.
Their beasts of burden were the dog and, in Peru, the llama. Unlike the peoples
of Europe, they had not built ships to cross the oceans. They had not reached
out to the world. In their isolation they found it hard to learn new ways. When
the Spanish came, it seemed that the Incas, the Mayas, and the Aztecs had
ceased to progress. They were ripe for conquest. North American Indians. Of
course there was no census of early America. But in 1500 the people in Mexico
probably numbered about 12 million. Farther north in what is now the United States
and Canada there were only some 4 million. The great empires of old America --
of the Mayas, the Incas, and the Aztecs -- were all in Mexico or south. North
of Mexico most of the people lived in wandering tribes and led a simple life.
North American Indians were mainly hunters and gatherers of wild food. An
exceptional few -- in Arizona and New Mexico -- settled in one place and became
farmers. The most advanced Indians of North America lived in the Southwest. The
Anasazi came to be known as Pueblo Indians, after their style of building. A
"pueblo" was a kind of apartment several stories tall, built of stone
or adobe. The Anasazi also built cliff dwellings where they could defend
themselves against enemy tribes. They and their descendants -- the Hopi, Zufii,
and Acoma -- made pottery, textiles, and baskets which we still admire. When
the Europeans came, the largest population of Indians north of Mexico was in
California. They were a tenth of all the Indians in what is now the United
States. They and the Indians of the Northwest lived by hunting and fishing and
by gathering the plentiful nuts and berries. Before Columbus and the Spanish
came to America, there were not many Indians on the Great Plains. They walked
for miles in pursuit of the herds of buffalo. The buffalo supplied them with
skins to wear, meat to eat -- and even (in dried buffalo chips) with fuel for
their fires. Their only beast of burden was the dog. There were no horses in
America until the Spanish brought them. In the Eastern Woodlands the many
tribes were mainly hunter-food gatherers, but they also did some farming. Some
of them had joined in their own small version of a United Nations. Five tribes
of Huron-Iroquois-speaking people -- the Mohawk, Seneca, Oneida, Onondaga, and
Cayuga -- in upper New York State formed the Iroquois League. The council of
chiefs who governed the league was chosen by certain women of high station. The
council had no power to make war but planned defense. The powerful Chief
Powhatan formed his own league (in Virginia), and there were others. Down south
in Mississippi the Natchez Indians seemed more like the Mexican Indians. Mainly
farmers, they were divided into nobles and commoners, and were ruled by a man
they called the Great Sun. The Indians of North America were as varied as the
peoples of Europe. There were countless tribes and hundreds of languages. Some
tribes made elegant gold jewelry, but others were still in the Stone Age. Some
wove handsome rugs and wore textiles of beautiful design. Others knew only
skins and furs. Their meat depended on the place. Deer were nearly everywhere,
and on the plains were herds of buffalo. The seashores and streams abounded in
fish and shell food. The Indians planted corn, which made their bread, and
beans, squashes, and many other crops. They knew where to find, and how to
enjoy, the nuts and berries and mushrooms and other delights of the woods. They
raised and smoked tobacco. Because the Indians lived so close to nature, most
of them had religions in which natural things played a major role. The Indians
saw and worshiped Nature. They had learned to know the stones, the animals, and
the plants. They were adept at using what they found for food, shelter, and
clothing. (7) More from Boorstin: "Columbus reported to his surprise and
somewhat to his disappointment, that 'in these islands I have so far found no
human monstrosities, as many expected, on the contrary, among all these peoples
good looks are esteemed. . . . Thus I have neither found monsters nor any
report of any, except . . . a people . . . who eat human flesh . . . they are
no more malformed than the others.' These Indians, he reassured the Spanish
sovereigns, were 'very well built, of very handsome bodies and fine
faces.'" (From The Discoverers) (8) Geography and History: Interaction
Refer students to the map on page 9. Have them locate all Indian tribes
mentioned in Section 2. Ask: What do the colors on the map mean? (The colors
signify culture areas.) Ask: Why would tribes living in particular areas share
a similar culture? (Over time, people adapt to the conditions of their
environments, and their cultures reflect these adaptations. Groups living
within a particular geographic region would necessarily share certain cultural
values, economic and political systems, and technologies.) (2C-D) Section 2
(pages 6-10). Before Discovery. FOCUS. To introduce the lesson, direct students
to open their books to the physical map of North America on page 948 of their
texts. Have students locate the Bering Strait area. Explain that it is believed
that North America and Asia were joined here by a land bridge during the last
Ice Age, 25,000 to 40,000 years ago. Over that land bridge, the first humans
traveled to America. INSTRUCT. Explain. (1) Tell students that the authors use
quotation marks around the word "discovered" on page 6 because there
were flourishing civilizations and active cultures in the Americas before
European explorers arrived; and (2) that archaeologists are still learning
about the Mayas, Aztecs, Incas, and Indian groups of North America. Writing
Process Activity. Drawing Conclusions. Have students imagine they are members
of a North American Indian tribe who visited an Aztec, Mayan, or Incan city. In
preparation for creating a tale about their experience, have them brainstorm
details about environment, Lifestyle, economy, and culture of the people whose
city they visited. As they write their tales, have them concentrate on
capturing audience interest and on recreating their visit vividly. Students
should revise for narrative impact and specific detail. After proofreading
carefully, students can read their tales aloud as if they were delivering them
at a campfire. Section Review Answers. Section 2, page 10. 1. a) an Indian
civilization in Central America, b) an Indian civilization in what is now
Central Mexico. They were great warriors, architects, and jewelers. c) an
Indian civilization in what is now Peru, that developed a strong, very
organized government, sophisticated farming techniques, and impressive roads. d)
a loose association for defense formed by five tribes who lived in what is now
upper New York State. e) Anasazi Indians of the American Southwest. The Spanish
gave them the name "Pueblo" because they lived in pueblos, adobe
houses built on top of each other. f) the body of water separating what is now
Alaska and the Soviet Union. 2. South and Central American Indians such as the
Incas, Aztecs, and Mayas lived in permanent settlements. On the whole, their
political, social, and cultural life was more advanced that that of Indians
living north of present-day Mexico. Most North American Indians, by contrast,
were wandering hunters and gatherers, although some groups, such as the
Anasazis, were farmers, living in permanent settlements. CLOSE. To conclude the
lesson, refer the students to the text where it states that the Indian
civilizations of Central and South America were "ripe for conquest"
(p. 8). Ask and discuss the following: What about their way of life made
Indians vulnerable to European domination? What yardsticks might be used as a
measure of a culture's advancement or sophistication. (Generally, only
economic, technological, and scientific factors are considered. Be sure
students understand that such cultural factors as religion and family structure
cannot be considered "advanced" or "primitive.") Discuss
why the Europeans had such a wide technological lead at this time. You might
also want students to consider what other factors contributed to the European
success.
[1992f] (2-9) CHAPTER 1. Three Discoveries of America. America was
discovered three times, each time by accident. The first time was about 30,000
years ago, when people from northern Asia touched foot on American soil in what
is now Alaska. The second discovery of America occurred about the year 1000,
but we know little about the Viking sailors who reached Newfoundland. The third
discovery, 500 years ago, was made by a persistent Italian who sailed under the
colors of Spain and claimed what he believed to be the Indies for King
Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. Thus began a Golden Age of discovery and conquest
of the Americas by Spain. Would Spain come to dominate the New World? 1. THE
FIRST AMERICANS. The Ice Age. Today Asia is separated from America by the
Bering Strait, a body of water between Alaska and Siberia more than 50 miles
(80 kilometers) wide. When early people first came to America from Asia, the
strait was dry land. The earth was then passing through a great Ice Age, a
period when the weather was much colder than at present. What in warmer times
would have fallen as rain and drained back into the oceans fell as snow
instead. Gradually, enormous amounts of this snow piled up in the northern and
southern regions of the earth, far more than could melt during the short
summers. Vast ice fields called glaciers formed. So much water was trapped in
these thick glaciers that the water level of the oceans dropped sharply,
exposing a land bridge between Asia and North America. Plants froze, but their
seeds and spores lay dormant until warmer weather came. With each period of
warmth the plants that grew from the seeds and spores spread to new areas.
Eventually they spread across the land bridge into North America. The animals
that fed on them followed. The bones of ancient Asian elephants, called mammoths,
and of saber-toothed tigers have been found in dozens of places in the United
States. Following the animals came people, the first Americans. The exact year,
decade, or century when the first Americans arrived will never be known, for no
historian recorded the adventures of these pioneers. Their graves are unmarked.
The ashes of their campfires have been scattered by the winds of the ages.
These were accidental discoverers, hunters following wild game or herders
driving their flocks over the next hill to find greener pastures. The first
American immigrants came in waves, for there were warmer periods when some of
the ice melted and the water level rose. The last crossed about 10,000 years
ago. At about that time the great glaciers began to melt, and the Bering land
bridge was flooded over by the rising ocean. The Great Migration. What did it
feel like to be among the first people to reach this great, empty land? We know
what the first astronauts experienced when they set foot on the moon. They were
aware that they were doing something no one had ever done before. We do not
know exactly what the first Americans experienced. They did not know that they
were exploring a new continent. Understanding the difference calls for an act
of historical imagination. Having a good historical imagination means being
able to look at past events, keeping in mind what the people of the day knew,
but at the same time remembering what they did not know. Once in North America,
the wanderers moved slowly southward and to the east, following the life-giving
game. The distances they covered were enormous. It is 15,000 miles (24,000
kilometers) from their homeland in Asia to the southern tip of South America
and 6,000 miles (9,600 kilometers) to what is now New England. Many thousand
years passed before they had spread over all this land. As they advanced and
multiplied, the first Americans gradually changed their ways of life. Some made
their homes In fertile valleys, others in tropical jungles. Some settled in
mountainous regions or in deserts. Each group had different problems, and each
learned to see the world in different ways. As a result each society created
its own culture. A society is a group of people who live in a specific
geographic area and who have a common culture. The culture of a society
consists of those values and behavior patterns held in common: language,
government, family relationships, how they make a living, how they educate
their children, and the objects they create. Some sense of how many different cultures
developed comes from the fact that the peoples of North and South America spoke
between 1,000 and 2,000 languages. A few researchers think that people from
other continents may have arrived in the Americas many hundreds of years ago.
They point out that the Chinese and Polynesians were excellent sailors and had
boats capable of making the voyage. And pottery found in Ecuador is quite
similar to that being made in Japan during the same period. Others claim that
free Africans came to America long before the first black slaves were brought.
They find evidence in the Negroid features of ancient statues found in Mexico.
Still others say Roman coins found in Venezuela suggest that Europeans reached
the New World even before the Vikings. Early American Cultures. By the 1400s
there were perhaps 50 million people living in North and South America. Only
about 1 or 2 million of these inhabited what is now the United States and
Canada. Partly because they were so few in number and spread over such a huge
area, these people had developed a number of distinct cultures. Many cultural
differences stemmed from the ways groups dealt with the basic problem of
scarcity. Like all societies these groups had to make choices about how best to
use their limited resources to meet basic needs. Some hunted and gathered wild
plants. Others turned to farming. Those who planted seeds and cultivated the
land were able to develop a more secure and comfortable life than those who
relied on hunting and gathering. People who had mastered farming, or
agriculture, could settle in one place instead of roaming in constant search of
food. They built permanent houses. Their societies grew to include more
members. None of the groups made much progress in developing simple machines or
substituting mechanical or even animal power for their own muscle power. They
had no wagons or other vehicles with wheels and no horses or oxen to help plow
the land. Their tools and weapons were made of wood or stone or bone. Aside
from a few copper objects and some gold and silver jewelry, they had no metals.
Anthropologists call this stage of development the Stone Age. It ended with the
arrival of Europeans and their technology. Most leaders, or chiefs, were chosen
in a fairly democratic manner. That is, most chiefs ruled with the consent of
their societies, not by force or written law. Life was mostly governed by
tradition and custom. People tended to work in groups rather than alone.
Usually they did not own their land as individuals. Their "hunting ground"
or homeland was the general region in which the group lived. It was not an area
with specific boundaries. This was true even of the farmers, who could not go
far from the crops they tended. These agricultural people were mostly peaceful,
though they could fight fiercely to protect their fields. The hunters and
gatherers, on the other hand, were quite warlike because their need to move
about brought them frequently into conflict with other groups. Some early
American cultures were matrilineal, which means that kinship was traced through
the female side. When a man and woman married in such a society, the man became
a member of his wife's social group, or clan. A typical household might consist
of an older woman, her daughters, and her granddaughters. Of course, the woman's
husband, her sons-in-law, and her grandsons would also live in the household
group. But only the female members were truly permanent members of the clan.
All of these statements are generalizations, broad statements that link loosely
associated facts. They are true of most of the groups we are discussing. Yet
every one of these communities was somewhat different from all the others. No
generalization about them can be completely accurate. History is full of such
"mostly but not entirely true" statements. This is unfortunate, but
we must learn to live with this weakness. Remember, as you read, to add words
like "usually" or "nearly always" when you spot a
generalization. Early American Societies. Land and climate strongly influenced
the way the first Americans lived. They adjusted to nature -- their environment
-- far more than they tried to change it. A brief look at some of the early
American societies gives us an idea of the variety of American Indian cultures
that evolved over hundreds of years. The Southwest. As much as 1,000 years ago
in the Southwest, the Hopi and Zufii were building with adobe -- sun-baked
brick plastered with mud. Their homes looked remarkably like modern apartment
houses. Some were four stories high and contained quarters for perhaps a
thousand people, along with storerooms for grain and other goods. These
buildings were usually put up against cliffs, both to make construction easier
and for defense against enemies. They were really villages in themselves, as
later Spanish explorers must have realized since they called them pueblos.
Pueblo is Spanish for town. The people of the pueblos were peaceful and gentle.
They raised what they called the three sisters -- corn, beans, and squash. They
made excellent pottery and wove marvelous baskets, some so fine that they could
hold water. The Southwest has always been a dry country, with water scarce. The
Hopi and Zufii brought water from streams to their fields and gardens through
irrigation ditches. Water was so important that it played a major role in their
religion. They developed elaborate ceremonies and religious rituals to try to
bring rain n . The Great Basin. The way of life of less settled groups was
simpler and more strongly influenced by nature. Small tribes such as the
Shoshone and Ute wandered the dry and mountainous lands between the Rocky
Mountains and the Pacific Ocean. They gathered seeds and hunted small animals
such as rabbits and snakes. The Far North. In Alaska and northern Canada the
ancestors of today's Eskimos hunted seals, walruses, and the great whales. They
lived in igloos built of blocks of packed snow. When summer came, they fished
for salmon and hunted the lordly caribou. The Northwest. Fishing was the
mainstay of the Kwakiutl, Nootka, and Tlingit tribes. These people lived mostly
on salmon and other fish caught in northwestern coastal waters. The magnificent
forests of redwood, pine, and cedar that grew right down to the ocean supplied
them with lumber to build their homes and canoes and to carve their ancestral totem
poles. The Great Plains. The Cheyenne, Pawnee, and Sioux tribes, known as the
Plains Indians, lived on the grasslands between the Rocky Mountains and the
Mississippi River. They hunted bison, commonly called buffalo. Its meat was the
chief food of these tribes, and its hide was used to make their clothing and
the covering of their tents and teepees. Every part of the animal was used,
even its waste, which when dried served as fuel for cook fires in that treeless
region. Little wonder that the buffalo was an important symbol in the religious
life of the Plains Indians. The Southeast. The Ohio Valley was once the home of
the ancestors of such important tribes as the Choctaw and the Creek. They were
called the Mound Builders because they buried their dead in elaborate earthen
mounds built in the shape of birds or snakes, or in human form. These were very
large, as high as an eight-story building, and one has been found that covers
an area as large as 50 modern city blocks. We know that the people of the mounds
traded with tribes as far away as the Rocky Mountains and the Gulf of Mexico
because objects made of stone and ornaments made of the teeth of sharks and
alligators have been found in their settlements. Tribes such as the Cherokee,
Natchez, and Choctaw gradually moved southeast from the Ohio Valley. The
Eastern Woodlands. The Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca made up a
group of tribes that was later called the Five Nations or League of the
Iroquois. They lived in the densely wooded central region of what is now New
York State. The Iroquois confederation, a loose association of tribes, was very
powerful because it could assemble many warriors. The Iroquois men were
hunters, the women farmers. The Iroquois women also participated in tribal decision
making, choosing new chiefs, for example. For thousands of years these tribal
societies knew nothing of the rest of the world. They were as isolated from
their original homeland in Asia and from Europe and Africa as if they were on
the moon. Uncovering the Past. Since the first Americans did not record their
history in books, we must reconstruct it from those objects they created that
have survived the centuries. These include campsites and buildings, engraved
stones, clay pots, tools and weapons, jewelry -- what are known as artifacts.
Putting together these fragments is like solving an enormous jigsaw puzzle with
many missing pieces. It is a difficult but fascinating task. Scientists called
archaeologists search for and study artifacts. In America archaeologists have
located and carefully dug up ancient camps, burial grounds, and entire cities.
They have found hundreds of thousands of artifacts from arrowheads to huge
stone statues. We can estimate the age of these artifacts by using the
technique called carbon-14 dating. Carbon is present in all living things, and
some of this carbon takes a form called carbon-14. When a living thing dies,
its carbon begins to break down at a very slow but steady rate. Thus, by
measuring what remains of the carbon-14 in, say, a human bone or even a piece
of charcoal from a campfire, an expert can tell about how long ago the person
was alive or the fire put out. Carbon-14 dates are accurate only to within a
few hundred years. They are not much use for studying recent events. But for
learning the history of the peoples who first settled America, the method is
most useful, In addition to what archaeologists can tell us about the first
Americans, we can also learn by studying their living descendants. The
scientists who do this research are called anthropologists. Some
anthropologists live with and observe the descendants of the first Americans.
They ask how these people explain their relation to one another. What are their
religious ideas and other values? Do they tell stories called folk tales that
have been handed down from generation to generation? What are their habits 'and
traditions? The answers to these questions throw light on how early Americans
lived and thought. In such ways historians have been able to learn a great deal
about these first settlers of America. (3) [Picture] This jaw of a
saber-toothed cat was found in the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles. This and
other fossils from the Pleistocene era; may be viewed today at the museum on
Wilshire Boulevard. How do fossils help us understand the past? [Map] MIGRATION
TO AMERICA c. 25,000-10,000 B.C. LEARNING FROM MAPS. The Asiatic wanderers who
came to the Americas spread slowly across the lands. What physical barriers
hindered their spread to the east and west in North America? (4) [Picture] This
agate point was wade into a weapon sharp enough to hill mammoths and bison.
When the point was attached to a spear, and the spear was flung by an atlatl --
a device for holding and throwing -- it changed the way people hunted. Use your
historical imagination to describe two hunts: one before these weapons existed
and one after. (5) [Picture] This water jar was one of the pieces of clay
pottery made by the Zuni who lived in the desert of the Southwest. After
reading page 6 about the Zuni environment, why do you think it was important
that jars were watertight? [Picture] What is this animal with horns? Nobody
today seems to know. It was carved around the first century by the early
residents of the Hopewell site in Ohio. The tail has a rattle, the heed is
horned, and little feet are pressed to the body How do you suppose the early
Americans used this carving? (6) [Picture] Pueblo Bauito was the greatest
Anwazi village in Chaco Canyon. New Mexico. At least 1,200 people lived there once.
Drought ended most great pueblos in the last years of the 13th century How
might modern environmental studies have helped save Pueblo Bonito? (7)
[Picture] An early Pawnee astronomer painted this star chart on buckskin to
show the stars and planets of the might shy A reverence for the heavens was a
part of the Pawnee tradition. How might the star chart have been used? (8)
[Picture] This Kwakiutl ceremonial mask was carved from wood and painted. One
head contains another. When opened, its heads look in three directions --
perhaps to past, present, and future. Early Americans of the Northwest carved
masks and totem poles to represent their ancestors. How many different works of
art in this chapter would you classify as religious? How many are made for everyday
use? Can you wake a generalization about the kinds of artifacts that are
usually preserved? (9) [Picture] The Anwazi of the Pueblo period around 1100
made this classic pottery in black on white. The vessels were painted with a
dye. (10-3) America's Indian Heritage. (10) [Map] MAJOR CULTURAL REGIONS AND
INDIAN TRIBES OF NORTH AMERICA, c. 1500. This map shows the geographic location
of the major cultural groups into which American Indian tribes have been
divided. It also shows some of the hundreds of tribes in each group. Of course
many tribes moved about a great deal, so the locations shown are approximate.
[Picture] This stone pipe found in Oklahoma shows a wan playing chunkey, a game
popular everywhere in the region of the Mound Builders. Games lasted all day.
Chunkey was a bit like bowling; a bit like the javelin toss. [Picture] The
Hopewell mounds yielded this mica serpent. Mica is a mineral silvery in color
and so fine it is translucent -- diffused light passes through. (11) [Picture]
Powhatan's Mantle was worn by the great leader of the Algonquins, who lived on
the Virginia tidewater -- lands just inland from the ocean. It is the oldest
historical example of American Indian art. The cloak is made of tanned buckskin
and decorated with shells. [Picture] Pocahontas, daughter of the great
Powhatan, is seen here in a 1616 painting. She married John Rolfe of Jamestown
and was taken to England. In 1617 she died of smallpox. [Picture] This painted
fish bowl was made by the Mimbres, a Mogollon people of southern New Mexico.
The Mogollon were among the first people of the Southwest to wake pottery They
are best remembered for their black-on-white ware. [Picture] A fragment of a;
woven basket was found at Hogup Cave near the Great Salt Lake in Utah. The
baskets were so tightly woven that they could hold water into which hot stones
were lowered to boil stews. (12) [Picture] The Hiawatha; Belt shows the unity
of the five Iroquois tribes. The squares are connected to a central tree, or
heart. The beads from which the belt is fashioned were probably brought to
America by Europeans. [Picture] The mask of painted wood below depicts the
moon. It was carved by the Haida, a people of the Queen Charlotte Islands;
which are west of British Columbia. [Picture] The men of the Hopi spun cotton
yarn on a spindle. Weaving was also primarily man's work. [Picture] The wooden
deer mask was made by inhabitants of Key Marco, off Florida's swampy coast.
[Picture] A thunderbird -- the mythical creator of the storms that rolled over
the Great Plains -- swoops out of the sky, hurling lightning flashes au this
Pawnee ceremonial drum. (13) [Picture] Those who knew the old ways wove this
Navajo blanket. [Picture] The great photographer of the American West was
Edward Sheriff Curtis. He took "A Piegan Dandy" showing traditional
Indian dress and hairstyle. More recently Norman New Rider, a Pawnee Indian,
was expelled from school for refusing to cut his braided hair. The Court held
that his hair style had no direct link to long-standing tradition or religious
identity. [Picture] George Catlin was one of America’s greatest painters of
western Indian life. His 1832 portrait of Black Rock shows Catlin's attention
to detail. The chief of the Two Kettele tribe of the Black foot nation wears a
split-horn ermine cap with a trail of eagle feathers, the mark of the bravest
of leaders.
[1992g] (26) A
Multicultural Nation. From the beginning the American land was host to not one,
but many peoples.
As early as 70,000 years ago, the first people came to America from Asia by
crossing the Bering Strait into Alaska. Over thousands of years, they spread
throughout North America and then into South America. When Christopher Columbus
crossed the Atlantic Ocean from Europe in 1492, millions of Native Americans
lived in North and Central America. (37) The First North American Economies.
Before European settlers arrived, Native Americans had a variety of economic
systems. Some Indians were primarily hunters, tracking deer in the forests or
buffalo on the plains. Most also harvested the fruits and vegetables they
found. Others, such as the Pueblos, planted fields of beans, corn, and squash,
which they irrigated with a system of canals. Many Native American groups
traded with their neighbors and with nations father away. For example, Indians
living in Illinois traded for copper bracelets made by people living near Lake
Superior. They also received alligator teeth from Indians living in Florida.
Western groups of Indians would meet to trade at gathering spots each year.
(37) [Picture] An Indian Hunts for Food. In Hunting Moose Deer in Winter, an
American artist, George Catlin, shows an Indian following his prey. Catlin
painted many scenes of traditional Indian ways, which were soon to vanish as
settlers moved west. Technology: How is the Indian traveling across the deep
snows? What advantages does this give him over the moose?
[1992h] (1-6) CHAPTER ONE. Serving Time in Virginia. As has become clear,
the historian's simple act of selection irrevocably separates "
"history" from "the past." The reconstruction of an event
is quite clearly different from the event itself. Yet selection is only one in
a series of interpretive acts that historians perform as they proceed about
their business. Even during the preliminary stages of research, when the
historian is still gathering information, interpretation and analysis are
necessary. That is because the significance of any piece of evidence is seldom
apparent at first glance. The historian quickly learns that the words evidence
and evident rarely mean the same thing. For historians attemptlng to
reconstruct an accurate picture of the first English settlements in Virginia,
the difficulty of taking any document at face value becomes quickly apparent.
The early Virginians were, by and large, an enterprising lot. They gave America
its first representative assembly, gave England a new and fashionable vice,
tobacco, and helped establish slavery as a labor system in the New World. These
actions raise perplexing and important questions for historians, and yet the
answers to them cannot be readily found in the surviving source materials
without a good deal of work. The difficulty does not arise entirely from lack
of information. Indeed, some Virginians were enterprising enough to write
history as well as make it, not the least of them being Captain John Smith.
Captain Smith wrote an account of the young colony entited A Generall Historte
of Virginia, published in 1624. Much of his history is based on eyewitness,
firsthand knowledge. At a vigorous age twenty-seven, he joined the expedition
sent to Virginia in 1606 by the Virginia Company of London. Once there, he
played a crucial role in directing the affairs of the inexperienced Jamestown
colony. Yet Smith's evidence cannot be accepted without making some basic
interpretive judgments. Simplest and most obvious -- is he telling the truth?
If we are to believe his own accounts, the young captain led a remarkably
swashbuckling life. Before joining the Virginia expedition, he had plunged as a
soldier of fortune into a string of complicated intrigues in central Europe.
There he waged desperate and brave warfare on behalf of the Hungarian nobility
before being taken prisoner by the infidel Turk. Once a prisoner, he likely
would have spent the remainder of his years as a slave had he not won the
affections (so he relates) of a Greek princess with the romantic name of
Charatza Trabiganza. The smitten princess helped Smith make his escape, and he
subsequently worked his way back to England in time to join the expedition to
Virginia in 1606. In Virginia the adventures came nearly as thick and fast as
in Hungary. While the colony's governing council quarreled at Jamestown,
Captain Smith went off on an exploring and food-gathering mission. He
established the first European contact with many of the Indian tribes around
Chesapeake Bay, succeeded in buying needed corn from them, and when captured by
Chief Powhatan, once again managed to get himself rescued by a beautiful
princess -- this one, the chief's young daughter Pocahontas. How much of this
romantic adventure story do we believe? The tone of Captain Smith's narrative
makes it reasonably apparent that he was not the sort of man to hide his light
under a bushel. Indeed, several nineteenth-century scholars, including Henry
Adams, challenged Smith's account of his Indian rescue. Adams pointed out that
the Pocahontas story did not appear in Smith's earliest published descriptions
of the Virginia colony. Only in 1624, when the Generall Htstorie was issued,
did the public first read of the Indian maiden's timely devotion. Captain
Smith. Adams argued, probably invented the story out of whole cloth, in order
to enhance his reputation. We can, of course, look for independent evidence
that would corroborate Smith's claims. But in the case of the Pocahontas story
no independent records survive. Yet recent historians have defended Smith,
Philip Barbour prime among them. Barbour has checked Smith's tales against
available records in both Hungary and England and found them generally accurate
as to names, places, and dates. Smith claimed, for example, that he used an
ingeniolis system of torch signals to coordinate a nighttime attack by his
Hungarian friends, "Lord Ebersbaught" and "Baron Kisell."
No other records mention Smith's role, but we do know such an attack was
launched -- and that it was led by two Hungarians named Sigismund Eibiswald and
Jakob Khissl. Similarly, although the records show no Greek princess named
Charatza Trabiganza, that may have been Smith's fractured pronunciation of the
Greek koritsi [girl] Trapedzoandos [from Trebizond]. Quite possibly, when he
asked his captors the identity of his saviour, they merely replied,
"koritsi Trapedzoandos" -- a "girl from Trebizond. " Yet
even if we grant Smith the virtue of honesty, significant problems remain when
using his account; problems common to all historical evidence. To say that
Smith is truthful is only to say that he reported events as he saw them. The
qualification is not small. Like every observer, Smith viewed events from his
own perspective. When he set out to describe the customs of the Chesapeake
Indians, for instance, he did so as a seventeeth-century Englishman. Behind
each observation he made stood a whole constellation of presuppositions,
attitudes, and opinions that he took for granted without ever mentioning them.
His descriptions were thus necessarily limited by the experience and education
-- or lack of it -- that he brought with him. The seriousness of these
limitations becomes clearer if we take a hypothetical example of what might
happen were Captain Smith to set down a history, not of Indian tribal customs,
but of a baseball game between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees: Not
long after, they tooke me to one of their greate Counsells, where many of the
generalitie were gathered in greater number than ever I had seen before. And
they being assembled about a great field of open grass, a score of their
greatest men ran out upon the field, adorned each in brightly hued jackets and
breeches, with letters cunningly woven upon their Chestes, and wearinge hats
uppon their heades, of a sort i know not what. One of their chiefs stood in the
midst and would at his pleasure hurl a white ball at another chief, whose
attire was of a different colour, and whether by chance or artyfice I know not
the ball flew exceeding close to the man yet never injured him, but sometimes
he would strike att it with a wooden club and so giveing it a hard blow would
throw down his club and run away. Such actions proceeded in like manner at
length too tedious to mention, but the generalitie waxed wroth, with greate
groaning and shoutinge, and seemed withall much pleased. Before concluding any
more than that Smith would make a terrible writer for the New York Post (we
don't even know if the Yankees won!), compare the description of the baseball
game with one by the real Smith, of Chesapeake Indian life: In this place
commonly are resident seaven [7] Priests. The chiefe differed from the rest in
his ornaments, but inferior Priests could hardly be knowne from the common
people, but that they had not so many holes in their eares to hang their jewels
at. The ornaments of the chiefe Priest were certaine attires for his head made
thus. They tooke a dosen, or 16, or more snakes skins and stuffed them with
mosse; and of Weesels and other Vermines skins a good many. All these they tie
by their tailes, so as all their tailes meete in the toppe of their head, like
a great Tassell. Round about this Tassell is as it were a crown of feathers, the
skins hang round about his head, necke, and shoulders, and in a manner cover
his face. The faces of all their Priests are painted as ugly as they can
devise, in their hands they had every one his Rattle, some base, some smaller.
Their devotion was most in songs, which the chiefe Priest beginneth and the
rest followed him: sometimes he maketh invocations with broken sentences, by
starts and strange passions; and at every pause, the rest give a short groane.
Without having read the account of the baseball game first, it would not be
anywhere near as obvious just how little Smith has told us about the Indian
rituals. Indeed, anyone who reads the Generall Historie or any of the captain's
writings will be impressed by their freshness, their wealth of detail, and
their perceptiveness. But that is because we, like Smith, are unfamiliar with
the rituals of the seventeenth-century Chesapeake Indians. Quite naturally --
almost instinctively -- we adopt Smith's point of view as our own. Furthermore,
the perspective that is embedded in Captain Smith's description unconsciously
diverts us from asking questions to which Smith does not have the answer. What,
after all, is the point of the communal ritual? the significance of the fur
tassels covering the priest's face? Is priest even the right word to use? Or is
Smith choosing an English term that distorts the Indian's status from the
beginning? In addition, the Captain's very presence has added a new dimension
to the ceremony. What effect will English culture have on Indian social
structures and belief systems? How much will the traditional tribal authority
of the "priests" be undermined by the arrival of a technologically
superior culture? These and many other questions remain unanswered or, more to
the point, unasked. They are beyond Smith's interest, his competence, or his
ken. If historians are to answer them, they must make a conscious effort to
raise the questions in the first place. It is easy enough to see how a point of
view is embedded in the facts of an eloquent narration. Smith is, after all,
not only headstrong and unabashed, but he is also consciously writing for a
wider public. He intends his book to be read and, in being read, to convince.
But consider for a moment evidence recorded by one of the pedestrian clerks
whose jottings constitute the great bulk of history's raw material. The
following excerpts are taken from the records of Virginia's General Assembly
and the proclamations of the Governor: We will and require you, Mr. Abraham
Persey, Cape Marchant, from this daye forwarde to take notice, that . . . you
are bounde to accepte of the Tobacco of the Colony, either for commodities or
upon billes, at three shillings the beste and the second sorte at 18d the
punde, and this shalbe your sufficient dischardge. Every man to sett 2 acres
corn (Except Tradesmen following their trades) penalty forfeiture of corn &
Tobacco & be a Slave a year to the Colony. No man to take hay to sweat
Tobacco because it robs the poor beasts of their fodder and sweating Tobacco
does it little good as found by Experience. Here we face the opposite of
Smith's description: small bits of information dependent on a great deal of
assumed knowledge. Whereas Smith attempted to describe the Indian ceremony in
some detail because it was new to him, Virginia's General Assembly knows all
too much about tobacco prices and the planting of corn. Policy is stated
without any explanation, just as the scorebox in the paper lists the single
line, "Yankees 10, Red Sox 3." In each case the notations are so terse,
the "narratives" so brief, that the novice historian is likely to
assume they contain no point of view at all, only the bare facts. But the truth
is, each statement has a definite point of view that can be summed up as simple
questions: (1) Did the Yankees win and if so by how much? (2) Should the price
of tobacco be three shillings or eighteen pence or how much? (3) What should
colonists use hay for? And so on. These viewpoints are so obvious, they would
not bear mentioning -- except that, unconsciously, we are led to accept them as
the only way to think about the facts. Since the obvious perspective often
appears irrelevant, we tend to reject the information as not worth our
attention. But suppose a fact is stripped of its point of view -- suppose we ask,
in effect, a completely different question of it? Historians looking back on
twentieth-century America would undoubtedly learn little from baseball box
scores, but at least by comparing the standings of the 1950s with those of the
1970s, they would soon discover that the Giants of New York had become the
Giants of San Francisco and that the Brooklyn Dodgers had moved to Los Angeles.
If they knew a bit more than Captain Smith about the economic implications of
major league franchises, they could infer a relative improvement in the
economic and cultural status of the West Coast. Similarly, by refusing to
accept the evidence of tobacco prices or corn planting at its face value,
historians might make inferences about economic and cultural conditions in seventeenth-century
Virginia. In adopting a perspective different from any held by the historical
participants, we are employing one of the most basic tactics of sociology.
Sociologists have long recognized that every society functions, in part,
through structures and devices that remain unperceived by its members. "To
live in society means to exist under the domination of society's logic,"
notes sociologist Peter Berger. "Very often men act by this logic without
knowing it. To discover this inner dynamic of society, therefore, the
sociologist must frequently disregard the answers that the social actors
themselves would give to his questions and look for explanations that are
hidden from their own awareness." Using that approach, historians have
taken documents from colonial Virginia, stripped them of their original
perspectives, and reconstructed a striking picture of Virginia society. Their
research reveals that life in the young colony was more volatile, acquisitive,
rowdy, raw -- and deadly -- than most traditional accounts have assumed.
Between the high ideals of the colony's London investors and the disembarkation
points along the Chesapeake, something went wrong. The society that was
designed to be a productive and diversified settlement in the wilderness soon
developed into a world where the singleminded pursuit of one crop, tobacco,
made life as nasty, brutish, and short as anywhere in the hemisphere. And the
colony that had hoped to pattern itself on the free and enlightened customs of
England instead found itself establishing something which the government of
England had never thought to introduce at home: the institution of human
slavery. (3) [Picture] "Their clubs were raised, and in another moment I
should have been deed, when Pocahontas, the King's dearest daughter, a child of
ten years old finding no entreaties could prevail to save me, darted forward,
and taking my head in her arms, laid her own upon it, and thus prevented my
death, " In Robert Vaughan's illustration for the Generall Historie (1624),
Pocahontas apparently is pictured twice, once at Smith's side, and again,
larger than life, pleading for mercy. (4) [Picture] "In this place
commonly are resident seaven [7] Priests . . . The faces of all their Priests
are painted as ugly as they can devise. in their hands they had every one his
Rattle, some base, some smaller." Presumably, the dark figure to the right
of Captain Smith is the chief priest with his headdress of snakeskins stuffed
with moss. Illustration by Robert vaughan.
[1993a] (3-4) MAKING USE OF A NEW WORLD. The first American was an immigrant. Although anthropologists
disagree about where the human race first appeared on earth, no one claims the
honor for the Western Hemisphere, which had probably never been seen by human
eyes until twenty or thirty or at most forty thousand years ago. Presumably the earliest immigrant
came by way of the Bering Straits and was followed by hundreds, perhaps
thousands, more who trickled slowly southward spreading out across North
America and funneling through Mexico into Central and South America, venturing
across the water to the Caribbean islands and perhaps much farther to the South
Pacific. The immigration may have gone on for centuries, and it probably
included people from various parts of Asia, Africa, and Europe. For these early arrivals
America was no melting pot. The people we lump together as Indians, or Native
Americans, were divided into hundreds of tribes, enormously varied in physical
appearance, language, and civilization. Those who made their homes south of the
present United States were unquestionably the most numerous and the most
skillful in exploiting their territory. They were the inventors of Indian corn
(maize) , as efficient a method of transforming earth into food as has ever
been devised. Corn is so civilized a plant, so highly bred, that botanists have
only recently been able to track down the wild ancestors from which the Indian
plant breeders developed it. The early inhabitants of Mexico and South America
were skilled in other ways too. They built great cities of stone, richly carved
and ornamented. They knew enough mathematics and astronomy to construct a
calendar that required no leap year and to predict eclipses of the sun. And
they knew enough political science to construct strong governments under which
they worked out an advanced division of labor. In central Mexico their economy
supported a population of several million and a city (Tenochtitlan, now Mexico
City) that ranked in size with those of Europe. By contrast, the Indians who
lived north of Mexico were primitive. They made less effective use of the land,
and it supported far fewer of them, probably not many more than ten million in
the present area of the United States. They grew some corn and other vegetables
but also relied on nuts and berries, game and fish, and starved when these were
unavailable. In parts of the Southeast they organized governments with real
authority, the Powhatan Confederacy in Virginia and the Creek Confederacy in
the Gulf Plains. But most often they joined together only loosely in tribes or
clans under leaders or chiefs whose authority depended on the respect that
their fierceness in war and their wisdom in peace could elicit from the other
members of the tribe. They had dignity in abundance, self-reliance, and
self-control -- it was rare for Indians to show anger or even to raise their
voices. Indeed, they were so self-reliant, so individualistic, that even in war
it was apt to be every man for himself; and in peace they did not achieve the
cooperation and organization, the division of labor, needed to make the most of
the country's resources or to defend it against strangers better organized than
they.
[1993b]
[1994a] (1-4) Chapter 1. Migrants to America. The first Americans were
immigrants. Many thousands of years ago they came on foot in small groups
across a bridge of dry land between Asia and Alaska -- a pathway that is now
underwater. Gradually they spread into all of North, Central, and South
America, and as they did so they developed a wide variety of societies. These
"Indians " were the first Americans. Much later, 500 years ago,
people came by sea from western Europe and from West and west-central Africa.
The Europeans thought they had found a "new world." The nations of
western Europe, especially England, France, Spain, Portugal, and the
Netherlands, began settling this laud, often with disastrous consequences for
the earliest inhabitants. The Indians died very rapidly, largely from new
diseases imported from Africa and Europe. Measles and smallpox killed millions
of Indians, who had had no previous contact with the microbes that cause them.
Christopher Columbus, an Italian navigator and ship captain working for the
monarchs of Spain, "discovered " this ancient laud. He died thinking
he had reached Asia, not America. THE FIRST AMERICANS. The Native Americans of
the eastern woodlands, in the region stretching from what is now Georgia to
Maine, had many common characteristics, even though the various groups differed
from one another as much as the European nations did. Anthropologists usually
sort them into three large groups, principally on the basis of language. The
Algonquian tribes lived along the coast from Canada to North Carolina, and for
the early English migrants they seemed the "typical" Indians. Further
south and west were several large tribes who spoke Muskogean languages. A third
language group, the Iroquoian, prevailed especially in the area around the
eastern Great Lakes. The Iroquoian peoples were probably relative newcomers, having
come from the Mississippi River valley into what is now upstate New York and
neighboring parts of Canada. Indian Economic Life All these Native American
peoples had common cultural characteristics, but varying climates and available
supplies of food and housing made for important differences. Although they
possessed a few technological skills that Europeans lacked, their lack of other
skills put them at a severe disadvantage when they were confronted by the
migrants from northern Europe. The Iroquois and Algonquins had developed a
highly efficient means of transportation at a time when roads in most parts of
the world were inferior to the highways of ancient Rome. The Indian elm and
birch-bark canoes were brittle but light enough to carry between lakes and
streams. Hollowed-Out logs were also used, more often along the Atlantic
coastline. Many of the coastal Indians fished with great efficiency in shallow
waters, using nets and weirs. They were not, however, fishers of the deep sea,
for they had not developed sails. All the eastern woodland Indians grew corn
(maize) and various kinds of squash, pumpkins, and beans. And of course they
hunted deer, which provided clothing as well as food, and they trapped and
hunted a variety of smaller animals unknown in the Old World, such as beaver,
opossum, and raccoon. Hunting was done with bows and arrows, which in skillful
hands were as accurate as European muskets and much more rapid-firing. They
also used tomahawks in warfare, and the Muskogean carried, in addition, spears
and shields woven from bark and vines. Their housing usually consisted of bent
poles covered with thatch or hides. The word "wigwam" is the
Algonquian term for "house." Metalworking was unknown, so stones and
shells served as weapons and tools. These Indians lacked three other
technological advantages widely used by Europeans: the wheel, the plow, and
draft animals, such as oxen and horses. Nature and Society. Eastern woodland
Indians lived closer to nature than Europeans did, though of course Europeans
then lived much closer to nature than we do now. They still kept time by the
sun or moon or by walking specific distances, in an age when Europeans were
increasingly using clocks and calendars. The Indians had a close psychological
rapport with animals and even with trees and mountains; many tribes believed
that animals had souls. Their religious faiths reflected their strong ties with
natural surroundings. Most -- perhaps all -- believed in a high god, a single
deity who was superior to other deities, who were often identified with
specific animals, vegetation, or places. This closeness with nature also
reflected the way that they thought about their societies. Many tribes
considered themselves to be divided into clans, groups of people thought to be
related to one another, and these clans were often identified by such names as
wolf, bear, deer, and beaver. The Indians were strongly attached to their land,
which they felt was theirs by reason of tradition and use, not because they
"owned" it. The land almost seemed to own them. This way of thinking
about territory was very different from the one that prevailed in Europe, where
various groups of people staked out their own turf by means of national
boundaries, and where they carved up those national spaces among individuals
who then "owned" land as "real estate." The gap between
these two concepts of land was to prove an enduring source of conflict between
Indians and Europeans in America. The social and political organizations of the
tribes varied considerably, but it is impossible today to describe them
accurately, largely because early Europeans tended to talk about Indian tribes
in terms of their own societies. European observers expected to find kings,
nobles, and commoners, and they became confused when they discovered that such
groups did not fit the societies they were describing. There was similar
confusion about the different Indian groups, which the English variously called
nations, tribes, or simply "sorts." It is clear, however, that there
were at least a hundred Algonquian tribes; sometimes groups of them were shaped
into confederacies by forceful leaders. The famous League of the Iroquois in
upstate New York came about because five tribes fashioned a sophisticated and
powerful political alliance. Each tribe sent a specific number of
representatives to a central council for decisions about war and diplomacy. The
Iroquois fascinate historians and anthropologists because of the unusual
strength of their confederation and also because of other distinguishing
aspects of their society: their longhouses, which were huge wigwams occupied by
four to six families; their reputation as fierce warriors; their reliance on
communal interpretation of individual dreams; and the powerful influence of
Iroquois women, who not only farmed while their men hunted and warred but also
chose which men would lead them in both war and peace. Among all eastern
Indians, political leadership depended on maturity, wisdom, and forcefulness
much more than on heredity or wealth. The woodland Indians were no more
peaceful than Europeans. They fought frequently against each other, but more
for sport and manhood than for territory. By European standards, casualties
were low. Silence and surprise were the usual methods of attack. Many tribes
either ritually tortured and killed their captives or formally adopted them
into their own group. Their style of peace resembled their style of war;
Europeans were struck by their quiet dignity in diplomatic negotiations.
Carefully weighing their words, they spoke with brief eloquence, confident that
those few words would sea] whatever agreement was being made. THE OLD WORLD
MEETS THE NEW. People from the Old World had discovered Indian America at least
twice, but the first discovery had little effect. The impact of the second
discovery was momentous in Europe as well as in America. In each instance
"America" was not discovered as a whole. Rather, European navigators
stumbled onto particular landfalls, not in the least aware that they had found
numerous islands and two "new" continents. The Norse. The Norse
(Norwegian) contacts with America took place about a thousand years ago.
Norwegians had long been settled in Iceland; from there they pushed westward.
About 980 they established tiny settlements near the southern tip of Greenland.
Some 4000 Norse people lived there for centuries, but for unknown reasons they
lost contact with Europe in the 1400s and died out for lack of food and
supplies. But the Norse thrust westward had gone further. In 986, Biarni Heriulfson
set sail from Iceland and ended up cruising along a shore he was sure could not
be Greenland because it was "a flat and wooded country" and had no
mountains of ice. He was, in fact, running along the coasts of Baffin Island
and Labrador, but he did not venture ashore. Although Heriulfson was the first
European we know of who saw the American coastline, Leif Ericson was the first
to set foot on North American soil. He landed on Baffin Island and then sailed
south along the coast of Labrador and Newfoundland. At last the voyagers came
ashore at a place they called Vinland. This original European discovery of
America remained unknown, except in some obscure old Norse stories, until the
nineteenth century. Some people have made claims for earlier contact with
Indian America -- by ancient Phoenicians from the Mediterranean, by black
Africans, and even by Chinese and Pacific islanders. None of these claims are
totally improbable, but all are very far from firmly established. Much more to
the point, if such contacts did occur, they had no widespread effect. The
voyages of Christopher Columbus did. (2) [Picture] Secota, an unfortified
village on the Carolina coast, as drawn by John White.
[1994b] (6-14) The People of America Before Columbus. Thousands of years
before the European voyages of discovery, the history of humankind in North
America began. Nomadic bands from Siberia, hunting big game animals such as
bison, caribou, and reindeer, began to migrate across a land bridge connecting
northeastern Asia with Alaska. Geologists
believe that this land bridge existed most recently between 25,000 and 14,000
years ago, when massive glaciers locked up much of the earth's moisture and
left part of the Bering Sea floor exposed. Ice-free passage through Canada was possible
only briefly at the beginning and end of this period, however. At other times
melting glaciers flooded the land bridge and blocked foot traffic to Alaska.
Paleoanthropologists remain divided on the exact timing, but the main migration
apparently occurred between 12,000 and 14,000 years ago, although possibly much
earlier. Hunters and Farmers. For thousands of years, these early hunters
trekked southward and eastward, following vegetation and game. In time, they
reached the tip of South America and the eastern edge of North America,
thousands of miles from their Asian homeland. Thus did people from the
"Old World" discover the "New World" thousands of years
before Columbus. Archaeologists have excavated ancient sites of early life in
the Americas, unearthing tools, ornaments, and skeletal remains that can be
scientifically dated. In this way they have tentatively reconstructed the
dispersion of these first Americans over an immense landmass. Although much
remains unknown, this archaeological evidence suggests that as centuries passed
and population increased, the earliest inhabitants evolved into separate
cultures, organizing life and adjusting to a variety of environments in
distinct ways. Europeans who rediscovered the New World thousands of years later
would indiscriminately lump together the myriad societies they found. But by
the 1500s, the "Indians" of the Americas were enormously diverse in
the size and complexity of their societies, the languages they spoke, and their
forms of social organization. Archaeologists and anthropologists have charted
several phases of "Native American" history. A long Beringian epoch
ended about 14,000 years ago. From that time a rich archaeological record
indicates that the hunters had developed a new technology. Big game hunters now
flaked hard stones into spear points and chose "kill sites" where
they slew whole herds of Pleistocene mammals. This more reliable food source
allowed population growth, and nomadism began to give way to settled
habitations or local migration within limited territories. In another phase of
evolution, the Archaic era, from about 10,000 to 2,500 years ago, great
geological changes brought further adaptations to the land. As the massive
glaciers of the Ice Age slowly retreated, a warming trend deprived vast areas
from Utah to the highlands of Central America of sufficient water and turned
them from grasslands into desert. The Pleistocene mammals could not survive
more arid conditions, but human populations ably adapted. They learned to
exploit new sources of food, especially plant life. In time, a second
technological breakthrough, the "agricultural revolution," occurred.
When Native Americans learned to domesticate plant life, they began the long
process of transforming their relationship to the physical world. To learn how
to harvest, plant, and nurture a seed was to gain partial control over natural
forces that before had been ungovernable. Anthropologists believe that this
process began independently in widely separated parts of the world -- Africa,
Asia, Europe, and the Americas -- about 7,000 to 9,000 years ago. Though
agriculture developed very slowly, everywhere it eventually brought dramatic
changes in human societies. Over the millennia, humans progressed from doorside
planting of a few wild seeds to systematic clearing and planting of bean and
maize fields. As the production of domesticated plant food ended dependence on
gathering wild plants and pursuing game, sedentary village life began to
replace nomadic existence. The increase in food supply brought about by
agriculture triggered other major changes. As populations grew, large groups
split off to form separate societies. Greater social and political complexity
developed because not everyone was needed as before to secure the society's
food supply. Men cleared the land and hunted game, while women planted,
cultivated, and harvested crops. Many societies empowered religious figures,
who organized the common followers, directed their work, and exacted tribute as
well as worship from them. In turn they were trusted to protect the community
from hostile forces. Everywhere in the Americas, regional trading networks
formed. Along trade routes carrying commodities such as salt, obsidian rock for
projectile points, and copper for jewelry also traveled technology, religious
ideas, and agricultural practices. By the end of the Archaic period, about 500
B.C. (to use the Christian European method of dating), hundreds of independent
kin-based groups, like people in other parts of the world, had learned to
exploit the resources of their particular area and to trade with other groups
in their region. Native Americans in 1600. The last epoch of pre-Columbian
development, the post-Archaic phase, occurred during the 2,000 years before
contact with Europeans. It involved a complex process of growth and
environmental adaptation among many distinct societies -- and crisis in some of
them. In the American Southwest, for example, the ancestors of the present-day
Hopi and Zuni developed carefully planned villages composed of large terraced
buildings, each with many rooms. By the time the Spanish arrived in the 1540s,
the indigenous Pueblo people were using irrigation canals, dams, and hillside
terracing to bring water to their arid maize fields. In their agricultural
techniques, their skill in ceramics, their use of woven textiles for clothing,
and their village life, Pueblo society resembled that of peasant communities in
many parts of Europe and Asia. Far to the east were the mound-building
societies of the Mississippi and Ohio valleys. When European settlers first
crossed the Appalachian Mountains a century and a half after arriving on the
continent, they were amazed to find hundreds of ceremonial mounds, some of them
70 feet high, and gigantic sculptured earthworks in geometric designs or in the
shapes of huge humans, birds, or writhing serpents. Believing all
"Indians" to be forest primitives, they reasoned that these were the
remains of an ancient civilization that had found its way to North America --
perhaps Phoenicians, survivors of the sunken island of Atlantis, or the Lost
Tribes of Israel spoken of in European mythology. The mound-building societies
of the Ohio valley declined many centuries before Europeans reached the
continent, perhaps because of attacks from other tribes or severe climatic
changes that undermined agriculture. But about A.D. 600 another mound-building
culture, based on intensive cultivation of beans, maize, and squash, began to
flourish in the Mississippi valley. Its center, a city of perhaps 40,000, stood
near present-day St. Louis. Great ceremonial plazas, flanked by a temple that
rose in four terraces to a height of 100 feet, marked this first metropolis in
America. This was the urban center of a far-flung Mississippi culture that radiated
out to encompass thousands of villages from Wisconsin to Louisiana and from
Oklahoma to Tennessee. Several centuries before Europeans arrived in North
America, the mound-building cultures of the continental heartlands began to
decline. But their influence had already passed eastward to transform the
woodlands societies along the Atlantic coastal plain. The numerous small tribes
that settled from Nova Scotia to Florida never equaled the larger societies of
the mid-continent in earthwork sculpture, architectural design, or development
of large-scale agriculture. But they were far from the "savages" that
the first European explorers described. They had added limited agriculture to
their skill in exploiting natural plants for food, medicine, dyes, and flavoring
and had developed food procurement strategies that used all the resources
around them -- cleared land, forests, streams, shore, and ocean. Most of the
eastern woodlands tribes lived in waterside villages. Locating their fields of
maize near fishing grounds, they often migrated seasonally between inland and
coastal village sites or situated themselves astride two ecological zones. In
the Northeast, their birchbark canoes, light enough to be carried by a single
man, gave them a means of trading and communicating over immense territories.
In the Southeast, population was denser and social and political organization
more elaborate. As European exploration of the Americas drew near, the
continent north of the Rio Grande contained perhaps 3-4 million people, of whom
perhaps 500,000 lived along the eastern coastal plain and in the piedmont
region accessible to the early European settlers. Though estimates vary widely,
perhaps 40-60 million people lived in the entire hemisphere when Europeans
first arrived. This contrasted with some 70-90 million in Europe about 1500 and
about 40-70 million in Africa. The colonizers were not coming to a "virgin
wilderness," as they often described it, but to a land inhabited for
thousands of years by people whose village existence in many ways resembled
that of the arriving Europeans. Contrasting World Views. Colonizing Europeans
called themselves "civilized" and typically described the people they
met in the Americas as "savage," "heathen," or "barbarian."
But the gulf separating people in Europe and North America was not defined so
much by how the two cultures extracted a food supply from the land, housed
themselves, or organized family life as by how they viewed their relationship
to the environment and defined social relations in their communities. In these
areas, a wide difference in values existed. This created the potential for a
dangerous conflict once the Atlantic Ocean that had separated two ancient
civilizations had been transformed from a barrier to a bridge by a technological
and scientific leap forward by western Europeans in the fifteenth century. In
the view of Europeans, the natural world was a resource designed for man's use.
"Subdue the earth," read the first book of the Old Testament,
"and have dominion over every living thing that moves on the earth."
God ruled the cosmos, bringing floods, droughts, and earthquakes, but humans
could reshape their physical surroundings into a productive and secure world.
Man's relationship to the natural environment was a secular matter, even if
God, in the sacred sphere, sometimes intervened. Native Americans, in contrast,
were "a people that are contented with Nature as they find her," as
one colonist phrased it. In their system of values, every part of the natural
environment was sacred and interconnected. Rocks, trees, and animals all
possessed spiritual power, and all were linked to form a sacred whole. To
injure the environment, by overfishing or abusing it in any way, was to offend
the spiritual power present throughout nature and hence to risk spiritual
retaliation. In the villages of Europe, peasant people had similarly believed
in spirits residing in trees and rocks, but such "superstition" was
fading. Regarding the soil as a resource to be exploited for man's benefit,
Europeans believed that land should be privately possessed. Individual
ownership of property became a fundamental concept, and an extensive
institutional apparatus grew up to support it. Fences symbolized private
property, inheritance became the mechanism for transmitting land from one
generation to another within the same family, and courts gained the power to
settle property disputes. Property was the basis not only of sustenance but
also of independence, material wealth, political status, and personal identity.
The social structure directly mirrored patterns of land ownership, with a
landwealthy elite at the apex of the social pyramid and a mass of propertyless
individuals forming the broad base. Native Americans also had concepts of
property, and tribes recognized territorial boundaries. But they believed that
land was invested with sacred qualities and should be held in common. As one
German missionary to the Delaware Indians explained their view in the
eighteenth century, the Creator "made the Earth and all that it contains
for the common good of mankind. Whatever liveth on the land, whatsoever groweth
out of the earth, and all that is in the rivers and waters . . . was given
jointly to all and everyone is entitled to his share." Communal ownership
sharply limited social stratification in most tribal communities. Accustomed to
wide disparities of wealth, Europeans often found this remarkable. Observing
the Iroquois of the eastern woodlands in 1657, a French Jesuit noted with
surprise that they had no almshouses because "their kindness, humanity and
courtesy not only makes them liberal with what they have, but causes them to
possess hardly anything except in common. A whole village must be without corn,
before any individual can be obliged to endure privation." Not all
Europeans were acquisitive, competitive individuals. The majority were peasants
scratching a subsistence living from the soil, living in kin-centered villages
with little contact with the outside world, and exchanging goods and labor
through barter. But in Europe's urban centers a wealth-conscious, ambitious
individual who valued and sought wider choices and greater opportunities to
enhance personal status was coming to the fore. In contrast, Native American
traditions stressed the group rather than the individual. Holding land and
other resources in common, Indian societies were usually more egalitarian and
their members more concerned with personal valor than personal wealth.
Exceptions to this cultural system occurred in the highly developed and populous
Aztec and Inca empires and, in North America, among a few tribes such as the
Natchez. But on the eastern and western coasts of the continent and in the
Southwest -- the regions of contact in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
-- the European newcomers encountered a people whose cultural values differed
strikingly from theirs. European colonizers in North America also found
disturbing the matrilineal organization of many tribal societies. Contrary to
European practice, family membership among the Iroquois, for example, was
determined through the female line. A typical family consisted of an old woman,
her daughters with their husbands and children, and her unmarried
granddaughters and grandsons. When a son or grandson married, he moved from
this female-headed household to one headed by the matriarch of his wife's
family. Divorce was also the woman's prerogative. If she desired it, she merely
set her husband's possessions outside their dwelling door. Clans were composed
of several matrilineal kin groups related by a blood connection on the mother's
side. To Europeans this was a peculiar and dangerous reversal of their sexual
hierarchy in which men, from time immemorial, had been supreme. In Native
American societies, women also held subordinate positions, but not nearly to
the extent found among European women. For example, European women, with rare
exceptions, were entirely excluded from political affairs. By contrast, in
Native American villages, again to take the Iroquois example, designated men sat
in a circle to deliberate and make decisions, but the senior women of the
village stood behind them, lobbying and instructing. The village chiefs were
male, but they were named to their positions by the elder women of their clans.
If they moved too far from the will of the women who appointed them, these
chiefs were removed -- or "dehorned." "Our ancestors," the
Oneida chief Giod Peter explained, "considered it a great transgression to
reject the counsel of their women, particularly the female governesses. Our
ancestors considered them mistresses of the soil. . . . The women, they are the
life of the nation." The role of women in the tribal economy reinforced
the sharing of power between male and female. Men were responsible for hunting,
fishing, and clearing land, but women controlled the cultivation, harvest, and
distribution of food. They were responsible for probably three-quarters of
their family's nutritional needs. When the men were away on hunting
expeditions, women directed village life. Europeans, imbued with the idea of
male superiority and female subordination, perceived such a degree of sexual
equality as another mark of the uncivilized nature of tribal society. In the
religious beliefs of Native Americans, the English saw a final cultural defect.
Europeans built their religious life around the belief in a single god, written
scriptures, an organized clergy, and churches. Most Native American societies,
sharing no literary tradition, expressed their religious beliefs in a less
structured way. Animated by a belief in a spirit power dwelling throughout
nature (polytheism), they seemed to Europeans to worship the Devil, European
settlers, their fear and hatred of infidels intensified by the Protestant
Reformation, saw a holy necessity to convert -- or destroy -- these enemies of
their God.
[1994c] (6) Chapter l. The First People of the Americas. The air was
freezing cold. Icy winds howled out of the north. Much of the land from the
Arctic Circle to south of the Great Lakes was covered by enormous sheets of
moving ice. These ice sheets are called glaciers (GLAY-shurz). Prehistoric
animals, such as huge woolly mammoths short-faced bears and saber-toothed
tigers, roamed the land. This was what the first people who came to the
Americas saw. Historians think that the first people of America walked here
from Asia across a land bridge. The land bridge connected Siberia in Asia with
Alaska in North America. These people were following the herds of animals that
were their main source of food.... (12) Chapter 2. Native Americans of the
North and the Pacific Coast Regions. Young Matka was very excited to be on his
first whale hunt. His people, the Nootka, were proud of their skill in hunting
these giant sea animals in open water. Whales were the Nootka's chief source of
food and most of their belongings. They feasted on the whale's delicious meat
and fat. The Nootka women used the whale's sinews to make long ropes. They used
the animal's intestines to make containers. Just as important, they used the
oil from the whale's fat to heat and light their homes. Matka knew that one day
he would become the chief harpooner, or spear thrower, like his father. He
would need to be very strong to drive the long harpoon into the whale. The many
different groups of Native Americans developed special ways of living that
suited their needs. In each region of the Americas, the early people developed
new cultures. Culture is a people's way of life. A culture includes people's
beliefs and customs, the way they organize their society, their language, their
buildings and art, and many other things.... (18) Chapter 3. Native Americans
of the Mid-Continent. The two cowboys rode their horses slowly along the trail.
Snow was beginning to fall, and they still had not found their lost cattle. As
the cowboys rode their horses into the snowy valley, they saw a sight they
would never forget. There, in the walls of the canyon, high above them, were
stone houses. As they looked more closely, they were even more amazed. The
stone houses were part of a village that people had built far above the valley.
On that snowy afternoon in December 1888, these cowboys discovered Mesa Verde.
This village in southern Colorado had been built nearly 600 years earlier by
early Native Americans called the Anasazi. (24) Chapter 4. Native Americans of
the Eastern Woodlands. Sixty men on each team were lined up, ready for the game
to start. Each player held two sticks with a webbed loop at the end for
catching a leather ball. The object of the game was to catch a ball and throw
it between the opposing team's goal posts. As the game began, the players
dashed about the field trying to get the ball. They tackled each other and
kicked and hit as hard as they could. This game, similar to lacrosse today, was
played by the Muskogee (mus-KOH-gee) people during their harvest celebration.
The game was taken seriously as practice for fighting in war. As part of the
harvest celebration, the Muskogee also went without food, took steam baths, and
drank dark herb tea. Then at the end they lighted new fires and roasted the
first green ears of corn. This harvest celebration was very important to the
Muskogee, for they were celebrating their first crop of the year. Like many
other Native Americans of the Eastern Woodlands, the Muskogee were skilled
farmers. (30) Chapter 5. Native Americans of Latin America. 1. One day in 1839,
an American named John Lloyd Stephens was on ah expedition deep in the rain
forests of Central America. Suddenly, in the dense jungle, Stephens and his
companions came upon the ancient city of Copan. It was overgrown with trees and
creeping vines. Yet everywhere Stephens saw huge stones and carved pillars
where great buildings had once stood. "All was mystery," Stephens
later wrote. The great city of Copan was in ruins. The only sounds he heard
were "the scrambling of monkeys and the chattering of parrots." After
Stephens's discovery, scientists and historians began to study this great city
and the Maya people who had built it. The Mayan civilization was one of three
great Native American civilizations that developed in Latin America.
[1994d] (6) COMPARING ART FORMS: NATIVE AMERICAN COMMUNICATION. Throughout
history art has been used by many people as a way of communicating. Art can
tell a story, describe something, or express deep feelings. Art in the form of
totem poles, pictographs, masks, and other works was a part of the life of
Native Americans. A. Shaman mask, Iroquois. B. Totem pole, Haida. C. Pictograph
from Texas. COMPARING ART FORMS. The illustrations show three different forms
of Native American art. The mask (A) is an Iroquois mask. The totem pole (B) is
from the northwest coast of North America. The last Native American art (C) is
a pictograph found in Texas. Look at the pictures carefully. Answer the
following questions. 1. Which of the art works has been used to show a scene
from a story, A, B, or C? What is the scene? C; The pictograph shows two
warriors fighting. 2. Masks had many purposes among Native Americans. Mask A
had a religious purpose. Explain how this mask might be used against evil
spirits. Possible answer: The mask is ugly and was probably intended to
frighten evil spirits away. 3. A totem pole, which was often placed in front of
a family's home, showed people's faces and an animal that was worshiped. What
meaning do you think such an object had for the family? Possible answer: The
totem pole may have identified the family who lived in the home and shown pride
and respect for the animal and the family portrayed. (7) INTERPRETING AN
ILLUSTRATION: TRANSPORTATION FOR NATIVE AMERICANS. Native Americans traveled
either by foot, by horse, or by boat. The fastest way to travel was by water.
The canoe was the most commonly used boat, but other kinds of boats, such as
coracles and dugouts, were also used. A. INTERPRETING AN ILLUSTRATION The
picture at the right shows coracles used by Native Americans of the Great
Plains called Mandans. Look at the picture carefully. Answer the following
questions. Mandan women crossing a river in coracles. 1. Why do you think such
a craft was well suited for river travel? Possible answer: The craft is light
and probably could cross the river quickly and was easily carried over land to
other rivers. 2. Why might this craft be unsuitable for fishing in the ocean or
in a large lake? Possible answer: The craft is not strong enough for large
bodies of water, where strong storms could sink it. B. COMPARING AND
CONTRASTING and contrast. Use the information in Chapters 2 and 4 to compare l
. How was the use of waterways by the Pacific Coast tribes and those of the
Eastern Woodlands a. alike? In both areas, the waterways were used for fishing
and for transportation. b. different? Pacific Coast tribes often fished and
traveled on the ocean; Eastern Woodlands peoples, on rivers and lakes. (8)
USING A MAP: NATIVE AMERICAN CULTURE REGIONS OF WESTERN NORTH AMERICA. Each
Native American culture region in Western North America supported a distinctive
way of life. Use the map below and in your textbook on page 13 to do the
exercise below. MATCHING. Match the Native Americans in the right column with
their culture region in the left column. E 1. Pomo D 2. Pueblo. G 3. Tlingit C
4. Comanche C 5. Crow. a. Arctic b. Subarctic c. Plains d. Southwest e.
California f. Northern Mexico g. Northwest Coast. (9) USING A MAP: NATIVE
AMERICAN CULTURE REGIONS OF EASTERN NORTH AMERICA. Each Native American
cultural region in eastern North America supported a distinctive way of life.
Use the map below and the map in your textbook on page 28 to do the exercise
below. MATCHING. Match the Native Americans in the left column with their
culture region in the right column. C 1. Mohegan D 2. Creek D 3. Cherokee C 4.
Iroquois C 5. Algonquin F 6. Cheyenne. a. Arctic b. Subarctic c. Eastern
Woodlands d. Southeast e. Central America f. Plains. (10) COMPLETING A CHART:
COMPARISON OF NATIVE AMERICANS. Before the arrival of Europeans in the Western
Hemisphere, many different Native American peoples lived on the two continents
of the Americas. Each people had its own culture and occupied its own region.
Native Americans lived as far apart as Alaska and Mexico. The chart below shows
the main characteristics of some of these Native American cultures. NATIVE
AMERICAN CULTIRES. A. COMPLETING A CHART. Use the information below to complete
the chart. Along the Northwest Coast, the Pacific Coast peoples lived chiefly
by fishing. In the river valleys of the Southwest, most tribes were farmers. In
the Southeast, many peoples, like the Creek, based their way of life mainly on
farming along with some hunting. Farther south, in the tropical rain forests of
Yucatan, Mexico, the Maya lived mainly by farming. (11) B. TRUE OR FALSE. Use
the chart to decide whether the following statements are true or false. In the
blank next to each statement write T or F. F 1. The Iroquois lived in the far
Southwest. T 2. Pacific Coast peoples lived chiefly from fishing. F 3. In the
southern climates, most Native Americans lived mainly from hunting. F 4. The
Maya lived near the Missouri River. T 5. The Anasazi made their homes near
river valleys. C. SENTENCE COMPLETION. In the blank provided, write the word or
words that best complete each of the following statements. Use the chart and
the information from the textbook. l. The Northwest Pacific Coast peoples made
their homes in the area from the state of Oregon to the state of Alaska. 2. In
the northeastern regions, the Iroquois made their living by hunting and
farming. 3. The Iroquois consisted of a group of tribes: Cayuga the Mohawk,
Oneida, Seneca, ,and Onondaga. 4 The people who lived m the Yucatan region of
Mexico were the Maya. 5. The people who brought most of central Mexico under
their control in the 1300s were the Aztecs. D. MULTIPLE CHOICE. Underline twice
the answer that best completes each of the following sentences. l. The Mandans
lived close to the a. Pacific Ocean (b.) Missouri River c. Ohio River d.
Atlantic Ocean. 2. A people who lived in present-day Alabama and Georgia were
the (a.) Creek b. Incas c. Anasazi. 3. The main lifestyle of the Maya was a.
fishing (b.) farming c. basket weaving d. pottery making. 4. The Native
American group that lived where the present-day states of Arizona, New Mexico,
Colorado, and Utah meet were the a. Incas b. Maya c. Iroquois (d.) Anasazi.
[1995a] −
[1995b] (3) THE EARLIEST AMERICANS. Introduction. Evidence is mounting that
indicates North America has been inhabited by people, whom Columbus called
"Indians," for at least 20,000, and perhaps 40,000, years. Most
historians believe that the earliest of these people came from Asia, most
likely Siberian Asia. They carried themselves, their children, and their scanty
possessions over a land bridge, since sunken and replaced by the Bering Strait.
They had no beasts of burden, and they did not know the use of the wheel. They
obtained their food by hunting, fishing, or gathering. Yet, over a period of
several thousand years they managed to populate every region of North America
and South America a remarkable people and a remarkable feat. Suggestions for
Teaching. 1. Supply your students with photocopies of the map and text on the
facing page, and the question page that follows it. Have your students find the
answers to the questions from the map and the accompanying information. After
the questions have been answered discussions can take place with supplemental
questions and comments made. 2. How many Indians are living in the United
States today? The most reliable and up-to-date statistics are furnished by the
Statistical Abstract of the United States and are listed in the next column.
Make the statistics available to your students via the chalk board. Then, have
them show the data on the incomplete graph on page 5. Remind them that each
symbol is to represent 20,000 Indians, and that it may be necessary to have a
partial symbol at the end of a line of symbols for a particular state. The Ten
States with the Greatest Indian Population. Oklahoma (OK): 250,000, California
(CA): 240,000, Arizona (AZ): 200,000, New Mexico (NM): 130,000, North Carolina
(NC): 80,000, Washington (WA): 80,000, Texas (TX): 60,000, New York (NY):
60,000, Michigan (MI): 60,000, South Dakota (SD): 50,000. Notes: 1. The
statistics for each state have been rounded to the nearest 10,000. 2. The term
"Indian" does not include Eskimo and Aleut. 3. National Geographic
(October, 1991) gave a figure of some 2,000,000 Indians in North America at the
time of Columbus's landing in 1492. Indian Sign Language Even though there were
many different Indian languages and dialects spoken in pre- and after- Columbus
America, various tribes still were able to communicate effectively through
signs. Even today many of the signs used for communicating with the
hard-of-hearing resemble Indian signs. You can bring your students' attentions
to some aspects of Indian sign language through the illustrations that follow.
It might be amusing to use some of the signs in class, for example, the signs
for "Yes" and "No." (4) Early People of North America: The
information on this page is about the earliest people, later to be called
"Indians," who migrated from Asia to North America. The process took
thousands of years. Each group that came into North America either settled in
camps abandoned by earlier settlers or moved on and beyond to establish
settlements of their own. Bering Strait - Once a land bridge, now a strip of
water about 50 miles long . . .before the land sank could be crossed by
walking, later crossed by small boat or by walking on ice in winter. . . .
Isthmus of Panama - Land bridge used by early people to enter South America
from North America, now the site of the Panama Canal. . . . Food Eaten by Early
People Huge mammoths (now extinct), caribou, and smaller animals; nuts,
berries, roots; fish. . . . Clothing of Early People Made from skins of animals
sewn together with leather thongs . . . no knowledge of weaving as a means of
making cloth. . . . Shelter of Early People Caves, tents made of skin, ice
houses (igloos). Weapons - Spears, sticks, stones no bows and arrows in the
earliest groups. . . . Method of Travel -- Walking and carrying possessions on
their backs, some rafting if currents carried them in the desired direction. .
. . of interest. Before the earliest people came to North America, horses
roamed the land. Then, for unknown reasons, the horses either died or wandered
north and crossed the land bridge into Asia. They returned with the Spanish
explorers in the early 1500's. Eventually the Indians, as they were called,
captured some of the horses and learned how to ride them and use them for
transporting possessions from place to place . . . Eastern Woodlands Indians
began farming about three thousand years ago, but it took many years for
farming to become their most important way of obtaining food. When this
happened it meant that more time could be spent on developing permanent homes
and villages, government, art and other forms of culture. . . . All of the
Indian tribes scattered over the continent had to adapt to the environment in
which they lived. Thus, Indian tribes developed different ways of living.
Arctic Indians and Northwest Coast Indians depended on fish and, later, whales
for food, but the Great Plains Indians depended upon the buffalo. Southwest
Plains Indians built homes on the sides of cliffs; Great Plains Indians built
tents of skins or constructed sod houses; Northwest Indians erected homes of
wood and bark, and so on. . . .
[1995c] −
[1996a] (11-5) EARLY NORTH AMERICAN CULTURES. The Americas were a new world
only to European latecomers. To the Asian peoples and their native American
descendants who had settled the continents tens of thousands of years earlier,
Columbus' new world was their own old world. But it is doubtful that the first
nomadic hunters who crossed from Siberia over the Bering Strait to Alaska
considered themselves discoverers or recognized what they had found -- a truly
new world, one wholly uninhabited by humans. The First Inhabitants. The first
passage of people from Asia to America probably took place during a prehistoric
glacial period -- either before 35,000 B.C. or about 10,000 years later -- when
huge amounts of the world's water froze into sheets of ice. Sea levels dropped
so drastically that the Bering Strait became a broad, grassy plain. Across that
land bridge between the two continents both humans and animals escaped icebound
Siberia for ice-free Alaska. Whenever the first migration took place, the
movement of Asians to America continued, even after 8000 B.C. when world
temperatures rose again and the water from melting glaciers flooded back into
the ocean, submerging the Bering Strait. Over a span of 25,000 years settlement
spread down the Alaskan coast, then deeper into the North American mainland,
and finally throughout Central and South America. Native Americans remained
nomadic hunters and gatherers for thousands of years, as did many Europeans,
Africans, and Asians of those millennia. But American cultures gradually
diversified, especially after about 5500 B.C., when the peoples of central
Mexico discovered how to cultivate food crops. As this "agricultural
revolution" spread slowly northward, native American societies were able
to grow larger and develop distinctive forms of economic, social, and political
organization. By the end of the fifteenth century, the inhabitants of North
America, perhaps 5 to 10 million people, spoke as many as 1000 languages.
Although later Europeans, like Columbus, lumped these societies together by
calling them Indian, any cultural unity had vanished long before 1492. The
simplest Indian societies were those that still relied on hunting and
gathering, like the Eskimos of the Arctic and the Serrano, Cahuilla, Luiseno,
and Dieguefio of southern California, Arizona, and the Baja peninsula of
Mexico. Stark deserts and frozen tundra defied cultivation and yielded food
supplies that could sustain nomadic bands numbering no more than about 50
people. Families occasionally joined together for a collective hunt or wintered
in common quarters, but for most of the year they scattered across the
landscape, the women gathering plants and seeds, making baskets, and cooking
meals while the men hunted for meat and hides. Political authority lay with
either the male family head or the "headman" of a small band.
"Shamans"-any tribesmen claiming spiritual powers-enlisted the
supernatural to assist individuals. Societies of Increasing Complexity Hunters
and gatherers. In the densely forested belt that stretched from Newfoundland to
the Bering Strait, resources more generous than those of the tundra to the
north made for larger populations and more closely knit societies. Northeastern
bands like the Montagnais, the Micmac, and the Penobscot and northwestern
tribes like the Yellowknife and the Beaver traveled forests in moccasins and
snowshoes, stalking deer, elk, moose, bear, and caribou; they speared fish in
icy lakes and streams from birch-bark canoes. Their environment encouraged
cooperative economic pursuits. Leading men assigned several families to
specific territories that they hunted together, dividing the returns among the
whole band. Religious beliefs strengthened the ties of kinship: each family had
a "totem," a particular animal from which they claimed descent. Women
in agricultural societies. While men dominated Indian bands based on hunting,
women assumed more influence in societies that relied for part of their food on
settled agriculture. Among the Pueblo peoples of Arizona and New Mexico, the
Hopi and Zufii tribes, men hunted bison and cultivated corn and beans, but
women owned the fields, the crops, and even the tools. They also owned the
sun-baked dwellings of adobe and stone, some of which rose to several stories,
that housed the families of their daughters. By 1540 some 70 Pueblo villages
flourished, as more reliable food supplies swelled the size and number of clans
(families sharing a common ancestry). A council of religious elders drawn from
the different clans governed each village. Pueblo religious ceremonies, in
contrast to those of simpler Indian societies, involved elaborate rituals
celebrating tribal unity and seeking the gods' blessing for hunts and harvests.
Thousands of miles to the northeast, in a natural setting far different from
the semiarid Southwest, the Iroquois created a remarkably similar culture. More
complex Indian civilizations arose in the bountiful environments of the Pacific
Northwest and the coastal region reaching from Virginia to Texas. The seas and
rivers from eastern Alaska to northern California teemed with fish, humpback
whales, seals, and otters. In the Southeast fertile soil and temperate climate
encouraged the cultivation of maize, rice, and a variety of fruits. By
harvesting these resources and developing techniques to preserve food supplies,
settlements could become larger and more complex. Far less egalitarian than
nomadic hunting bands or even the Pueblo and Iroquois, these tribes developed
elaborate systems of status. Among southeastern tribes like the Natchez, below
the chief or "Great Sun," stood a hereditary nobility of lesser
"Suns," who demanded elaborate displays of respect from the lowly
"Stinkards," the common people. Mesoamerican Empires. Even more
advanced were the vast agricultural empires of Mesoamerica -- south and central
Mexico and Guatemala. As the Roman empire was declining in Europe, the
civilization of the Mayas was flourishing in the lowland jungles of Central
America. They built cities filled with palaces, bridges, aqueducts, baths,
astronomical observatories, and temples topped by pyramids. Their priests
developed a written language, their mathematicians discovered the zero, and
their astronomers devised a calendar more accurate than any then existing. Rise
of the Aztecs. The Aztecs, who invaded central Mexico from the north in the
fourteenth century, built on the Mayas' achievements. Within a century Aztec
conquest had created an empire of several million people. The capital,
Tenochtitlan, was a glittering island metropolis with a population in 1400 of
perhaps a quarter of a million several times the size of London. The Great
Temple of the Sun dominated the center of the city, and through the canals
leading to Tenochtitlan flowed gold, silver, exotic feathers, cocoa, and
millions of pounds of maize -- all trade goods and tribute from other Mexican
city-states conquered by the Aztecs. Warfare enriched the empire, but its
primary purpose was to maintain a steady supply of human captives for
sacrifice. Aztecs believed that they were the chosen people -- chosen to
nourish the earth by sustaining the life of the sun. Each year priests wielding
razor-sharp obsidian knives sliced open the chests of thousands of captives and
offered up to the sun hearts still beating. Human sacrifice shocked early
modern Europeans. Yet the sense of religious mission that underlay Aztec
rituals resembled the convictions that inspired bloody Christian crusades
against "Muslim infidels." Similarities between Aztec and European
cultures. In other ways, too, the world of the Aztecs paralleled the societies
of early modern Europe. Like Europe's peasants, Aztec farmers lived in
permanent villages. Aztec merchants and specialized craftworkers clustered in
large cities, organized themselves into guilds, and clamored for protection
from the government. And, as in Europe, noble and priestly classes took the
lead in politics and religion, demanding tribute from the common people. For
all their similarities there was at least one crucial difference between Aztec
and European civilizations. Aztec expansion did not take the form of colonial
settlements that spanned the oceans indeed, the globe. That difference
reflected a host of distinctive changes in European social, economic, and
political development during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It was
these transformations that made it possible for bold sailors like Columbus and
Cabot or anonymous fisher-folk and traders to dream of profit, glory, and
empire. (12) [Map] INDIANS OF NORTH AMERICA, CIRCA 1500. (14) EYEWITNESS TO
HISTORY. A Spanish Conquistador Visits the Aztec Marketplace in Tenochtitlan.
On reaching the market-place . . . we were astounded at the great number of
people and the quantities of merchandise, and at the orderliness and good
arrangements that prevailed, for we had never seen such a thing before. . . .
Every kind of merchandise was kept separate and had its fixed place marked for
it. Let us begin with the dealers in gold, silver, and precious stones,
feathers, cloaks, and embroidered goods, and male and female slaves who are
also sold there. They bring as many slaves to be sold in that market as the
Portuguese bring Negroes from Guinea. Some are brought there attached to long poles
by means of collars round their necks to prevent them from escaping, but others
are left loose. Next there were those who sold coarser cloth, and cotton goods
and fabrics made of twisted thread, and there were chocolate merchants. . . .
In this way you could see every kind of merchandise to be found anywhere in New
Spain, laid out in the same way as goods are laid out in my own district [in
Spain] of Medina del Campo, a center for fairs, where each line of stalls has
its own particular sort. So it was in this great market. There were those who
sold sisal cloth and ropes and the sandals they wear on their feet . . . and in
another part were skins of tigers and lions, otters, jackals, and deer,
badgers, mountain cats, and other wild animals. I must also mention, with all
apologies, that they sold many canoe-loads of human excrement, which they kept
in the creeks near the market. This was for the manufacture of salt and the
curing of skins, which they say cannot be done without it. I know that many
gentlemen will laugh at this, but I assure them it is true. I may add that on
all the roads they have shelters made of reeds or straw or grass so that they
can retire when they wish to do so, and purge their bowels unseen by
passers-by; and also in order that their excrement shall not be lost. [Bernal
Diaz, The Conquest of New Spain, translated by J M Cohen (New York: Penguin
Classics, 1963), pp. 232-233. Copyright © J M Cohen, 1963.]
[1996b] (2-8) AMERICAN SOCIETIES. Human beings probably originated on the
continent of Africa, where humanlike remains about three million years old have
been found in what is now Ethiopia. Over many millennia, the growing human
population slowly dispersed to the other continents. Some people crossed a
now-submerged stretch of land that joined Asia and North America at the site of
the Bering Strait. Paleo-Indians. The forerunners of the American population
are known as Paleo-Indians. The earliest confirmed evidence of their presence
in the Americas dates to approximately twenty-eight thousand years ago. The
Paleo-Indians were nomadic hunters of game and gatherers of wild plants. They
spread throughout North and South America, probably moving as extended families
or bands. (Tribes were composed of allied bands.) By about 11,500 years ago, the
Paleo-Indians were making fine stone projectile points, which they attached to
wooden spears and used to kill and butcher the large mammals then living in the
Americas. But as the Ice Age ended and the human population increased, all the
large American mammals except the bison (buffalo) disappeared. Scholars cannot
agree whether their demise was caused by overhunting or by a change in climate.
In either case, deprived of their primary source of meat, the Paleo-Indians had
to find new ways to survive. The most significant innovation was the
development of agriculture. By approximately seven thousand years ago, the
residents of what is now central Mexico began to cultivate food crops,
especially maize (corn), squash, beans, and peppers. Centuries before, people
living in the Andes Mountains of South America had started to grow potatoes. As
knowledge of agricultural techniques improved and spread through the Americas,
vegetables and maize proved more reliable sources of food than hunting and
gathering. Except for those living in the harshest climates, most Americans
started to adopt a more sedentary style of life so they could tend fields
regularly. Some established permanent settlements; others moved several times a
year among fixed sites. They became adept at clearing forests through the use
of controlled burning. All Native American cultures emphasized producing
sufficient food to support themselves. Although they traded goods, no tribe
ever became wholly dependent on another group for items vital to its survival.
Wherever agriculture dominated the economy, more complex civilizations
flourished. Such societies were able to accumulate wealth, produce ornamental
objects, and create elaborate rituals and ceremonies. In North America, the successful cultivation of
nutritious crops seems to have led to the growth and development of all major
civilizations: first the large city-states of Mesoamerica (modern Mexico and
Guatemala), then the urban clusters known collectively as the Mississippian
culture and located in the present-day United States. Each society reached its
height of population and influence only after achieving success in agriculture,
and each declined and collapsed after reaching the limits of its food supply.
Even the powerful Aztec empire that the Spaniards encountered in 1519 is
thought to have been approaching the point at which it could no longer sustain
its population.
The Aztecs were the heirs of a series of Mesoamerican civilizations. The first
great civilization in the region was that of the Olmecs, whose Olmecs and
Mayas. culture mysteriously appeared in the swampy lowlands near the Gulf of
Mexico more than three thousand years ago and just as mysteriously disappeared
about one thousand years later. The Olmecs created urban centers with ceremonial
plazas flanked by temple pyramids, a construction style that would be adopted
by all later Mesoamerican societies. Their chief deity was a jaguar god, an
image that would reappear in the pantheons of later civilizations. The Olmec
civilization, like its successors, was a highly stratified society ruled by an
elite priestly caste that claimed the exclusive ability to communicate with the
gods. After the decline of the Olmec cities, the Mayan civilization developed
in the Yucatan Peninsula. The Mayas also built large cities containing tall
pyramids and constructed temples. They studied astronomy, created the first
writing system in the Americas, and developed a richly symbolic religious life
in which rituals of bloodletting played a major role. The kings of the great
Mayan city-states vied with each other for power. By the fifth century C.E.
(common era), or about fifteen hundred years ago, they had begun to engage in
open warfare. But no king or city could win total victory: Eventually, the
constant fighting combined with overpopulation and the resulting environmental
stress to cause the collapse of the most powerful cities. By the time the
Spaniards arrived, only a few remnants of the once-mighty Mayan civilization
remained. The City of Teotihuacan. The largest Mesoamerican metropolis was a
contemporary and a major trading partner of the Ma as. Teotihuacan founded
about 300 B.C.E. (before the common era)some twenty-three hundred years ago --
in the Valley of Mexico, was one of the largest cities in the world in the
fifth century C.E., with an estimated population of up to two hundred thousand.
The rulers of Teotihuacan gained their position through commerce rather than
warfare, and their trading network extended hundreds of miles in all
directions. Teotihuacan also served as a religious center; pilgrims must have
come long distances to visit the impressive Pyramids of the Sun and Moon and
the great temple of Quetzalcoatl -- the feathered serpent, the primary god of
central Mexico. Teotihuacan's influence was felt so widely in Mesoamerica
before its decline in the eighth century C.E. that some scholars have argued
that this great Mexican city-state also influenced societies farther north, in
what is now the United States. Although unproved, Teotihuacan and later
Mesoamerican empires, like that of the Aztecs, may have affected the
development of the Mississippian culture, which flourished around 1000 C.E. in
what is now the midwestern and southeastern United States. Like those to the
south, the civilization of Teotihuacan was based on the cultivation of maize,
beans, and squash. Not until about 700 to 900 C.E. were these crops grown
successfully in what is now the United States; soon after their introduction,
large cities with plazas and earthen pyramids first appeared in the region. The
largest of the cities was Cahokia, near modern St. Louis. At its peak (before
1250 C.E.), Cahokia had a population of about ten thousand -- small by
Mesoamerican standards but far larger than any other northern community. Like Teotihuacan,
Cahokia seems to have been a center for religion and trade. Its main pyramid,
today called the Monk's Mound, was the largest earthwork built in North America
and stood about half as high as the Pyramid of the Sun. Other Mississippian
sites were located in present-day Alabama and Georgia. Traces of this
civilization remained when Spaniards first visited the area in the sixteenth
century. Aztecs. Aztec histories tell of the long migration of their people
(who called themselves Mexica) into the Valle of Mexico during the twelfth
century. The uninhabited ruins of Teotihuacan, which by then had been deserted
for at least two hundred years, awed and mystified the migrants. The Aztecs'
primary god, Huitzilopochtli, was a god of war, represented by an eagle. Aztec
chronicles record that Huitzilopochtli directed them to establish their capital
at the spot on an island where they saw an eagle eating a serpent (thus
symbolizing Huitzilopochtli's triumph over the traditional deity,
Quetzalcoatl). That island city became Tenochtitlan, the center of a rigidly
stratified society composed of hereditary classes of the earth and all people
who lived on it had been destroyed. They predicted that their own world would
end in earthquakes and hunger. In the Aztec year Thirteen Flint, volcanoes
erupted, sickness and hunger spread, and an eclipse of the sun darkened the
sky. Did some priest wonder whether the Fifth Sun was approaching its end? But
nothing ominous happened, at least not immediately, Eventually; the Aztecs learned
that their year Thirteen Flint was called 1492 by the Europeans. NORTH AMERICAN
IN 1492. Over the centuries, the Americans who lived north of Mexico adapted
their once-similar ways of life to quite different geographical settings, thus
creating the diverse cultures that the Europeans encountered when they first
arrived (see map). Hunter-gatherer bands lived in environments not well suited
to agriculture. Within the area of the present-day United States, these tribes
included the Paiutes and Shoshones, who inhabited the Great Basin (now Nevada
and Utah). Because of the difficulty of finding food sufficient for more than a
few people, such bands were small. Where large game was more plentiful and food
supplies therefore more certain, as in present-day Canada and the Great Plains,
bands of hunters were somewhat larger. In more favorable environments, larger
groups combined agriculture with gathering, hunting, and fishing. Tribes that
lived near the seacoasts, like the Chinooks of present-day Washington and Oregon,
consumed fish and shellfish in addition to growing crops and gathering seeds
and berries. Tribes of the interior (for example, the Arikaras of the Missouri
River valley) hunted large animals and cultivated maize, squash, and beans. The
Algonkian tribes of what is now eastern Canada and the northeastern United
States also combined hunting and agriculture. The Algonkians typically moved
four or five times a year. Once crops were well established, villages broke
into small mobile bands to engage in gathering, hunting, and fishing. Villages
reassembled for harvest, then dispersed again for the fall hunting season.
Finally, the people would spend the harsh winter months together in a protected
location before returning to their fields in the spring. Every few years, they
would use controlled burning techniques to clear new fields and ensure
continuing fertility. Sexual Division of Labor in America. Societies that
relied primarily on hunting large animals like deer and buffalo assigned that
task to men, allotting food-processing, clothing-production, and child-rearing
chores to women. Before such nomadic bands acquired horses from the Spaniards,
women -- occasionally assisted by dogs -- also carried the family's belongings
whenever the band relocated. Such a sexual division of labor was universal
among hunting tribes. By contrast, agricultural societies differed in how they
assigned cultivating crops to the sexes. In what is now the southwestern United
States, the Pueblo peoples defined agricultural labor as men's work. In the
East, Algonkian, Iroquoian, and Muskogean peoples allocated agricultural chores
to women, whereas men hunted and cleared the land. In all farming societies,
women gathered wild foods, prepared food for consumption or storage, and cared
for children. The southwestern and eastern agricultural peoples had similar
social organizations. They lived in villages, sometimes sizable ones with a
thousand or more inhabitants. Pueblo villages had large, multistory buildings
and were built on terraces along the sides of cliffs or other easily defended
sites in what is now New Mexico and Arizona. Northern Iroquois villages (in
modern New York State) were composed of large, rectangular, bark-covered
structures, or longhouses; the word Iroquois means People of the Long House. In
the present-day southeastern United States, Muskogeans and southern Algonkians
lived in large houses made of thatch. Most eastern villages were surrounded by
wood palisades and ditches to aid in fending off attackers. The defensive design
of such villages and of the western pueblos suggests the significance of
warfare in pre-Columbian America. In all these agricultural societies, each
dwelling housed an extended family defined matrilineally (through a female line
of descent). Mothers, their married daughters, and their daughters' husbands
and children lived together. Matrilineal descent did not imply matriarchy or
the wielding of power by women, but rather served as a means of reckoning
kinship. Extended families were linked into clans, also defined by matrilineal
ties. The nomadic bands of the Great Plains, on the other hand, were most often
related patrilineally, through the male line. Native American Politics and
Religion. The authority of American leaders rested ultimately on the consent of
the other tribal members, but political structures in the various tribes
differed considerably. Among Pueblo and Muskogean peoples, the village council
was the highest political authority; there was no government at the tribal
level. By contrast, the Iroquois had an elaborate political hierarchy that
incorporated villages into tribes and tribes into a widespread confederation.
All North American cultures divided political power between civil and war
leaders who wielded authority only so long as they retained the confidence of
the people. Consensus rather than autocratic rule characterized these political
systems. The political position of women varied from tribe to tribe. Women were
more likely to assume leadership roles among agricultural peoples than among
nomadic hunters. For example, women led certain Algonkian villages, but they
were never chosen to lead hunting bands of the Great Plains. Iroquois women did
not become chiefs, yet tribal matrons exercised political power. Probably the
most powerful female chiefs were found in what is now the southeastern United
States. In the mid-sixteenth century, a female ruler known as the Lady of
Cofitachequi governed a large group of villages in what today is western South
Carolina. Early English settlers in New England also noted in nearby villages
the presence of female chiefs, most of whom were the wives, sisters, or widows
of male leaders. Americans' religious beliefs varied even more than did their
political systems, but all the peoples were polytheistic, worshipping a
multitude of gods. One common thread was their integration with nature. Thus
each tribe's most important beliefs and rituals were closely tied to its
economy. The major deities of agricultural peoples were associated with
cultivation, and their chief festivals centered on planting and harvest. The
most important gods of hunting tribes were associated with animals, and their
major festivals were related to hunting. A tribe's economy and women's role in
it helped to determine women's potential as religious leaders. Women held the
most prominent positions in those agricultural societies (like the Iroquois')
in which they were also the chief food producers. A wide variety of cultures,
comprising perhaps four to six million people, inhabited mainland North America
when the Europeans arrived. In modern Mexico, hereditary rulers presided over
vast agricultural empires. Along the Atlantic coast of the present-day United
States, Americans likewise cultivated crops, but their political systems
differed greatly from those of Mesoamerica. To the north and west, in what is
now Canada and the Great Plains, lived nomadic and seminomadic societies
primarily dependent on hunting large animals. Still farther west were the
hunter-gatherer bands of the Great Basin and the agricultural villages of the
Southwest. Finally, on the Pacific coast lived tribes that based their
subsistence chiefly on fish. All told, these diverse groups spoke well over one
thousand different languages. For obvious reasons, they did not consider
themselves one people, nor did they for the most part, think of uniting to
repel the European invaders. (6) [Map] Native Cultures of North America. The
natives of the North American continent effectively used the resources of the
regions in which they lived. As this map shows, coastal tribes relied on
fishing, residents of fertile areas engaged in agriculture, and other tribes
hunted (often combined with gathering) as a primary mode of subsistence.
[1996c] (15) 1-1 DRAW! It is critical that students learn geography and
begin to appreciate how it can affect historical developments. Tracing a map or
just filling in information on a ready-made map will not have the same learning
value as actually creating it. By drawing the shape of the landforms, seas, and
lakes themselves, your students will be far more engaged and will therefore
learn more. Some of your students will not believe they can draw a map. Be sure
to encourage them that they can do it. Some of their creations will not be
exact, but that is not important; they will remember the geography if they must
recreate it themselves! Also, it is important for students to understand that
the Europeans and Africans did not just "fill up" an empty continent!
They need to know the extent of the Native American civilizations that existed
here before foreigners arrived. (19) 1-1 DRAW! The map below shows where many
of the Native American tribes and nations (Dakota, Cherokee, etc.) lived before
European colonization. It also shows the seven Native American cultural regions
(Eastern Woodlands, Great Plains, etc.). Using a larger piece of paper (legal
size or larger construction paper), a pencil, and your eyes, redraw this map.
Do not trace or use an overhead projector to enlarge the image! You can do it!
Using colored pencils or markers, color each Native American cultural region
differently. Then, with a black pencil or marker, write in the names of all the
nations and tribes. This will give you an idea of the many different Native
American cultures that existed before the Europeans arrived!
[1996d] −
[1996e] (12) Early North American Culture. The people who first settled the
Americas were descendants of Asian migrants who crossed the Bering Strait to
Alaska many millennia before 1492. When Europeans first arrived in the
Americas, these Indian cultures were numerous and diverse, ranging from the
hunting and gathering societies of the Great Plains to the sophisticated
civilization of the Aztecs in Mesoamerica. Indeed, the Aztec economy and
society encountered by Spanish explorers was similar in some respects to that
of sixteenth-century Europe. One crucial difference, however, was that Aztec
expansionism did not take the form of exploration and colonization across the
seas. (14) KEY EVENTS. Ca. 50,000-25,000 B.P, First Asian penetration of the
Americas: initial human settlement of the two continents. Ca. 1300, Rise of the
Aztec empire: the Indian civilization encountered by the Spanish in present-day
Mexico. (15) LEARNING OBJECTIVES When you have finished studying this chapter,
you should be able to: 1. Describe the character of Indian cultures and western
European society in the fifteenth century, identifying comparisons and
contrasts. 2. Explain why western Europeans were able to establish colonies
across the Atlantic during the early modern period. 3. Describe the Spanish
empire in America and discuss its impact on European development. 4. Explain
the ways in which English efforts at colonization in the sixteenth century
shaped their eventual settlements in North America. 5. Explain the significance
of the Protestant Reformation and its relationship to western Europe's
expansion. Review Questions. (16-7) MULTIPLE CHOICE. 4. Although misnamed
"Indians" by Columbus, the Native Americans in the Western Hemisphere
were the descendants of Asians who came to the "New World" thousands
of years before the Europeans by: a, crossing a temporary land bridge across
the Bering Strait from Siberia to Alaska. b. sailing large, sophisticated ships
from islands in the central Pacific. c. sailing small, simple boats from what
is now China, Indonesia, and the Philippines. d. migrating across Antarctica,
then moving further and further north over generations. (p. 11). 5. Starting in
Mexico around 5500 BC, a major change occurred among native tribes in the
Western Hemisphere with the discovery of a. lucrative trade routes to Asia, b.
how to cultivate food crops. c. silver by Spanish conquistadors. d. a single,
universal language, (p. 11-12). 6. One major difference between Aztec
civilization and that of the Spanish was that the Aztecs: a. did not practice
slavery. b. did not possess a written language. c. still remained hunters and
gatherers, and had no urban centers of great size. d. lacked the navigational
expertise to sail across the ocean. (pp. 14-15, 17). 7. Aztecs were known for
all of the following EXCEPT: a. participating in a lively trade in various
goods. b. engaging in mass human sacrifice to the Sun god. c. having a strong,
centralized government and friendly alliances with neighboring tribes. d. a
high susceptibility to small pox and other diseases brought by the Spanish.
(pp. 14-15, 20-21). IDENTIFICATION QUESTIONS. You should be able to describe
the following key terms, concepts, individuals and places, and explain their
significance: Terms and Concepts. agricultural revolution, privateers,
encomienda, reconquista, Black Legend, indulgences, Protestant Reformation,
doctrine of the calling, quadrant, Black Death, Price Revolution, caravel,
justification by faith alone. Individuals and Places. Marco Polo, Bartholomeu Dias,
Arawaks, Pueblo Indians, Hernando de Soto, Bartolome de Las Casas, John Calvin,
Martin Frobisher, Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, Prince Henry of Portugal,
Vasco da Gama, Amerigo Vespucci, Ferdinand Magellan, Moctezuma, Martin Luther,
Puritans, Francis Drake. (20) MAP IDENTIFICATIONS On the map below, label or
shade in the following places. In a sentence, note their significance to the
chapter. (For reference, consult the map in Nation of Nations on page 19.) 1.
Aztec Empire: 2. Mesoamerica: 3. The Spanish Main: 4. The West Indies: 5.
Caribbean Sea: (21) ESSAY QUESTIONS. 1. Discuss the conditions that encouraged
early modern Europeans to undertake voyages of exploration and discovery. 2.
Describe the conditions under which native American cultures became more
complex and elaborate. 3. How did Portuguese exploration prepare the way for
the Spanish discovery of North America? 4. Characterize the Protestant
Reformation as both an ecclesiastical revolution and a response to social
conditions. 5. What factor was most essential in encouraging early modern
Europeans to undertake voyages of discovery and exploration? 6. "Under
such vibrant, often chaotic conditions a sense of crisis mixed with a sense of
possibility.” Explain why this blend of desperation and idealism made the newly
discovered Americas so attractive to Europeans. Critical Thinking. EVALUATING
EVIDENCE (MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS). 1. What does the scope of English and French
exploration shown by the map on page 17 indicate about the evolution of relations
between those nations with Spain in the sixteenth century? 2. What was the
dominant mode of subsistence among North American Indian tribes, as indicated
by the map on page 12? 3. What is the significance of the ivory mask fashioned
by a West African artist shown on page 9? What does the mask indicate about the
African perception of the Portuguese?
[1997a] (3-16) Columbus, the Indians, and Human Progress. Arawak men and
women, naked, tawny; and full of wonder, emerged from their villages onto the
island 's beaches and swam out to get a closer look at the strange big boat.
When Columbus and his sailors came ashore, carrying swords, speaking oddly; the
Arawaks ran to greet them, brought them food, water, gifts. He later wrote of
this in his log: They. . .brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and
many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks' bells.
They willingly traded everything they owned . . . . They were well-built, with
good bodies and handsome features. . . . They do not bear arms, and do not know
them, for I showed them a sword they took it by the edge and cut themselves out
of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane. . . . They
would make fine servants. . . . With fifty men we could subjugate them all and
make them do whatever we want. These Arawaks of the Bahama Islands were much
like Indians on the mainland, who were remarkable (European observers were to
say again and again) for their hospitality, their belief in sharing. These
traits did not stand out in Renaissance Europe, dominated as it was by the
religion of popes, the government of kings, the frenzy for money that marked
Western civilization and its first messenger to the Americas, Christopher
Columbus. Columbus wrote: As soon as I arrived in the Indies, on the first
Indies, on the first Island which I found, I took some of the natives by force
in order that they might learn and might give me information of whatever there
is in these parts. The information that Columbus wanted most was: Where is the
gold? He had persuaded the king and queen of Spain to finance an expedition to
the lands, the wealth, he expected would be on the other side of the Atlantic
the Indies and Asia, gold and spices. For, like other informed people of his
time, he knew the world was round and that he could sail west in order to get
to the Far East. Spain was recently unified, one of the new modern
nation-states, like France, England, and Portugal. Spain's population, mostly
poor peasants, worked for the nobility, who were 2 percent of the population
and owned 95 percent of the land. Spain had tied itself to the Catholic Church,
expelled all the Jews, driven out the Moors. Like other states of the modern
world, Spain sought gold, which was becoming the new mark of wealth, more
useful than land because it could buy anything. There was gold in Asia, it was
thought, and certainly silks and spices, for Marco Polo and others had brought
back marvelous things from their overland expeditions centuries before. Now
that the Turks had conquered Constantinople and the eastern Mediterranean, and
controlled the land routes to Asia, a sea route was needed. Portuguese sailors
were working their way around the southern tip of Africa. Spain decided to
gamble on a long sail across an unknown ocean. In return for bringing back gold
and spices, Ferdinand and Isabella promised Columbus lo percent of the profits,
governorship over newfound lands, and the fame that would go with a new title:
Admiral of the Ocean Sea. He was a merchant's clerk from the Italian city of
Genoa, part-time weaver (the son of a skilled weaver), and expert sailor. He
set out with three sailing ships, the largest of which was the Santa Maria,
perhaps one hundred feet long, and thirty-nine crewmembers. Columbus would never
have made it to Asia, which was thousands of miles farther away than he had
calculated, imagining a smaller world. He would have been doomed by that great
expanse of sea. But he was lucky. One-fourth of the way there he came upon an
unknown, uncharted land that lay between Europe and Asia the Americas. It was
early October 1492, thirty-three days since he and his crew had left the Canary
Islands, off the Atlantic coast of Africa. Now they saw branches and sticks
floating in the water. They saw flocks of birds. These were signs of land.
Then, on October 12, a sailor called Rodrigo saw the early morning moon shining
on white sands, and cried out. It was an island in the Bahamas, the Caribbean
sea. The first man to sight land was supposed to get a yearly pension of ten
thousand maravedis for life, but Rodrigo never got it. Columbus claimed he had
seen a light the evening before. He got the reward. So, approaching land, they
were met by the Arawak Indians, who swam out to greet them. The Arawaks lived
in village communes, had a developed agriculture of corn, yams, cassava. They
could spin and weave, but they had no horses or work animals. They had no iron,
but they wore tiny gold ornaments in their ears. This was to have enormous
consequences: it led Columbus to take some of them aboard ship as prisoners
because he insisted that they guide him to the source of the gold. He then
sailed to what is now Cuba, then to Hispaniola (the island that today consists
of Haiti and the Dominican Republic). There, bits of visible gold in the
rivers, and a gold mask presented to Columbus by a local Indian chief, led to
wild visions of gold fields. On Hispaniola, out of timbers from the Santa
Maria, which had run aground, Columbus built a fort, the first European
military base in the Western Hemisphere. He called it Navidad (Christmas) and
left thirty-nine crewmembers there, with instructions to find and store the
gold. He took more Indian prisoners and put them aboard his two remaining
ships. At one part of the island he got into a fight with Indians who refused
to trade as many bows and arrows as he and his men wanted. Two Arawaks were run
through with swords and bled to death. Then the Nina and the Pinta set sail for
the Azores and Spain. When the weather turned cold, the Indian prisoners began
to die. Columbus's report to the royal court in Madrid was extravagant. He
insisted he had reached Asia (it was Cuba) and an island off the coast of China
(Hispaniola). His descriptions were part fact, part fiction: Hispaniola is a
miracle. Mountains and hills, plains and pastures, are both fertile and
beautiful . . .the harbors are unbelievably good and there are many wide rivers
of which the majority contain gold . . . . There are many spices, and great
mines of gold and other metals. . . . The Indians, Columbus reported, "are
so naive and so free with their possessions that no one who has not witnessed
them would believe it. When you ask for something they have, they never say no.
To the contrary, they offer to share with anyone . . . ." He concluded his
report by asking for a little help from their Majesties, and in return he would
bring them from his next voyage "as much gold as they need and as many
slaves as they ask." He was full of religious talk "Thus the eternal
God our Lord gives victory to those who follow His way over apparent
impossibilities." Because of Columbus's exaggerated report and promises,
his second expedition was given seventeen ships and more than twelve hundred
men. The aim was clear: slaves and gold. They went from island to island in the
Caribbean, taking Indians as captives. But as word spread of the Europeans'
intent they found more and more empty villages. On Haiti, they found that the
sailors left behind at Fort Navidad had been killed in a battle with the Indians,
after they had roamed the island in gangs looking for gold, taking women and
children as slaves for sex and labor. Now, from his base on Haiti, Columbus
sent expedition after expedition into the interior. They found no gold fields,
but had to fill up the ships returning to Spain with some kind of dividend. In
the year 1495, they went on a great slave raid, rounded up fifteen hundred
Arawak men, women, and children, put them in pens guarded by Spaniards and
dogs, then picked the five hundred best specimens to load onto ships. Of those
five hundred, two hundred died en route. The rest arrived alive in Spain and
were put up for sale by the archdeacon of the town, who reported that, although
the slaves were "naked as the day they were born," they showed
"no more embarrassment than animals." Columbus later wrote: "Let
us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be
sold." But too many of the slaves died in captivity. And so Columbus,
desperate to pay back dividends to those who had invested, had to make good his
promise to fill the ships with gold. In the province of Cicao on Haiti, where
he and his men imagined huge gold fields to exist, they ordered all persons
fourteen years or older to collect a certain quantity of gold every three
months. When they brought it, they were given copper tokens to hang around
their necks. Indians found without a copper token had their hands cut off and
bled to death. The Indians had been given an impossible task. The only gold
around was bits of dust garnered from the streams. So they fled, were hunted
down with dogs, and were killed. Trying to put together an army of resistance,
the Arawaks faced Spaniards who had armor, muskets, swords, and horses. When
the Spaniards took prisoners, they hanged them or burned them to death. Among
the Arawaks, mass suicides began, with cassava poison. Infants were killed to
"save" them from the Spaniards. In two years, through murder,
mutilation, or suicide, half of the two hundred fifty thousand Indians on Haiti
were dead. When it became clear that there was no gold left, the Indians were
taken as slave labor on huge estates, known later as encomiendas. They were
worked at a ferocious pace, and died by the thousands. By the year 1515 , there
were perhaps fifty thousand Indians left. By 1550, there were five hundred. A
report of the year 1650 shows none of the original Arawaks or their descendants
left on the island. The chief source and, on many matters, the only source of
information about what happened on the islands after Columbus came is Bartolome
de las Casas, who, as a young priest, participated in the conquest of Cuba. For
a time he owned a plantation on which Indian slaves worked, but he gave that up
and became a vehement critic of Spanish cruelty Las Casas transcribed
Columbus's journal and, in his fifties, began a multivolume History of the
Indies. Women in Indian society were treated so well as to startle the
Spaniards. Las Casas describes sex relations: Marriage laws are nonexistent:
men and women alike choose their mates and leave them as they please, without
offense, jealousy or anger. They multiply in great abundance; pregnant women
work to the last minute and give birth almost painlessly; up the next day, they
bathe in the river and are as clean and healthy as before giving birth. If they
tire of their men, they give themselves abortions with herbs that force
stillbirths, covering their shameful parts with leaves or cotton cloth;
although on the whole, Indian men and women look upon total nakedness with as much
casualness as we look upon a man's head or at his hands. The Indians, Las Casas
says, "put no value on gold and other precious things. They lack all
manner of commerce, neither buying nor selling, and rely exclusively on their
natural environment for maintenance. They are extremely generous with their
possessions and by the same token covet the possessions of their friends and
expect the same degree of liberality. . . ." Las Casas tells about the
treatment of the Indians by the Spaniards. Endless testimonies . . .prove the
mild and pacific temperament of the natives. . . . But our work was to
exasperate, ravage, kill, mangle and destroy; small wonder, then, if they tried
to kill one of us now and then. . . . The admiral, it is true, was blind as
those who came after him, and he was so anxious to please the King that he
committed irreparable crimes against the Indians. . . Total control led to
total cruelty; The Spaniards "thought nothing of knifing Indians by tens
and twenties and of cutting slices off them to test the sharpness of their
blades." Las Casas tells how "two of these so-called Christians met
two Indian boys one day, each carrying a parrot; they took the parrots and for
fun beheaded the boys. '' While the native men were sent many miles away to the
mines, their wives remained to work the soil, forced into the excruciating job
of digging and making thousands of hills for cassava plants. Thus husbands and
wives were together only once every eight or ten months and when they met they
were so exhausted and depressed on both sides. . . they ceased to procreate. As
for the newly born, they died early because their mothers, overworked and
famished, had no milk to nurse them, and for this reason, while I was in Cuba,
7,000 children died in three months. Some mothers even drowned their babies
from sheer desperation. . . . In this way, husbands died in the mines, wives
died at work, and children died from lack of milk. . . and in a short time:
this land which was so great, so powerful and fertile . . . was depopulated. .
. . My eyes have seen these acts so foreign to human nature, and now I tremble
as I write. . . . When he arrived on Hispaniola in 1508, Las Casas says,
"there were 60,000 people living on this island, including the Indians; so
that from 1494 to 1508, over three million people had perished from war,
slavery; and the mines. Who in future generations will believe this?" Thus
began the history, five hundred years ago, of the European invasion of the
Indian settlements in the Americas, a history of conquest, slavery, and death.
But in the history books given to children in the United States, for generation
after generation, it all starts with heroic adventure there is no bloodshed and
Columbus Day is a celebration. Only in recent years do we see droplets of
change. Past the elementary and high schools, there have been only occasional
hints of something else. Samuel Eliot Morison, the Harvard historian, was the
most distinguished writer on Columbus, the author of a multivolume biography,
and was himself a sailor who retraced Columbus's route across the Atlantic. In
his popular book Christopher Columbus, Mariner, written in 1954, he tells about
the enslavement and the killing: "The cruel policy initiated by Columbus
and pursued by his successors resulted in complete genocide." That is on
one page, buried halfway into the telling of a grand romance. In the book's
last paragraph, Morison sums up his view of Columbus: He had his faults and his
defects, but they were largely the defects of the qualities that made him great
his indomitable will, his superb faith in God and in his own mission as the
Christ-bearer to lands beyond the seas, his stubborn persistence despite
neglect, poverty and discouragement. But there was no flaw, no dark side to the
most outstanding and essential of all his qualities-his seamanship. One can lie
outright about the past. Or one can omit facts which might lead to unacceptable
conclusions. Morison does neither. He refuses to lie about Columbus. He does
not omit the story of mass murder; indeed he describes it with the harshest
word one can use: genocide. But he does something else. He mentions the truth
quickly and goes on to other things more important to him. Outright lying or
quiet omission takes the risk of discovery, which, when made, might arouse the
reader to rebel against the writer. To state the facts, however, and then to
bury them in a mass of other information is to say to the reader with a certain
infectious calm: yes, mass murder took place, but it's not that important it
should weigh very little in our final judgments; it should affect very little
what we do in the world. It is true that the historian cannot avoid emphasis of
some facts and not of others. This is as natural to him as to the mapmaker,
who, in order to produce a usable drawing for practical purposes, must first
flatten and distort the shape of the earth, then choose out of the bewildering
mass of geographic information those things needed for the purpose of this or
that particular map. My argument cannot be against selection, simplification,
or emphasis, which are inevitable for both cartographers and historians. But
the mapmaker's distortion is a technical necessity for a common purpose shared
by all people who need maps. The historian's distortion is more than technical,
it is ideological; it is released into a world of contending interests, where
any chosen emphasis supports (whether the historian means to or not) some kind
of interest, whether economic or political or racial or national or sexual.
Furthermore, this ideological interest is not openly expressed in the way a
mapmaker's technical interest is obvious ("This is a Mercator projection
for long-range navigation for short-range, you'd better use a different
projection"). No, it is presented as if all readers of history had a
common interest that historians serve to the best of their ability. To
emphasize the heroism of Columbus and his successors as navigators and
discoverers, and to de-emphasize their genocide, is not a technical necessity
but an ideological choice. It serves unwittingly to justify what was done. My
point is not that we must, in telling history, accuse, judge, condemn Columbus
in absentia. It is too late for that; it would be a useless scholarly exercise
in morality. But the easy acceptance of atrocities as a deplorable but
necessary price to pay for progress (Hiroshima and Vietnam, to save Western
civilization; Kronstadt and Hungary, to save socialism; nuclear proliferation,
to save us all, that is still with us. One reason these atrocities are still
with us is that we have learned to bury them in a mass of other facts, as
radioactive wastes are buried in containers in the earth. The treatment of
heroes (Columbus) and their victims (the Arawaks) the quiet acceptance of
conquest and murder in the name of progress is only one aspect of a certain
approach to history, in which the past is told from the point of view of
governments, conquerors, diplomats, leaders. It is as if they, like Columbus,
deserve universal acceptance, as if they the Founding Fathers, Jackson.
Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt, Kennedy, the leading members of Congress, the
famous justices of the Supreme Court represent the nation as a whole. The
pretense is that there really is such a thing as "the United States,"
subject to occasional conflicts and quarrels, but fundamentally a community of
people with common interests. It is as if there really is a "national
interest" represented in the Constitution, in territorial expansion, in
the laws passed by Congress, the decisions of the courts, the development of
capitalism, the culture of education, and the mass media. "History is the
memory of states," wrote Henry Kissinger in his first book, A World
Restored, in which he proceeded to tell the history of nineteenth-century
Europe from the viewpoint of the leaders of Austria and England, ignoring the
millions who suffered from those statesmen's policies. From his standpoint, the
"peace" that Europe had before the French Revolution was
"restored" by the diplomacy of a few national leaders. But for
factory workers in England, farmers in France, people of color in Asia and
Africa, women and children everywhere except in the upper classes, it was a
world of conquest, violence, hunger, and exploitation a world not restored but
disintegrated. My viewpoint, in telling the history of the United States, is
different: that we must not accept the memory of states as our own. Nations are
not communities and never have been. The history of any country, presented as
the history of a family, conceals fierce conflicts of interest (sometimes
exploding, most often repressed) between conquerors and conquered, masters and
slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex. And
in such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job
of thinking people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the
executioners. Thus, in that inevitable taking of sides which comes from
selection and emphasis in history, I prefer to try to tell the story of the
discovery of America from the viewpoint of the Arawaks, of the Constitution
from the standpoint of the slaves, of Andrew Jackson as seen by the Cherokees,
of the Civil War as seen by the New York Irish, of the Mexican War as seen by
the deserting soldiers of Scott's army, of the rise of industrialism as seen by
the young women in the Lowell textile mills, of the Spanish-American War as
seen by the Cubans, the conquest of the Philippines as seen by black soldiers
on Luzon, the Gilded Age as seen by southern farmers, the First World War as
seen by socialists, the Second World War as seen by pacifists, the New Deal as
seen by blacks in Harlem, the postwar American empire as seen by peons in Latin
America. And so on, to the limited extent that any one person, however he or
she strains, can "see" history from the standpoint of others. My
point is not to grieve for the victims and denounce the executioners. Those
tears, that anger, cast into the past, deplete our moral energy for the
present. And the lines are not always clear. In the long run, the oppressor is
also a victim. In the short run (and so far) human history has consisted only
of short runs, the victims, themselves desperate and tainted with the culture
that oppresses them, often turn on other victims. Still, understanding the
complexities, this book will be skeptical of governments and their attempts,
through politics and culture, to ensnare ordinary people in a giant web of
nationhood pretending to a common interest. I will try not to overlook the
cruelties that victims inflict on one another as they are jammed together in
the boxcars of the system. I don't want to romanticize them. But I do remember
(in rough paraphrase) a statement I once read, "The cry of the poor is not
always just, but if you don't listen to it, you will never know what justice
is." I don't want to invent victories for people's movements. But to think
that history writing must aim simply to recapitulate the failures that dominate
the past is to make historians collaborators in an endless cycle of defeat. If
history is to be creative, to anticipate a possible future without denying the
past, it should, I believe, emphasize new possibilities by disclosing those
hidden episodes of the past when, even if in brief flashes, people showed their
ability to resist, to join together occasionally to win. I am supposing, or
perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past's fugitive
moments of compassion rather than in its solid centuries of warfare. That,
being as blunt as I can, is my approach to the history of the United States.
The reader may as well know that before going on. What Columbus did to the
Arawaks of the Bahamas, Cortes did to the Aztecs of Mexico, Pizarro to the
Incas of Peru, and the English settlers of Virginia and Massachusetts to the
Powhatans and the Pequots. It seems there was a frenzy in the early capitalist
states of Europe for gold, for slaves, for products of the soil, to pay the
bondholders and stockholders of the expeditions, to finance the monarchical
bureaucracies rising in Western Europe, to spur the growth of the new money
economy rising out of feudalism, to participate in what Karl Marx would later
call "the primitive accumulation of capital." These were the violent
beginnings of an intricate system of technology; business, politics, and
culture that would dominate the world for the next five centuries. Jamestown,
Virginia, the first permanent English settlement in the Americas, was set up
inside the territory of an Indian confederacy; led by the chief, Powhatan. Powhatan
watched the English settle on his people 's land, but did not attack,
maintaining a posture of coolness. When the English were going through their
"starving time" in the winter of 1610, some of them ran off to join
the Indians, where they would at least be fed. When the summer came, the
governor of the colony sent a messenger to ask Powhatan to return the runaways,
whereupon Powhatan, according to the English account, replied with "no
other than proud and disdainful answers." Some soldiers were therefore
sent out "to take revenge." They fell upon an Indian settlement,
killed fifteen or sixteen Indians, burned the houses, cut down the corn growing
around the village, took the queen of the tribe and her children into boats,
then ended up throwing the children overboard "and shooting out their
brains in the water." The queen was later taken off and stabbed to death.
Twelve years later, the Indians, alarmed as the English settlements kept
growing in numbers, apparently decided to try to wipe them out for good. They
went on a rampage and massacred 347 men, women, and children. From then on it
was total war. Not able to enslave the Indians, and not able to live with them,
the English decided to exterminate them. According to historian Edmund Morgan, "Within
two or three years of the massacre the English had avenged the deaths of that
day many times over." In that first year of the white man in Virginia,
1607. Powhatan had addressed a plea to John Smith that turned out prophetic.
How authentic it is may be in doubt, but it is so much like so many Indian
statements that it may be taken as, if not the rough letter of that first plea,
the exact spirit of it: I have seen two generations of my people die. . . . I
know the difference between peace and war better than any man in my country.
Why will you take by force what you may have quietly by love? Why will you
destroy us who supply you with food? What can you get by war? Why are you
jealous of us? We are unarmed, and willing to give you what you ask, if you
come in a friendly manner, and not so simple as not to know that it is much
better to eat good meat, sleep comfortably, live quietly with my wives and
children, laugh and be merry with the English, and trade for their copper and
hatchets, than to run away from them, and to lie cold in the woods, feed on
acorns, roots and such trash, and be so hunted that I can neither eat nor
sleep. When the Pilgrims came to New England, they too were coming not to
vacant land but to territory inhabited by tribes of Indians. The Pequot Indians
occupied what is now southern Connecticut and Rhode Island. The Puritans wanted
them out of the way; they wanted their land. So, the war with the Pequots
began. Massacres took place on both sides. The English developed a tactic of
warfare used earlier by Cortes and later, in the twentieth century, even more
systematically: deliberate attacks on noncombatants for the purpose of
terrorizing the enemy So the English set fire to the wigwams of villages.
William Bradford, m his History of the Plymouth Plantation written at the time,
describes John Mason's raid on the Pequot village: Those that escaped the fire
were slain with the sword; some hewed to pieces, others rune throw with their
rapiers, so as they were quickly dispatched, and very few escaped. It was
conceived they thus destroyed about 400 at this time. It was a fearful sight to
see them thus frying in the fire. A footnote in Virgil Vogel's book This Land
Was Ours (1972) says: "The official figure on the number of Pequots now in
Connecticut is twenty-one persons." For a while, the English tried softer
tactics. But ultimately, it was back to annihilation. The Indian population of
ten million that lived north of Mexico when Columbus came would ultimately be
reduced to less than a million. Huge numbers of Indians would die from diseases
introduced by the whites. Behind the English invasion of North America, behind
their massacre of Indians, their deception, their brutality, was that special
powerful drive born in civilizations based on private property. It was a
morally ambiguous drive; the need for space, for land, was a real human need.
But in conditions of scarcity, in a barbarous epoch of history ruled by
competition, this human need was transformed into the murder of whole peoples.
Was all this bloodshed and deceit from Columbus to Cortes, Pizarro, the
Puritans a necessity for the human race to progress from savagery to
civilization? If there are necessary sacrifices to be made for human progress,
is it not essential to hold to the principle that those to be sacrificed must
make the decision themselves? We can all decide to give up something of ours,
but do we have the right to throw into the pyre the children of others, or even
our own children, for a progress that is not nearly as clear or present as
sickness or health, life or death? Beyond all that, how certain are we that
what was destroyed was inferior? Who were these people who came out on the
beach and swam to bring presents to Columbus and his crew, who watched Cortes
and Pizarro ride through their countryside, who peered out of the forests at
the first white settlers of Virginia and Massachusetts? Columbus called them
Indians, because he miscalculated the size of the earth. In this book we too
call them Indians, with some reluctance, because it happens too often that
people are saddled with names given them by their conquerors. Widely dispersed
over the great landmass of the Americas, they numbered approximately
seventy-five million people by the time Columbus came, perhaps twenty-five million
in North America. Responding to the different environments of soil and climate,
they developed hundreds of different tribal cultures, perhaps two thousand
different languages. They perfected the art of agriculture and figured out how
to grow maize (corn), which cannot grow by itself and must be planted,
cultivated, fertilized, harvested, husked, and shelled. They ingeniously
developed a variety of other vegetables and fruits, as well as peanuts and
chocolate and tobacco and rubber. On their own, the Indians were engaged in the
great agricultural revolution that other peoples in Asia, Europe, and Africa
were going through about the same time. While many of the tribes remained
nomadic hunters and food gatherers in wandering, egalitarian communes, others
began to live in more settled communities where there was more food, larger
populations, more divisions of labor among men and women, more surplus to feed
chiefs and priests, more leisure time for artistic and social work, for
building houses. From the Adirondacks to the Great Lakes, in what is now
Pennsylvania and upper New York, lived the most powerful of the northeastern
tribes, the League of the Iroquois. In the villages of the Iroquois, land was
owned in common and worked in common. Hunting was done together, and the catch
was divided among the members of the village. Women were important and
respected in Iroquois society. The women tended the crops and took general
charge of village affairs while the men were always hunting or fishing. As Gary
B. Nash notes in his fascinating study of early America, Red. White, and Black,
"Thus power was shared between the sexes and the European idea of male
dominancy and female subordination in all things was conspicuously absent in
Iroquois society." Children in Iroquois society, while taught the cultural
heritage of their people and solidarity with the tribe, were also taught to be
independent, not to submit to overbearing authority. All of this was in sharp
contrast to European values as brought over by the first colonists, a society
of rich and poor, controlled by priests, by governors, by male heads of
families. Gary Nash describes Iroquois culture: No laws and ordinances,
sheriffs and constables, judges and juries, or courts or jails the apparatus of
authority in European societies were to be found in the northeast woodlands
prior to European arrival. Yet boundaries of acceptable behavior were firmly
set. Though priding themselves on the autonomous individual, the Iroquois
maintained a strict sense of right and wrong. . . . He who stole another's food
or acted invalourously in war was "shamed" by his people and
ostracized from their company until he had atoned for his actions and
demonstrated to their satisfaction that he had morally purified himself. Not
only the Iroquois but other Indian tribes behaved the same way So, Columbus and
his successors were not coming into an empty wilderness, but into a world which
in some places was as densely populated as Europe itself, where the culture was
complex, where human relations were more egalitarian than in Europe, and where
the relations among men, women, children, and nature were more beautifully
worked out than perhaps any place in the world. They were people without a
written language, but with their own laws, their poetry, their history kept in
memory and passed on, in an oral vocabulary more complex than Europe's,
accompanied by song, dance, and ceremonial drama. They paid careful attention
to the development of personality, intensity of will, independence and flexibility,
passion and potency, to their partnership with one another and with nature.
John Collier, an American scholar who lived among Indians in the 1920s and
1930s in the American Southwest, said of their spirit: "Could we make it
our own, there would be an eternally inexhaustible earth and a forever lasting
peace.” Perhaps there is some romantic mythology in that. But even allowing for
the imperfection of myths, it is enough to make us question, for that time and
ours, the excuse of progress in the annihilation of races, and the telling of
history from the standpoint of the conquerors and leaders of Western
civilization.
[1997b] (22-7) The Earliest Americans. 38,000 B.C.-10,000 B.C.: PEOPLE CROSS
LAND BRIDGE TO NORTH AMERICA. ARCHAEOLOGICAL EVIDENCE INDICATES THAT ACROSS THE
WIDE, GRASSY LAND BRIDGE THAT ONCE CONNECTED ASIA AND NORTH AMERICA TREKKED THE
FIRST PEOPLE TO SETTLE IN NORTH AMERICA. With spears poised they may have
pursued a mammoth, the huge game animal that once strode the earth. Today
Beringia, the land bridge that allowed passage from Asia to Alaska, lies
underwater. At several periods during the Ice Age, the glaciers that covered
most of North America lowered sea levels by as much as 300 feet (91.44 m) --
sufficient to expose a 1,000-mile (1609-km) wide passageway between continents.
The first settlers stalked big game such as mammoths and bison. Later settlers
came by boat, hunting seals and whales. Gradually, over thousands of years, the
press of a growing population prompted the southward and eastward migration of
smaller groups. Seeking new hunting grounds, the migrants followed their animal
prey through the narrow pass between towering glaciers. When they reached the
plains of North America, the earliest people beheld a paradise of plenty: animals
from the antelope to the saber-toothed tiger; and berries, nuts, and grasses
for the picking Over the centuries, groups continued breaking off and migrating
farther southward and eastward, About 8,000 B.C. melting glaciers again boosted
the sea level, burying Beringia underwater and drowning the land bridge back to
Asia. Scientists disagree on when people first came to the Americas and on how
many waves of settlement they rode. Beringia, the land bridge, surfaced during
3 separate periods: between 70,000 and 30,000 years ago; between 25,000 and
15,000 years ago; and between 14,000 and 10,000 years ago. Some archaeologists
speculate that people arrived from Asia as early as 40,000 years ago. Others
suggest a much later date or a series of arrivals. Nevertheless, on several
facts scientists do agree: by 10,000 B.C. people had spread 15,000 miles
(24,135 km) south to Tierra del Fuego, the southern tip of South America, and
6,000 miles (9,654 km) east to the East Coast of North America. After
generations of adapting to diverse climates and terrains, Native Americans
practiced a staggering variety of lifeways and spoke several thousand
languages. They became most populous in Mexico and Central America
(Mesoamerica), but Native Americans also developed distinctive cultures
throughout North America. There -- in the deserts of the Southwest, along the
fertile banks of the Mississippi, and in the woodlands of the East Coast --
three contrasting cultures arose. Cliff Dwellers of the Southwest: From Nomads
to Farmers. During the Ice Age, descendants of the nomadic people who had
followed their prey to North America hunted huge game animals such as mastodons
in the southwestern part of what is now the United States. In time the weather
warmed and the glaciers melted. As the climate grew drier, the larger game
disappeared. The challenge of human survival in a newly arid environment
launched a desert culture that depended on fishing, hunting small birds and
animals, and on collecting edible foods that grew in the wild. This
Southwestern desert culture survived for thousands of years. Development of
Agriculture. Between about 8,000 B.C. and 5,000 B.C., agriculture began to
develop independently in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. As in other
parts of the world, the cultivation of crops in the Southwest ushered in
dramatic social changes. These changes included giving up a nomadic, or
wandering, lifestyle for a more sedentary, or settled, one. A more dependable
food supply stimulated population growth and reduced the amount of time people
had to work to obtain food. Less time spent foraging afforded people more time
for developing socially, politically, and religiously, In most places the
growth of agriculture also decreed the division of labor. Now men hunted game and
cleared the land that women then planted and cultivated. Like their modern
Pueblo descendants, but unlike most other highly developed early peoples, the
Anasazi fostered an egalitarian culture in which people functioned as equals.
Without kings, chiefs, or other official authority figures to compel
cooperation, members of Anasazi farming villages built dams, reservoirs, and
irrigation systems that harnessed the region's precious moisture to water corn
and other crops. Beginning around A.D. 900, the Anasazi also constructed 400
miles (643.6 km) of roads and broad avenues leading to Chaco Canyon in
northwest New Mexico, which became the heart of a thriving turquoise trade.
Anasazi Architecture. The leisure that accompanied the farming culture's
prosperity allowed the Anasazi to turn out beautiful baskets and pottery, but
their greatest creativity flowered in architecture. Generation after generation
of Anasazi had lived in underground houses whose stonework walls and strong
roofs provided shelter from the harshness of the seasons. Now, adapting their
aboveground food storage houses for living quarters, the Anasazi transformed
their underground pit houses into spiritual centers, or kivas. Some kivas in
the populous valley held as many as 500 people. Constructing these kivas
without horses (which were not brought to the Americas until the 1500s)
required people to transport tons of timber to reinforce kiva roofs. The
Anasazi also began to build huge apartment complexes. At one dwelling site,
Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon, more than 1,000 residents lived in a
freestanding 600-room structure. From the plaza amphitheater, some apartment
sections towered 5 stories above the canyon floor. Until a larger apartment
building went up in New York City in 1882, the size of this Anasazi building of
the tenth century remained unsurpassed in the world. When drought or a
devaluation of turquoise prompted the Anasazis to abandon Chaco Canyon, about
3,000 Anasazi built stunning multifamily apartments within the protected cliff
walls of Mesa Verde in Southwest Colorado. From their rooms in the cliff walls,
the farmers used toeholds to clamber to the mesa top, where they cultivated
corn, beans, and squash. The largest structure in Mesa Verde, later named the
Cliff Palace, boasted 220 rooms that may have housed as many as 350 people. By
1300, perhaps driven by drought or enemies, the Anasazi abandoned their homes
in Mesa Verde. Among their descendants are today's Zuni, Hopi, and Taos Pueblo.
The Taos Pueblo people of New Mexico repeat this myth about their beginnings, a
story that may well have been told in this part of the world for more than
1,000 years: "The boy cried and cried. The blood came out, and finally he
died. With his tears our lakes became. With his blood the red clay became. With
his body our mountains became, and that was how Earth became."
Moundbuilders' Rich: Culture Metropolis on the Mississippi. About 1,000 years
before the Anasazis began to farm mesa tops and construct apartment buildings
in the dry Southwest, a friendlier eastern landscape had given rise to a very
different culture. In the lushly watered country near the Ohio River, Native
Americans farmed, hunted, and foraged for food. They also built gigantic earth
mounds by the tens of thousands. The First Moundbuilders. Used primarily as
burial and ceremonial sites, the earth mounds rose as high as 70 feet (21.3 m).
Their grandeur baffled the colonial settlers, who came upon the mounds after
crossing the Appalachian Mountains in the late 1700s. Because the settlers had
stereotyped eastern Native Americans as primitive forest dwellers, they
invented myths to explain the imposing structures. Perhaps, they thought,
survivors of the legendary sunken island of Atlantis or descendants of the
ancient Egyptians had constructed the huge mounds. Instead the mounds had been
built by Native American people during the first century A.D. The building of
such gigantic structures suggests a high degree of cooperation, that required
powerful leaders. These leaders were adorned at death and buried in special
locations. Many excavations have shown individuals of high rank in the center
of a group of people of secondary importance who had died earlier. One
archaeologist described a Moundbuilder grave of a high-ranking female: At the
head, neck, hips and knees of the female and completely encircling the skeleton
were thousands of pearl beads and buttons of wood and stone covered with
copper; extending the full length of the grave along one side was a row of
copper ear ornaments; at the wrists of the female were copper bracelets . . .
[she wore a necklace] of grizzly bear canines and [a] copper breastplate on the
chest. -- quoted in Joy Hakim's The First Americans, 1993. The contents of the
burial mounds revealed the Moundbuilders as brilliant metalworkers and
sculptors. The materials they worked with depended on a far-flung trading
network, most likely based on a relay system. The tentacles of the
Moundbuilders' trading network reached west to Yellowstone (present-day
northwest Wyoming) for obsidian, a natural glass used to make ceremonial
blades; north to the Great Lakes for copper nuggets to beat out breastplates;
east to the Appalachians for mica to fashion into decorated combs; and south to
the Gulf of Mexico for turtle shells and alligator teeth to beautify ornaments.
The population of the Moundbuilders, ancestors of today's Creek, Choctaw, and
Natchez, began to decline by about A.D. 500, perhaps due to the enmity of
rivals or to a lingering cold spell that made farming and foraging less productive.
West along the Mississippi River, however, another Moundbuilding culture arose.
Centered at what is now East St. Louis, Illinois, on the Missouri border, this
Mississippian culture encompassed thousands of villages from Wisconsin to
Louisiana and from Oklahoma to Tennessee. Cahokia. Like the Moundbuilders of
the Ohio River valley, the Mississippians had strong leaders who directed the
raising of huge mounds for burial and ceremonial purposes. The largest mound,
built between A.D. 900 and 1100 rises 100 feet (30.5 m) from a rectangular base
covering nearly 15 acres (6.1 ha) and containing 22 million cubic feet (616,000
cubic m) of earth. Its size surpasses that of the base of the Great Pyramid of
Egypt. This gigantic earthwork faces the site of a palisaded city that contains
100 smaller burial mounds and the remains of a busy urban settlement that
archaeologists call Cahokia. Deemed "America's first metropolis" by
one archaeologist, Cahokia once housed as many as 35,000 people. The city's
residents worked at a variety of tasks, from jewelry making and weaving to hide
dressing and salt making. Mysteriously, the metropolis on the Mississippi lay
abandoned centuries before the Europeans arrived on the Atlantic Coast. Before
they disappeared, however, both the Mississippians and the Ohio River
Moundbuilders passed on key agricultural skills to their trading partners in
the Eastern Woodlands. Eastern Woodland Native Americans: From varied Lifeways,
an Alliance. Like the Mississippians, the Native Americans who lived along the
Eastern seaboard ate the fish they caught and the animals they hunted.
Occasionally the men would don a deer head with antlers as a hunting ruse.
Fertilizing the young plants with fish heads, the women cultivated corn, beans,
and squash -- which were called "the three sisters" -- in the same
plots. The sister plants supported each other as they grew, bean vines curling
themselves around a supporting cornstalk. In addition, the nitrogen that beans
brought to the soil benefited the other plants. Like the Mississippians, the
Eastern Woodland Native Americans also cleared their chosen planting grounds by
girdling the trees. First they slashed the bark all the way around the trunk,
leaving the tree to die. After burning the branches and leaves, they hoed the
rich ash into the ground as a fertilizer. The Mississippians passed on another
influence, too. With their clusters of domed wigwams, occasionally surrounded
by a palisade, the villages of many Eastern Woodland groups resembled the villages
most Mississippians had called home. No Eastern Woodland village ever competed
in size or sophistication with Cahokia. Still, excavation of one Huron town in
the Great Lakes region revealed that it had housed about 5,000 people in more
than 100 large structures. Its size exceeded that of the average European
village of the 1500s. The roquois
Alliance. Eventually, the Iroquois became the most populous and powerful of all
the groups that lived along the eastern seaboard. The group controlled
territory from the Adirondack Mountains to the Great Lakes and from
Pennsylvania to northern New York. The power of the Iroquois derived from a
longstanding alliance of 5 Native American groups -- the Mohawk, Oneida,
Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca. Europeans later called the Iroquois alliance the
League of the Iroquois. The Iroquois themselves called their alliance
Ganonsyoni or The Lodge Extended Lengthwise, after the lodges, or longhouses,
that as many as 20 families shared. In an Iroquois longhouse, a woman and her
female relatives ruled. The women owned the house and all its belongings. Women
also controlled the fields where they planted their crops. When a son married, he left
his mother's longhouse to move in with his wife's family. Iroquois women held
power in the outside world as well. They chose the chiefs, or sachems, and
could also depose them. Though only men could speak in the community councils,
women exerted behind-the-scenes influence determining, for example, the fate of
captive warriors from enemies. At one time, the 5 groups that formed the
Iroquois League had themselves been enemies. By the late 1400s the constant
feuding that had rendered the Iroquois people powerless in the face of their
mutual enemy, the powerful Algonquian people, spurred them to form the league
for mutual protection. In Iroquois legend the league began when a Mohawk sachem
named Hiawatha had a vision. In Hiawatha's vision a spirit named Dekanawidah
dictated how the five groups should affiliate with one another. According to
the legend, Dekanawidah spoke these words: We bind ourselves together by taking
hold of each other's hands so firmly and forming a circle so strong that if a
tree should fall upon it, it could not shake nor break it, so that our people
and grandchildren shall remain in the circle in security, peace, and happiness.
-- quoted in Gary Nash's Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of Early America,
1982. European Attitudes. The Europeans who colonized the eastern seaboard
wrongly considered the Native Americans to be ignorant savages. Nevertheless,
they praised the organization of the Iroquois League. Benjamin Franklin wrote,
"It would be a very strange Thing, if six Nations of ignorant Savages
should be capable of forming a Scheme for such a Union . . . and yet that a like
Union should be impracticable for ten or a Dozen English Colonies, to whom it
is more necessary." For the European colonists, the Iroquois League
offered a model for achieving unity among disparate states. For the Native
Americans, the Iroquois League proved a powerful tool that enabled them to deal
shrewdly with the European newcomers. (22) [Picture] Land of Plenty. As people
moved south into the Americas, they found abundant herds of bison and other
grazing animals such as mammoths. (23) [Map] MIGRATION TO NORTH AMERICA. By
10,000 B.C. people occupied North America from present-day Alaska to the tip of
what is now Chile. In which areas did Native Americans become most populous?
(24) [Picture] Ancient City. In the Southwest, the Anasazi built cities of
cliff-side dwellings, such as this one at Mesa Verde, Colorado, which was
constructed around 1100. What are the possible explanations for why the Anasazi
abandoned Mesa Verde? (25) [Picture] Burial Site. The quarter-mile-long Great
Serpent Mound in Ohio was made of earth and stone carried on Moundbuilders'
backs. Moundbuilders often buried artifacts like the terra-cotta figurine,
right, with their dead. How , were the Moundbuilder cultures of the Ohio and
Mississippi River valleys alike? (26) [Map] EASTERN NATIVE AMERICAN GROUPS,
1500S. Native American groups in eastern North America supported themselves to
varying degrees with agriculture. In what areas are most groups of Native
Americans concentrated? (27) [Picture] THE IROQUOIS LONGHOUSE. In the world of
the Iroquois, nothing expressed the idea of community more than the longhouse.
How did women affect the group's decision to go to war? The Iroquois followed a
community philosophy based on equality, individual responsibility, and inner
strength. At its center was the hearth of the longhouse. Iroquois women
directed and advised the men at community meetings. Women, because they
maintained control over food, moccasins, and other supplies needed for
conducting warfare, helped to determine when the community went to war. WHO LIVED
IN A LONGHOUSE? Based on her maternal bloodline a woman lived in one of the
multiroom dwellings with her daughters and granddaughters, their husbands, and
any single male family members. (28-9) Geography: Impact on History.
HUMAN/ENVIRONMENT INTERACTION. Native American Housing. Long before European
settlers arrived, Native Americans had adapted to a broad range of
environments, finding food and building homes using locally available
resources. From the upper reaches of the Arctic to the Great Plains, the
natural environment shaped Native American cultures. Living on the Plains. On
the Great Plains, Native American hunters and their families followed herds of
millions of buffalo across the rolling grasslands. The Dakota, the Blackfeet,
the Crow, and other Native American groups used the buffalo as a source of
food, clothing, and shelter. They adapted their lifestyles to enable them to
follow the buffalo, living nomadically in portable homes called tepees. The
Native Americans of the Plains built conical tepees by stretching buffalo hides
across a frame of pine or cedar timbers. The tepees could be assembled and
taken apart quickly, Because timber was scarce in the grasslands, the tepee
poles were bundled together with the hides and transported from camp to camp.
The hides formed a platform for carrying goods and even people across the
Plains. Northwest Coast Villages. In the rainy, mountainous forests of the
Northwest Coast of North America, people lived in an environment of abundance.
Rivers, streams, and the ocean teemed with fish, and the forest provided wild
plants, berries, and a variety of game. Because a reliable supply of food was
locally available, the people of the Northwest developed a sedentary culture
and lived in permanent homes and villages. Using timbers hewn from the immense
trees that blanketed the coastal mountains, the Native Americans of the
Northwest built sturdy multi-family dwellings. Huge beams composed the
frameworks of the houses. Planks made from split logs covered the frames.
Pitched roofs shed the frequent rains. Craftspeople also made seaworthy canoes
from hollowed-out logs. Water travel was a common form of transportation.
Native American villages nestled along narrow beaches or river shores. In only
a few months' work each spring, villagers gathered enough food to last for the
remainder of the year. Fishers caught large quantities of salmon, halibut, cod,
and trout. The fish were dried on racks in the rafters of the houses and used
as needed until the following spring. Abodes of the Arctic. In the icy reaches
of the Arctic, the Inuit used a variety of strategies to survive in an
often-harsh environment. Arctic peoples hunted and fished, moving in a rhythm
that followed the seasons and the habits of their prey, Although they sometimes
traveled great distances when hunting, the Inuit often built permanent homes
and villages to which they returned between expeditions. The Aleuts lived in
small communities beside the sea. They built semisubterranean houses framed
with whalebones and driftwood and covered with dirt, stone, and layers of sod.
After a time, grass and other plants created a living roof that insulated
against the cold. Most of their sustenance came from the sea, where they caught
fish, hunted whales, seals, and other marine mammals, and gathered mussels and
seaweed. During the cold season, Inuit whalers moved north onto the Arctic ice
to hunt seals. They traveled by dogsled and on foot, carrying few possessions.
Lacking timber and other building materials, the whalers built ingenious
dwellings called igloos from blocks of snow. The igloo's walls insulated
occupants from the cold and wind. A small oil lamp or fire heated the igloo.
Occupants carefully controlled the heat to prevent the igloo from melting. (28)
[Map] NATIVE AMERICAN CULTURAL AREAS, 1500s-1800s. Many Native American groups
used more than one type of dwelling, according to the season. Why did Native
American housing types vary by region? (29) [Picture] Scraping Hides Cheyenne
women scrape and stretch hides for use in tepee covers. Why was the buffalo
critical to the livelihood of the Native Americans of the Plains?
[1998a] (13-7) EARLY NORTH AMERICAN CULTURES. The Americas were a new world
only to European latecomers. To the Asian peoples and their native American
descendants who had settled the continents tens of thousands of years earlier.
Columbus's new world was their own old world. But it is doubtful that the first
nomadic hunters who crossed from Siberia over the Bering Strait to Alaska
considered themselves discoverers or recognized what they had found -- a truly
new world, one wholly uninhabited by humans. The First Inhabitants. The first
passage of people from Asia to America probably took place during a prehistoric
glacial period -- either before 35,000 B.C. or about 10,000 years later -- when
huge amounts of the world's water froze into sheets of ice. Sea levels dropped
so drastically that the Bering Strait became a broad, grassy plain. Across that
land bridge between the two continents both humans and animals escaped icebound
Siberia for ice-free Alaska. Whenever the first migration took place, the
movement of Asians to America continued, even after 8000 B.C. when world
temperatures rose again and the water from melting glaciers flooded back into
the ocean, submerging the Bering Strait. Over a span of 25,000 years settlement
spread down the Alaskan coast, then deeper into the North American mainland,
and finally throughout Central and South America. Diversity of cultures. Native
Americans remained nomadic hunters and gatherers for thousands of years, as did
many Europeans, Africans, and Asians of those millennia. But American cultures
gradually diversified, especially after about 5500 B.C., when the peoples of
central Mexico discovered how to cultivate food crops. As this
"agricultural revolution" spread slowly northward, native American
societies were able to grow larger and develop distinctive forms of economic,
social, and political organization. By the end of the fifteenth century; the
inhabitants of North America, perhaps 5 to 10 million people, spoke as many as
1000 languages. Although later Europeans, like Columbus, lumped these societies
together by calling them Indian, any cultural unity had vanished long before
1492. The simplest Indian societies were those that still relied on hunting and
gathering, like the Eskimos of the Arctic and the Serrano, Cahuilla, Luiseno,
and Dieguefio of southern California, Arizona, and the Baja peninsula of
Mexico. Stark deserts and frozen tundra defied cultivation and yielded food
supplies that could sustain nomadic bands numbering no more than about 50
people. Families occasionally hunted together or wintered in common quarters,
but for most of the year they scattered across the landscape, the women gathering
plants and seeds, making baskets, and cooking meals while the men hunted for
meat and hides. Political authority lay with either the male family head or the
"headman" of a small band. "Shamans" -- any tribesmen
claiming spiritual powers -- enlisted the supernatural to assist individuals.
Societies of Increasing Complexity. Hunters and gatherers. In the densely
forested belt that stretched from Newfoundland to the Bering Strait, resources
more generous than those of the tundra to the north made for larger populations
and more closely knit societies. Northeastern bands like the Montagnais, the
Micmac, and the Penobscot and northwestern tribes like the Yellowknife and the
Beaver traveled forests in moccasins and snowshoes, stalking deer, elk, moose,
bear, and caribou; they speared fish in icy lakes and streams from birch-bark
canoes. Their environment encouraged cooperative economic pursuits. Leading men
assigned several families to specific territories that they hunted together,
dividing the returns among the whole band. Religious beliefs strengthened the
ties of kinship: each family had a "totem," a particular animal from
which it claimed descent. Women in agricultural societies. While men dominated
Indian bands based on hunting, women assumed more influence in societies that
relied for part of their food on settled agriculture. Among the Pueblo peoples
of Arizona and New Mexico, the Hopi and Zufii tribes, men hunted deer and
cultivated corn and beans, but women owned the fields, the crops, and even the
tools. They also owned the sun-baked dwellings of adobe and stone, some of
which rose to several stories, that housed the families of their daughters. By
1540 some 70 Pueblo villages flourished, as more reliable food supplies swelled
the size and number of clans (families sharing a common ancestry). A council of
religious elders drawn from the different clans governed each village. Pueblo
religious ceremonies, in contrast to those of simpler Indian societies,
involved elaborate rituals celebrating tribal unity and seeking the gods'
blessing for hunts and harvests. Thousands of miles to the northeast, in a
natural setting far different from the semiarid Southwest, the Iroquois created
a remarkably similar culture. More complex Indian civilizations arose in the
bountiful environments of the Pacific Northwest and the coastal region reaching
from Virginia to Texas. The seas and rivers from eastern Alaska to northern
California teemed with fish, humpback whales, seals, and otters. In the
Southeast fertile soil and temperate climate encouraged the cultivation of
maize, rice, and a variety of fruits. Settlements became larger and more
complex as tribes harvested these resources and developed techniques to
preserve food supplies. Far less egalitarian than nomadic hunting bands or even
the Pueblo and Iroquois, these tribes developed elaborate systems of status.
Among southeastern tribes like the Natchez, below the chief, or "Great
Sun," stood a hereditary nobility of lesser "Suns," who demanded
elaborate displays of respect from the lowly "Stinkards," the common
people. Mesoamerican Empires. Even more advanced were the vast agricultural
empires of Mesoamerica -- south and central Mexico and Guatemala. As the Roman
empire was declining in Europe, the civilization of the Mayas was flourishing
in the lowland jungles of Central America. They built cities filled with
palaces, bridges, aqueducts, baths, astronomical observatories, and temples
topped by pyramids. Their priests developed a written language, their
mathematicians discovered the zero, and their astronomers devised a calendar
more accurate than any then existing. Rise of the Aztecs. The Aztecs, who
invaded central Mexico from the north in the fourteenth century, built on the
Mayas' achievements. Within a century Aztec conquest had created an empire of
several million people. The capital, Tenochtitlan, was a glittering island
metropolis with a population in 1400 of perhaps a quarter of a million --
several times the size of London. The Great Temple of the Sun dominated the center
of the city, and through the canals leading to Tenochtitlan flowed gold,
silver, exotic feathers, cocoa, and millions of pounds of maize -- all trade
goods and tribute from other Mexican city-states conquered by the Aztecs. In
many ways, the world of the Aztecs paralleled the societies of early modern
Europe. Both worlds were predominantly rural, most of their inhabitants living
in small villages and engaging in agriculture. In both worlds, merchants and
specialized craftworkers clustered in cities, organized themselves into guilds,
and clamored for protection from the government. And, as in Europe, Aztec noble
and priestly classes took the lead in politics and religion, demanding tribute
from the common people. The question of human sacrifice aside, there was at
least one crucial difference between Aztec and European civilizations. Aztec
expansion did not take the form of colonial settlements that spanned the oceans
– indeed, the globe. That difference reflected a host of distinctive changes in
European social, economic, and political development during the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries. It was these transformations that made it possible for
bold sailors like Columbus and Cabot or anonymous fisherfolk and traders to
dream of profit, glory, and empire. (14) [Picture] An artist traveling with
Francis Drake (probably in the 1590s) painted this Indian tending a tropical
Caribbean garden. Maize com flourishes (right) as well as beans on two poles,
while a papaya tree can be seen (upper left) as well as a manioc shrub (middle
left) and gourds (lower left). Many of these crops -- corn and manioc
especially -- eventually became important staples in diets around the globe.
(15) [Map] INDIANS OF NORTH AMERICA, CIRCA 1500. (16) COUNTERPOINT. The role of
human sacrifice. Some students of history, however, emphasize that the Aztecs
differed from Europeans in one striking way: they practiced ritual human
sacrifice. Every year, Aztec priests wielding razor-sharp knives sliced open
the chests of thousands of captives and offered up to the sun hearts still
beating, the essence of life. Indeed, the primary purpose of Aztec warfare was
less to extend their empire than to maintain a steady supply of captives for
such rites. Aztecs believed that they were the chosen people -- chosen to
nourish the earth by sustaining the life of the sun with offerings of human
blood. Put simply, the Aztecs slaughtered other human beings in the name of
religion. As one recent historian noted, "In numbers, in the elevated
sense of ceremony which accompanied the theatrical shows involved, as in its
significance in the official religion, human sacrifice in Mexico was
unique." But were the Aztecs really so different in this regard from
invading Europeans? The sense of being a "chosen people" that underlay
Aztec rituals also inspired Christians in their own crusades. They campaigned
ruthlessly against "Muslim infidels," massacred Jews, and executed
thousands of witches during the Middle Ages and even into the seventeenth
century Put just as simply, European Christians, too, slaughtered other human
beings in the name of religion. But it was a similarity that Europeans found
convenient to overlook. They preferred to portray themselves as
"civilizers" of a people whose "savagery" was proved by the
practice of human sacrifice. (38-41) AFTER THE FACT: HISTORIANS RECONSTRUCT THE
PAST. Tracking the First Americans. Sometimes the most ordinary circumstances
end in the most extraordinary discoveries. One of those times was a morning in
1908 when George McJunkin, an African American cowboy scanning the range near
Folsom, New Mexico, for stray cattle, dropped his gaze into a dry gully and
spotted some large bones poking through the soil. Intrigued, he began digging
and found a stone spearpoint lodged in the skeleton, He carried the lot back to
his ranch, where they remained for the next seventeen years. Then McJunkin's
curiosities somehow came to the attention of archaeologists, who identified the
bones as those of a long-extinct form of bison which had ranged throughout the
Southwest at least ten thousand years earlier. They realized, too, that only a
spear-wielding human could have killed the bison. That discovery rocked the
scientific community, which for the previous century had confidently declared
that Indians had first arrived in the Americas only about 4000 years ago,
Shortly thereafter, in 1932, another shock wave followed when some amateur
collectors digging at Clovis, New Mexico, unearthed more bones and spearheads
suspected to be even older. Finally, in 1949, scientists established the great
antiquity of both finds by using "radiocarbon dating," a method for
measuring decay rates of the radioactive isotope of carbon, which exists in
organic matter like bone and starts to break down immediately after an organism
dies. Tests revealed that the Indians whose hunting grounds were now called
Folsom and Clovis had been turning bison into bones between 10,800 and 11,500
years ago. Those conclusions pointedly raised the question of exactly how much
earlier the first American ancestors of such hunters had come to the New World.
This tantalizing mystery puzzles (and divides) archaeologists and
anthropologists, geologists and historians, right down to the present. Such men
and women devote their lives to the hard work of digging in remote sites or
exploring the ocean's floor, to the harder work of analyzing their finds in
laboratories, and to the hardest work of all -- trying to make sense of what it
all means, Their efforts have yielded much new evidence and increasingly
sophisticated techniques for understanding its significance, but many important
questions still remain unanswered. Even so. almost all of them agree on a
number of points. First, whoever the first inhabitants of the New World were,
they came, originally, from the Old World: scientists have found no fossil
remains to support the view that human beings evolved into modem men and women
in the Americas. Second, these first Americans were almost certainly fully
evolved human beings, known as Homo sapiens sapiens -- not their less developed
forerunners, the Neanderthals, or even earlier ancestors. These Homo sapiens
sapiens excelled at surviving anywhere, armed as they were with the
intellectual ability" to plan and project and the technology to sew warm clothing
and to store food. About 35,000 years ago, these resourceful adapters came to
predominate, edging out the Neanderthals, whose more limited skills had
restricted their settlements to the tropical and temperate parts of the world.
The new species multiplied rapidly; and the pressure of its growing population
pushed many into settling in less hospitable regions -- including the arctic
frontier of Siberia in northeastern Asia. Indeed, a third point of general
agreement among scholars is that the descendants of these migrants to Siberia
continued the wandering ways of their ancestors and somehow, at some time,
wandered into North America by way of Alaska. The research of physical
anthropologists documents key biological similarities between Siberians and
American Indians. Both groups share not only certain genetic variants that
suggest their descent from common ancient ancestors but also distinctive
formations of the roots and crowns of their teeth known as Sinodonty. But how
did Asians get to Alaska – a region now separated from Siberia by fifty miles
of ocean known as the Bering Strait? It is not impossible that they sailed
across, for some Homo Sapiens could build boats sturdy enough to navigate short
stretches of open ocean. Archaeologists have discovered that Southeast Asians
floated across 55 miles of ocean on rafts to reach Australia some 35,000 years
ago. Could their contemporaries in northeast Asia, using bark canoes, have made
a voyage of similar length over the Bering Strait? Not impossible, scientists conclude,
but not likely either, if only because navigating calm, tropical waters of the
southern Pacific is far less difficult than mastering the Bering Strait, which,
even in summer, is choked with ice floes. Such an undertaking would have been
even more daunting to the earliest Siberians, who, as anthropologists have
discovered, were land-based hunters, not seafaring folk. So most scientists now
believe that Siberians did not sail to the New World: instead, they walked.
They were able to do that because the Bering Strait is not a timeless feature
of arctic geography. On the contrary, geologists have discovered submerged far
below the Bering Strait traces of a landmass that once connected Siberia to
Alaska. Even in the late nineteenth century, some naturalists suspected that
such a land bridge had once existed after noting that the vegetation and
wildlife of Siberia was nearly identical to that in Alaska. By the 1930s,
scientists had enough information to speculate that what turned a water-way
into an exposed, inhabitable lowland plain was the coldest phase of the last
Ice Age, which began about 30,000 years earlier when plunging temperatures
caused the world’s oceans to drop in depth by freezing great expanses of
seawater into sheets of ice. Those climatic changes formed “Beringia,” a land
bridge between Siberia and Alaska that existed from about 25,000 B.P. (before
the present) until about 15,000 B.P. During those millennia, most scientists
now believe, Siberians gradually settled the length of this link to the
Americas. Thereafter, when temperatures began to warm again and the seas rose
and closed over Beringia, some of its inhabitants strayed into Alaska. But even
now, there are some scientists who doubt this account. True, no one has yet
discovered an archaeological site in Alaska – or anywhere else in the Americas
– that can be positively dated to earlier than about 15,000 B.P. Yet a few
archaeologists working mainly in South America claim to have found artifacts in
rockshelters dating to 30,000 B.P. Many others argue that such “finds” are not
the result of human manufacture but natural processes like erosion. Then, too,
those scientists who take the position that the first Americans arrived 30,000
years ago or even earlier -- before the existence of the Beringia land bridge
-- must prove the improbable: that Siberians crossed into Alaska by sailing
across the Bering Strait, A recent discovery in the state of Washington is also
prompting scientists to wonder whether the first inhabitants of the Americas might
have included peoples other than Asians. In 1996, the sheriff of a small desert
town, puzzled by a half-buried human skeleton found along the shores of the
Columbia River, showed the bones to an anthropologist, James Chatters. Like
McJunkin's find of almost a century earlier, this skeleton encased a stone
spearpoint, and radiocarbon dating revealed it to be nearly as old (9300 years)
as the Folsom bones. But unlike McJunkin's specimen, this is almost certainly
-- and astonishingly -- the skeleton of a Caucasian. Such is the judgment of
Chatters and other scientists who have carefully examined and measured its
skull, which is far narrower than any Indian skull of similar antiquity. Within
the last thirty years, other ancient skull remains with Caucasian features have
been found, but none so well preserved as the Columbia River specimen, which
even has some teeth intact. To date it is the strongest evidence that some
people of European stock may have migrated across northern Asia and then joined
Siberians in crossing to the Americas. Are today's Native. Americans descended
from both Asians and Europeans? Other scientists are quick to point out that
the evidence of one skeleton can hardly support such sweeping conclusions. For
their part, many Indians still living along the Columbia River reject all
scientific explanations of their origins in favor of religious accounts --
tribal creation myths which proclaim that their people have always lived in the
Americas. Angered by the conduct of earlier anthropologists, who freely dug up
Indian grave sites, they have demanded the right to rebury the skeleton under
the terms of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of
1990. So the debates about America's first colonizers continue, and, if recent
history is any guide, so too will the discoveries. This part of the past, like
every other, holds in store many surprises for those in the present determined
to probe its secrets. BIBLIOGRAPHY. Keeping up with recent discoveries in this
field poses many challenges. New discoveries turn up frequently, and most
reports of those findings are written in a highly technical language.
Fortunately, a few well-written books provide a guide to both the early Asian
migration to and throughout the Americas and the evolution of scholarly debate.
Bryan M. Fagan. The Great Journey (London, 1987) is lucid, and the same author
has more recently written a more detailed textbook on both ancient Native
American archaeology and history., Ancient North America (1991). A less comprehensive
but elegantly written treatment of these topics is William MacLeish's The Day
before America (1994). Students seeking more advanced and specialized
information should consult Stuart J. Fiedei. Prehistory of the America, (2d
ed., Cambridge, 1992). Bear in mind, too, that the science section of each
Tuesday's New York Times regularly features articles on the ongoing research of
archaeologists, anthropologists, and geologists. For the report on the Columbia
River skeleton, see The New York Times for September 30, 1996, A12. (38)
[Picture] Arrowheads known as Clovis points found with the skeleton of a
mammoth. (40) [Picture] UPPER JAW. (41) [Picture] Dr. James Chatters, an
anthropologist found a skull approximately 9300 years old along the Columbia
River in 1996. The skull’s Eurasian features suggest that at least some
migrants over the Bering Strait may also have been of European stock.
[1998b] (1) Early North American Cultures The people who first settled the
Americas were descendants of Asian migrants who crossed the Bering Strait to
Alaska many millennia before 1492. When Europeans first arrived in the
Americas, these Indian cultures were numerous and diverse, ranging from the
hunting and gathering societies of the Great Plains to the sophisticated civilization
of the Aztecs in Mezoamerica. Indeed, the Aztec economy and society encountered
by Spanish explorers was similar in many respects to that of sixteenth-century
Europe. One crucial difference, however, distinguished the direction of Aztec
development from that of Europe: Aztec expansionism did not take the form of
exploration and colonization across the Atlantic. (2-3) KEY EVENTS. Ca.
50,000-25,000 B.P.: First Asians arrive in the Americas: initial human
settlement of the two continents. ca. 1300: Rise of the Aztec empire: the
Indian civilization encountered by the Spanish in present-day Mexico. (3)
LEARNING OBJECTIVES. When you have finished studying this chapter, you should
be able to: 1. Compare and contrast Indian cultures with western European society
m the fifteenth century 2. Explain why western Europeans were able to establish
colonies across the Atlantic during the early modern period. 3. Describe the
Spanish empire in America and discuss its impact on European development. 4.
Explain the ways in which English efforts at colonization in the sixteenth
century shaped their eventual settlements in North America. 5. Explain the
significance of the Protestant Reformation and its relationship to western
Europe's expansion. (4-5) Review Questions. MULTIPLE CHOICE. 4. After about
5500 B.C., native American society grew larger and their cultures more
diversified because of the: a. discovery of how to cultivate food crops. b.
spread of populations to more temperate regions. c. discovery of improved fishing
techniques. d. growth of intertribal trading networks. (p. 13) 5. The most
advanced native American cultures were located: a. along the Gulf Coast. b. on
the Pacific Northwest Coast. c. among the Pueblo peoples of the southwest. d.
in Mesoamerica. (pp. 16-17) (6) IDENTIFICATION QUESTIONS. You should be able to
describe the following key terms, concepts, individuals and places, and explain
their significance: Terms and Concepts; agricultural revolution, reconquista,
encomienda, Black Legend, Protestant Reformation, quadrant, Price Revolution,
privateers, justification by faith alone, repartimiento, indulgences, doctrine
of the calling, Black Death, caravel. Individuals and Places; Marco Polo,
Bartholomeu Dias, Arawaks, Pueblo Indians, Hernando de Soto, Bartolome de Las
Casas, John Calvin, Martin Frobisher, Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, Prince
Henry of Portugal, Vasco da Gama, Amerigo Vespucci, Ferdinand Magellan,
Montezuma, Martin Luther, Puritans, Francis Drake. (7) MAP IDENTIFICATIONS. On
the map, label or shade in the following places. In a sentence, note their
significance to the chapter. (For reference, consult the map in Nation of
Nations on page 15.) 1. Aztec Empire, 2. Inca Empire, 3. Mezoamerica, 4. The
Spanish Main, 5. The West Indies, 6. Caribbean Sea. (8) ESSAY QUESTIONS. 1.
Describe the conditions under which native American cultures became more
complex and elaborate. 2. How did Spain's colonial empire influence the
development of western Europe during the sixteenth century? 3. Characterize the
conditions and changes in sixteenth-century Europe that contributed to the
Protestant Reformation. 4. What factor was most essential in encouraging early
modem Europeans to undertake voyages of discovery in exploration? 5. Consider
the motives of early English promoters of colonization like Gilbert, Raleigh,
Frobisher, and the Hakluyts. What were their goals and motives? Critical
Thinking. EVALUATING EVIDENCE (MAPS). 1. What does the scope of English and
French exploration shown by the map on page 8 indicate about the evolution of
relations between those nations with Spain in the sixteenth century? 2. What
was the dominant mode of subsistence among North American Indian tribes, as
indicated by the map on page 15? EVALUATING EVIDENCE (ILLUSTRATIONS). 1. What is
the significance of the ivory mask fashioned by a West African artist shown on
page 11? What does the mask indicate about the African perception of the
Portuguese? 2. What image of native Americans is conveyed by the picture of
Columbus meeting the natives on Hispaniola (page 33)? What is the image of
Europeans?
[1998c] (6-14) The People of America Before Columbus. Thousands of years
before the European voyages of discovery; the history of humankind in North
America began. Nomadic bands from Siberia, hunting big game animals such as
bison, caribou, and reindeer, began to migrate across a land bridge connecting
northeastern Asia with Alaska. Geologists believe that this land bridge,
perhaps 600 miles wide, existed most recently between 25,000 and 14,000 years
ago, when massive glaciers locked up much of the earth's moisture and left part
of the Bering Sea floor exposed. Ice-free passage through Canada was possible
only briefly at the beginning and end of this period, however. At other times,
melting glaciers flooded the land bridge and blocked foot traffic to Alaska.
Paleoanthropologists remain divided on the exact timing, but the main migration
apparently occurred between 12,000 and 14,000 years ago, although possibly much
earlier. Hunters and Farmers. For thousands of years, these early hunters
trekked southward and eastward, following vegetation and game. In time, they
reached the tip of South America and the eastern edge of North America,
thousands of miles from their Asian homeland. Thus did people from the
"Old World" discover the "New World" thousands of years
before Columbus. Archaeologists have excavated ancient sites of early life in
the Americas, unearthing tools, ornaments, and skeletal remains that can be
scientifically dated. In this way, they have tentatively reconstructed the
dispersion of these first Americans over an immense land mass. Although much
remains unknown, this archaeological evidence suggests that as centuries passed
and population increased, the earliest inhabitants evolved into separate
cultures, organizing life and adjusting to a variety of environments in
distinct ways. Europeans who rediscovered the New World thousands of years
later would indiscriminately lump together the myriad societies they found. But
by the 1500s, the "Indians" of the Americas were enormously diverse
in the size and complexity of their societies, the languages they spoke, and
their forms of social organization. Archaeologists and anthropologists have
charted several phases of "Native American" history. A long Beringian
epoch ended about 14,000 years ago. From that time, a rich archaeological
record indicates that the hunters had developed a new technology. Big-game
hunters now flaked hard stones into spear points and chose "kill
sites" where they slew whole herds of Pleistocene mammals. This more
reliable food source allowed population growth, and nomadism began to give way
to settled habitations or local migration within limited territories. In
another phase of evolution, the Archaic era, from about 10,000 to 2,500 years
ago, great geological changes brought further adaptations to the land. As the
massive glaciers of the Ice Age slowly retreated, a warming trend deprived vast
areas from Utah to the highlands of Central America of sufficient water and
turned them from grasslands into desert. The Pleistocene mammals were weakened
by more arid conditions, but human populations ably adapted. They learned to
exploit new sources of food, especially plant life. In time, a second
technological breakthrough, the "agricultural revolution," occurred.
We have sometimes imagined that these early people lived in a primordial
paradise where they lived in harmony with their surroundings. But recent
archaeological evidence points to examples of environmental devastation that
severely damaged the biodiversity of the Americas. The first wave of intruders
coming across the Bering land bridge found a wilderness teeming with so-called
megafauna: saber-toothed tigers, woolly mammoths, gigantic ground sloths, huge
bison, and monstrous bear. But by about 10,000 years ago, these animals were
almost extinct. Many anthropologists believe that native hunters engaged in
"Pleistocene overkill" of the giant species. However, a massive shift
of climate that deprived the huge beasts of their grazing environment was also
a cause. The depletion of the megafauna left the hemisphere with a much
restricted catalogue of animals. Left behind were large animals such as elk,
buffalo, bears, and moose. But the extinction of the huge beasts forced people
to prey on new sources of food such as turkeys, ducks, and guinea pigs. Their
reduced food supply may have gradually reduced their population. Over many
centuries in the Americas, salinization and deforestation put the environment
under additional stress. For example, in what is today central Arizona, the
Hohokam civilization collapsed hundreds of years ago, much like that in ancient
Mesopotamia, when the irrigation system became too salty to support
agriculture. At Arizona's Chaco Canyon, the fast-growing Anasazi denuded a
magnificently forested region in their search for firewood and building
materials. This, in turn, led to the erosion of rich soil that impoverished the
region for the Anasazi. When Native Americans learned to domesticate plant
life, they began the long process of transforming their relationship to the
physical world. Learning how to plant, cultivate, and harvest created a new
relationship to natural forces that before had been ungovernable.
Anthropologists believe that this process began independently in widely
separated parts of the world -- Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas -- about
7,000 to 9,000 years ago. Though agriculture developed very slowly, everywhere
it eventually brought dramatic changes in human societies. Over the millennia,
humans progressed from doorside planting of a few wild seeds to systematic
clearing and planting of bean and maize fields. As the production of
domesticated plant food ended dependence on gathering wild plants and pursuing
game, settled village life began to replace nomadic existence. The increase in
food supply brought about by agriculture triggered other major changes. As more
ample food fueled population growth, large groups split off to form separate
societies. Greater social and political complexity developed because not
everyone was needed as before to secure the society's food supply Men cleared
the land and hunted game, and women planted, cultivated, and harvested crops.
Many societies empowered religious figures, who organized the common followers,
directed their work, and exacted tribute as well as worship from them. In
return, the community trusted them to ward off hostile forces. Everywhere in
the Americas, regional trading networks formed. Along trade routes carrying
commodities such as salt, obsidian rock for projectile points, and copper for
jewelry also traveled technology, religious ideas, and agricultural practices.
By the end of the Archaic period, about 500 B.C. (to use the Christian European
method of dating), hundreds of independent kin-based groups, like people in
other parts of the world, had learned to exploit the resources of their
particular area and to trade with other groups in their region. Native
Americans in 1600. The last epoch of pre-Columbian development, the
post-Archaic phase, occurred during the 2,000 years before contact with
Europeans. It involved a complex process of growth and environmental adaptation
among many distinct societies -- and crisis in some of them. In the American
Southwest, for example, the ancestors of the present-day Hopi and Zuni
developed carefully planned villages composed of large terraced multistoried
buildings, each with many rooms. By the time the Spanish arrived in the 1540s,
the indigenous Pueblo people were using irrigation canals, dams, and hillside
terracing to bring water to their arid maize fields. In their agricultural
techniques, their skill in ceramics, their use of woven textiles for clothing,
and their village life, Pueblo society resembled that of peasant communities in
many parts of Europe and Asia. Far to the east were the mound-building
societies of the Mississippi and Ohio valleys. When European settlers first
crossed the Appalachian Mountains a century and a half after arriving on the
continent, they were amazed to find hundreds of ceremonial mounds, some of them
70 feet high, and gigantic sculptured earthworks in geometric designs or in the
shapes of huge humans, birds, or writhing serpents. Believing all
"Indians" to be forest primitives, they reasoned that these were the
remains of an ancient civilization that had found its way to North America --
perhaps Phoenicians, survivors of the sunken island of Atlantis, or the Lost
Tribes of Israel spoken of in European mythology. The mound-building societies
of the Ohio valley declined many centuries before Europeans reached the
continent, perhaps because of attacks from other tribes or severe climatic
changes that undermined agriculture. But about A.D. 600, another mound-building
culture, based on intensive cultivation of beans, maize, and squash, began to
flourish in the Mississippi valley. Its center, a city of perhaps 40,000, stood
near present-day St. Louis. Great ceremonial plazas, flanked by a temple that
rose in four terraces to a height of 100 feet, marked this first metropolis in
America. This was the urban center of a far-flung Mississippi culture that
radiated out to encompass hundreds of villages from Wisconsin to Louisiana and
from Oklahoma to Tennessee. While the mound-building cultures of the
continental heartlands mysteriously declined, their influence had already
passed eastward to transform the woodlands societies along the Atlantic coastal
plain. The numerous small tribes that settled from Nova Scotia to Florida never
equaled the larger societies of the midcontinent in earthwork sculpture,
architectural design, or development of large-scale agriculture. But they were
far from the "savages" that the first European explorers described.
They had added limited agriculture to their skill in exploiting natural plants
for food, medicine, dyes, and flavoring and had developed food procurement
strategies that used all the resources around them -- cleared land, forests,
streams, shore, and ocean. Most of the eastern woodlands tribes lived in
waterside villages. Locating their fields of maize near fishing grounds, they
often migrated seasonally between inland and coastal village sites or situated
themselves astride two ecological zones. In the Northeast, their birchbark
canoes, light enough to be carried by a single man, gave them a means of
trading and communicating over immense territories. In the Southeast,
population was denser and social and political organization more elaborate. As
European exploration of the Americas drew near, the continent north of the Rio
Grande contained at least 3 to 4 million people, of whom perhaps 500,000 lived
along the eastern coastal plain and in the piedmont region accessible to the
early European settlers. Though estimates vary widely, perhaps 40 to 60 million
people lived in the entire hemisphere when Europeans first arrived. This
contrasted with some 70 to 90 million in Europe about 1500 and about 50 to 70
million in Africa. The colonizers were not coming to a "virgin
wilderness," as they often described it, but to a land inhabited for thousands
of years by people whose village existence in many ways resembled that of the
arriving Europeans. In some important ways, however, Indian culture also
differed from that of Europeans. Horses, for example, were not available to the
native peoples of the New World as they developed their methods of farming,
transportation, and warfare. Without draft animals such as the horse or ox,
they had not developed wheeled vehicles or, for that matter, the potter's
wheel, which also uses the wheel-and-axle principle. Many inventions -- such as
the technology for smelting iron, which had diffused widely in the Old World --
had not crossed the ocean barrier to reach the New World. The opposite was also
true: Valuable New World crops, such as corn and potatoes, which had been developed
by Indian agriculturists, were unknown in the Old World before Columbus.
Contrasting World Views. Colonizing Europeans called themselves
"civilized" and typically described the people they met in the
Americas as "savage," "heathen," or "barbarian." The
gulf separating people in Europe and North America was defined not only by
their material cultures, but also by how they viewed their relationship to the
environment and how they defined social relations in their communities. Having
evolved in complete isolation from each other, European and Indian cultures
exhibited a wide difference in values. Regarding the soil as a resource to be
exploited for human benefit, Europeans believed that land should be privately
possessed. Individual ownership of property became a fundamental concept, and
an extensive institutional apparatus grew up to support it. Fences symbolized
private property; inheritance became the mechanism for transmitting land from
one generation to another within the same family; and courts gained the power
to settle property disputes. Property was the basis not only of sustenance, but
also of independence, material wealth, political status, and personal identity.
The social structure directly mirrored patterns of land ownership, with a
land-wealthy elite at the apex of the social pyramid and a mass of propertyless
individuals forming the broad base. Native Americans also had concepts of
property, and tribes recognized territorial boundaries. But they believed that
land was invested with sacred qualities and should be held in common. As one
German missionary to the Delaware Indians explained their view in the
eighteenth century; the Creator "made the Earth and all that it contains
for the common good of mankind. Whatever liveth on the land, whatsoever groweth
out of the earth, and all that is in the rivers and waters . . . was given
jointly to all and everyone is entitled to his share." Communal ownership
sharply limited social stratification in most Indian communities. Accustomed to
wide disparities of wealth, Europeans often found this remarkable. Observing
the Iroquois of the eastern woodlands in 1657, a French Jesuit noted with
surprise that they had no almshouses because "their kindness, humanity and
courtesy not only makes them liberal with what they have, but causes them to
possess hardly anything except in common. A whole village must be without corn,
before any individual can be obliged to endure privation." Not all
Europeans were acquisitive, competitive individuals. The majority were peasants
scratching a subsistence living from the soil, living in kin-centered villages
with little contact with the outside world, and exchanging goods and labor
through barter. But in Europe's urban centers, a wealth-conscious, ambitious
individual who valued and sought wider choices and greater opportunities to
enhance personal status was coming to the fore. In contrast, Native American
traditions stressed the group rather than the individual. Holding land and
other resources in common, Indian societies were usually more egalitarian and
their members more concerned with personal valor than personal wealth.
Exceptions to this cultural system occurred in the highly developed and
populous Aztec and Inca empires and, in North America, among a few tribes such
as the Natchez. But on the eastern and western coasts of the continent and in
the Southwest -- the regions of contact in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries -- the European newcomers encountered a people whose cultural values
differed strikingly from theirs. European colonizers in North America also
found disturbing the matrilineal organization of many tribal societies.
Contrary to European practice, family membership among the Iroquois, for
example, was determined through the female line. A typical family consisted of
an old woman, her daughters with their husbands and children, and her unmarried
granddaughters and grandsons. When a son or grandson married, he moved from
this female-headed household to one headed by the matriarch of his wife's
family Divorce was also the woman's prerogative. If she desired it, she merely
set her husband's possessions outside their dwelling door. Clans were composed
of several matrilineal kin groups related by a blood connection on the mother's
side. To Europeans, this was a peculiar and dangerous reversal of their sexual
hierarchy in which men, from time immemorial, had been supreme. In Native
American societies, women also held subordinate positions, but not nearly to
the extent found among European women. For example, European women, with rare
exceptions, were entirely excluded from political affairs. By contrast, in
Native American villages, again to take the Iroquois example, designated men
sat in a circle to deliberate and make decisions, but the senior women of the
village stood behind them, lobbying and instructing. The village chiefs were
male, but they were named to their positions by the elder women of their clans.
If they moved too far from the will of the women who appointed them, these
chiefs were removed -- or "dehorned." "Our ancestors," the
Oneida chief Giod Peter explained, "considered it a great transgression to
reject the counsel of their women, particularly the female governesses. Our
ancestors considered them mistresses of the soil. . . . The women, they are the
life of the nation." The role of women in the tribal economy reinforced
the sharing of power between male and female. Men were responsible for hunting,
fishing, and clearing land, but women controlled the cultivation, harvest, and
distribution of food. They were responsible for probably three-quarters of
their family's nutritional needs. When the men were away on hunting
expeditions, women directed village life. Europeans, imbued with the idea of
male superiority and female subordination, perceived such a degree of sexual
equality as another mark of the uncivilized nature of tribal society. In
economic relations, Europeans and Indians differed in ways that sometimes led
to misunderstanding and conflict. Over vast stretches of the continent, Indians
had engaged in trading networks for centuries before Europeans arrived. This
experience made it easy for them to engage in trade with arriving Europeans and
incorporate new metal and glass trade items into their culture. But trade for
Indian peoples was not only a way of acquiring desirable goods. It was also a
way of preserving interdependence and equilibrium between individuals and
communities. This principle of reciprocity displayed itself in elaborate
ceremonies of gift giving and pipe smoking that preceded the exchange of goods.
For Europeans, trade was an economic matter with the benefit of building good
will between two parties, but the social and spiritual functions of trade were
sharply limited in comparison with Indians. In the religious beliefs of Native
Americans, the English saw a final damning defect. Europeans built their
religious life around the belief in a single god, written scriptures, a trained
and highly literate clergy and churches with structured ceremonies. Native
American societies, sharing no literary tradition, expressed their religious
beliefs in a less structured way At the core of their religion was a belief
that spiritual power, mysterious and supernatural, existed everywhere in
nature. Believing that human life could be affected -- positively or negatively
-- by the spiritual power in rocks, water, sun, moon, and animals, Indian
people sought to conciliate the spirits in nature -- even the spirits of the
fish, beaver, and deer they hunted. Pueblo people, for example, living in arid lands
where rainfall dictated their well-being, expressed their thanks for rain by
performing frequent ritual dances. For Europeans, the Indians' polytheism was
pagan and devilish. Europeans understood that Indians had religious leaders
called shamans, who used medicinal plants and magical chants to heal the sick
and facilitated the people's quests to communicate with the spiritual world.
But Europeans regarded the shamans as especially dangerous because they
occupied powerful roles among a spiritually misled people. Their fear and
hatred of infidels intensified by the Protestant Reformation, Europeans saw a
holy necessity to convert -- or destroy -- these enemies of their God.
[1999a] (11-5) EARLY NORTH AMERICAN CULTURES. The Americas were a new world only to
European latecomers. To the Asian peoples and their native American descendants
who had settled the continents tens of thousands of years earlier, Columbus'
new world was their own old world. But the first nomadic hunters who crossed
from Siberia over the Bering Strait to Alaska probably did not consider
themselves discoverers or recognize what they had found -- a truly new world
wholly uninhabited by humans. The
First Inhabitants. The first passage of people from Asia to America probably
took place during a prehistoric glacial period -- either before 35,000 B.C. or
about 10,000 years later -- when huge amounts of the world's water froze into
sheets of ice. Sea levels dropped so drastically that the Bering Strait became
a broad, grassy plain. Across that land bridge between the two continents both
humans and animals escaped icebound Siberia for ice-free Alaska. Whenever the
first migration took place, the movement of Asians to America continued, even
after 8000 B.C. when world temperatures rose again and the water from melting
glaciers flooded back into the ocean, submerging the Bering Strait. Over a span
of 25,000 years settlement spread down the Alaskan coast, then deeper into the
North American mainland, and finally throughout Central and South America. Native
Americans remained nomadic hunters and gatherers for thousands of years, as did
many Europeans, Africans, and Asians of those millennia. But American cultures
gradually diversified, especially after about 5500 B.C., when the peoples of
central Mexico discovered how to cultivate food crops. As this ''agricultural
revolution" spread slowly northward, native American societies were able
to grow larger and develop distinctive forms of economic, social, and political
organization. By the end of the fifteenth century; the inhabitants of North
America perhaps 5 to 10 million people spoke as many as 1000 languages.
Although later Europeans, like Columbus, lumped these societies together by
calling them Indian any cultural unity had vanished long before 1492. The
simplest Indian societies were those that still relied on hunting and
gathering, like the Eskimos of the Arctic and the Serrano, Cahuilla, Luiseno,
and Dieguefio of southern California, Arizona, and the Baja peninsula of
Mexico. Stark deserts and frozen tundra defied cultivation and yielded food
supplies that could sustain nomadic bands numbering no more than about 50
people. Families occasionally joined together for a collective hunt or wintered
in common quarters, but for most of the year they scattered across the
landscape, the women gathering plants and seeds, making baskets, and cooking
meals while the men hunted for meat and hides. Political authority lay with
either the male family head or the "headman" of a small band
"Shamans" -- any tribesmen claiming spiritual powers -- enlisted the
supernatural to assist individuals. Societies of Increasing Complexity In the
densely forested belt that stretched from Newfoundland to the Bering Strait,
resources more generous than those of the tundra to the north made for larger
populations and more closely knit societies. Northeastern bands like the
Hunters and gatherers. Montagnais, the Micmac, and the Penobscot and
northwestern tribes like the Yellowknife and the Beaver traveled forests in
moccasins and snowshoes, stalking deer, elk, moose, bear, and caribou; they
speared fish in icy lakes and streams from birch-bark canoes. Their environment
encouraged cooperative economic pursuits. Leading men assigned several families
to specific territories that they hunted together, dividing the returns among
the whole band. Religious beliefs strengthened the ties of kinship each family
had a "totem," a particular animal from which they claimed descent.
Women in agricultural societies. While men dominated Indian bands based on
hunting, women assumed more influence in societies that relied for part of
their food on settled agriculture. Among the Pueblo peoples of Arizona and New
Mexico, the Hopi and Zufii tribes, men hunted bison and cultivated corn and
beans, but women owned the fields, the crops, and even the tools. They also
owned the sun-baked dwellings of adobe and stone, some of which rose to several
stories, that housed the families of their daughters. By 1540 some 70 Pueblo
villages flourished as more reliable food supplies swelled the size and number
of clans (families sharing a common ancestry). A council of religious elders
drawn from the different clans governed each village. Pueblo religious
ceremonies, in contrast to those of simpler Indian societies, involved elaborate
rituals celebrating tribal unity and seeking the gods' blessing for hunts and
harvests. Thousands of miles to the northeast, in a natural setting far
different from the semiarid Southwest, the Iroquois created a remarkably
similar culture. More complex Indian civilizations arose in the bountiful
environments of the Pacific Northwest and the coastal region reaching from
Virginia to Texas. The seas and rivers from eastern Alaska to northern
California teemed with fish, humpback whales, seals, and otters. In the
Southeast fertile soil and temperate climate encouraged the cultivation of
maize, rice, and a variety of fruits. By harvesting these resources and
developing techniques to preserve food supplies, settlements could become
larger and more complex. Far less egalitarian than nomadic hunting bands or
even the Pueblo and Iroquois, these tribes developed elaborate systems of
status. Among southeastern tribes like the Natchez, below the chief, or
"Great Sun " stood a hereditary nobility of lesser "Suns,"
who demanded elaborate displays of respect from the lowly "Stinkards
" the common people. Mesoamerican Empires. Even more advanced were the
vast agricultural empires of Mesoamerica -- south and central Mexico and
Guatemala. As the Roman empire was declining in Europe, the civilization of the
Mayas was flourishing in the lowland jungles of Central America. They built
cities filled with palaces, bridges, aqueducts, baths, astronomical
observatories, and temples topped by pyramids. Their priests developed a written
language, their mathematicians discovered the zero, and their astronomers
devised a calendar more accurate than any then existing. Rise of the Aztecs.
The Aztecs, who invaded central Mexico from the north in the fourteenth
century, built on the Mayas' achievements. Within a century Aztec conquest had
created an empire of several million people. The capital, Tenochtitlan, was a
glittering island metropolis with a population in 1400 of perhaps a quarter of
a million -- several times the size of London. The Great Temple of the Sun
dominated the center of the city, and through the canals leading to
Tenochtitlan flowed gold, silver, exotic feathers, cocoa, and millions of
pounds of maize -- all trade goods and tribute from other Mexican city-states
conquered by the Aztecs. In many ways, the world of the Aztecs paralleled the
societies of early modern Europe. Both worlds were predominantly rural, most of
their inhabitants living in small villages and engaging in agriculture. In both
worlds, merchants and specialized craftworkers clustered in cities, organized
themselves into guilds, and clamored for protection from the government. And,
as in Europe, Aztec noble and priestly classes took the lead in politics and
religion, demanding tribute from the common people. The question of human
sacrifice aside, there was at least one crucial difference between Aztec and
European civilizations. Aztec expansion did not take the form of colonial
settlements that spanned the oceans -- indeed, the globe. That difference reflected
a host of distinctive changes in European social, economic, and political
development during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It was these
transformations that made it possible for bold sailors like Columbus and Cabot
or anonymous fisherfolk and traders to dream of profit, glory, and empire. (12)
[Map] INDIANS OF NORTH AMERICA, CIRCA 1500. (14) EYEWITNESS TO HISTORY. A
Spanish Conquistador Visits the Aztec Marketplace in Tenochtitlan. On reaching
the market-place . . . we were astounded at the great number of people and the
quantities of merchandise, and at the orderliness and good arrangements that
prevailed, for we had never seen such a thing before. . . . Every kind of
merchandise was kept separate and had its fixed place marked for it. Let us begin
with the dealers in gold, silver, and precious stones, feathers, cloaks, and
embroidered goods, and male and female slaves who are also sold there. They
bring as many slaves to be sold in that market as the Portuguese bring Negroes
from Guinea. Some are brought there attached to long poles by means of collars
round their necks to prevent them from escaping, but others are left loose.
Next there were those who sold coarser cloth, and cotton goods and fabrics made
of twisted thread, and there were chocolate merchants. . . .In this way you
could see every kind of merchandise to be found anywhere in New Spain, laid out
in the same way as goods are laid out in my own district [in Spain] of Medina
del Campo, a center for fairs, where each line of stalls has its own particular
sort. So it was in this great market. There were those who sold sisal cloth and
ropes and the sandals they wear on their feet . . . and in another part were
skins of tigers and lions, otters, jackals, and deer, badgers, mountain cats, and
other wild animals. I must also mention, with all apologies, that they sold
many canoe-loads of human excrement, which they kept in the creeks near the
market. This was for the manufacture of salt and the curing of skins, which
they say cannot be done without it. I know that many gentlemen will laugh at
this, but I assure them it is true. I may add that on all the roads they have
shelters made of reeds or straw or grass so that they can retire when they wish
to do so, and purge their bowels unseen by passers-by, and also in order that
their excrement shall not be lost. (Bernal Diaz, The Conquest of New Spain,
translated by J M Cohen (New York: Penguin Classics, 1963), pp. 232-233.
Copyright © J M Cohen, 1963.) (15-6) COUNTERPOINT. The Role of Human Sacrifice.
Some students of history; however, emphasize that the Aztecs differed from
Europeans in one particularly striking way: they practiced ritual human
sacrifice. Every year, Aztec priests wielding razor-sharp knives sliced open
the chests of thousands of captives and offered up to the sun hearts still
beating, the essence of life. Indeed, the primary purpose of Aztec warfare was
less to extend their empire than to maintain a steady supply of captives for
such rites. Aztecs believed that they were the chosen people -- chosen to
nourish the earth by sustaining the life of the sun with offerings of human
blood. Put simply; the Aztecs slaughtered other human beings in the name of
religion. As one recent historian noted, "In numbers, the elevated sense
of ceremony which accompanied the theatrical shows involved, as in its
significance in the official religion, human sacrifice in Mexico was
unique." But were the Aztecs really so different in this regard from
invading Europeans? The sense of being a "chosen people" that
underlay Aztec rituals also inspired Christians in their own crusades. They
campaigned ruthlessly against "Muslim infidels," massacred Jews, and
executed thousands of witches during the Middle Ages and even into the
seventeenth century. Put just as simply, European Christians, too, slaughtered
other human beings in the name of religion. But it was a similarity that
Europeans found convenient to overlook. They preferred to portray themselves as
"civilizers" of a people whose “savagery" was proved by the practice
of human sacrifice.
[1999b] −
[1999c] (5-14) American Origins. The forces that propelled Columbus toward
the Western Hemisphere merely echoed other forces that had sent a population to
the New World thousands of years before. These forces resulted from countless
choices that countless individuals through time made as they struggled to
better their lives and those of their children. Thus the process that led to
the peopling of North America and the development of a unique set of cultures
began many thousands of years before Columbus and is part of the larger drama
of human development. Environment, Change, and Human History. Human culture
apparently began about 4 million years ago in the east-central region of
Africa. Within 1 to 2 million years, human beings were to be found throughout
many parts of the Eastern Hemisphere. This expansion of human culture took
place against a backdrop of extremely bad weather. The Quaternary era, or Great
Ice Age, began about 2.5 million years ago and ended only about 10,000 years
ago. During the height of the Ice Age, great sheets of ice advanced and
withdrew across the world's continents, and temperatures were between fifteen
and twenty degrees lower on the average than they are today, During the last
Quaternary ice advance, the Wisconsin glaciation, a sheet of ice more than
8,000 feet thick, covered the northern half of both Europe and North America.
So much water was frozen into this massive glacier that sea levels dropped as
much as 450 feet. Finding vast regions closed to them by the imposing ice
fields, people ventured into areas exposed by the receding sea. One such
region, Beringia, lay between present-day Siberia on the Asian continent and
Alaska in North America (see Map 1.1). Now covered by the waters of the Bering
Sea and Arctic Ocean. Beringia during the Ice Age was a dry, frigid grassland,
low lying and thus not subject to glacier formation -- a perfect grazing ground
for animals such as giant bison and huge-tusked woolly mammoths, which thrived
in the cold. Hosts of predators, including large wolves, saber-toothed cats,
and humans, followed them into Beringia. Scholars who have analyzed soil
samples, plant remains, animal bones, and other relics now conclude that sea
levels were low enough to expose Beringia about 70,000 years ago and that the
area remained above sea level continually until about 10,000 years ago.
Archaeological evidence yields a wide variety of dates for when people first
moved southward into North America, ranging from about 40,000 to about 12,000
years ago. Evidence based on blood DNA, differences in tooth shapes, and
similarities in languages suggests that the majority of North America's
original residents are descended from three separate migrating groups, each of
which arrived at a different time. The first of these, the groups called
Paleo-Indians, probably entered the continent between 30,000 and 40,000 years
ago, and their descendants eventually occupied the entire area of the Western
Hemisphere. The second group, collectively called the Na-Dene people, appears
to have arrived very near the end of the Wisconsin era, between 10,000 and
11,000 years ago, and their descendants are concentrated in two areas: the
subarctic regions of Canada and the southwestern United States, The final group,
the Arctic-dwelling Inuits, or Eskimos, arrived sometime later, perhaps after
the land connection between North America and the rest of the world was already
gone (see Map 1.1). Even after the Ice Age came to an end, it took between four
and five thousand years for the massive glaciers to melt, and during that time
the melting ice kept the climate cold and damp everywhere on the continent. But
by about 9,000 years ago, the glaciers were so reduced in size that they began
to lose their influence over the North American climate. The elimination of
this enormous temperature-regulating system resulted in the formation of many
different climates and natural environments. Most important, as temperatures
warmed and the grasslands disappeared, the gigantic Ice Age creatures whose
presence supplied early hunters with their primary source of meat and whose
movements set the tempo and pattern for Paleo-Indian life began to die out. The
hunters faced the unpleasant prospect of following the large animals into extinction
if they kept trying to survive by hunting big game. Seedtime for Native
Cultures in North America. Over time, the changing environment forced the
ancestors of the American Indians to change their ways, which marked the
beginning of a host of new cultures. The first phase of the adaptation process
began even as the climate change was occurring and lasted until about 3,000
years ago. Archaeologists call it the Archaic phase in Indian culture. During
this period, people everywhere in North America abandoned nomadic big-game
hunting. They began to explore new sources for food, clothing, shelter, and
tools – sources that they found within newly emerging local environments.
Archaic culture emerged at different times in different places. It appears that
the western part of North America was hit earliest by the changing climate. At
an archaeological site in southern Oregon, a place called Fort Rock Cave,
archaeologists have unearthed very early evidence of people abandoning big-game
hunting and adapting to local conditions. As long as 9,600 years ago, people in
this region began inventing new tools and mastering new manufacturing skills.
For example, investigators found a large number of different tools for grinding
seeds, a sign that these people were eating less meat and more local grass
seeds, nuts, and other vegetable foods. They also found baskets, sandals, and
clothing woven from grasses and reeds, indicating less dependence on animals
and greater reliance on local plants. Third, investigators found small spear
points and fishing and bird-hunting equipment, implying that these early
Indians had stopped chasing after mammoths and had begun to hunt and fish for
animals that they could find close by Over the next several thousand years,
people throughout western North America and then all over the continent made
similar adaptations, differing only in the specific foods and types of
materials they employed. In the forests that grew up to cover the eastern half
of the continent, Archaic Indians developed finely polished stone tools, which
they used to make functional and beautiful implements out of wood, bone, shell,
and other materials. In the eastern forests and along the Pacific shore, people
used large, heavy stone axes, chisels, and adzes to hollow out massive tree
trunks, making boats from which they could harvest food from inland waterways
and from the sea. During this time domesticated dogs were introduced into North
America, probably by newly arriving migrants from Asia. Dogs provided
companionship, protection, a domesticated food source, and hunting help, and
they served as draft animals. With dogs to help carry loads on land and boats
for river transportation, Archaic people were able to make the best use of
their local environments by moving around to different spots during different
seasons of the year. Thus they did not establish permanent towns or villages.
Rather they followed an annual round of movement from camp to camp -- perhaps
collecting shellfish for several weeks in one spot and then moving to where
wild strawberries were ripening and then on to where maturing wild onions or
sunflower seeds could be harvested. Such efficient use of local resources
caused an enormous increase in two things during the Archaic period: population
and spare time. Although Indian populations had grown enormously during the
several millennia in which they remained primarily hunters, the precarious
nature of nomadic hunting forced big-game hunters to live in small bands that
could move quickly in pursuit of elusive prey, Archaic life was much more
stable, and efficient manufacturing and harvesting helped prevent famine. After
people began settling down, populations increased more quickly, Being freed
from the constant need to track and kill big game for meat also gave Archaic
people more time for other things. One result was the continuing invention of
new tools and craft skills. Another was the emergence of art. Artwork played a
prominent role in elaborate burial practices that emerged everywhere in North
America during this period. In central Florida, for example, bodies of the
dead, along with tools and carved animal effigies, were sewn into weighted
woven bags and then staked to the bottom of shallow ponds. Elsewhere, the bones
of the dead were stripped of flesh and painted bright colors before they were
buried with an assortment of art objects. The connection between artwork and
elaborate burials points to a rich religious and ceremonial life. Sculptures
and pictures from the time indicate that nature lay at the heart of the Archaic
religious world. Some anthropologists and religious scholars have speculated
that these Archaic ancestors of modern Indians believed in and celebrated the
animating spirits of the plants and animals that they knew so well and depended
on for survival. Although these early Indians apparently worshiped nature and
adapted well to conditions around them, they also left their mark on local
environments. They used fire to clear forests of unwanted scrub and to
encourage the growth of berries and other plants they found valuable, while
discouraging the growth of weeds. In this way they produced vegetables for
themselves and also provided food for browsing animals like deer, which
increased in number while other species, less useful to people, declined. Plant
Cultivation and the Rise of New Societies. A highly significant example of such
environmental engineering comes from north-central Mexico, where archaeologists
have found evidence that humans altered the natural growth of plants. Beginning
perhaps 7,000 years ago, human intervention helped a wild strain of grass
develop bigger seedpods with more nutritious seeds. Such intervention
eventually transformed a fairly unproductive plant into an enormously
nourishing and prolific food crop: maize. Maize (corn), along with beans,
squash, and chilies, formed the basis for an agricultural revolution in North
America, allowing many people to settle in larger villages for longer periods.
From its origins in central Mexico about 3,500 years ago, maize agriculture spread
like wildfire, reaching settlements in New Mexico and Arizona as early as 1,000
or 2,000 years ago. From there, the plant itself and knowledge about how to sow
its seeds and care for and harvest it spread northward and eastward. Successful
adaptation -- including plant cultivation and eventually agriculture -- along
with population growth and the constructive use of spare time allowed some
Indians in North America to build large, ornate cities. Generally these were
not residential centers. Instead, most large Indian cities in North America
were trading and ceremonial centers where large populations congregated from
time to time. People, often from vastly different geographical and cultural
settings, came to these places to trade goods and exchange knowledge and
information. Large earthen mounds in various shapes-some like huge animals,
others formed as pyramids or interesting geometrical patterns -- are prominent
features at these sites, leading archaeologists to call these trading and
ceremonial centers mound builder societies. The map of late Archaic America is
dotted with such centers. Along the Ohio River, a complex of sites was
constructed about 3,000 years ago. Archaeologists call this the Adena culture.
Adena cities were centers of exchange and ceremony, Large quantities of both
practical and purely decorative artifacts from all over North America have been
found at Adena sites. In Illinois and elsewhere in eastern North America,
Hopewell culture took the place of Adena culture. Hopewell culture reached its
peak between 1,500 and 1,000 years ago at Cahokia, a site near the modern city
of East St. Louis, Illinois. Cahokia was more than just a trading center. It
was a central clearing-house for ideas from all over the Western Hemisphere.
Archaeologists have found distinctive forms of pottery, tools, and religious
and artistic objects spread in concentric rings outward from Cahokia. In
addition, the people at Cahokia appear to have developed both the tools and the
specific knowledge required for growing corn in that region. Despite its size
and apparent influence, Cahokia probably did not have a large permanent
population. Archaeologists believe that the people who came to Cahokia and to
other Hopewell centers lived elsewhere, in small agricultural villages or in
mobile hunting and gathering bands, and came to the centers to trade and to
participate in ceremonial activities. Earthen mounds shaped like flat-topped
pyramids are the most distinctive feature of late Hopewell sites. Although
these pyramids were constructed over ornate graves, probably those of former
leaders, they also served as a base for buildings. These buildings may have
served a double function -- as places of worship and as administrative offices
for priest-administrators who oversaw trading, planting, and invention. About
800 years ago, Cahokia and the entire Hopewell complex fell into decline. The
people who once had congregated at the Hopewell centers withdrew to their
villages or bands. From time to time, however, some of them returned to the
ceremonial centers, digging passages into the pyramids in order to bury
important individuals. The Complex World of Indian America. Although the broad shape of
American Indian life was similar throughout North America, vast differences
existed between various Indian groups, because Archaic cultures developed in
direct response to local environmental conditions. Anthropologists have tried to make the
extremely complicated cultural map of North America understandable by dividing
the continent into a series of culture areas -- regions where the similarities
among native societies were greater than the differences. The chapter-opening
map shows eleven such areas. In one of these regions, the Southeast, life
continued much as it had in the Adena and Hopewell cultures. Between 1,200
years ago and the time of European entry into the region in the 1700s, peoples
speaking Siouan, Caddoan, and Muskogean languages formed a vibrant agricultural
and urban society, which scholars have named Mississippian culture. Mississippian
urban development, pyramid building, and political organization had ties with
the earlier Adena and Hopewell cultures but were more directly influenced by
contacts with adventurous traders from Mexico. At places like Natchez,
fortified cities housed gigantic pyramids, and farmland radiating outward
provided food for large residential populations. Unlike Adena and Hopewell
sites, these were true cities, but like the earlier centers they were magnets
attracting ideas, technologies, and religious notions from all parts of the
Western Hemisphere. Farther north, in the region called the Eastern Woodlands,
people lived in smaller villages and combined agriculture with hunting and
gathering. The Iroquois, for example, lived in towns numbering three thousand
or more people, changing locations only as soil fertility, firewood, and game
became exhausted. Each town was made up of a group of longhouses, structures
often 60 feet or more in length. Individual family apartments ranged down both
sides of a long central hallway, in the middle of which were fireplaces that
served the two families living across from each other. This hallway was the
center for social and political life -- babies crawled, children played, men
swapped hunting stories and gossip, and women cooked and cleaned in this
communal space. Under the supervision of a dominant matriarch, the day-to-day
tasks of running the household were shared out among its members. A tradition
that may go back to the time when the Iroquois lived as nomadic hunters and
gatherers dictated that men and women occupy different spheres of existence.
The women's world was the world of plants, healing, nurturing, and order. The
men's was the world of animals, hunting, war, and disorder. By late pre-Columbian times, the Iroquois
became strongly agricultural, and since plants were in the women's sphere,
women occupied places of high social and economic status in Iroquois society.
Families were matrilineal, meaning they traced their descent through the
mother's line, and matrilocal, meaning a man left his home to move in with his
wife's family upon marriage.
Women distributed the rights to cultivate specific fields and controlled the
harvest. Clan matriarchs chose the men who would sit as judges and political
council members. Variations on the Iroquois pattern were typical throughout the
Northeast and in the neighboring Great Plains and the Southwest. Agricultural
village life was the dominant lifestyle in each region before Europeans came.
In fact, migrants into the plains probably came from the east carrying seed
corn from the declining Hopewell settlements. Groups like the Mandans began
settling on bluffs overlooking the many streams that eventually come together
to form the Missouri River. Living in substantial houses insulated against the
cold winters, these people divided their time between hunting, crop raising,
and trade. Over a five-hundred-year period, populations increased and
agricultural settlements expanded. By 1300, such villages could be found along
every stream ranging southward from North Dakota into present-day Kansas. Just
as agriculturalists in the Great Plains had strong connections to the Eastern
Woodlands, Indians in the Southwest were closely tied to Mexico. As early as
3,200 years ago, corn appears to have been brought into the area. But the
Southwestern Indians, unlike their contemporaries farther south, continued to
engage in hunting and food gathering for a long time after experiencing the
agricultural revolution. Not until about A.D. 400 did Indians in this region
begin building larger and more substantial houses and limiting their
migrations. The greatest change, however, came during the eighth century, when
a shift in climate made the region drier and a pattern of late-summer
thunderstorms created dangerous and erosive flash floods. There seem to have
been two quite different responses to this drastic change in climate. Groups
whom the Navajos would later call the Anasazi (ancient alien ones) expanded
their agricultural ways, cooperating to build flood-control dams and irrigation
canals. This need for cooperative labor meant forming larger communities, and
between about 900 and 1300 the Anasazi responded by building whole cities of
multistory apartment houses along the high cliffs, safe from flooding but near
their irrigated fields. In these densely populated towns Anasazi craft
specialists like potters, weavers, basket makers, and tool smiths manufactured
goods for the community while farmers tended fields and priests attended to the
spiritual needs of the society Another contingent of Southwestern Indians
abandoned the region, moving southward into Mexico. Here they came upon the
remnants of classical city-states like Teotihuacan, which had fallen on hard
times. One of several highly developed societies of central Mexico, Teotihuacan
was the largest city-state in the Western Hemisphere, with a population of
nearly 200,000. However, by around A.D. 600 Teotihuacan and other such
societies were in decline. Over the next several hundred years, migrants from
southwestern North America -- so-called Chichimecs or "wild tribes"
-- borrowed architectural and agricultural skills from the fallen societies and
built new monumental cities. Tula, the first of these, entered its heyday in
about the year 1000, but within another two hundred years a civil war brought
that civilization to an end. Shortly thereafter, another Chichimec tribe rose
to prominence in central Mexico. The Aztecs arrived in the Valley of Mexico
shortly after 1200, settling on a small island in the middle of a brackish
lake. From this unappealing center, a series of strong leaders used a
combination of diplomacy and brutal warfare to establish a tributary empire as
extensive and populated as the great empires of Europe. By the time Europeans entered
Mexico in the early sixteenth century, the Aztecs may have ruled as many as 6
million people and had turned their island capital into a showplace that
visitors compared favorably with the most advanced cities in Europe. Other major changes occurred
in the Southwest after 1300. During the last quarter of the thirteenth century,
a long string of summer droughts and bitterly cold winters forced the Anasazi
to abandon their cities. They disappeared as a people, splitting into smaller
communities that eventually became the various Pueblo tribes. These small
communities found their survival more certain if they engaged in both
agriculture and hunting and gathering. The arrival of an entirely new
population to the region aided this adaptation. Related to the Na-Dene people,
these hunter-gatherers brought new technologies, including the bow and arrow,
into the Great Plains and then, splitting off from more northerly groups, they
began a southward trek that eventually brought them into the Southwest. About
half of them continued to be hunter-gatherers, and the rest borrowed
cultivating and home-building techniques from the Pueblos. Europeans who later
entered the area called the hunter-gatherers Apaches and the settled
agriculturalists Navajos. In the balance of North America, agriculture was
practiced only marginally, if at all. In areas like the Great Basin, desert
conditions made agriculture too risky, and in California, the Pacific
Northwest, and the Plateau region, the bounty of available wild foods made it
unnecessary, In these regions, hunting and gathering remained the chief
occupations, and lifestyles centered around the various activities that
contributed to group well-being. The Nez Perces and their neighbors living in
the Plateau region, for example, moved around from season to season hunting,
fishing, and gathering as different plants and animals became available.
Although they occupied permanent village sites in the winter, they did not stay
together in a single group all year. Rather, they formed task groups --
temporary villages that came together to share the labor required to harvest a
particular resource -- and then went their separate ways when the task was
done. These task groups brought together not only people who lived in different
winter villages but often people from different tribes and even different
language groups. At the peak of the salmon-fishing season, for example, large
villages consisting of Nez Perces, Cayuses, Palouses, Flatheads, and members of
numerous other groups formed to catch, salt, dry, and package the fish that
would feed their individual villages during the coming winter. In such groups,
political authority passed among those who were best qualified to supervise
particular activities. If the task group was hunting, the best and most senior
hunters -- almost always men -- directed things. If the task group was
gathering roots, then the best and most senior diggers -- almost always women
-- directed things. Thus among Plateau people, political organization changed
from season to season, and social status depended on what activities were most
important to the group at a particular time. As these examples illustrate,
variations in daily life and social arrangements in pre-Columbian North America
reflected variations in climate, soil conditions, food supplies, and cultural
heritages from place to place across the vast continent. The only generalization we can
make is that pre-Columbian Indians adopted economic strategies, social
conventions, and political systems that were well suited to their ecological
and historical circumstances. It is a mistake, however, to assume pre-Columbian
Americans lived in isolated tribes. Archaeological research continues to reveal
complex trading patterns within and between ecological regions. In the West, for example,
seed-grinding tools from the Great Basin are found at Plateau sites. Obsidian
and other Plateau items are found in the Great Basin and beyond; varieties of
shell found naturally only in the Northwest Coast region have been found in
Indian villages as far away as Florida. Such findings reveal a far-reaching
trading network that linked the people of North America into a single complex
world of culture and experience. (24) Much that Vespucci and other Europeans found most objectionable
about Native American peoples was the result of their trying to understand
different cultures in their own terms. In some ways, the arrival of Europeans
may have been easier for American Indians to understand and explain than the
existence of American indians was for the Europeans. (25) Europeans and European goods
slipped easily into this ceremonial trading system. The trade items – glass
beads, mirrors, bras bells – that the Europeans generally offered to American
Indians on first contact resembled closely the items that the Indians
traditionally used to establish friendly spiritual and economic relations with
strangers – mica, copper, and shells. Europeans perceived such items as nearly
worthless trinkets, of value only because they were personal property and therefore
legally sacred. Native Americans perceived these objects differently. According
to their beliefs, all things have spirits of their own and belong to
themselves. Thus a knife, for example – whether made by an Indian stone smith
or by a European metalworker – was a living being that might become exclusively
associated with one person, but only by mutual agreement. This belief baffled
Europeans, especially when items that they regarded as their own lifeless
personal property entered into exclusive kin relationships with Indians. Such
transfers of ownership, which Europeans usually defined as theft, were often
the cause of ill will and violence. Differing perceptions of land also led to
misunderstanding. According to Indian belief, people cannot own land: the land
is a living being – a mother – who feeds, clothes, and houses people as long as
she receives proper respect. The idea of buying or selling land was unthinkable
to Indians. When Europeans offered spiritually significant objects in exchange
for land on which to build, farm, or hunt, Indians perceived the offer as an
effort to join an already existing relationship, not to transfer ownership. Europeans did not appear to be
either superhuman or even particularly strange to the Indians. Their mode of
arrival, manners, speech, and dress probably seemed odd, but no odder than the
language, behavior, and appearance of traders from the Valley of Mexico or
other groups active in the pre-Columbian trading world. The perceived
similarity of the trade goods offered by the Europeans led indians to accept
the new comers as simply another new group in the complex social cosmos uniting
the spiritual and material worlds.
[2000a] (1-7) CHAPTER ONE. Serving Time in Virginia. As has become clear,
the historian's simple act of selection irrevocably separates
"history" from "the past." The reconstruction of an event
is quite clearly different from the event itself. Yet selection is only one in
a series of interpretive acts that historians perform as they proceed about
their business. Even during the preliminary stages of research, when the
historian is still gathering information, interpretation and analysis are
necessary. That is because the significance of any piece of evidence is seldom
apparent at first glance. The historian quickly learns that the words evidence
and evident rarely amount to the same thing. For historians attempting to
reconstruct an accurate picture of the first English settlements in Virginia,
the difficulty of taking any document at face value becomes quickly apparent.
The early Virginians were, by and large, an enterprising lot. They gave America
its first representative assembly, gave England a new and fashionable vice
(tobacco), and helped establish slavery as a labor system in North America.
These actions raise perplexing and important questions far historians, and yet
the answers to them cannot be found in the surviving source materials without a
good deal of work. The difficulty does not arise entirely from lack of
information. Indeed, some Virginians were enterprising enough to write history
as well as make it, not the least of them being Captain John Smith. Captain
Smith wrote an account of the young colony entitled A Generall Historie of
Virginia, published in 1624. Much of his history is based on eyewitness,
firsthand knowledge. At a vigorous age twenty-seven, he joined the expedition
to Virginia in 1606 sent by the Virginia Company of London and played a crucial
role in directing the affairs of the inexperienced Jamestown colony. Yet
Smith's evidence cannot be accepted without making some basic interpretive
judgments. Simplest and most obvious -- is he telling the truth? If we are to
believe his own accounts, the young captain led a remarkably swashbuckling
life. Before joining the Virginia expedition, he had plunged as a soldier of
fortune into a string of complicated intrigues in central Europe. There he
waged desperate and brave warfare on behalf of the Hungarian nobility before
being taken prisoner by the Turks. Once a prisoner, he was made a slave to a
young but "noble Gentlewoman" with the romantic name of Charatza
Tragabigzanda. The smitten princess "tooke (as it seemed) much
compassion" on Smith, but alas, he came under the control of her sadistic
brother, who reviled and taunted the captain so much, Smith lost his temper one
day in the granary and "beat out [his] braines with his threshing
bat" and made a daring escape, reaching England in time to sign on with
the Virginia Company's expedition.
In Virginia the adventures came nearly as thick and fast. While the
colony's governing council quarreled at Jamestown, Captain Smith went off on an
exploring and food-gathering mission. He established the first European contact
with many of the Indian tribes around Chesapeake Bay, succeeded in buying
needed corn from them, and was captured by a party of Indians loyal to
Powhatan, the principal chief in the Cheaspeake region. With Smith facing
execution, once again he managed to win the affections of a beautiful princess
-- this one, Powhatan's young daughter Pocahontas. How much of this romantic
adventure story do we believe? The tone of Captain Smith's narrative makes it
reasonably apparent that he was not the sort of man to hide his light under a
bushel. (In writing of his adventures, he compared himself implicitly with
Julius Caesar, "who wrote his owne Commentaries, holding it no less honour
to write, than fight.") Indeed, several nineteenth-century scholars,
including Henry Adams, challenged Smith's account of his Indian rescue as mere embellishment.
Adams pointed out that the Pocahontas story did not appear in Smith's earliest
published descriptions of the Virginia colony. Only in 1624, when the Generall
Historie was issued, did the public first read of the Indian maiden's timely
devotion. Captain Smith, Adams argued, probably invented the story out of whole
cloth in order to enhance his reputation. We can, of course, look for
independent evidence that would corroborate Smith's claims, but in the case of
the Pocahontas story, no independent records survive. Vet other historians have
defended Smith, Philip Barbour prime among them. Barbour has checked Smith's
tales against available records in both Hungary and England and found them
generally accurate as to names, places, and dates. Smith claimed, far example,
that he used an ingenious system of torch signals to coordinate a nighttime
attack by his Hungarian friends, "Lord Ebersbaught" and "Baron
Kisell." No other records mention Smith's role, but we do know such an
attack was launched -- and that it was led by two Hungarians named Sigismund
Eibiswald and Jakob Khissl. Similarly, although the records show no princess
named Charatza Tragabigzanda, that may have been Smith's fractured
pronunciation of the Greek koritsi [girl] Trapedzoundos [from Trebizond].
Possibly, when he tried to discover the identity of his new mistress, someone
merely replied that she was "koritsi Trapedzoundos" -- a "girl
from Trebizond." Yet even if we grant Smith the virtue of honesty,
significant problems remain when using his account; problems common to all
historical evidence. To say that Smith is truthful is only to say that he
reported events as he saw them. The qualification is not small. Like every
observer, Smith viewed events from his own perspective. When he set out to describe
the customs of the Chesapeake Indians, for instance, he did so as a
seventeenth-century Englishman. Behind each observation he made stood a whole
constellation of presuppositions, attitudes, and opinions that he took for
granted without ever mentioning them. His descriptions were necessarily limited
by the experience and education -- or lack of it -- that he brought with him.
The seriousness of these limitations becomes clearer if we take a hypothetical
example of what might happen if Captain Smith were to set down a history, not
of Indian tribal customs, but of a baseball game between the Boston Red Sox:
and the New York Yankees: Not long after, they tooke me to one of their greate
Counsells, where many of the generalitie were gathered in greater number than
ever I had seen before. And they being assembled about a great field of open
grass, a score of their greatest men ran out upon the field, adorned each in
brightly hued jackets and breeches, with letters cunningly woven upon their
Chestes, and wearinge uppon their heades caps of a deep navy blue, with bi11es,
of a sort I know not what. One of their chiefs stood in the midst and would at
his pleasure hurl a white ball at another chief, whose attire was of a
different colour, and whether by chance or artyfice I know not the ball flew
exceeding close to the man yet never injured him, but sometimes he would strike
att it with a wooden club and so giveing it a hard blow would throw down his
club and run away. Such actions proceeded in like manner at length too tedious
to mention, but the generalitie waxed wroth, with greate groaning and
shoutinge, and seemed withall much pleased. Before concluding any more than
that Smith would make a terrible writer for the New York Post (we don't even
know if the Yankees won!), compare the description of the baseball game with
the account by the real Smith of what happened to him after his capture. (Smith
writes in the third person, referring to himself as "he" and
"Captain Smith.") At last they brought him to Meronocomoco, where was
Powhatan their Emperor. . . . Before a fire upon a seat like a bedsted,
[Powhatan] sat covered with a great robe, made of Rarowcun skinnes, and all the
tayles hanging by. On either hand did sit a young wench of 16 or 18 yeares, and
along on each side the house, two rowes of men, and behind them as many women,
with all their heads and shoulders painted red; many of their heads bedecked
with the white down of Birds; but every one with something: and a great chayne
of white beads about their necks. At his entrance before the King, all the
people gave a great shout. The Queene of Appamatuck was appointed to bring him
water to wash his hands, and another brought him a bunch of feathers, in stead
of a Towell to dry them. Having feasted him after their best barbarous manner
they could, a long consultation was held, but the conclusion was, two great
stones were brought before Powhatan. Then as many as could layd hands on him,
dragged him to them, and thereon laid his head, and being ready with their clubs,
to beat out his braines, Pocahontas the Kings dearest daughter, when no
intreaty could prevaile, got his head in her armes, and laid her owne upon his
to save him from death: whereat the Emperour was contented he should live to
make him hatchets, and her bells, beads, and copper. If we had not first read
the account of the baseball game, it would not be nearly as obvious just how
little Smith has told us about what is going on here. Indeed, anyone who reads
the Generall Historie or any of the captain’s writings will be impressed by
their freshness and the wealth of detail. But that is because we, like Smith,
are unfamiliar with the rituals of the seventeenth-century Chesapeake Indians.
Quite naturally – almost instinctively – we adopt Smith’s point of view as our
own. And that point of view diverts us from asking questions to which Smith
does not have the answer. What, after all, is the reason the Indians painted
their heads and shoulders red and wore white down on their heads? We know no
more than we did when baseball players were described as wearing bright outfits
with letters woven upon their chests. Even more to the point, consider the form
of Smith's narrative as it has been passed down to us over the years. The good
captain is about to die until he is suddenly rescued at the last moment by
"the Kings dearest daughter." Does the story have a familiar ring?
Indeed -- there is at least half an echo of Smith's being pitied by Princess
Tragabigzanda. And -- equally important -- the story has become prominent in
our folklore because the romantic traditions of the nineteenth century
delighted in such stories: a pure and noble-born woman saves the life of a
brave commoner. Smith tells a story that fits a narrative pattern we love to
hear. But what if we lay aside the narrative perspective of Smith's story and
consider the same facts from the point of view of Powhatan? Powhatan was the
leader of a confederacy of Algonquian Indians living around Chesapeake Bay. He
was, in short, the most powerful person in the region. But his control over the
lesser chiefs in the area varied. Some tribal groups resisted paying tribute to
him; others at a greater distance showed no allegiance and were indeed rivals.
Into this situation stepped Smith, along with the strange new tribe of white
people who had just arrived from across the salt water. In hindsight, we see
the arrival of Europeans as a momentous event that changed North America
radically. But from Powhatan's point of view, here was simply another new group
of people -- strange indeed, but human beings nonetheless -- whom he would have
to set into the balance of his own political equation. Should he treat the
newcomers as allies or enemies? Some historians and anthropologists have
suggested that Powhatan's behavior toward Smith was in fact a kind of
ritualized adoption ceremony and that Smith's supposed execution was a kind of
initiation rite in which the captain was being ritually humiliated and
subordinated. Once Smith passed the test of bravery in the face of apparent death,
Powhatan was willing to adopt him as a vassal. As Smith himself puts it,
Powhatan decides his prisoner can make hatchets for him and bells and beads for
Pocahontas. Powhatan's subsequent actions also suggest that he now considered
Smith a chief, or werowance, over this new tribe of English allies. At the end
of another ceremony two days later, the chief told Smith "now they were
friends" and that Smith should go to Jamestown and send back "two
great gunnes, and a gryndstone" -- just as other Indian allies supplied
Powhatan with tribute. In return, Powhatan would give Smith land and treat him
"as his sonne." This interpretation of Smith's capture and adoption
must remain speculative, but it is responsible speculation, informed by study
of the ways of Algonquian Indians by historians and anthropologists. And we
would have been blind to the interpretation without having separated Smith's
information from the narrative perspective in which it came to us. It is easy
enough to see how a point of view is embedded in the facts of an eloquent
narration. But consider for a moment evidence recorded by one of the pedestrian
clerks whose jottings constitute the great bulk of history's raw material. The
following excerpts are taken from the records of Virginia's general assembly
and the proclamations of the Governor: We will and require you, Mr. Abraham
Persey, Cape Marchant, from this dare forwarde to take notice, that. . . you
are bounde to accepte of the Tobacco of the Colony, either for commodities or
upon billes, at three shillings the beste and the second sorte at 18d the
punde, and this shalbe your sufficient dischardge. Every man to sett two acres
corn (Except Tradesmen following their trades) penalty forfeiture of corn a
Tobacco & be a Slave a year to the Colony. No man to take hay to sweat
Tobacco because it robs the poor beasts of their fodder and sweating Tobacco
does it little good as found by Experience. With these excerpts we face the
opposite of Smith's description: small bits of information dependent on a great
deal of assumed knowledge. Whereas Smith attempted to describe the Indian
ceremony in some detail because it was new to him, Virginia's general assembly
knows all too much about tobacco prices and the planting of corn. Policy is
stated without any explanation, just as the box score in the paper lists the
single line, "Yankees 10, Red Sox 3." In each case the notations are
so terse, the "narratives" SO brief, that the novice historian is
likely to assume they contain no point of view at all, only the bare facts. But
the truth is, each statement has a definite point of view that can be summed up
as simple questions: (1) Did the Yankees win and if so by how much? (2) Should
the price of tobacco be three shillings or eighteen pence or how much? (3) What
should colonists use hay for? And so on. These viewpoints are so obvious, they
would not bear mentioning -- except that, unconsciously, we are led to accept
them as the only way to think about the facts. Because the obvious perspective
often appears irrelevant, we tend to reject the information as not worth our
attention. But suppose a fact is stripped of its point of view -- suppose we
ask, in effect, a completely different question of it? Historians looking back
on twentieth-century America would undoubtedly learn little from baseball box
scores, but at least by comparing the standings of the 1950s with those of the
1970s, they would soon discover that the Giants of New York had become the
Giants of San Francisco and that the Brooklyn Dodgers had moved to Los Angeles.
If they knew a bit more about the economic implications of major league
baseball franchises, they could infer a relative improvement in the economic
and cultural status of the West Coast. Similarly, by refusing to accept the
evidence of tobacco prices or corn planting at its face value, historians might
make inferences about economic and cultural conditions in seventeenth-century
Virginia. In adopting a perspective different from any held by the historical
participants, we are employing one of the most basic tactics of sociology.
Sociologists have long recognized that every society functions, in part,
through structures and devices that remain unperceived by its members. "To
live in society means to exist under the domination of society's logic," notes
sociologist Peter Berger. "Very often men act by this logic without
knowing it. To discover this inner dynamic of society, therefore, the
sociologist must frequently disregard the answers that the social actors
themselves would give to his questions and look for explanations that are
hidden from their own awareness.” Using that approach, historians have taken
documents from colonial Virginia, striped them of their original perspectives,
and reconstructed a striking picture of Virginia society. Their research
reveals that life in the young colony was more volatile, acquisitive, rowdy,
raw – and deadly – than most traditional accounts have assumed. Between the
high ideals of the colony’s London investors and the disembarkation points
along the Chesapeake, something went wrong. The society that was designed to be
a productive and diversified settlement in the wilderness soon developed into a
world in which the singleminded pursuit of one crop, tobacco, made life nasty,
brutish, and short. And the colony that had hoped to pattern itself on the free
and enlightened customs of England instead found itself establishing something
that the government of England had never thought to introduce at home: the
institution of human slavery. (4) “Then as many as could layd hands on him,
dragged him to them, and thereon laid his head, and being ready with their
clubs, to beat out his braines, Pocahontas the Kings dearest daughter, when no
intreaty could prevaile, got his head in her armes, and laid her owne upon his
to save him from death. . . .” The tale has been passed down as a romantic
rescue, but from Powhatan’s point of view, was this event an adoption ceremony
designed to cement a political alliance? (Library of Congress)
[2000b] (1-7) CHAPTER ONE. Serving Time in Virginia. As has become clear,
the historian's simple act of selection irrevocably separates
"history" from "the past." The reconstruction of an event
is quite clearly different from the event itself. Yet selection is only one in
a series of interpretive acts that historians perform as they proceed about
their business. Even during the preliminary stages of research, when the
historian is still gathering information, interpretation and analysis are
necessary. That is because the significance of any piece of evidence is seldom
apparent at first glance. The historian quickly learns that the words evidence
and evident rarely amount to the same thing. For historians attempting to
reconstruct an accurate picture of the first English settlements in Virginia,
the difficulty of taking any document at face value becomes quickly apparent.
The early Virginians were, by and large, an enterprising lot. They gave America
its first representative assembly, gave England a new and fashionable vice
(tobacco), and helped establish slavery as a labor system in North America.
These actions raise perplexing and important questions far historians, and yet
the answers to them cannot be found in the surviving source materials without a
good deal of work. The difficulty does not arise entirely from lack of
information. Indeed, some Virginians were enterprising enough to write history
as well as make it, not the least of them being Captain John Smith. Captain
Smith wrote an account of the young colony entitled A Generall Historie of Virginia,
published in 1624. Much of his history is based on eyewitness, firsthand
knowledge. At a vigorous age twenty-seven, he joined the expedition to Virginia
in 1606 sent by the Virginia Company of London and played a crucial role in
directing the affairs of the inexperienced Jamestown colony. Yet Smith's
evidence cannot be accepted without making some basic interpretive judgments.
Simplest and most obvious -- is he telling the truth? If we are to believe his
own accounts, the young captain led a remarkably swashbuckling life. Before
joining the Virginia expedition, he had plunged as a soldier of fortune into a
string of complicated intrigues in central Europe. There he waged desperate and
brave warfare on behalf of the Hungarian nobility before being taken prisoner
by the Turks. Once a prisoner, he was made a slave to a young but "noble
Gentlewoman" with the romantic name of Charatza Tragabigzanda. The smitten
princess "tooke (as it seemed) much compassion" on Smith, but alas,
he came under the control of her sadistic brother, who reviled and taunted the
captain so much, Smith lost his temper one day in the granary and "beat
out [his] braines with his threshing bat" and made a daring escape,
reaching England in time to sign on with the Virginia Company's expedition. In Virginia the adventures came nearly
as thick and fast. While the colony's governing council quarreled at Jamestown,
Captain Smith went off on an exploring and food-gathering mission. He
established the first European contact with many of the Indian tribes around
Chesapeake Bay, succeeded in buying needed corn from them, and was captured by
a party of Indians loyal to Powhatan, the principal chief in the Cheaspeake
region. With Smith facing execution, once again he managed to win the
affections of a beautiful princess -- this one, Powhatan's young daughter
Pocahontas. How much of this romantic adventure story do we believe? The tone
of Captain Smith's narrative makes it reasonably apparent that he was not the
sort of man to hide his light under a bushel. (In writing of his adventures, he
compared himself implicitly with Julius Caesar, "who wrote his owne
Commentaries, holding it no less honour to write, than fight.") Indeed,
several nineteenth-century scholars, including Henry Adams, challenged Smith's
account of his Indian rescue as mere embellishment. Adams pointed out that the
Pocahontas story did not appear in Smith's earliest published descriptions of
the Virginia colony. Only in 1624, when the Generall Historie was issued, did
the public first read of the Indian maiden's timely devotion. Captain Smith,
Adams argued, probably invented the story out of whole cloth in order to
enhance his reputation. We can, of course, look for independent evidence that
would corroborate Smith's claims, but in the case of the Pocahontas story, no
independent records survive. Vet other historians have defended Smith, Philip
Barbour prime among them. Barbour has checked Smith's tales against available
records in both Hungary and England and found them generally accurate as to
names, places, and dates. Smith claimed, far example, that he used an ingenious
system of torch signals to coordinate a nighttime attack by his Hungarian
friends, "Lord Ebersbaught" and "Baron Kisell." No other
records mention Smith's role, but we do know such an attack was launched -- and
that it was led by two Hungarians named Sigismund Eibiswald and Jakob Khissl.
Similarly, although the records show no princess named Charatza Tragabigzanda,
that may have been Smith's fractured pronunciation of the Greek koritsi [girl]
Trapedzoundos [from Trebizond]. Possibly, when he tried to discover the
identity of his new mistress, someone merely replied that she was "koritsi
Trapedzoundos" -- a "girl from Trebizond." Yet even if we grant
Smith the virtue of honesty, significant problems remain when using his
account; problems common to all historical evidence. To say that Smith is
truthful is only to say that he reported events as he saw them. The
qualification is not small. Like every observer, Smith viewed events from his
own perspective. When he set out to describe the customs of the Chesapeake
Indians, for instance, he did so as a seventeenth-century Englishman. Behind
each observation he made stood a whole constellation of presuppositions,
attitudes, and opinions that he took for granted without ever mentioning them.
His descriptions were necessarily limited by the experience and education -- or
lack of it -- that he brought with him. The seriousness of these limitations
becomes clearer if we take a hypothetical example of what might happen if
Captain Smith were to set down a history, not of Indian tribal customs, but of
a baseball game between the Boston Red Sox: and the New York Yankees: Not long
after, they tooke me to one of their greate Counsells, where many of the
generalitie were gathered in greater number than ever I had seen before. And
they being assembled about a great field of open grass, a score of their
greatest men ran out upon the field, adorned each in brightly hued jackets and
breeches, with letters cunningly woven upon their Chestes, and wearinge uppon
their heades caps of a deep navy blue, with bi11es, of a sort I know not what.
One of their chiefs stood in the midst and would at his pleasure hurl a white
ball at another chief, whose attire was of a different colour, and whether by
chance or artyfice I know not the ball flew exceeding close to the man yet
never injured him, but sometimes he would strike att it with a wooden club and
so giveing it a hard blow would throw down his club and run away. Such actions
proceeded in like manner at length too tedious to mention, but the generalitie
waxed wroth, with greate groaning and shoutinge, and seemed withall much
pleased. Before concluding any more than that Smith would make a terrible
writer for the New York Post (we don't even know if the Yankees won!), compare
the description of the baseball game with the account by the real Smith of what
happened to him after his capture. (Smith writes in the third person, referring
to himself as "he" and "Captain Smith.") At last they
brought him to Meronocomoco, where was Powhatan their Emperor. . . . Before a
fire upon a seat like a bedsted, [Powhatan] sat covered with a great robe, made
of Rarowcun skinnes, and all the tayles hanging by. On either hand did sit a
young wench of 16 or 18 yeares, and along on each side the house, two rowes of
men, and behind them as many women, with all their heads and shoulders painted
red; many of their heads bedecked with the white down of Birds; but every one
with something: and a great chayne of white beads about their necks. At his
entrance before the King, all the people gave a great shout. The Queene of
Appamatuck was appointed to bring him water to wash his hands, and another
brought him a bunch of feathers, in stead of a Towell to dry them. Having
feasted him after their best barbarous manner they could, a long consultation
was held, but the conclusion was, two great stones were brought before
Powhatan. Then as many as could layd hands on him, dragged him to them, and thereon
laid his head, and being ready with their clubs, to beat out his braines,
Pocahontas the Kings dearest daughter, when no intreaty could prevaile, got his
head in her armes, and laid her owne upon his to save him from death: whereat
the Emperour was contented he should live to make him hatchets, and her bells,
beads, and copper. If we had not first read the account of the baseball game,
it would not be nearly as obvious just how little Smith has told us about what
is going on here. Indeed, anyone who reads the Generall Historie or any of the
captain’s writings will be impressed by their freshness and the wealth of
detail. But that is because we, like Smith, are unfamiliar with the rituals of
the seventeenth-century Chesapeake Indians. Quite naturally – almost
instinctively – we adopt Smith’s point of view as our own. And that point of
view diverts us from asking questions to which Smith does not have the answer.
What, after all, is the reason the Indians painted their heads and shoulders
red and wore white down on their heads? We know no more than we did when
baseball players were described as wearing bright outfits with letters woven
upon their chests. Even more to the point, consider the form of Smith's
narrative as it has been passed down to us over the years. The good captain is
about to die until he is suddenly rescued at the last moment by "the Kings
dearest daughter." Does the story have a familiar ring? Indeed -- there is
at least half an echo of Smith's being pitied by Princess Tragabigzanda. And --
equally important -- the story has become prominent in our folklore because the
romantic traditions of the nineteenth century delighted in such stories: a pure
and noble-born woman saves the life of a brave commoner. Smith tells a story
that fits a narrative pattern we love to hear. But what if we lay aside the
narrative perspective of Smith's story and consider the same facts from the
point of view of Powhatan? Powhatan was the leader of a confederacy of
Algonquian Indians living around Chesapeake Bay. He was, in short, the most
powerful person in the region. But his control over the lesser chiefs in the
area varied. Some tribal groups resisted paying tribute to him; others at a
greater distance showed no allegiance and were indeed rivals. Into this situation
stepped Smith, along with the strange new tribe of white people who had just
arrived from across the salt water. In hindsight, we see the arrival of
Europeans as a momentous event that changed North America radically. But from
Powhatan's point of view, here was simply another new group of people --
strange indeed, but human beings nonetheless -- whom he would have to set into
the balance of his own political equation. Should he treat the newcomers as
allies or enemies? Some historians and anthropologists have suggested that
Powhatan's behavior toward Smith was in fact a kind of ritualized adoption
ceremony and that Smith's supposed execution was a kind of initiation rite in
which the captain was being ritually humiliated and subordinated. Once Smith passed
the test of bravery in the face of apparent death, Powhatan was willing to
adopt him as a vassal. As Smith himself puts it, Powhatan decides his prisoner
can make hatchets for him and bells and beads for Pocahontas. Powhatan's
subsequent actions also suggest that he now considered Smith a chief, or
werowance, over this new tribe of English allies. At the end of another
ceremony two days later, the chief told Smith "now they were friends"
and that Smith should go to Jamestown and send back "two great gunnes, and
a gryndstone" -- just as other Indian allies supplied Powhatan with
tribute. In return, Powhatan would give Smith land and treat him "as his
sonne." This interpretation of Smith's capture and adoption must remain
speculative, but it is responsible speculation, informed by study of the ways
of Algonquian Indians by historians and anthropologists. And we would have been
blind to the interpretation without having separated Smith's information from
the narrative perspective in which it came to us. It is easy enough to see how
a point of view is embedded in the facts of an eloquent narration. But consider
for a moment evidence recorded by one of the pedestrian clerks whose jottings
constitute the great bulk of history's raw material. The following excerpts are
taken from the records of Virginia's general assembly and the proclamations of
the Governor: We will and require you, Mr. Abraham Persey, Cape Marchant, from
this dare forwarde to take notice, that. . . you are bounde to accepte of the
Tobacco of the Colony, either for commodities or upon billes, at three
shillings the beste and the second sorte at 18d the punde, and this shalbe your
sufficient dischardge. Every man to sett two acres corn (Except Tradesmen
following their trades) penalty forfeiture of corn a Tobacco & be a Slave a
year to the Colony. No man to take hay to sweat Tobacco because it robs the
poor beasts of their fodder and sweating Tobacco does it little good as found
by Experience. With these excerpts we face the opposite of Smith's description:
small bits of information dependent on a great deal of assumed knowledge.
Whereas Smith attempted to describe the Indian ceremony in some detail because
it was new to him, Virginia's general assembly knows all too much about tobacco
prices and the planting of corn. Policy is stated without any explanation, just
as the box score in the paper lists the single line, "Yankees 10, Red Sox
3." In each case the notations are so terse, the "narratives" SO
brief, that the novice historian is likely to assume they contain no point of
view at all, only the bare facts. But the truth is, each statement has a
definite point of view that can be summed up as simple questions: (1) Did the
Yankees win and if so by how much? (2) Should the price of tobacco be three
shillings or eighteen pence or how much? (3) What should colonists use hay for?
And so on. These viewpoints are so obvious, they would not bear mentioning --
except that, unconsciously, we are led to accept them as the only way to think
about the facts. Because the obvious perspective often appears irrelevant, we
tend to reject the information as not worth our attention. But suppose a fact
is stripped of its point of view -- suppose we ask, in effect, a completely
different question of it? Historians looking back on twentieth-century America
would undoubtedly learn little from baseball box scores, but at least by
comparing the standings of the 1950s with those of the 1970s, they would soon
discover that the Giants of New York had become the Giants of San Francisco and
that the Brooklyn Dodgers had moved to Los Angeles. If they knew a bit more
about the economic implications of major league baseball franchises, they could
infer a relative improvement in the economic and cultural status of the West
Coast. Similarly, by refusing to accept the evidence of tobacco prices or corn
planting at its face value, historians might make inferences about economic and
cultural conditions in seventeenth-century Virginia. In adopting a perspective
different from any held by the historical participants, we are employing one of
the most basic tactics of sociology. Sociologists have long recognized that
every society functions, in part, through structures and devices that remain
unperceived by its members. "To live in society means to exist under the
domination of society's logic," notes sociologist Peter Berger. "Very
often men act by this logic without knowing it. To discover this inner dynamic
of society, therefore, the sociologist must frequently disregard the answers
that the social actors themselves would give to his questions and look for
explanations that are hidden from their own awareness.” Using that approach,
historians have taken documents from colonial Virginia, striped them of their
original perspectives, and reconstructed a striking picture of Virginia
society. Their research reveals that life in the young colony was more
volatile, acquisitive, rowdy, raw – and deadly – than most traditional accounts
have assumed. Between the high ideals of the colony’s London investors and the
disembarkation points along the Chesapeake, something went wrong. The society
that was designed to be a productive and diversified settlement in the
wilderness soon developed into a world in which the singleminded pursuit of one
crop, tobacco, made life nasty, brutish, and short. And the colony that had
hoped to pattern itself on the free and enlightened customs of England instead
found itself establishing something that the government of England had never
thought to introduce at home: the institution of human slavery. (4) [Picture]
“Then as many as could layd hands on him, dragged him to them, and thereon laid
his head, and being ready with their clubs, to beat out his braines, Pocahontas
the Kings dearest daughter, when no intreaty could prevaile, got his head in
her armes, and laid her owne upon his to save him from death. . . .” The tale
has been passed down as a romantic rescue, but from Powhatan’s point of view,
was this event an adoption ceremony designed to cement a political alliance? (Library
of Congress)