Africa and the Americas moved towards civilization to rhythms very different from those operating elsewhere. Of course, this was not quite so true of Africa as of the Americas, which were cut off by the oceans from all but fleeting contacts with other continents. The Africans, by contrast, lived in a continent much of which was gradually Islamicized, and for a long time had at least peripheral encounters with first Arab and then European traders. These were of growing importance as time went by, though they did not suck Africa completely into the mainstream of world history until the late nineteenth century. This isolation, combined with an almost complete dependence for much of the story on archaeological evidence, makes much African and American history an obscure business.
African history before the coming of European trade and exploration is largely a matter of an internal dynamic we can barely discern, but we may presume folk-movements to have played a large part in it. There are many legends of migration and they always speak of movement from the north to the south and west. In each case, scholars have to evaluate the legend in its context, and with help from reference in Egyptian records, travellers’ tales and archaeological discovery, but the general tendency is striking. It seems to register a general trend, the enrichment and elaboration of African culture in the north first and its appearance in the south only much later.
The kingdom of Kush, whose connections with Egypt have been noted, is a convenient beginning. By the fifth century BC the Kushites had lost control of Egypt and retreated once more to Meroe, their capital in the south, but they had centuries of flourishing culture still ahead of them. From Egypt, probably, they had brought with them a hieroglyph (claims are now being made to have deciphered it). Certainly they diffused their knowledge to the south and west in the Sudan, where notable metallurgical skills were later to flourish among the Nubians and Sudanese. In the last few centuries BC iron-working appears south of the Sahara, in central Nigeria. Its importance was recognized by its remaining the closely guarded secret of kings, but so valuable a skill slowly travelled southwards. By about the twelfth century ad it had penetrated the south-east and the pygmies and the bushmen of the south were the only Africans then still living in the Stone Age.
Probably the greatest difference made by the spread of iron-working was to agriculture. It made possible a new penetration of the forests and better tilling of the soil (which may be connected with the arrival of new food-crops from Asia in the early Christian era), and so led to new folk-movements and population growth. Hunting and gathering areas were broken up by the coming of herdsmen and farmers, who can be discerned already by about ad 500 in much of east and south-east Africa, in modern Zimbabwe and the Transvaal. Yet those Africans did not acquire the plough. Possibly the reason lies in the lack in most of the continent south of Egypt of an animal resistant enough to African diseases to draw one. One area where there were ploughs was Ethiopia, and there animals could be bred successfully, as the early use of the horse indicates. Horses were also bred for riding in the southern Sahara.
This suggests once again the important limiting factor of the African environment. Most of the continent’s history is the story of response to influences from the outside - iron-working and new crops from the Near East, Asia, Indonesia and the Americas; steam engines and medicine from nineteenth-century Europe. These made it possible gradually to grapple with African nature. Without them, Africa south of the Sahara seems almost inert under the huge pressures exercised upon it by geography, climate and disease. It remained (with some exceptions) for the most part tied to a shifting agriculture, not achieving an intensive one; this was a positive response to difficult conditions but could not sustain more than a slow population growth. Nor did southern Africa arrive at the wheel; so it lagged behind in transport, milling and pottery.
The story was different north of the Equator. Much Kushite history waits, in the most literal sense, to be uncovered, for few of the major cities have yet been excavated. It is known that in about ad 300 Kush was overthrown by Ethiopians. They were not then the unique people they were to become, with kings claiming descent from Solomon and for centuries the only Christian people in Africa outside Egypt. They were converted to Christianity by Copts only later in the fourth century; at that time they were still in touch with the classical Mediterranean world. But the Islamic invasions of Egypt placed between them and it a barrier which was not breached for centuries, during which the Ethiopians battled for survival against pagan and Muslim, virtually isolated from Rome or Byzantium. An Amharic-speaking people, they were the only literate non-Islamic African nation.
The only other place in Africa where Christianity established itself was in the Roman north. Here it had been a vigorous, if minority, cult. The violence of its dissensions and the pursuit of the Donatists as heretics probably explain its weakness when the Arab invasions brought it face to face with Islam. Except in Egypt, Christianity was extinguished in the Africa of the Arab states. Islam, on the other hand, was and has remained enormously successful in Africa. Borne by Arab invasion it spread in the eleventh century right across to the Niger and western Africa. Arab sources therefore provide our main information about the non-literate African societies which stretched across the Sudan and Sahara after the passing of Kush. They were often trading communities and may reasonably be thought of as city-states; the most famous was Timbuctoo, impoverished by the time Europeans finally got there, but in the fifteenth century important enough to be the site of what has been described as an Islamic university. Politics and economics are still as closely intertwined in Africa as in any part of the world, and it is not surprising that the early kingdoms of black Africa should have appeared and prospered at the end of important trade routes where there was wealth to tap. Merchants liked stability.
Another African state, the earliest recorded by the Arabs, had a name later taken by a modern nation: Ghana. Its origins are obscure, but may well have lain in the assertion of its supremacy by a people in the late pre-Christian era, who had the advantage of iron weapons and horses. However this may be, the Ghana recorded by Arab chroniclers and geographers is already an important kingdom when it appears in the records in the eighth century ad. At its greatest extent, Ghana spanned an area about 500 miles across the region framed to the south by the upper reaches of the Niger and Senegal and protected to the north by the Sahara. The Arabs spoke of it as ‘the land of gold’; the gold came from the upper Senegal and the Ashanti, and was passed by Arab traders by trans-Saharan routes or through Egypt to the Mediterranean, where it lubricated European trade. In this way, Africa for a time exercised a positive influence on the outside world. The most important other commodities traded across the Sahara were salt and slaves. Ghana collapsed during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
Its eclipse was followed by the pre-eminence of Mali, a kingdom whose ruler’s wealth caused a sensation when in 1307 he made a pilgrimage to Mecca. It, too, has given a name to a twentieth-century African state. Mali was even bigger than Ghana, taking in the whole Senegal basin and running about a thousand miles inland from the coast at the beginning of the fourteenth century. Its golden age coincided with much more effective exploitation of the bullion trade than had been achieved by the Ghanaians.
The Mali ruler is said to have had 10,000 horses in his stables. This empire broke up in dynastic wars in the late fourteenth century and finally went under after defeat by the Moroccans. Other African states were to follow. But although in some cases the Arab records speak of African courts attended by men of letters there is no native documentation which enables us to reach these peoples. Clearly they remained pagan while their rulers belonged to the Islamic world. It may be that the dissolution of Ghana owed something to dissent caused by conversions to Islam. Arab reports make it obvious that the Islamic cult was associated with the ruler in the Sudanese and Saharan states but had also still to accommodate traditional practice from the pagan past - rather as early Christianity in Europe accepted a similar legacy. Nor did social custom always adapt itself to Islam: Arabic writers expressed shocked disapproval at the public nakedness of Mali girls.
Africa further south of the Sahara is even harder to get at. At the roots of the history which determined its structure on the eve of its absorption into world events was a folk-migration of the negroid peoples who speak languages of the group called Bantu. This is a term somewhat like ‘Indo-European’, referring to identifiable linguistic characteristics, not a genetic strain. The detailed course of this movement is, of course, still highly obscure but its beginnings lie in eastern Nigeria, where there were early Bantu-speakers. From there they took their language and agriculture south, first into the Congo basin. There followed a rapid spread, round about the beginning of the Christian era, over most of southern Africa. This set the ethnic pattern of modern Africa.
Some peoples, speaking the language the Arabs called ‘Swahili’ (from the Arabic word meaning ‘of the coast’), established towns on the east African coasts which were linked to mysterious kingdoms in the interior. This was before the eighth century ad, when the Arabs began to settle in these towns and turn them into ports. The Arabs called the region the land of the Zanz (from which was later to come the name of Zanzibar) and said that its peoples prized iron above gold. It is probable that these polities had some kind of trading relations with Asia even before Arab times; who the intermediaries were it is not possible to say, but they may have been Indonesians such as those who colonized Madagascar. The Africans had gold and iron to offer for luxuries and they also began the implantation of new crops from Asia, cloves and bananas among them.
Even a vague picture of the working of these states is hard to arrive at. Monarchy was by no means the rule in them and a sense of the importance of ties of kin seems to have been the only widespread characteristic shared by the black African polities. Organization must have reflected the needs of particular environments and the possibilities presented by particular resources. Yet kingship was widely diffused. Again, the earliest signs are northern, in Nigeria and Benin. By the fifteenth century there were kingdoms in the region of the great eastern lakes and we hear of the kingdom of the Kongo, on the lower Congo River. There are not many signs of organization on this scale and African states were for a long time not to produce bureaucratized administration or standing armies. The powers of kings must have been limited, not only by custom and respect for tradition, but by the lack of resources to bind men’s allegiance beyond the ties imposed by kinship and respect. No doubt this accounts for the transitory and fleeting nature of many of these ‘states’. Ethiopia was an untypical African country.
Yet some remarkable traces remain of these dim and shadowy kingdoms. A high level of culture in the east African interior in about the twelfth century is demonstrated by the remains of mine-workings, roads, rock paintings, canals and wells; these were the product of a technology which archaeologists have called ‘Azanian’. It was the achievement of an advanced Iron Age culture. Agriculture had been practised in the region since about the beginning of the Christian era. On the basis it provided, it was possible to exploit the gold which was for a long time easily accessible in what is now Zimbabwe. Only simple techniques were needed at first; large quantities could be obtained by little more than scratching the surface. This drew traders to the area - Arabs first, and later Portuguese - but also other Africans as migrants. The search for gold had in the end to be taken underground as the most easily available supplies ran out.
None the less there was a rich enough supply to support a ‘state’ lasting four centuries. It produced the only significant building in stone in southern Africa. There are relics of it in hundreds of places in modern Zimbabwe, but the most famous is at the place itself called by that name (which means only ‘stone houses’). From about 1400 this was a royal capital, the burial place of kings and a sacred site for worship. So it remained until it was sacked in about 1830 by another African people. The Portuguese of the sixteenth century had already reported a great fortress built of dry-stone masonry but only in the nineteenth century have we records by Europeans of what we know to be this site. They were amazed to find massive walls and towers in carefully shaped stone, laid in courses without mortar but with great accuracy. There was disinclination to believe that Africans could have produced anything so impressive; some suggested the Phoenicians should have the credit and a few romantics toyed with the idea that Zimbabwe had been put there by the masons of the Queen of Sheba. Today, remembering the world of other Iron Age peoples in Europe and the civilizations of America, such hypotheses do not seem necessary. The Zimbabwe ruins may reasonably be attributed to the Africans of the fifteenth century.
Advanced as East Africa was, its peoples failed to achieve literacy for themselves; like the early Europeans, they were to acquire it from other civilizations. Perhaps the absence of a need for careful records of land, or of crops which could be stored, is a part of the explanation. Whatever the reason, the absence of literacy was a handicap in acquiring and diffusing information and in consolidating government. It was also a cultural impoverishment: Africa would not have a native tradition of learned men from whom would come scientific and philosophic skill. On the other hand, the artistic capacity of black Africa was far from negligible, as the achievement of Zimbabwe, or the bronzes of Benin which captivated later Europeans, show.
Islam had been at work in Africa for nearly eight hundred years (and before that there had been the influence of Egypt on its neighbours) by the time the Europeans arrived in America, to discover civilizations which had achieved much more than those of Africa and appeared to have done so without stimuli from the outside. This has seemed so improbable to some people that much time has been spent investigating and discussing the possibility that the elements of civilization were implanted in the Americas by trans-Pacific voyagers a very long time ago. Most scholars find the evidence inconclusive. If there was such a contact in remote times, it had long since ceased. There is no unequivocal trace of connection between the Americas and any other continent between the time when the first Americans crossed the Bering Straits and the landings of Vikings. There is then none thereafter until the Spanish arrived at the end of the fifteenth century. To an even greater degree than Africa, and for a longer time, we must assume the Americas to have been cut off from the rest of the world.
Their isolation accounts for the fact that even in the nineteenth century pre-agricultural peoples still survived in North America. On the eastern plains of the modern United States there were ‘Indians’ (as Europeans later came to call them) practising agriculture before the arrival of Europeans, but further west other communities were then still hunting and gathering. They would go on doing so, though with important changes of techniques as first the horse and metal, brought by Europeans, and then firearms were added to their technical equipment. Further west still, there were peoples on the west coast who fished or collected their subsistence on the seashore, again in ways fixed since time immemorial. Far to the north, a tour de force of specialization enabled the Eskimos to live with great efficiency in an all but intolerable environment; this pattern survives in its essentials even today. Yet although the Indian cultures of North America are respectable achievements in their overcoming of environmental challenge, they are not civilization. For the American achievement in indigenous civilization it is necessary to go south of the Rio Grande. Here were to be found a series of major civilizations linked by common dependence on the cultivation of maize and by possessing pantheons of nature gods, but strikingly different in other ways.
In Meso-america the Olmec foundation proved very important. The calendars, hieroglyphics and the practice of building large ceremonial sites which mark so much of the region in later times may all be ultimately derived from it; the gods of Meso-america were already known in Olmec times, too. Between the beginning and the fourth centuries of the Christian era the successors of the Olmecs built the first great American city, Teotihuacan, in what is now Mexico. It was for two or three centuries a major trading centre and probably of outstanding religious importance, for it contained a huge complex of pyramids and great public buildings. Mysteriously, it was destroyed in about the seventh century, possibly by one of a series of waves of invaders moving southwards into the valley of central Mexico. These movements began an age of migration and warfare which was to last until the coming of the Spaniards, and produced several brilliant regional societies.
The most remarkable were those formed by the Maya cultures of Yucatan, Guatemala and northern Honduras. Their setting was extraordinary, given its appearance today. Virtually all the great Maya sites lie in tropical rain-forest, whose animals and insects, climate and diseases demand great efforts if its resources are to be tapped by agriculture. Yet the Maya not only maintained huge populations for many centuries with rudimentary agricultural techniques (they had no ploughs or metal tools and long depended on burning and clearing land to use it for a couple of seasons only before moving on), but also raised stone buildings comparable to those of ancient Egypt.
Many Maya sites may remain undiscovered in the jungle, but enough have now been found to reconstruct an outline of Maya history and society, both of which have in the last few decades been shown to have been much more complex than was once thought. The earliest traces of Maya culture have been discerned in the third and fourth centuries BC; it blossomed into its greatest period between the sixth and ninth centuries ad, when its finest buildings, sculpture and pottery were produced. Maya cities of that era contained great ceremonial complexes, combinations of temples, pyramids, tombs and ritual courts, often covered with hieroglyphic writing,
which has only in the last few decades begun to yield to investigation. Religion played an important part in the government of this culture, endorsing the dynastic rulers of the cities in ceremonies in which bloodshed and sacrifice played a signal part. There were also regular acts of intercession and worship in a cycle calculated from a calendar derived from astronomical observation. Many scholars have found this the only Maya achievement worthy of comparison with the buildings and it was indeed a great feat of mathematics. Through the calendar, enough of Maya thinking can be grasped to make it evident that this people’s religious leaders had an idea of time much vaster than that of any other civilization of which we have knowledge; they calculated an antiquity of hundreds of thousands of years. They may even have arrived at the idea that time has no beginning.
The stone hieroglyphs and three surviving books tell us something of this calendar and have provided a chronology for Maya dynasties. The Maya of the classical era used to put up dated monuments every twenty years to record the passage of time. The last of them is dated to 928.
By then, Maya civilization had reached its peak. For all the skill of its builders and craftsmen in jade and obsidian, it had considerable limitations. The makers of the great temples never achieved the arch, nor could they employ carts in their operations for the Maya never discovered the wheel, while the religious world in whose shadows they lived was peopled by two-headed dragons, jaguars and grinning skulls. As for its political achievement, Maya society had long been based on patterns of alliances tying together the cities in two dynastic agglomerations whose history is set out in the hieroglyph of the monuments. At its greatest extent, the largest Maya city may have had as many as 40,000 inhabitants, with a dependent rural population about ten times as big as that: this implies a density of population far greater than that of Maya America today.
Maya civilization was, therefore, a very specialized achievement. Like the Egyptian it required huge investment of labour in unproductive building, but the Egyptians had done much more. Perhaps Maya civilization was overloaded at an early date. Soon after its beginning a people from the valley of Mexico, probably Toltec, seized Chichen Itza, the greatest Maya site, and from this time the jungle centres of the south began to be abandoned. The invaders brought metal with them and also the Mexican practice of sacrificing prisoners of war. Their gods begin to appear in sculpture at the Maya sites. Seemingly, there was a contemporaneous cultural recession marked by cruder pottery and sculpture and a decline in the quality of the hieroglyph, too. By the beginning of the eleventh century, the Maya political order had collapsed, though a few cities were to flicker back into life at a lower level of cultural and material existence during the next couple of centuries. Chichen Itza was finally abandoned in the thirteenth century and the centre of Maya culture shifted to another site, sacked in its turn, possibly after a peasant rising in about 1460. With that, the Maya story goes into eclipse until our own day. In the sixteenth century Yucatan passed into the hands of the Spanish, though only in 1699 did the last Maya stronghold fall to them.
The Spaniards were only in the most formal sense the destroyers of Maya civilization. It had already collapsed from within by the time they arrived. Explanation is not easy, given our information, and it is tempting to fall back on metaphor: Maya civilization was the answer to a huge challenge and could meet it for a time, but only with a precarious political structure vulnerable to outside interference, and at the cost of narrow specialization and burdens which were huge in relation to the resources available to support them. Even before foreign invasion, as political fragmentation occurred, the irrigation arrangements of which the archaeologists have discovered the remains were falling into desuetude and decay. As decisively as elsewhere in the Americas, the native culture left behind no living style, no technology of note, no literature, no political or religious institution of significance. Only in the language of the Maya peasantry did the past retain some foothold. What the Maya left behind were wondrous ruins, which would long bemuse and fascinate those who had later to try to explain them.
While Maya society was in its final decay, one of the last peoples to arrive in the valley of Mexico won a hegemony there which amazed the Spanish more than anything they later found in Yucatan. These were the Aztecs, who had entered the valley in about ad 1350, overthrowing the Toltecs who then exercised supremacy there. They settled in two villages on marshy land at the edge of Lake Texcoco; one of these was called Tenochtitlan and it was to be the capital of an Aztec empire which expanded in less than two centuries to cover the whole of central Mexico. Aztec expeditions went far south into what was later the republic of Panama but showed no diligence in settlement. The Aztecs were warriors and preferred an empire of tribute: their army gave them the obedience of some thirty or so minor tribes or states which they left more or less alone, provided the agreed tribute was forthcoming. The gods of these peoples were given the compliment of inclusion in the Aztec pantheon.
The centre of Aztec civilization was Tenochtitlan, the capital they had built up from the village. It stood in Lake Texcoco on a group of islands connected to the lake shores by causeways, one of which was five miles long and took eight horsemen abreast. The Spanish left excited descriptions of this city: its magnificence, said one, exceeded that of Rome or Constantinople. It probably contained about a hundred thousand inhabitants at the beginning of the sixteenth century and to its maintenance went what was received from the subject peoples. By comparison with European cities, it was an astonishing place, filled with temples and dominated by huge artificial pyramids, yet its magnificence seems to have been derivative, for the Aztecs exploited the skills of their subjects. Not a single important invention or innovation of Mexican culture can confidently be assigned to the post-Toltec period. The Aztecs controlled, developed and exploited the civilization that they found.
When the Spanish arrived in the early sixteenth century, the Aztec empire was still expanding. Not all of its subject peoples were completely subdued, but Aztec rule ran from coast to coast. At its head was a semi-divine but elected ruler, chosen from a royal family. He directed a highly ordered and centralized society, making heavy demands on its members for compulsory labour and military service, but also providing them with an annual subsistence. It was a civilization pictographically literate, highly skilled in agriculture and the handling of gold, but knowing nothing of the plough, iron-working or the wheel. Its central rituals - which greatly shocked the Spaniards - included human sacrifice; no less than 20,000 victims were killed at the dedication of the great pyramid of Tenochtitlan. Such holocausts re-enacted a cosmic drama which was the heart of Aztec mythology; it taught that the gods had been obliged to sacrifice themselves to give the sun the blood it needed as food.
This religion struck Europeans by its revolting details - the tearing out of victims’ hearts, the flayings and ceremonial decapitations - but its bizarre and horrific accompaniments were less significant than its profound political and social implications. The importance of sacrifice meant that a continual flow of victims was needed. As these were usually supplied by prisoners of war - and because death in battle was also a route to the paradise of the sun for the warrior - a state of peace in the Aztec empire would have been disastrous from a religious point of view. Hence, the Aztecs did not really mind that their dependencies were only loosely controlled and that revolts were frequent. Subject tribes were allowed to keep their own rulers and governments so that punitive raids could be made upon them at the slightest excuse. This ensured that the empire could not win the loyalty of the subject peoples; they were bound to welcome the Aztec collapse when it came. Religion was also to affect in other ways the capacity to respond to the threat from Europeans, notably in the Aztecs’ desire to take prisoners for sacrifice rather than to kill their enemies in battle, and in their belief that one day their great god, Quetzalcoatl, white-skinned and bearded, would return from the east, where he had gone after instructing his people in the arts.
Altogether, for all its aesthetic impressiveness and formidable social efficiency, the feel of Aztec civilization is harsh, brutal and unattractive. Few civilizations of which we know much have pressed so far their demands on their members. It seems to have lived always in a state of tension, a pessimistic civilization, its people uneasily aware that collapse was more than a possibility.
To the south of Mexico and Yucatan lay several other cultures distinct enough in their degree of civilization but none of them was so remarkable as the most distant, the Andean civilization of Peru. The Mexican peoples still lived for the most part in the Stone Age; the Andeans had got much further than this. They had also created a true state. If the Maya excelled among the American cultures in the elaborate calculations of their calendar, the Andeans were far ahead of their neighbours in the complexity of their government. The imagination of the Spaniards was captured by Peru even more than by Mexico, and the reason was not simply its immense and obvious wealth in precious metals, but its apparently just, efficient and highly complex social system. Some Europeans soon found accounts of it attractive, for it required an almost total subordination of the individual to the collective.
This was the society ruled by the Incas. In the twelfth century a people from Cuzco began to extend its control over earlier centres of civilization in Peru. Like the Aztecs, they began as neighbours of those longer civilized than themselves; they were barbarians who soon took over the skills and fruits of higher cultures. At the end of the fifteenth century the Incas ruled a realm extending from Ecuador to central Chile, their conquest of the coastal areas being the most recent. This was an astonishing feat of government, for it had to contend with the natural obstacles provided by the Andes. The Inca state was held together by about 10,000 miles of roads passable in all weathers by chains of runners who bore messages either orally or recorded in quipu, a code of knots in coloured cords. With this device elaborate records were kept. Though preliterate, the Andean empire was formidably totalitarian in the organization of its subjects’ lives. The Incas became the ruling caste of the empire, its head becoming Sapa Inca - the ‘only Inca’. His rule was a despotism based on the control of labour. The population was organized in units of which the smallest was that of ten heads of families. From these units, labour service and produce were exacted. Careful and tight control kept population where it was needed; removal or marriage outside the local community were not allowed. All produce was state property; in this way agriculturists fed herdsmen and craftsmen and received textiles in exchange (the llama was the all-purpose beast of Andean culture, providing wool as well as transport, milk and meat). There was no commerce. Mining for precious metals and copper resulted in an exquisite adornment of Cuzco which amazed the Spaniards when they came to it. Tensions inside this system were not dealt with merely by force, but by the resettlement of loyal populations in a disaffected area and a strict control of the educational system in order to inculcate the notables of conquered peoples with the proper attitudes.
Like the Aztecs, the Incas organized and exploited the achievements of culture which they found already to hand, though less brutally. Their aim was integration rather than obliteration and they tolerated the cults of conquered peoples. Their own god was the sun. The absence of literacy makes it hard to penetrate the mind of this civilization, but it is noticeable that, though in a different way, the Peruvians seem to have shared the Aztecs’ preoccupation with death. Accidents of climate, as in Egypt, favoured its expression in rites of mummification; the dry air of the high Andes was as good a preservative as the sand of the desert. Beyond this it is not easy to say what divisions among the conquered peoples persisted and were expressed in the survival of tribal cults. When a challenge appeared from Europe it became apparent that Inca rule had not eliminated discontent among its subjects, for all its remarkable success.
All the American civilizations were in important and obvious ways very different from those of Asia or Europe. At present, it still seems that complete literacy escaped them, though the Incas had good enough bureaucratic processes to run complex governmental structures, and the Maya kept elaborate historical records. Their technologies, though they had certain skills at a high level, were not so developed as those already known elsewhere. Though these civilizations provided satisfactory settings and institutions for cultures of intense (but limited) power, the contribution of the indigenous Americans to the world’s future was not to be made through them, therefore. It had in fact already been made before they appeared, through the obscure, unrecorded discoveries of primitive cultivators who had first discovered how to exploit the ancestors of tomatoes, maize, potatoes and squash. In so doing they had unwittingly made a huge addition to the resources of mankind and were to change economies around the world. The glittering civilizations built on that in the Americas, though, were fated in the end to be no more than beautiful curiosities in the margin of world history, ultimately without progeny.