NOTES

^*1 According to Joseph Conrad, the violence was of culinary origin. “The Noble Red Man was a mighty hunter,” explained the great novelist, “but his wives had not mastered the art of conscientious cookery—and the consequences were deplorable. The Seven Nations around the Great Lakes and the Horse tribes of the plains were but one vast prey to raging dyspepsia.” Because their lives were blighted by “the morose irritability which follows the consumption of ill-cooked food,” they were continually prone to quarrels.
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^*2 In the United States and parts of Europe the name is “corn.” I use “maize” because Indian maize—multicolored and mainly eaten after drying and grinding—is strikingly unlike the sweet, yellow, uniform kernels usually evoked in North America by the name “corn.” In Britain, “corn” can mean the principal cereal crop in a region—oats in Scotland, for example, are sometimes referred to by the term.
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^*3 The Mayflower passengers are often called “Puritans,” but they disliked the name. Instead they used terms like “separatists,” because they separated themselves from the Church of England, or “saints,” because their church, patterned on the early Christian church, was the “church of saints.” “Pilgrims” is the title preferred by the Society of Mayflower Descendants.
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^*4 The first Europeans known to have reached the Americas were the Vikings, who appeared off eastern Canada in the tenth century. Their short-lived venture had no known effect on native life. Other European groups may also have arrived before Columbus, but they, too, had no well-substantiated impact on the people they visited.
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^*5 These preposterous tales may actually be true; other amazing Smith stories certainly are. While Smith was establishing a colony at Jamestown, for instance, Pocahontas likely did save his life, although little of the rest of the legend embodied in the Disney cartoon is true. The girl’s name, for instance, was actually Mataoka—pocahontas, a teasing nickname, meant something like “little hellion.” Mataoka was a priestess-in-training—a kind of pniese- to-be—in the central town of the Powhatan alliance, a powerful confederacy in tidewater Virginia. Aged about twelve, she may have protected Smith, but not, as he wrote, by interceding when he was a captive and about to be executed in 1607. In fact, the “execution” was probably a ritual staged by Wahunsenacawh, head of the Powhatan alliance, to establish his authority over Smith by making him a member of the group; if Mataoka interceded, she was simply playing her assigned role in the ritual. The incident in which she may have saved Smith’s life occurred a year later, when she warned the English that Wahunsenacawh, who had tired of them, was about to attack. In the Disney version, Smith returns to England after a bad colonist shoots him in the shoulder. In truth, he did leave Virginia in 1609 for medical treatment, but only because he somehow blew up a bag of gunpowder while wearing it around his neck.
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^*6 Gorges may have met Tisquantum before. In 1605 the adventurer George Weymouth abducted five Indians, conning three into boarding his ship voluntarily and seizing the other two by the hair. According to Gorges’s memoirs, Tisquantum was one of the five. He stayed with Gorges for nine years, after which he went to New England with John Smith. If this is correct, Tisquantum had barely come home before being kidnapped again. Historians tend to discount Gorges’s tale, partly because his memoirs, dictated late in life, mix up details, and partly because the notion that Tisquantum was abducted twice just seems incredible.
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^*7 Runa Simi (Quechua, to the Spanish) is the language of all Inka names, including “Inka.” I use the standard Runa Simi romanization, which means that I do not use the Spanish “Inca.”
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^*8 The Inka sovereign had the title of “Inka”—he was the Inka—but he could also include “Inka” in his name. In addition, Inka elites changed their names as they went through their lives. Each Inka was thus known by several names, any of which might include “Inka.”
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^*9 Because of their obsession with gold, the conquistadors are often dismissed as “gold crazy.” In fact they were not so much gold crazy as status crazy. Like Hernán Cortés, who conquered Mexico, Pizarro was born into the lower fringes of the nobility and hoped by his exploits to earn titles, offices, and pensions from the Spanish crown. To obtain these royal favors, their expeditions had to bring something back for the king. Given the difficulty and expense of transportation, precious metals—“nonperishable, divisible, and compact,” as historian Matthew Restall notes—were almost the only goods that they could plausibly ship to Europe. Inka gold and silver thus represented to the Spaniards the intoxicating prospect of social betterment.
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^*10 Just one major disease, syphilis, is believed to have spread the other way, from the Americas to Europe, though this has long been controversial. See Appendix C, “The Syphilis Exception.”
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^*11 Because the point is persistently misunderstood, it bears repeating that Indians’ relative genetic homogeneity does not imply genetic inferiority. Even a champion of Indians like historian Francis Jennings got this wrong: “The Europeans’ capacity to resist certain diseases,” he wrote in his polemical Invasion of America, “made them superior, in the pure Darwinian sense, to the Indians.” No: Spaniards simply represented a wider genetic array. Asserting their superiority is like saying that the motley mob at a football game is somehow intrinsically superior to the closely related attendees of a family reunion.
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^*12 In 2004 two U.S. anthropologists and a Venezuelan medical researcher proposed that Native American susceptibility to infectious disease might have a second cause: helper-T cells, which like HLAs help the immune system recognize foreign objects. To simplify considerably, helper-T cells occur in two main types, one that targets microorganisms and one that targets parasites. The body cannot sustain large numbers of both, and hence adult immune systems tend to be skewed toward one or the other, usually depending on whether as children they were more often exposed to microorganisms or parasites. Indians have historically been burdened by flukes, tapeworms, and nematodes, so they have long had majorities of parasite-fighting helper-T cells. Europeans, who grew up in germ-filled environments, usually lean the other way. As a result, the three researchers suggested, adult Indians were—and possibly still are—more vulnerable to infectious diseases than adult Europeans. Conversely, Europeans would be comparatively more vulnerable to parasites. If further research supports this hypothesis, preventing childhood parasite infections might allow Indian immune systems to orientate themselves toward bacteria and viruses, possibly reducing future deaths.
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^*13 Historians increasingly shy away from the term “Aztec,” because the nineteenth-century naturalist Alexander von Humboldt coined it in a misapprehension. Humboldt’s “Aztecs” were actually the people of three nations, the members of the Triple Alliance.
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^*14 I use the hedge words “basically,” “almost,” and “in essence” because sperm actually have 50 to 100 mitochondria, just enough to power them through their short lives. By contrast, the egg has as many as 100,000 mitochondria. When the sperm joins the egg, the egg eliminates sperm mitochondria. Every now and then, though, a few escape destruction and end up in the embryo’s cells.
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^*15 A puzzle to Europeans, anyway—Indians seem to have been, as a rule, satisfied with traditional explanations of their origins.
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^*16 Hrdlika’s complaint about the lack of skeletal evidence was unfair for another reason: paleo-Indian skeletons are extremely rare. In Europe, archaeologists have discovered scores of skeletons ten thousand years old or more. By contrast, only nine reasonably complete skeletons of similar age have been found in North America (a few more exist in South America, although, as with the Lagoa Santa skeletons, their provenance is often unclear). “It’s a big mystery why we don’t find the burials,” the University of Vermont archaeologist James Petersen told me. “Some Indians will tell you that their dead all moved to a spiritual plane, and that’s about as good as any answer that we’ve got.”
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^*17 Here and throughout I give the currently accepted dates, which are made with better techniques and more grasp of the vagaries of carbon dating than were then available to Haynes. Scientists discovered in the 1960 s that the rate of C¹⁴ formation and intake varied more than Libby had thought. As a result, raw C¹⁴ dates must be corrected (“calibrated,” in the jargon) to obtain calendar dates, something archaeologists do not always make clear. In addition, they often write dates not as years A.D. or B.C. but as years B.P. (Before Present), with the present set by convention at 1950 A.D. Thus 2000 B.P. is 50 B.C. In an attempt to reduce confusion, all dates in this book are ordinary calendar dates—that is, radiocarbon dates corrected by the most recent calibration. Scientists usually report C¹⁴ dates with their potential error, as in 3000 ± 150 B.P. (1050 ± 150 B.C.). To avoid typographical clutter, I do not include the error spread, believing that readers understand the unavoidable uncertainties in measuring minute levels of residual radioactivity.
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^*18 I am not criticizing McNeill for failing to include the Americas on his list of civilizations; he was simply reflecting the beliefs of his time. I would criticize World History: Patterns of Change and Continuity, a high school text published two decades later, in time for my son to encounter it. Referring exclusively to the “four initial centers” of civilization, this “world history” allocated just nine pages to the pre-Columbian Americas. The thesis of the book in your hands is that Native American history merits more than nine pages.
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^*19 Given the choice between their own scratchy wool and the Indians’ smooth cotton, the conquistadors threw away their clothes and donned native clothing. Later this preference was mirrored in Europe. When cotton became readily available there in the eighteenth century, it grabbed so much of the textile market that French woolmakers persuaded the government to ban the new fiber. The law failed to stem the cotton tide. As the historian Fernand Braudel noted, some woolmakers then thought outside the box: they proposed sending prostitutes in cotton clothing to wander Paris streets, where police would publicly strip them naked. In theory, bourgeois women would then avoid cotton for fear of being mistaken for prostitutes and forcibly disrobed. This novel form of protectionism was never put into place.
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^*20 The statues’ broad lips and flat noses have led “Africanist” historians like Clyde Winters and Ivan Van Sertima to claim that the Olmecs either were visited by Africans or had actually migrated from Africa. The African knowledge gained thereby explains the Olmec’s rapid rise. These views are not widely endorsed. Surprisingly, several noted archaeologists, including Betty Meggers and Gordon Ekholm, have suggested the geographical opposite: that Olmec society was inspired by China. Visitors from the Shang Dynasty are said to have crossed the Pacific to teach the ancient Olmec how to write, build monuments, and worship a feline god. This hypothesis, too, has failed to stir enthusiasm.
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^*21 Here, as elsewhere in this book, I am being chronologically inexact. The oldest Zapotec palisade Flannery and Marcus excavated yielded calibrated radiocarbon dates in the range between 1680 and 1410 B.C., which for brevity’s sake I render as “about 1550 B.C.”
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^*22 Actually, it didn’t. Inexplicably, the biggest unit, the 144,000-day “millennium,” began with 13, rather than 0. The first day in the calendar was thus 13.0.0.0.0. When I remarked on the peculiarity of this exception to a mathematician, he pointed out societies whose timekeeping systems are so irregular that children have to learn rhymes to remember the number of days in the months (“Thirty days hath September…”) are in no position to scoff at the calendrical eccentricities of other cultures. At least all the “months” in the Mesoamerican calendar had the same number of days, he said.
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^*23 Chak Tok Ich’aak’s name, like most Maya names, is easier to pronounce than it looks. In most transliterations, all letters are pronounced much as they are in English, except that x is “sh.” Thus the small ruin of Xpuhil is “Shpoo-heel.” The only difficulty is the glottal stop, the constriction of the throat that occurs when someone with a classic Brooklyn accent pronounces “bottle.” In Maya, the glottal stop is indicated by an apostrophe, as in Ich’aak. Chak Tok Ich’aak, incidentally, meant something like “Great True Jaguar Claw.”
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^*24 The river’s main channel is in this area called the Solimões. English-language maps usually put Manaus at the meeting of the Negro and the Solimões, with the latter changing its name back to Amazon upstream. Brazilian maps say that the Amazon begins at the conjunction of the Negro and Solimões.
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^*25Terra preta exists in two forms: terra preta itself, a black soil thick with pottery, and terra mulata, a lighter dark brown soil with much less pottery. A number of researchers believe that although Indians made both, they deliberately created only the terra mulata. Terra preta was the soil created directly around homes by charcoal kitchen fires and organic refuse of various types. I use terra preta loosely to cover both.
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Every book is built on other books, the adage says, and this one is an exemplary case. Think of the list of texts below as the architect’s specifications for 1491. Except that this list is more selective, consisting as it does only of the works consulted necessary to make a particular point, not everything used in the construction of the book. If at all possible, I have cited printed, English-language versions of each source; many texts can be found online, too, but URLs change so fast that I have avoided listing them whenever possible. Texts available on the Web as of early 2005 are indicated by a star (); most can be found through search engines or in such collections as Early English Books Online, Project Gutenberg, the Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, the University of Virginia’s Electronic Text Center, the University of Maryland’s Early American Digital Archive, and the Virtual Cervantes Library.

Perhaps paradoxically, some works were so important to this book that my notes give short shrift to them; they are in the background everywhere, but rarely summoned to make a specific point. For the first section, these would include Terence d’Altroy’s The Incas; William Cronon’s Changes in the Land; Alfred W. Crosby’s Columbian Exchange and Ecological Imperialism; John Hemming’s Conquest of the Incas; Karen Ordahl Kuppermann’s Indians and English; María Rostworowski de Diez Canseco’s History of the Inca Realm; and Neal Salisbury’s Manitou and Providence.

As I stitched together the second section, books that kept my keyboard constant company included Ignacio Bernal’s The Olmec World; Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel; Brian Fagan’s Ancient North America; Stuart Fiedel’s Prehistory of the Americas; Nina Jablonski’s edited collection, The First Americans; the special issue of the Boletín de Arqueología PUCP edited by Peter Kaulicke and William Isbell; Alan Kolata’s The Tiwanaku; Mike Moseley’s marvelous Incas and Their Ancestors; and the historical writings of David Meltzer, which I hope he will someday combine into a book, so that people like me won’t have to keep piles of photocopies.

The third section sometimes seems like an extended riff on the three Cultural Landscapes books assembled by William Denevan and written by Denevan; Thomas M. Whitmore and B. L. Turner II; and William E. Doolittle. But I depended also on the special September 1992 issue of the Annals of the Association of American Geographers edited by Karl Butzer; the essays in The Great New Wilderness Debate, edited by J. Baird Callicott and Michael P. Nelson; Michael Coe’s sturdy sourcebook, The Maya; Melvin Fowler’s Cahokia Atlas; Shepard Krech’s Ecological Indian; the amazing Chronicles of the Maya Kings and Queens, by Simon Martin and Nikolai Grube; and two books on terra preta (and much else besides), Amazonian Dark Earths: Explorations in Space and Time, edited by Bruno Glaser and William Woods, and Amazonian Dark Earths: Origin, Properties, Management, edited by Johannes Lehmann et al. (Full citations are in the Bibliography.)

Even a book of this length must leave out many things, given the magnitude of the subject matter. Thus I ignored the inhabitants of the Americas’ northern and southern extremes and barely touched on the Northwest Coast. The most painful decision, though, was to omit, after it had been written, a section on the North American West. My qualms were soothed by the recent appearance of Colin Calloway’s One Vast Winter Count, a magnificent synthesis of practically everything known about the subject.

1 / A View from Above

Erickson and scope of Beni earthworks: Erickson 2005, 2001, 2000b, 1995; see also Denevan 2001: chap. 12.

Old view of Indians: Ward Churchill, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado in Boulder, mockingly summed the paradigm: “How many Indians were there?—One million; Where did they come from?—Across the Bering Strait land bridge; When did they come?—15,000 years ago (plus or minus 15 minutes); How did they live?—They were squalid Stone Age hunter-gatherers wandering nomadically about the landscape at the bare margins of subsistence, waiting hopefully, millennium after millennium, for Europeans to show up and improve their quality of life” (Churchill 2003:44).

Smithsonian-backed archaeologists: Dougherty and Calandra 1984 (small numbers needed for causeways, 180; natural origins of mounds, 182–85). Their discussion has been dismissed as “improbably interpreted” (Myers et al. 1992:87). Roughly similar conclusions appear in Langstroth 1996.

Snow’s critiques: Interviews, Snow.

Pristine myth: Denevan 1992a, 1996b.

Wilderness Act: P.L. 88–577, 3 Sept. 1964 (“untrammeled,” section 2c); Callicott 1998:349–50 (act embodies “the conventional understanding of wilderness”).

Obligation to restore natural state: Cronon 1995a:36.

Fish weirs: Erickson 2000a.

Future options for Beni: Interviews, Erickson, Balée, CIDDEBENI. By leasing their land to loggers and miners, the Kayapó in the southeast Amazon basin demonstrated how Indians can disappoint environmentalists (Epstein 1993; the article is reproduced and discussed in Slater 1995:121–24). Some environmentalists propose tucking the eastern Beni into a nearby UNESCO biopre-serve, one of the 350 such preserves the agency sponsors worldwide.

Devil tree: Interviews and email, Balée. I found no published work on this specific form of obligate mutualism, but see, generally, Huxley and Cutler eds. 1991.

Ibibate and pottery: Interviews, Balée, Erickson; Erickson and Balée 2005; Balée 2000; Erickson 1995; Langstroth 1996.

Holmberg’s view of Sirionó: Holmberg 1969:17 (“brand,” “culturally backward”), 37 (“sleepless night”), 38–39 (clothing), 110 (lack of musical instruments), 116 (“universe,” “uncrystallized”), 121 (count to three), 261 (“quintessence,” “raw state”). After Holmberg’s death, Lauriston Sharp introduced Nomads as a study of “lowly but instructive” “survivors” who “retained a variety of man’s earliest culture.” The book, he said, “discovered, described, and thus introduced into history a new and in many respects extraordinary Paleolithic experience” (Sharp 1969: xii–xiii). Nomadswas a widely used undergraduate text for decades (Erickson, pers. comm.).

Holmberg’s work and career: Interviews, Henry Dobyns; Doughty 1987; Stearman 1987 (account of his blind walk, Chap. 4).

Lack of study of Beni and Langstroth: Interviews, Erickson, Langstroth; Langstroth 1996.

Sirionó epidemics: The chronology is uncertain. Holmberg (1969:12) describes smallpox and influenza epidemics that forced the “decimated” Sirionó into mission life in 1927. Citing other sources, Swedish anthropologist Stig Rydén, who visited the Sirionó briefly ten years after Holmberg, reports epidemics in 1920 and 1925, which he interprets as episodes in a single big flu epidemic (Rydén 1941:25). But such heavy casualties are less likely from a single source.

Sirionó population: Holmberg 1969:12 (fewer than 150 during his fieldwork). Rydén (1941:21) estimated 6,000–10,000 in the late 1920s, presumably a pre-epidemic count. Today there are 600–2,000 (Balée 1999; Townsend 1996:22). Stearman (1986:8) estimated 3,000–6,000.

Stearman returns, bottleneck, abuse by army and ranchers, Holmberg’s failure to grasp: Stearman 1984; Stearman 1987; author’s interviews, Balée, Erickson, Langstroth. Holmberg (1969:8–9) noted the incidence of clubfoot and ear marks, but made little of it.

Migration of Sirionó: Interviews, Balée; Barry 1977; Priest 1980; Pärssinen 2003. A Spanish account from 1636 suggests that they had arrived only a few decades before (Métraux 1942:97), but this is not widely accepted.

First Beni research and Denevan thesis: Nordenskiöld 1979a; Denevan 1966.

Bauré culture and Erickson’s perspective: Interviews, Erickson; Erickson 1995, 2000b, 2005; Anon. 1743.

Las Casas ethnography: Casas 1992a; Wagner 1967:287–89 (publication history).

“lyve in that goulden”: Arber ed. 1885:71 (letter, Martire, P., to Charles V, 30 Sept. 1516).

“Indian wisdom”: “[W]e cannot know truth by contrivance and method; the Baconian is as false as any other, and with all the helps of machinery and the arts, the most scientific will still be the healthiest and friendliest man, and possess a more perfect Indian wisdom” (Thoreau 1906 [vol. 5]:131).

Crying Indian campaign: Krech 1999:14–16.

Indians without history: “In North America, whites are the bearers of environmental original sin, because whites alone are recognized as laboring. But whites are thus also, by the same token, the only real bearers of history. This is why our flattery…of ‘simpler’ peoples is an act of such immense condescension. For in a modern world defined by change, whites are portrayed as the only beings who make a difference” (White 1995:175). The phrase “people without history” was popularized in an ironic sense in Wolf 1997.

“unproductive waste”: Bancroft 1834–76 [vol. 1]:3–4.

Kroeber on warfare and agriculture: Kroeber 1934:10–12 (all quotes).

Conrad on Indian dyspepsia: Conrad 1923:vi.

“pagans expecting”: Morison 1974:737.

“chief function”: Trevor-Roper 1965:9. To be fair, the baron was dismissing all indigenous peoples around the world, not singling out Indians.

Fitzgerald survey: Fitzgerald 1980:89–93 (“resolutely backward,” 90; “lazy,” 91; “few paragraphs,” 93). See also, Axtell 1992.

Views have continued to appear: Examples, listed alphabetically by author, include Bailey et al. 1983:9 (the “vast and virgin continent…was so sparsely populated by Indians that they could be eliminated or shouldered aside. Such a magnificent opportunity for a great democratic experiment would never come again”), quoted in Axtell 1992:203; Bailyn et al. 1977:34 (“But the Indians’ hold upon the land was light…. No where was more than one percent of the land available for horticulture actually under cultivation”; editions of this textbook appeared, essentially unaltered, into the 1990s); Berliner 2003 (“Prior to 1492, what is now the United States was sparsely inhabited, unused, and undeveloped…. There was virtually no change, no growth for thousands of years”); Billard 1975:20 (“To a virgin continent where prairie grass waved tall as a man and vast forests perfumed the air for miles offshore came Spanish adventurer, French trapper, Dutch sailor, and doughty Englishman”); Fernández-Armesto 2001:154 (many Amazonian Indians’ lives were “unchanged for millennia” and the rainforest was “still a laboratory of specimen peoples apparently suspended by nature in a state of so-called underdevelopment”—the key word here being “suspended,” as in fixed in place, motionless); McKibben 1989:53 (Wilderness Society founder Robert Marshall concluding a currently unpopulated part of the United States was “as it existed outside human history”); Sale 1990:315–16 (“the land of North America was still by every account a lush and fertile wilderness…[which] gave off the aspect of an untouched world”); Shabecoff 1993:23 (Lewis and Clark traveling through land “unchanged by humans”); Shetler 1991:226 (“Pre-Columbian America was still the First Eden, a pristine natural kingdom. The native people were transparent in the landscape, living as natural elements of the ecosphere. Their world, the New World of Columbus, was a world of barely perceptible human disturbance”).

“For thousands”: Current, Williams, and Brinkley 1987:1. Such statements are often due less to prejudice than to European and American historians’ continuing uncertainty about how to think about non-European and non-American societies. Thus on the next page Current et al. describe Indians both as establishing some of “the world’s most dazzling cultures” and “lack[ing] some of mankind’s most basic tools and technologies” (2)—the latter state assuming, ethnocentrically, that European technologies are “basic” whereas indigenous technologies are inessential. See Chaps. 2 and 3.

New perspectives and techniques: Crosby ed. 1994 (“faint smudges,” 7).

“replaced”: Vale 1998:231.

Growth of Bering Strait theory and fight over Chilean site: See Chap. 5.

Deloria index entries: Deloria 1995:284.

Invention of agriculture: See, e.g., Lev-Yadun, Gopher, and Abbo 2000.

Neolithic Revolution: I am simplifying here. Sumerian villages were growing wheat and barley by about 6000 B.C. Around 4000 B.C. the villages became hierarchically organized towns or cities. Early forms of writing date to at least 3000 B.C. Five centuries later, the writing had become a unified system and the city of Uruk had a population of forty thousand.

“The human career”: Wright 2005:45. Sumer was the first to develop agriculture, laying the foundation for later civilizations in Egypt, Greece, India, and Mesopotamia. China apparently invented farming on its own, but borrowed mathematics, writing, art, and much else from Sumer. This last claim is fiercely debated, though, and some believe China to have been as independent of Sumer as Peru and Mesoamerica.

Maize and early American domestications, Olmec accomplishments: See Chaps. 6, 7.

“one of the greatest”: Dantzig 1967:35. I am grateful to Dick Teresi for introducing me to this terrific book.

History of zero: Kaplan 1999:11–57; Teresi 2002:22–25, 86–87, 379–82.

“bleak, frigid land”: von Hagen, V., commentary, in Cieza de León 1959:272.

Tiwanaku: See chap. 7.

Populations of Tiwanaku and Paris: Kolata 1993:204–05; Bairoch, Batou, and Chévre 1988:28. Metropolitan Paris reached a quarter million in about 1400.

Wari: See chap. 7.

Glacial evidence of dust storms: Thompson, Davis, and Mosley-Thompson 1994. More than a few archaeologists are skeptical of this evidence (Erickson, pers. comm.).

Mega-Niños: Schimmelmann, Lange, and Meggers 2003; Meggers 1994.

Climate and Tiwanaku, Wari decline: Kolata 2000; Binford et al. 1997; Thompson, Davis, and Mosley-Thompson 1994.

Little Ice Age: Lamb 1995:Chaps. 12, 13; Fagan 2001.

Maya: See Chap. 8.

Toltecs and Yucatán: Diehl 1983 (basic history); Coe 1999:165–80 (favoring invasion scenario); Schele and Mathews 1998:198–201, esp. fn. 13 (arguing against). The Schele-Mathews arguments center on disputed radiocarbon dates and interpretations of artworks’ styles that to my mind seem all but to ignore their content.

Mississippians: See Chap. 8.

Plains Indians rock rings: Teresi 2002:107–09.

Lake Superior copper: S. R. Martin 1999.

Newly discovered Acre sites: Pärssinen et al. 2003. See also Erickson 2002.

Amazon: See Chap. 9.

Early world histories: E.g., Otto I 1966; Dinawari 1986.

2 / Why Billington Survived

Massasoit, Samoset, and Tisquantum: Bradford 1981:87–88; Winslow 1963b:37, 43–59 (“tall proper men,” 53); Deetz and Deetz 2000:61–62. In quotations I have modernized the use of “f” and “v.”

Negotiations: Bradford 1981:87–89; Winslow 1963b:50–59 (“very lusty,” 57); Deetz and Deetz 2000:61–62; Kuppermann 2000:7.

“A friendly Indian”: Wood et al. 1971:73.

Tisquantum’s life: I have relied greatly on Salisbury 1989. See also Adams 1892–93 (vol. 1): 22–44; Foreman 1943:20–21; Humins 1987; Kinnicutt 1914; Shuffelton 1976.

Tisquantum, and fish fertilizer: Accounts of Squanto and fish fertilizer include Winslow 1963a:81–82 (“increase,” 82); Bradford 1981:94–95; Morton 1632:89. Skepticism about the aboriginality of fish fertilization dates back to 1939, but the question was first raised forcefully in Rostlund 1957a and then still more strongly in Ceci 1975a, 1975b, 1990b. Ceci’s conclusions were disputed (Nanepashemet 1991; Russell 1975, 1980:166–67; Warden 1975), but much of the critique boiled down to refuting the charge that the Indians were too stupid to figure out the use of fertilizer, an argument Ceci did not make. Instead Ceci suggested that the added productivity would not have been worth the added trouble, given the alternative of fallowing. Because Europeans had much less land per person and less mobility, they had to resort to fertilization. In the early 1990s Stephen A. Mrozowski, an archaeologist at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, unearthed evidence on Cape Cod suggesting that fish were used there as fertilizer a few decades before the Mayflower, but he has not yet published it (interview, Mrozowski). The fish may have been ordinary household waste, though. Incidentally, fish fertilizer was common in Peru (Denevan 2001:35–36).

Pilgrims’ lack of curiosity about Indian motives: The early chroniclers did explore Tisquantum’s motives, especially when they accused him of scheming to better his station. But they did not, in modern terms, try to put themselves in his place, which is what is at issue here. Nor did the colonists puzzle over why they never suffered a sustained attack, to judge by the lack of discussion by Bradford, Winslow et al. Here one cannot charge the colonists with special insensitivity. Compared to later historians, Pilgrim writers were more likely to see Indians as independent actors with their own beliefs and goals (Kuppermann 2000:2–4).

“Divine providence”: Gookin 1792:148.

Dissatisfied historians: For a survey of ethnohistory’s origins, see Axtell 1978.

Explosion of research: Author’s interviews, Axtell, Neal Salisbury; Chaplin 2003:esp. 1445–55 (“No other field,” 1431).

Squanto as devil: Shuffelton 1976. Tisquantum, according to a Massachusett dictionary, is a variant of musquantum, “he is angry.” When Indians had accidents, according to Roger Williams, the minister and linguist who founded Rhode Island, “they will say, God was angry and did it;musquantum manit, God is angry” (cited in Shuffelton 1976:110).

Norumbega: D’Abate 1994; Parkman 1983 (vol. 1):155. The term referred vaguely to a mythical city, the river that supposedly reached it, and the region around the river, all somewhere in the Northeast.

Patuxet population: A vexing question. Tisquantum is said to have claimed it had two thousand souls (James ed. 1963:29). According to the most widely cited colonial observer, Daniel Gookin, the Wampanoag federation, of which Patuxet was a member, “could raise, as the most credible and ancient Indians affirm, about three thousand men” (Gookin 1792:148). If the federation were able to muster three thousand adult males, then typical population estimates for the whole would be on the order of twelve to fifteen thousand. The Wampanoag had about a dozen settlements, which would suggest that Patuxet may have had a thousand inhabitants, or maybe a few more. Countering this, anthropologist Kathleen Bragdon argues the available archaeological evidence suggests that individual coastal settlements like Patuxet held “probably no more than two hundred people” (Bragdon 1996:58). I have accepted Gookin’s figure because it was apparently derived from contemporaneous Indians themselves, and because the archaeological traces, as Bragdon herself notes, are difficult to interpret.

Names and distribution of Indian groups: Most historical accounts rely on Gookin (1792:147–49), including the standard reference, Salwen (1978:160–76). See also Bragdon 1996:20–25; Russell 1980:19–29; Salisbury 1982:13–30 passim; Vaughan 1995:50–58.

Dawnland: Stewart-Smith 1998:49.

Slow movement into New England: Bragdon 1996:57–58 (salt marshes, 1000 B.C.); Wilkie and Tager eds. 1991:10–11 (maps of distribution through time of known paleo-Indian archaeological sites); Fagan 2000:101–04 (low carrying capacity of postglacial areas); Petersen 2004. On a continental scale, the New England indigenous groups were so small that one conscientious continental survey doesn’t even mention them (Fagan 1991).

Patchwork environment: Cronon 1983:19–33 (“tremendous variety,” 31).

Glottochronology: Glottochronology was invented in the 1960s by U.S. linguist Morris Swadesh, a controversial figure who spent much of his career in Mexico after his colorful political views cost him his passport during the McCarthy period. The technique was the subject of his posthumously printed magnum opus, The Origin and Diversification of Language (Swadesh ed. 1971). Glottochronology tries to ascertain how long ago two languages diverged from a common ancestor language, as French and Italian did from Latin. To accomplish this, Swadesh drew up a list of one hundred basic terms, such as “ear,” “mother,” and “vomit.” When two languages are closely related, Swadesh argued, their words for these terms will resemble each other. For example, the French and Italian for “ear” are oreille and orecchio, terms similar enough to suggest that these languages split off from each other relatively recently. On average, Swadesh claimed, the words on the Swadesh list change at a rate of 14 percent every one thousand years. Thus if two languages have similar entries for seventy-nine of the hundred words on the Swadesh list, they broke off from a common ancestor about 1,500 years ago. Unsurprisingly, Swadesh’s ideas have been criticized. Especially implausible is the notion that linguistic change occurs at a constant, universal rate. Nonetheless researchers use glottochronology, partly because of the lack of alternatives, and partly because the basic idea intuitively seems correct (Swadesh 1971, 1952; Hymes 1971, 1960:5–6).

Glottochronological analysis of Algonquian languages: Fiedel 1987; Goddard 1978; Mulholland 1985.

Diverse New England communities: This description relies on the surveys of evidence in Petersen and Cowrie 2002; Bragdon 1996:55–79 (“no name,” 58–59). Bragdon (1996:39) adopts the term “conditional sedentism” for the coastal communities (coined in Dunford 1992). For the growth of coastal communities, see Robinson 1994. In the past, some have argued that coastal Indians practiced little agriculture (Ceci 1990a), but Petersen and Cowrie assemble evidence to refute this.

Coastal diet: Little and Schoeninger 1995; Kavasch 1994.

Description of Patuxet: Author’s visit; James ed. 1963:7 (“Pleasant for air,” alewives), 75–76; Winslow 1963b:8–43; Anon. ed. 1963:xx–xxi (map of area in 1613 by Champlain). In these years big areas along the coastline had neatly planted maize fields, traces of which survived even into the twentieth century (Delabarre and Wilder 1920:210–14).

Wetus, meals, and domestic style: Morton 1637:24–26; Wood 1977:86–88, 112 (“warmer,” 112); Bragdon 1996:104–07; Gookin 1792:149–51 (“so sweet,” 150–51). “The best sort” of wetus, Gookin said, were “covered very neatly, tight, and warm, with barks of trees”—“warm as the best English houses” (150). Clearly, the homes of the wealthy in England were not leaky or drafty, but in that deforested land even the rich could not afford the plentiful fires that kept Indians warm (Higginson 1792:121–22).

2,500 calories/day: Bennett 1955:table 1; Braudel 1981–84 (vol. 1):129–45 (European calorie levels).

Indian and European views on children: Kuppermann 2000:153–56; Williams 1936:29 (spoiling); Denys 1908:404; Ariés 1962 (European views).

Games: Wood 1977:103–06.

Character, training, and pniese: Salisbury 1989:229–31; Wood 1977:91–94 (“He that speaks,” 91; “Beat them,” 93 [I have modernized “winch,” an obsolete form of “flinch”]); Winslow 1624:55–56; James ed. 1963:77; Kittredge ed. 1913:151, quoted in Axtell 1981:44.

Sachems: Wood 1977:97–99; Winslow 1624:56–60; Gookin 1792:154–55; Salisbury 1982:42–43; Dunford 2001:32–37; Johnson 1993:chap. 3. To the north, sachems were called sagamores, a distinction I am ignoring.

Population increase, attendant social change, and rise of political tensions: On the one hand, there is surprisingly little archaeological evidence for coastal agriculture (Ceci 1990a); on the other, there are multiple colonial reports that the seacoast was thick with farms. This scenario is an attempt to reconcile the apparently contradictory evidence (Bragdon 1996:146–53). See also Johnson 1993:chap. 3; Thomas 1979:24–44 (“The political scene,” 30); Metcalf 1974; and esp. Petersen and Cowrie 2002.

Indigenous warfare as less bloody: Hariot 1588:36–37; Williams 1936:188 (“farre less”); Hirsch 1988; Kuppermann 2000:106–09; Russell 1980:187–94; Vaughan 1995:37–41. One reason for the low casualties, Williams observed, was that Indians fought “with [so much] leaping and dancing, that seldome an Arrow hits.” (Evidently, the games of archery dodgem paid off.) Some activists have claimed that scalping was actually invented by white colonists. But European visitors witnessed the practice in the 1530s and 1540s, before any colonies existed north of Florida. “Hanging, disemboweling, beheading, and drawing and quartering were commonplace” in Europe, James Axtell observed, but not scalping. Each continent had its own forms of mutilation, and “it hardly seems worth arguing” which was worse (Axtell 1980:463).

Early European exploration: Some of the vast literature includes Kuppermann 1997a; Bourque and Whitehead 1994; Quinn 1974: chap. 1; Salisbury 1982:51–54; Axtell 1994:154–55 (Corte-Real).

Verrazzano as first visitor: In his popular book, 1421: The Year the Chinese Discovered America, Gavin Menzies, a British ex–naval officer, argues that in that year a huge fleet led by warrior eunuchs sailed from China to the Americas. After the fleet lost many ships to Caribbean reefs, it had to leave off “several thousand men and concubines” in Rhode Island. They were supposed to be picked up by subsequent expeditions, but the emperor who sponsored the expedition died, and his successor was not interested in globetrotting. The stranded Chinese melted into the local population. Verrazzano noted that the peoples of Rhode Island were more “beautiful” than other Indians, which to Menzies is evidence that they were not Indians. So enchanting is the image of 500-foot-long Chinese junks in New England that I am sorry to report that few researchers other than Menzies believe it (Menzies 2003:281–96 [“several thousand,” 291]).

Verrazzano’s account: Wroth ed. 1970:71–90, 133–43 (“densely populated,” 137; “little bells,” 138; “irksome clamor,” 139; “showing,” “barbarous,” 140); Axtell 1992:156–57.

Indians’ physical appearance: Gookin 1792:152–53 (“one part,” 153); Higginson 1792:123; Morton 1632:32 (“as proper”); Wood 1977:82–83 (“more amiable,” 82, “torture,” 83); Russell 1980:30–32. See also the drawings of Algonquians further south by John White (Hulton 1984). Differences between colonial and native ways of treating the body are explored in Kuppermann 2000:chap. 2 (bow string, 55–56), and Axtell 2000:154–58.

Popularity of Indian hairstyles: Kuppermann 1997b:225 (“lovelocks”); Higginson 1792:123.

Indian views of Europeans: Jaenen 2000 (weak, 76; ugly, 77; sexually untrustworthy, 83; Micmac, 85; dirty, handkerchiefs, 87); Axtell 1988; Stannard 1992:5 (Indian cleanliness). As a rule, only wealthy Europeans bathed—commoners wiped themselves with rags when they could.

Two hundred British ships: Cell 1965.

Champlain’s exploration: Biggar ed. 1922–36 (vol. 1):349–55, 397–401. See also, Salisbury 1982:62–66, and the enjoyable Parkman 1983 (vol. 1):191–93, 199.

Gorges and Maine: Gorges 1890a:204–07; Salisbury 1982:92–94. I have followed Salisbury rather than wholly accept Gorges’s account, which is confused and confusing. Unlike Plymouth colony, the Maine expedition did not land in winter with no food. It lost only two members the first winter, whereas death and illness so beset the Pilgrims that in their first few months ashore they usually had only a few functioning people.

Pring: Pring 1905:51–63.

Smith and Pocahontas: The best retelling of the Pocahontas story I have come across is Gunn Allen 2003. A similar, briefer account is Richter 2001:70–78. An enjoyable nonscholarly account of Smith and Virginia is Milton 2000.

Smith in New England, Hunt kidnaps Tisquantum: Arber and Bradley eds. 1910 (vol. 1):192–205, 256–57 (“great troupes,” “fortie,” 205); (vol. 2):697–99; Bradford 1981:89–90; Winslow 1963b:52; 1963c:70; Gorges 1890a:209–11 (“worthlesse,” 209; “warre,” 211).

French sailors killed or enslaved: Winship 1905:252 (shipwreck); Winslow 1963c:27–28 (finding body); Bradford 1981:92; Hubbard 1848:54–55; Adams 1892–93:6–10.

Billington: Bradford 1981:259–60 (hanging, “profanest”), 97 (runaway), 173–74; Bradford 1906:13 (“knave”); Winslow 1963b:31 (shooting gun in ship); Winslow 1963d:69–72 (runaway); Prince 1855:291 (contempt charge); A. C. Mann 1976; Dillon 1975:203 (“troublesome”).

Framing my ancestor: My grandfather told me that Billington was an excellent hunter and trapper. With this independent source of food, he could ignore colonial edicts. To take him down a peg, my grandfather claimed, the powers that be sent men to rob his traps. Billington caught on. He lay in wait and discovered a thief in the act. The thief shot at him. My ancestor, a much better shot, returned fire, with predictably lethal consequences. This story is unlikely but not impossible. The Billingtons were among the few families to survive the first winter intact, suggesting that John may indeed have been a fine hunter. And the Pilgrims’ contemporary reputation for ridding themselves of religiously unsympathetic people was so widespread that in 1664 the poet Samuel Butler mocked the practice in his popular satire Hudibras: “Our brethren of NEW ENGLAND use / Choice malefactors to excuse, / And hang the guiltless in their stead, / Of whom the Churches have less need” (Canto II, lines 409–12).

Actual first executions: During the catastrophic “starving time” (winter 1609–10) in Jamestown, according to colony governor George Percy, “one of our Colline murdered his [pregnant] wyfe Ripped the childe outt of her woambe and threw itt into the River and after chopped the Mother in pieces and salted her for his foode.” Percy had the man tortured and executed (Percy 1922:267). In March 1623 a man at Wessagusset, a rival Massachusetts colony, was hanged for stealing maize from an Indian family (Morton 1632:108–10; Bradford 1981:129). Bradford calls Billington’s execution “the first” in Plymouth (259), so my family can claim that our ancestor was the first person of European descent hanged in the Cape Cod area. I am arbitrarily not including the French and Spaniards in Florida who executed each other by the score in the 1560s.

No idea where they were heading: According to Bradford, their intended destination was “some place about Hudson’s River” (Bradford 1981:68), an assertion backed up by the diplomat John Cory, who surveyed Plymouth in 1622 on behalf of British investors (James ed. 1963:5–6). But they had earlier tried to obtain permission to settle in what is now New England, so some historians have argued that it is possible that they were going there. One theory is that the Dutch, who then had possession of the Hudson, bribed the Mayflower’s captain to steer them away (Morton 1669:11–12). In any case, they gave little evidence of knowing where they were going (Rutman 1960). Smith’s claims, which seem to be true, are reported in Arber and Bradley eds. 1910 (vol. 2):891–92.

Pilgrim incompetence: Most of this catalog of error is lifted from Bates 1940:112–13.

Half the Pilgrims died: Accompanied by about 30 crew members, 102 people set sail. One died en route, but a child was born before landfall, the wonderfully named Oceanus Hopkins, making the party 102 again. Of these, 44 died before spring. Among them was Bradford’s wife, Dorothy, thought to have drowned herself by leaping off the Mayflower rather than face the unknown continent (Deetz and Deetz 2000:39, 59–60).

Robbing Indian graves and houses: Bradford 1981:73–75; Winslow 1963b:19–29 (“providence,” 26). Later the Pilgrims did try to compensate the Indians for the theft (Winslow 1963c:61–62).

English vs. continental financing for colonies, British colonists’ flakiness and helplessness: Kuppermann 2000:3–4, 11–15, 148 (“utterly,” 13); Cell 1965.

Inability to understand climate: The confusion is especially surprising given that a number of British visitors had kept careful track of the weather (e.g., Anon. 1979).

Time of drought: Stahle et al. 1998.

Thoreau’s disdain: Thoreau 1906 (vol. 4):295–300 (“A party,” 300).

Tisquantum’s travels in New England: Baxter 1890:103–10 (“appears to,” 106); Gorges 1890a:212–25; 1890b:26–30; Dermer 1619 (“void,” 131). The line from The Tempest is in act 2, scene 2.

“Indians themselves”: Panzer 1995:118–19 (text of Sublimis Deus, Paul III).

Slany: Cell 1965:615.

Epidemic: Morton 1637:22–24 (“died,” 23; “Golgotha,” 23); Hubbard 1848:54–55 (French sailor’s curse); Spiess and Spiess 1987; Snow 1980:31–42; Snow and Lanphear 1988. Salisbury (1982:103–05) suggests that the disease was the plague, but Snow and Lanphear point out that this requires a chain of transmission that would have trouble getting established. According to John Smith, “where I had seene 100 or 200 Salvages [in 1614], there is scarce ten to be found [in 1620]” (Arber and Bradley eds. 1910 [vol. 2]:259). The Pilgrims may have seen evidence of the original disease carrier. One of the corpses they exhumed on Cape Cod had blond hair and was buried in a wrap of sailor’s canvas (Winslow 1963b:27–28).

“The idea”: Gunn Allen 2003:30.

Mather’s experiment: Mather 1820 (vol. 1):507.

Wampanoag spiritual and political crises: Salisbury 1989:235–38 (“their deities,” 236).

Plymouth and more than fifty villages: Pyne 1982:45–48; Cronon 1983:90.

Bradford and Gorges quotes: Anon. 1792:246 (attrib. to Bradford); Gorges, 1890b:77. From today’s point of view, these opinions were both unfortunately sanguine and unfortunately common. Viz., John Winthrop, first governor of the rival colony in Massachusetts Bay, describing in May 1634 the legal implications of the loss of many natives to smallpox: “The Lord hathe cleared our title to what we possess” (Winthrop 1976:116); or Cotton Mather calmly explaining that the land had been swept free “of those pernicious creatures [Indians], to make room for better growth [Europeans]” (quoted in C. F. Adams 1892–93 [vol. 1]:12).

“Could make [the] English”: Pratt 1858:485.

“He thinks we may”: Winslow 1963b:58.

Indians and guns: Chaplin 2001:111–12; Percy 1905–07:414 (all Jamestown quotes).

Indian technology: Rosier 1605:21 (canoes); Kuppermann 2000:166–68 (shoes); Bourque and Whitehead 1994:136–42 (Indian shallops). To some readers, the notion that European technology did not determine the outcome of the culture clash may seem absurd. Compare, though, the difference between the colonial histories of the Americas and Africa. The indigenous inhabitants of both places had technology that is often described as wildly inferior. And both places were the target of sustained colonial enterprises by the same nations. In the Americas, though, the Indians were rapidly defeated. “The Indians die so easily that the bare look and smell of a Spaniard causes them to give up the ghost,” a missionary commented in 1699 (quoted in Crosby 2003b:37). Yet the majority of Africa—which had, if anything, an even more “inferior” technological base—did not fall until the late nineteenth century. Technology was not a dominant factor.

Massasoit’s negotiations: Winslow 1963b:43–59; Deetz and Deetz 2000:61–62.

Tisquantum’s machinations, death: Bradford 1981:108–09 (“came running,” “and he thought,” “all was quiet”), 125–26 (Tisquantum’s death); Morton 1637:103–05; Winslow 1963a:82 (thanksgiving); Humins 1987; Salisbury 1989; Shuffelton 1976.

Massasoit’s son and war in 1675: The best short account I have encountered is the first section of Schultz and Tougias 1999. See also Richter 2001:90–109; Vaughan 1995:308–22; Salisbury 1982:Chap. 7.

1633 epidemic: Snow and Lanphear 1998.

3 / In the Land of Four Quarters

Pizarro’s body: Maples and Browning 1994:213–19.

Ezell thesis: Ezell 1961.

Dobyns in Peru and Mexico: Interviews, Dobyns; Dobyns 2004.

Prescott as first full history: As opposed to colonial-era accounts.

Politicization of Andean studies: Beyers 2001. Among the better known examples (and actually a pretty good book) is Baudin 1961.

Dobyns’s 1963 article: Dobyns 1963.

Comparison of Inka realm to other states in 1491: Fernández-Armesto 2001:390–402 (“imperial potential,” 395).

Inka realm as empire: Peruvian historian María Rostworowski de Diez Canseco has argued that because the term “empire” has “Old World connotations”—it implies a sophisticated center that dominates “barbarians” on the periphery, as was the case for Rome—it should not be applied to the Inka, who overran societies bigger and more cosmopolitan than themselves (Rostworowski de Diez Canseco 1999:x). Although one can see what she means, the word is now used loosely to describe a situation in which “a core polity gains control over a range of other societies” (D’Altroy 2002:6). And the Inka did exactly that.

Inka goals, methods: “The Inkas were coolly pragmatic, efficient, and totalitarian in their policies toward conquered nations, [attempting to impose] a restrictive area wide standardization of politics, religion, customs, and language…. They maintained order by instilling fear and using force rather than by encouraging knowledgeable participation” (Dobyns and Doughty 1976:48–49).

Inka road system: Hyslop 1984:esp. 215–24, 342–43. The network appears to have been planned carefully (Jenkins 2001:655–87).

“not with the Wars”: Rowe 1946:329.

“where millions”: Quoted in Lechtman 1996a:15. My next sentence is a revamped version of Lechtman’s sentence following the quotation.

Steepest street: Filbert Street. I am grateful to Wade Roush for checking this comparison.

“a wide range”: Diamond 1997:140.

20 of 34 life zones: Burger 1992:12. Only 2 percent of Peru is today considered suitable for agriculture (ibid.).

“vertical archipelagoes”: Murra 1967.

Inka origin accounts: Cobo 1979:103–07 (“extreme ignorance,” 20; “ridiculous,” 103).

Betanzos: Betanzos 1996 (“thirty small,” 13; “two hundred,” 19). For a discussion of his value as a source, see Fossa 2000.

Inkas vs. Chankas, Wiraqocha Inka vs. Inka Yupanki: Betanzos 1996:19–43 (“To this,” 33; “crazy impulse,” 36); Cieza de León 1998:317 (Pizarro sees skins); Cobo 1979:130–33 (“valiant prince,” 130); Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamayhua 1879:270–73; D’Altroy 2002:62–65; Rostworowski de Diez Canseco 2001:78–119; Santa 1963. Three of the fifteen Spanish accounts of Inka history claim that Wiraqocha Inka, not Inka Yupanki, fought the Chankas and then his father. Among them is Cobo, who confusingly attributes what seem to be the same events to both. Rostworowski de Diez Canseco (1999:28–34) convincingly argues against Wiraqocha. Pachakuti literally means “he who remakes the world” or “he who turns over time and space,” but I have followed Michael Moseley in an attempt to suggest how the name might have struck Inka ears (Moseley 2001:14).

Inka chronology: John H. Rowe laid out the timeline of the empire in an influential article (Rowe 1946:203). Rowe relied on the calculation in a manuscript from 1586, still not published in its entirety, by Father Miguel Cabello Balboa (Cabello Balboa 1920). A Swedish historian, Åke Wedin, fiercely criticized Rowe’s use of this and other sources (Wedin 1963, 1966). An insurmountable problem with the accounts, Wedin insisted, was that they were not drawn from interviews with the elite record keepers who actually kept track of events. The implication was that most other Indians were as reliably informed about their society’s history as, say, average U.S. citizens are about their society’s history. Since Wedin’s work historians have come to place a little more trust in Spanish chronicles, which although not taken from record keepers tended to be drawn from interviews with the educated elite. In addition, radiocarbon dating seems generally to support the chronology (Michczynski and Adamska 1997). Rowe’s chronology is now typically viewed as roughly correct, though subject to debate.

Fall of Chincha: Castro and Ortega Morejón 1974:91–104 (“son of the Sun,” 93; “Everything,” 95). My thanks to Robert Crease for obtaining this article for me. See also Santillán 1879:14; Sarmiento de Gamboa 2000:113–14, 135 (brother left in command). As Sarmiento de Gamboa notes, Chincha was a minor incident in a much larger campaign against the bigger polity of Chimor (see Chap. 6). The rising claim on local labor both reflected a deliberate strategy by the Inka state of gradually increasing control and a rise in labor demand in the Inka state itself (Morris 1993:36–50).

Luttwak’s book: Luttwak 1976.

Inka as hegemonic empire: D’Altroy 1987; Hassig 1985.

Austere, contemporary feel of Inka art and architecture: Paternosto 1996:219–22 (influence on twentieth-century art); Thomson 2003:60–62, 86–87, 246–49.

Qosqo and Awkaypata: Rowe 1991, 1990. I thank Patricia Lyon for sending me a copy of these articles. Descriptions of the structures are in Sarmiento de Gamboa 2000:85–91.

“point of a pin”: Pizarro 1969:272–73. He was describing Saqsawaman fortress, at the edge of town, but the same is true of the structures in central Qosqo. Sancho was similarly impressed (Sancho 1917:156–57). One viceroy wrote in 1571 that an Inka fortress was “the work of the devil…for it does not seem possible that the strength and skill of men could have made it” (quoted in Wright 2005:57).

Zeq’e and Wak’a: D’Altroy 2002:155–67 (“otherwise diligent,” 156 [D’Altroy closed his remark by wryly noting “(see below)”]). He relied on Bauer 1998, which I have also done. The classic colonial account is from Cobo 1990:51–84 (“more than a thousand,” 9). But as a Booknewsreviewer dryly noted, Cobo “based his account of [Inka] religion almost entirely on previous literature (his employer having eradicated his subject).”

Calendar: The Inka calendar and their means of reckoning time were so complex that I have basically ducked and avoided them. See instead Aveni 1995:278–304.

Inka economics and labor system: Cobo 1979:189–93, 211–34; La Lone 1982:312–36; Murra 1980; Rostworowski de Diez Canseco 2001:182–201; D’Altroy 2002:263–86.

Absence of money in Europe: Braudel 1981–84 (vol. 1):467–68.

“managed to eradicate”: Vargas Llosa 1992:26.

Population reshuffling: Cieza de León 1959:59–63; Cobo 1979:189–93; D’Altroy 2002:248–49; Rowe 1946:269–70.

Disproportionate size of conquest: The contrast between the tiny Spanish force and the vast Inka empire was noted as early as 1534, in the first narrative of the conquest, Verdadera relación de la conquista del Perú, by Francisco de Xerez. “When in ancient times have such few [triumphed] against so many?” he crowed. “And who has equaled those of Spain? Certainly not the Jews nor the Greeks nor Romans, about whom most is told.” Although the Romans subjugated many lands, Jerez said, “it was with equal or greater numbers of people, in known territories, provided with the usual sustenance, and with paid captains and armies. But our Spaniards…were never more than two or three hundred, sometimes a hundred or even less…. And the many times they traveled, they were neither paid nor forced but went of their own will and at their own cost” (Xerez 1938:16–17).

Inka “crown” and clothes, saving of waste: Pizarro 1969:222–26 (clothing and headband); Cobo 1979:244–47; Ruiz de Arce 1933:361 (spittle), cited in Hemming 2004:51; Rowe 1946:258–59.

Thupa Inka’s grandeur, military career: Sarmiento de Gamboa 2000:112–19, 122–23 (“worshiped and adored,” 112); D’Altroy 2002:67–74. The description of the litter is from Thupa Inka’s successor, but seems to apply in general (Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamayhua 1879:79).

Thupa Inka’s marriage(s): Betanzos 1996:119–20; Cobo 1979:142; D’Altroy 2002:103–06. As Rowe notes, multiple sister-marriages were embedded in Inka culture—the leader of the four brothers who arrived in Qosqo married his four sisters (Rowe 1946:317–18). In addition, Andean societies traditionally recognized that a man owed obligations to his sister’s son. By ensuring that his nephew was also his son, the Inka tried to reduce the potential for intrafamilial conflict (Rostworowski de Diez Canseco 2001:103–04).

Troubled accession of Wayna Qhapaq: Sarmiento de Gamboa 2000:133–38; Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamayhua 1879:293–97; Rostworowski de Diez Canseco 2001:104–05. According to one report, Wayna Qhapaq was sixteen (Anello Oliva 1998:77). See also, Peñaherrera de Costales and Costales Samienego 1964.

Makework projects: Cieza de León 1959:77 (“mountain”), 137–38.

Ecuador campaign: Cobo 1979:155–60 (“commanded,” 155, “prepared himself,” 156); Betanzos 1996:182–83; Cieza de León 1959:46–50, 77–78; Cabello Balboa 1920:84–108; Niles 1999:97–105. Betanzos, but not Cobo, mentions Atawallpa’s disgrace; Cobo, but not Betanzos, describes Wayna Qhapaq’s discomfiture; omissions are consonant with the chroniclers’ biases.

“When his captains”: Pizarro 1969:198–99, 228 (vampire-bat wool).

Wayna Qhapaq’s death, succession battle: Cieza de León 1959:78–87; 1998:187–93; Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamayhua 1879:309–24; Sarmiento de Gamboa 2000:144–60; Cabello Balboa 1920:113–21, 128–72; Anello Oliva 1998:87–92. A clear summary is D’Altroy 2002:76–83; see also, Rostworowski de Diez Canseco 2001:110–25. Betanzos’s narrative, though useful, is understandably biased; his wife was Atawallpa’s sister (Betanzos 1996:183–234). Pedro Pizarro’s version of events interestingly highlights the internal politics of Qosqo (Pizarro 1969:198–206). Garcilaso de la Vega says that Wayna Qhapaq’s death followed omens and prophecies of the collapse of the empire, which seems unlikely. If true, though, it may account for a certain fatalism toward the Spanish among the Inka elite (Gheerbrant ed. 1962:284–89). He also suggests that the war occurred after Wayna Qhapaq split up Tawantinsuyu in a Lear-like fashion, giving Atawallpa a rump kingdom to the north. Most ethnographers and historians disagree. Garcilaso’s description of the war itself as consisting in essence of a single big engagement outside Qosqo is at variance with other accounts.

Washkar’s marriage and his mother’s marriage: Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamayhua 1879:308; Cabello Balboa 1920:120–21 (“begging,” 121).

Cieza de León casualty estimates: Cieza de León 1959:84 (16,000), 87 (35,000).

Skull cup: “I saw the head with the skin, the dried flesh, and its hair, and it had the teeth closed, and between them was a silver straw, and attached to the top of the head was a gold cup [with a hole in the bottom that entered the skull], from which he drank when memories of [Atawallpa’s] war against his brother came to mind; he put chicha in the cup, from which it came out through the mouth, and he drank through the straw” (Mena 1930:250–53). The cup is also mentioned in Cieza de León 1959:84.

Pizarro and Atawallpa at Cajamarca: I draw mainly on Hemming 2004:30–85. See also, Sancho 1917:9–19; Mena 1930:231–81; Pizarro 1969:171–221 (“made water,” 179–80); Ruiz de Arce 1933:363 (“mounds”), cited in Hemming 2004:42.

Spaniards and gold: Restall 2003:22–23 (“nonperishable,” 23), 34–37, 65–67.

“What could,” “No amount”: Hemming 2004:115, 158. See also the vigorously argued Guilmartin 1991.

Marveling at failure to develop steel: “It is worthy of remark, that…the Peruvians, in their progress towards civilization, should never have detected the use of iron, which lay around them in abundance” (Prescott 2000:810).

Andean metallurgy: Burger and Gordon 1998; Lechtman 1996b (“hardness,” 35; “plasticity,” 37); 1993 (“eminent scholar,” 253); 1984.

Different contexts of technology: Interviews, Lechtman (“people solved”), Conklin, Leonard Morse-Fortier (force of sling projectiles); Ihde 2000.

Inka ships: Cieza de León 1998: 75–76; Heyerdahl 1996; Hemming 2004:25; Prescott 2000:854–55; interview, Vranich (replica boat created for documentary). See the account of the new ship at http://www.reedboat.org.

“without endangering themselves”: Sancho 1917:62.

Importance and fineness of textiles in Tawantinsuyu: Murra 1964 (stripping soldiers, 718); Lechtman 1993:254–59 (five hundred threads per inch, 257). “The [cotton] clothes they made were so fine that we [Spaniards] thought they were made of silk, worked with figures of beaten gold, beautifully made” (Mena 1930:225).

Cloth armor: Lechtman 1993:256; Murra 1964:718 (stripping of soldiers); Rowe 1946:274–75; Montell 1929:Fig. 21.

“with such force”: Enríquez de Guzmán 1862:99.

Inka rebellion with flaming missiles: Hemming 2004:193–94; Prescott 2000:1021–23.

Inka armies and horses: Hemming 2004 (“Even when,” 111–12; “dreaded,” 158).

Inka roads and horses: Letter, Pizarro, H., to Oidores of Santo Domingo, 23 Nov. 1533, quoted in Hemming 2004:31 (“so bad”); Prescott 2000:954. On one steep road “all made of steps of very small stones,” Pedro Sancho wrote, Pizarro’s “horses toiled so much that, when they had finished going up, the greater part of them had lost their shoes and worn down the hoofs of all four feet” (Sancho 1917:63).

Inka military techniques: Sancho 1917:67; Hemming 2004:195 (bolas); Prescott 2000:922, 984.

Historians ignore disease: Interviews, Crosby, Denevan, Dobyns. According to Dobyns, “the published works focused on New World historic epidemiology could be counted on the fingers of one hand” at that time (Dobyns 1995). Actually, Dobyns’s own count is eighteen articles prior to 1964. Still, most researchers in the field did not “seem to be paying much attention” (ibid.), e.g., the claim that “not until 1720 did any great losses through pestilence occur in Peru” (Kubler 1946:336). Peruvian researchers noted the epidemics (Patrón 1894 [proposing that Wayna Qhapaq died of bartonellosis, not smallpox]), but others were like U.S. researchers in failing to grasp the impact of disease (Vellard 1956). I am grateful to Robert Crease for helping me obtain a copy of this last article.

Cieza de León: Cook and Cook 1998 (bio); Cieza de León 1959:52 (“great plague”).

Elite losses to smallpox: Sarmiento de Gamboa 2000:144–45; Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamayhua 1879:307 (“scabs,” “millions”); Murúa 1962–64 (vol. 1):136 (“infinite”), quoted in Crosby 2003b:53; Pizarro 1969:196–97; Cobo 1979:160; Poma de Ayala 2001:114, 141, 288; Hopkins 1983:208–11. For a dissenting view, see McCaa, Nimlos, and Hampe-Martínez 2004.

Evolution of smallpox: Baxby 1981; Gubser and Smith 2002.

“virgin soil”: Crosby 1976.

India smallpox study: Rao 1972:37, cited in Fenn 2001:21.

“may well have been halved”: Dobyns 1963:497.

Thucydides’ account of epidemic: Thucydides 1934:109–14.

Not in a European language: Crosby 2003b:xxii.

Royal mummies: Pizarro 1969:202–04, 251–54 (“the greater part,” 203); Estete, M.d., untitled narrative of journey to Pachacamac, quoted in Hemming 2004:127 (“seated”); Sancho 1917:159, 170, 195, 200; Rowe 1946:308; D’Altroy 2002:96–99, 141–42. Sarmiento de Gamboa matter-of-factly describes Inka methods of storing bodies after death, though he only uses the word “mummy” once (Sarmiento de Gamboa 2000:120–23, 135–36, 145–46).

Burning of Thupa Inka: Sarmiento de Gamboa 2000:121, 159; Betanzos 1996:74–79; D’Altroy 2002:108.

Atawallpa execution: Rowe 1997. I thank Patricia Lyon for sending me this article.

“win the land”: Pizarro 1969:199. See also, Sancho 1917:171–72; Wright 1992:72–75.

European failures without epidemics, factions: Restall 2003:70–72 (Mexico, Florida); Hemming 1978:69–84 (Brazil); White 1991: esp. Chap. 4 (France).

Additional smallpox epidemics: Hopkins 1983:212–13 (“They died by scores,” quoted on 213).

Typhus, flu, etc., 90 percent death toll: Dobyns 1963. Dobyns’s argument was supported almost two decades later in Noble David Cook’s book-length survey, which argued that six main epidemics hit Tawantinsuyu between 1524 and 1614, reducing the population by an estimated 93 percent (N. D. Cook 1981).

Smallpox in Hispaniola: The first evidence of smallpox’s arrival is in a letter of 10 January 1519 by the Hieronymite Fathers, then entrusted with ruling Hispaniola. At the time, the disease had killed a third of the island’s inhabitants and spread to Puerto Rico (Henige 1986:17–19). Smallpox may not have been the first Caribbean epidemic. Francisco Guerra, a medical historian at the Universidad de Alcalá de Henares, in Spain, makes a strong case for a swine influenza epidemic in 1493 that “was responsible for the disappearance of the American Indians in the Antilles” (Guerra 1988:305). Noble David Cook suggests the epidemic was smallpox (N. D. Cook 2003).

Smallpox hits Mexico: The evidence is examined carefully in McCaa 1995. See also, Hopkins 1983:204–08 and the sources in Chap. 4.

“Debated since”: Denevan ed. 1976:xvii. Denevan was far from alone in his interest. At about the same time, for instance, Wilbur Jacobs, a historian at the University of California in Santa Barbara, described the puzzle of native numbers as “truly one of the most fascinating number games in history” (Jacobs 1974:123).

Mooney: Mooney 1928; Ubelaker 1976, 1988. Mooney’s article was posthumous.

Kroeber’s estimates: Kroeber 1934 (“sharply localized,” 25); 1939:31, 134, 166. Greenland is included in Kroeber’s population density figure, lowering it somewhat.

Sauer, Cook, and Borah: Among their many works are Sauer 1935; Cook and Simpson 1948; Borah and Cook 1964; Cook and Borah 1963, 1979. See also, Denevan 1996c.

“Historians and anthropologists”: Dobyns 1995.

World population in 1500: United Nations Population Division 1999:5.

“greatest destruction”: Lovell 1992:426. See also, Crosby 1986:208–09; Porter 1998:163; Jacobs 1974:128.

Dobyns’s 1966 article, Denevan’s book: Dobyns 1966; Denevan 1976.

Dobyns’s ideas attacked: Author’s interviews, Dobyns, Russell Thornton, Shepard Krech. See also Thornton 1987:34–36; Krech 1999:83–84; Henige 1998, 1990, 1978b.

Dobyns revises figures: Dobyns 1983:42. The new figure was for North America only.

Henige bio, critiques: Interview, Henige; Henige 1998 (bio, 4–5; “Suspect,” 314); 1978b (Hispaniola); Osborne 1998.

“You always hear”: Interview and email, Stiffarm. The unconscious persistence of the view that before Columbus the Americas were uninhabited, or almost so, is amazing. As late as 1986 Bernard Bailyn, past president of the American Historical Society, published a book called The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction (Bailyn 1986). The book is about British immigration. But the title also suggests that before Europeans the land was not peopled. Indeed, Indians are almost not to be found in the text.

“crater”: Interview, Wilson; Wilson 1999.

4 / Frequently Asked Questions

De Soto: Duncan 1995; Mena 1930:264–66 (Challcochima). De Soto, Hemming observed, was “as brutal as any other conquistador. He [led] the force that raped the mamaconas [nuns, more or less] of Cajas during the march toward Cajamarca. His reputation among some modern writers of being more humane than his companions is undeserved” (Hemming 2004:555).

De Soto expedition: The numbers of men and animals differ somewhat in different accounts. I use Ramenofsky 1987:59. The basic sources are “Gentleman of Elvas” 1922 and its apparent predecessor, Fernández de Biedma 1922. These and other documents are collected in Clayton, Knight, and Moore eds. 1993. The state of scholarly knowledge is assayed in Galloway ed. 1997. Popular accounts include Wilson 1999:134–37; Morgan 1993:72–75; Parkman 1983 (vol. 1):28–31.

Hudson’s reconstruction of route: Interview, Hudson; Hudson 1993. For a fierce debate on the reliability of these reconstructions, see Henige 1993; Hudson, DePratter, and Smith 1993; Hudson et al. 1994.

De Soto’s passage over Mississippi: “Gentleman of Elvas” 1922 (vol. 1):112–17 (all quotes, 113); Fernández de Biedma 1922 (vol. 2):25–28. See also Rollings 1995:39–40.

La Salle expedition: Parkman 1983 (vol. 1):920–30.

Contrast between De Soto and La Salle’s experiences: Author’s interviews, Galloway, Hudson, Ramenofsky; Ramenofsky 1987:55–63; Burnett and Murray 1993:228.

Pigs as source for epidemic: Ramenofsky and Galloway 1997:271–73; Crosby 1986:172–76, 212–13 (suggesting epidemic disease may also have come before De Soto), 273; Crosby 2003b:77 (importance of pigs to Spanish).

Indian lack of domesticated animals, lactose intolerance: Crosby 1986:19, 27; Ridley 2000:192–94. Francisco Guerra notes that the Philippines did not experience epidemics from colonization, though its inhabitants were as isolated as Indians. The critical difference, he suggests, was the existence of domesticated animals, especially pigs, in the Philippines (Guerra 1988:323).

Caddo and Coosa: Perttula 1993, 1991:512–14; M. T. Smith 1994:264–65; M. T. Smith 1987.

Mass graves in the Southeast: M. T. Smith 1987:60–68.

1918 flu epidemic: Crosby 2003a.

Plague origin, losses: Epidemiologists increasingly question whether the Black Death was bubonic plague. Rats and fleas carry bubonic plague, but the Black Death spread faster—and over colder land—than these animals usually travel. And Y. pestis has never been shown to be as contagious as the Black Death. The epidemic may instead have been of a hemorrhagic fever like Ebola (Scott and Duncan 2001). I am grateful to David Henige for drawing this discussion to my attention. For losses, see, e.g., Wrigley 1969:63.

Population nadir: Ubelaker 1992:169–76, table 3. The 1890 U.S. census listed the Native American population as 237,000 (United States Bureau of the Census 1937:3, table 2). But it is widely believed that the Census Bureau undercounted, both because it did not accurately survey many native areas and because its definition of “Indian” was too restrictive. Most demographers double the reported number.

Zambardino critique: Zambardino 1980 (“the errors multiply,” 8; “meaningful,” 18).

“no better than”: Crosby 1992:175.

Skepticism: Interviews, Ubelaker, Snow; Snow 1995 (“no support,” 1604); 1992; Snow and Lanphear 1988. I believe David Henige coined “Low Counter” and “High Counter.”

Historians’ reluctance: Calloway 2003:415–16 (“boggle,” 415); McNeill 1998:19–23.

1967 measles epidemic: Interviews, Napoleon Chagnon, Thomas Headland, Francis Black, Patrick Tierney; Neel et al. 1970; Neel 1977:155–68. The epidemic became the subject of controversy when U.S. journalist Patrick Tierney accused Neel and his anthropologist coauthor, Chagnon, of exacerbating and perhaps even causing it in the course of an unethical experiment on the effects of vaccination (Tierney 2000). After a furor, researchers generally agreed that the likelihood that Neel and Chagnon had spread measles was negligible (Mann 2000a, 2001; Neel et al. 2001); as the main text indicates, the epidemic apparently originated with the Tootobi missionaries (Headland 2000). The Yanomamo are also known as Yanomami, Yanoama, and Yanomamö, the different terms coming from different dialects.

Distribution of blood types: Crosby 2003b:22–30. For a more complete explanation, see Crawford 1998:95–101.

Relative lack of genetic disease: Author’s interviews, Black, Crosby, Dobyns (cystic fibrosis, Huntington’s chorea); Black 2004:155 (asthma and autoimmune diseases); Hurtado, Hurtado, and Hill 2004:185 (diabetes). Dobyns stressed that the evidence is weak. Because Europeans recorded “things like the lack of beggars and madmen in city streets,” he told me, “you can assemble a sketchy picture” of societies with little genetic disease. “But as Henige would say,” Dobyns remarked of his fiercest critic, “it’s an argument from silence.”

Black and HLA types: Author’s interviews, Black, Stephen S. Hall; Black 1992, 1994, 2004; Crawford 1998:131–34. HLA classes are succinctly explained in Hall 1997:368–69. My thanks to Steve Hall for walking me through this material.

“Europeans’ capacity”: Jennings 1975:22.

Russian fur trade: Standard histories include Fisher 1943; Lincoln 1994.

1768–69 epidemic: Bril 1988:238 (“No one knows”); Samwell 1967:1252–59 (“Ruins,” 1252); Sauer 1802:306–08. Sauer’s death tally of 5,368 is identical to that of the writer William Coxe (Coxe 1780:5) and reasonably congruent with the estimate that “three fourths” of the populace died by French consul Jean Baptiste Barthelemy Lesseps, who was traveling in Kamchatka at the time (Lesseps 1790:128–29 [“three fourths,” 128]). I am grateful to Elizabeth Fenn for providing me with her notes on these references, from which I have taken the material from Lessep and Sauer.

“As soon as”: Füch 1988:169–70. Again I thank Prof. Fenn.

Helper-T cell hypothesis: Hurtado, Hurtado and Hill 2004.

Revolutionary War epidemic: Interviews, Fenn; Fenn 2001 (start of Boston epidemic, 46; ten to thirty a day, 47; one day before the Declaration, 53–54; “Ethiopian regiment,” 57–61; Quebec, 62–71; Adams, 79).

Mexico City epidemic: Calloway 2003:417–19 (“It seems likely,” 561); Fenn 2001:138–40 (Fenn suggests that a third epidemic, which moved west from New Orleans, may have “collided” with the Mexico City epidemic in the Southwest).

Hopi-Nermernuh-Shoshone-Blackfoot connection: Thompson 1916:318–25, 336–38 (“with our sharp,” 336–37); Calloway 2003:419–21 (Sioux, 421); Fenn 2001:211–22. See also, Ewers 1973. “Blackfoot” usually refers to groups in Canada; “Blackfeet,” to those in the United States.

“winter counts”: Sundstrom 1997; Calloway 2003:424. In Sundstrom’s survey of winter counts, all but one of the fifteen that cover 1780–82 characterized at least one of the years with the symbol for an epidemic, though some called it measles instead of smallpox (many groups initially did not distinguish them). Plains Indians defined a year as the period between the first snowfall of one winter and the first snowfall of the next, so it was not the same as a European year.

Pox in Northwest: Calloway 2003:421–23; Fenn 2001:224–32 (“great preponderance,” 227), 250–58; Harris 1994; Boyd 1999:esp. 21–39.

Vancouver expedition: Vancouver 1984 (vol. 2):516–40 and passim (“promiscuously scattered,” 516); Puget 1939:198 (“pitted”).

Quarantine: Braudel 1981–84 (vol. 1):86–87; Salisbury 1982:106 (“could only”); Cronon 1983:88.

Wider impact of epidemics: Crosby 1992; Calloway 2003:419–26; Stannard 1991:532–33; Thornton 1987; Hopkins 1994:48 (“my people”); Salisbury 1982: 105–06.

Death of Hawaiian king and queen: Kuykendall 1947:76–81.

Montreal peace negotiations: Havard 2001:49, 65 (Haudenosaunee losses), 130–02 (epidemic and Kondiaronk’s death).

Former captives: Haudenosaunee Brandão 1997:72–81.

Fates of Cree, Shoshone, Omaha: Calloway 2003:422–26 (“The country,” 422). See also, Campbell 2003.

1524 meeting: Sahagún 1980; Klor de Alva 1990. See also, Motolinía 1950:37–38, 174–86 (de Valencia’s life).

“bishops and pampered prelates”: Prescott 2000:637.

Franciscan-Mexica debate: Sahagún 1980:lines 109, 115, 117, 217–18, 223–29, 235–37, 759–63, 1054 (“gods were not powerful,” 54 [summary]). See also, León-Portilla 1963:62–70.

Teotihuacan and its influence: Often-cited works include Cowgill 1997; Carrasco, Jones, and Sessions eds. 2000; Berlo ed. 1993.

Mexica arrival date: Smith 1984.

Tezozómoc’s account: Quoted in Sullivan and Knab eds., trans. 1994:98–100.

Tlacaelel: Chimalpahin Quauhtlehuanitzin 1997 (vol. 1):41–53, 135–45; (vol. 2):33–37, 89, 109; León-Portilla 1992a:xxxvii–xli (“It is not fitting,” xxxviii); 1963:158–66. As Chimalpahin put it, Tlacaelel “was the instigator, the originator, through wars [of the system] by which he made the great city of México Tenochtitlan eminent and exalted” (35; trans. slightly altered for readability).

“In this Sun”: Anon. 1994:66. Experts dispute the verse structure in all these poems.

“tortillas”: Durán 1994:231.

“moral combat”: León-Portilla 1963:216.

Cortés on sacrifice: Cortés 1986:35–36 (both quotes). See also, Durán 1994:406 (excitedly, raising the toll to “2,000, 3,000, 5,000, or 8,000 men” a day on special occasions).

Denial of sacrifice: Hassler 1992; Moctezuma and Solis Olguín 2003 (indigenous images of sacrifice). The anthropologist Michael Harner argued (1977) that the human sacrifice and cannibalism of the Mexica were “natural and rational,” “the only possible solution” (both 132) to supply protein to a dense population with no domesticated animals. But the Mexica lived on a lake with abundant fish and aquatic life and also obliged conquered peoples to ship them food (Ortiz de Montellano 1978). See also, Graulich 2000.

European executions: Braudel 1981–84 (vol. 2):516–18 (Tyburn, “the corpses,” 518); Pepys 1970 (vol. 5):21 Jan 1664 (“at least”).

English executions, population: Gatrell 1994:6–15; Wrigley 1983:121.

Nahuatl corpus: Frances Karttunen, pers. comm.

Tlamatinime: León-Portilla 1963:9–24, 62–81, 136 (quotes, 12–13).

Nezahualcóyotl poems on mortality: Peñafield 1904, quoted in Sullivan and Knab eds. 1994:163 (“Truly”—I slightly altered the first line to scan better); León-Portilla 1963:6 (“Do flowers”); 1992:81 (“Like a painting”); Nabokov 1989:19 (“brief crack”).

Nahuatl rhetoric: Author’s interviews, Karttunen; Garibay 1970:115.

Art and truth: León-Portilla 1963:71–79 (“nothing is ‘true,’” 73; “He goes,” 75; “From whence,” 77).

Northwest Coast art: Jonaitis 1991:chaps. 1, 8.

Spanish reactions to Tenochtitlán: Díaz de Castillo 1975:214–19; Cortés 1986:102–12 (“can there,” 108–09; “obliterate,” 88).

Conquest of alliance and disease’s role: Thomas 1995. Crosby (1986:200) calls Cortés’s victory “a triumph of the [smallpox] virus.” 143 Postconquest population decline: Borah 1976; Borah and Cook 1964; Cook and Borah 1963 (25.2 million, 88); Borah 1951; Cook and Simpson 1948. For postconquest epidemics in Mexico and New Spain, see the thorough discussions in Prem 1992; N. D. Cook and Lovell 1992; the other articles in N. D. Cook and Lovell eds. 1992; Malvido 1973. Cook and Borah’s estimate was a best guess; more confidently, they argued that the precontact population was between eighteen and thirty million.

“We, Christians”: Cieza de León 1959:62.

Holocaust and moral capital: Examples include Thornton 1987; Stannard 1992; Churchill 1997. To be clear: Many of the books and articles that employ the term “holocaust,” such as Russell Thornton’s American Indian Holocaust and Survival (1987), are careful works of scholarship. But their authors wish also to make a political point, one that in their view flows directly from their research. Sensitive to language, they have selected a charged term to convey that point. For discussions of the moral capital that is the reward of mass victimhood, see Stannard 2001; Alexander 1994:esp. 195.

“Very probably”: Katz 1994 (vol. 1):20 (emphasis in original).

“economic depression”: Borah 1951:27.

Holmes: Quoted in Stannard 1992:244.

Inadvertent subjugation: I made this argument myself in Chap. 2.

Siege of Kaffa: O’Connell 1989:171.

“And what was”: Churchill 2003:53.

“the Spaniards are”: Klor de Alva 1992:xx–xxi.

Díaz de Castillo: This line is not in any recent English translation, all of which are abridged; it is the last sentence of chapter 174 in the Spanish original.

Argument in Spanish court: Detailed in Pagden 1990: Chap. 1.

Spanish view of sickness: Porter 1998; interviews, Crease, Denevan, Lovell.

Salomon: Salomon 1993.

Las Casas: Las Casas 1992b:28 (“beehive”), 31 (“twelve million”). See also, Motolinía 1950:38–40.

Colonial accounts came to seem exaggerated: “Modern students commonly have been inclined to discount early opinions of native numbers, but rarely specified their reasons for doing so” (Sauer 1935:1). Responding to Sauer, the anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber simply said, without further explanation, “I am likely to reject most [sixteenth- and seventeenth-century documents] outright” (Kroeber 1939:180). See also, Cook and Borah 1971 (vol. 1):376–410 (“Sixteenth-century,” 380).

Numbers creep down: Jennings 1975:16–20.

Forty or fifty million: Spinden 1928:660 (50 to 75 million “souls” lost); Rivet, Stresser-Pean, and Loukotka 1952 (40 to 45 million).

“Most of the arrows,” Henige’s estimate: Author’s interviews, Denevan, Henige.

“a very high population”: Zambardino 1978. Henige responded in Henige 1978a.

5 / Pleistocene Wars

Discovery of Lagoa Santa skeletons: Calogeras 1933 (reproducing Lund’s initial letters of discovery); Mattos 1939. Lund and his successors did not well document their initial location (Soto-Heim 1994:81–82; Hrdlika et al. 1912:179–84).

Fifteen thousand years: Laming-Emperaire 1979. Other researchers got even older dates, e.g., Prous 1986. Other very early Brazilian dates include Beltrão et al. 1986.

Morphology of skulls: Neves, Meyer, and Pucciarelli 1996; Soto-Heim 1994:86–103; Neves and Pucciarelli 1991; Beattie and Bryan 1984; Mattos 1946.

North American scoffing: One example: “These claims [of great antiquity] have long been shown to be erroneous, although the proponents of early glacial humans in the area remain vociferous” (Bruhns 1994:62). No citation for the refutation is provided.

Botocudos history: Wright and Carneiro de Cunha 2000; Paraíso 1999 (botoques, 423–24); Paraíso 1992:esp. 240–43 (“just war,” 241).

Botocudos’ purported similarity to Lagoa Santa Man: Interview, Pena; Soto-Heim 1994:84.

Two genomes: I borrow the phrase from Margulis and Sagan 2001. Margulis pioneered the contemporary theory of the origin of mitochondria.

Human genome project: Genome International Sequencing Consortium 2001; Venter et al. 2001. The announcement was in June 2000; publication followed seven months later. These genome maps were preliminary; biologists put together a 99.9 percent complete picture only in 2003.

Mitochondrial genome project: Anderson et al. 1981.

Mitochondria in sperm: Gyllensten et al. 1991.

History of mtDNA research: Richards and Macaulay 2001.

Four haplogroups: Schurr et al. 1990; Horai et al. 1993; Torroni and Wallace 1995; Bandelt 2003. In 1998 scientists reported a fifth, very rare haplogroup. Also found in Europe, it may be a legacy of Genghis Khan’s incursion (Brown et al. 1998).

Disdain for amateurs: As far back as 1893, William J. McGee reported with satisfaction that the Anthropological Section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science was refreshingly free “of those pseudoscientific communications which tend to cluster about every branch of science in its formative period…anthropology is rapidly taking form as an organized body of knowledge no less definite than the older sciences” (McGee 1900:768).

Taino Letter, Columbus, C., to Santangel, L.D., 14 Mar. 1493, trans. A. B. Hart and E. Channing, in Eliot ed. 1909–14, online at http://www.bartleby.com/43/2.htm.

Test of divinity: Benzoni 1857:77.

Motecuhzoma and Spanish “gods”: Restall 2003:108–20. For an example of the story, see Prescott 2000:171–73; Tuchman 1984:11–14 (“wooden,” 14).

Northeast and supernatural powers: Trigger 1991.

Choctaw and Zuñi origins: Cushman 1999:199; Bunzel 1932.

“mountains of Ararat”: Genesis 8:4 (King James version).

Christian befuddlement: Hallowell 1960.

José de Acosta wrestles with question: Acosta 2002:51–74 (“contradict Holy Writ,” “Europe or Asia,” 61; “must join,” 63; refutation of Lost Tribes theory, 71–72).

Candidate ancestors: Wauchope 1962:3. The full list of candidates is even longer, but some pride of place should be given to the Welsh, who have had a widespread following for two hundred years. As Lewis and Clark began their journey across the continent, Thomas Jefferson tried to put them in contact with a man who had come from Wales to search for errant bands of Welsh-speaking white Indians (Letter, Jefferson, T., to Lewis, M., 22 Jan. 1804, available from the Library of Congress at http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/mtj:@field(DOCID+@lit(je00060)). See also, Williams 1949a, 1949b. In an earlier article (Mann 2002c), I incorrectly wrote that Jefferson himself had instructed them to look for Welsh Indians.

Most widely accepted answer: Hrdlika 1912 (“the most widespread theory, and one with the remnants of which we meet to this day, was that the American Indians represented the so-called Lost Tribes of Israel,” 3); Kennedy 1994:225–31 (Mormons); Hallowell 1960:4–6 (Penn, Mather). See also, Parfitt 2002.

Lost Tribes of Israel: II Kings 17:4–24, 18:9–12 (“So was Israel,” 17:23); II (or IV) Esdras 13:39–51 (“a distant land,” 42–48); Ezekiel 37:15–26 (“take the children,” 21); Jeremiah 13:11, 33:7–8. All quotes except Esdras from King James version; Esdras is from New English Bible, as it is not in the King James version.

Ussher’s calculation: Ussher 1658:1 (23 Oct. 4004); 68 (721 b.c.).

Ussher’s authority: White 1898:Chap. 6 (“his dates”). One modern history says that although few endorsed “the exact detail” of Ussher’s chronology, its precepts ruled “general thought about man’s past” (Daniel and Renfrew 1986:22).

Discovery of European Pleistocene remains: Grayson 1983. I have simplified the story somewhat. In 1858 British geologists, Sir Charles Lyell among them, unearthed tools and Pleistocene fossils in an English cave. Twenty-one years before, Jacques Boucher de Crèvecoeur de Perthes, a French customs officer and amateur scientist, had made a similar but larger find near Abbéville, in northern France. His announcement was met with ridicule, some of it from Lyell. A year after the British discovery, Lyell and other scientists went to Abbéville, decided that Boucher de Perthes had been right all along, and issued gracious public apologies. From that point on, the scientific consensus was in favor of an early origin of humankind.

Abbott’s finds, proselytizing: Abbott 1876 (“driven,” 72); 1872a (“so primitive,” 146); 1872b.

Bureau of American Ethnology: Meltzer 1994; 1993:chaps. 3, 5; Judd 1967. The Smithsonian’s brief history of the Bureau of American Ethnology is at http://www.nmnh.si.edu/anthro/outreach/depthist.htm.

Holmes critique: Interview, Meltzer; Meltzer 1992; 1994:9–11; Hough 1933.

Abbott, McGee, and the Paleolithic Wars: Abbott 1892a (“The stones are inspected,” 345); 1892b (“scientific men of Washington,” 270); 1883a (“high degree,” 303); 1883b (“more ‘knowing,’” 327); 1884 (“neither among,” 253); Meltzer 2003; 1994:11–12; 1993:41–50; Cultural Resource Group 1996.

Hrdlika’s life work: Meltzer 1994:12–15; 1993:54 (“respectable antiquity”); Montagu 1944; Loring and Prokopec 1994:26–42.

“favorable cave”: Quoted in Deuel 1967:486.

Folsom: Meltzer 1994:15–16; 1993:50–54; Roberts 1935:1–5; Kreck 1999.

Brown’s announcement: Anon. 1928; Chamberlin 1928.

Whiteman: Anon. 2003; McAlavy 2003; Cotter and Boldurian 1999:1–10.

“driving mania”: Eiseley 1975:99.

Howard at Clovis: Cotter and Boldurian 1999:11–20 (“EXTENSIVE BONE,” 11; “One greenhorn,” 14; 130ºF, 15); Anon. 1932; Howard 1935 (I thank Robert Crease for helping me obtain this article).

Discovery of Clovis culture: Cotter 1937; Roberts 1937.

“So far”: Hrdlika 1937:104. Other skeptics were less careful. Writing in 1933, Walter Hough, of the U.S. National Museum, flatly claimed that “archaeologists now agree that there are no American paleolithic implements” (Hough 1933:757).

Lack of skeletons: Interview, Petersen; Steele and Powell 2002 (ten skeletons); Preston 1997:72 (interview with Owsley).

More than eighty Clovis and Folsom sites: Hannah Wormington lists ninety-six sites in the 1957 edition of her well-regarded Ancient Man in North America. But she describes some as small and uncertain, so I have hedged and said “more than eighty” (Wormington 1957). Grayson and Meltzer (2002) tally seventy-six paleo-Indian sites in the continental United States.

Cosmic-ray race: Crease and Mann 1996:Chap. 10.

Detection of organic C¹⁴ and halflife: Anderson et al. 1947a, 1947b; Engelkemeier et al. 1949.

First radiocarbon dates: Arnold and Libby 1949 (“seen to be,” 680); Marlowe 1999.

“You read books”: Libby 1991:600.

UA C¹⁴ lab and Haynes’s background: Author’s interview, Haynes; Feldman 1998.

Consistency of C¹⁴ dates: Haynes 1964.

13,500 and 12,900 years ago: I use the calibrations in Stuiver et al. 1998 (online at http://depts.washington.edu/qil/datasets/intcal98_14c.txt.). These calibrations are essentially applied to Clovis and Folsom in Fiedel 1999b:102. They have been attacked as based on unreliable data (Roosevelt, Douglas, and Brown 2002; Roosevelt 1997).

Beringia: For a general physical description, see Fiedel 1992:46–47. Although now a little dated, Fiedel’s book remains one of the best expositions of the basic issues.

Beringia insects: Elias 2001; Elias et al. 1996; Alfimov and Berman 2001; Colinvaux 1996.

Temperature rise: Alley 2000.

Ice-free corridor and 1950s investigations: E.g., Elson 1957.

“ice-free” and “700 years”: Haynes 1964:1412. The potential relevance of the ice-free corridor was first described in Johnston 1972:22–25, 44–45. I am grateful to Josh d’Aluisio-Guerreri for helping me obtain this book.

Pleistocene bestiary: Anderson 1984; Kurtén and Anderson 1980.

11,500 and 10,900 B.C.: Corrected radiocarbon dates from unpublished data provided to the author by Stuart Fiedel.

“zoologically impoverished”: Wallace 1962 (vol. 1):149–50.

Martin’s overkill thesis: Martin 1984, 1973 (“thoroughly superior predator,” “swift extermination,” 972), 1967.

Other extinctions: Wilson 1992:244–53.

“Paradigmatic image”: Fiedel 1992:63–84. The image is summed in Easton 1992 (“stout-hearted,” 31).

Northwest Coast salmon wars: Wilkinson 2000. The treaty language at issue (“right of taking”) is in Article 3, http://www.nwifc.wa.gov/tribes/treaties/tmedcreek.asp.

Hrdlika in Larsen Bay: Denny’s story can be augmented with the essays in Bray and Killion eds. 1994. Larsen Bay was not an anomaly. In 1902 Hrdlika visited Sonora, Mexico, where Yaqui Indians were fighting the Mexican army. On a battlefield Hrdlika found sixty-four fresh Yaqui corpses—men, women, and children. He lopped off their heads and shipped them to the Smithsonian (Hrdlika 1904:65–66).

Fifty shot down: Cited in Meltzer 1995:22. “The shelf-life of pre-Clovis claims seems little more than a decade,” Meltzer wrote (ibid.).

“Clovis police,” new Hrdlika: Author’s interviews, Meltzer, Haynes, Thomas Dillehay; Pringle 1999 (police); Alsoszatai-Petheo 1986:18 (new Hrdlika); Meltzer 1989:478–79. Clovis-firsters were attacked as the “Clovis Mafia” (Koppel 2003:147–50). Fiedel (2000:42–43) marshals evidence against the charges.

Landmark article: Greenberg, Turner, and Zegura 1986 (“the three,” 479; “we are dealing,” “28 key,” “dental clusters,” 480; “widely held,” 484; “tripartite division,” 487).

Languages of California: Mithun 1997 (fifteen families); Kroeber 1903 (five families).

180 language families: This rough figure for the linguistic state of the art in 1986 is created by adding together two then-recent tallies: Campbell and Mithun 1979 (62 families in North America) and Loukokta 1968 (118 in South and Central America).

Critiques of three-migrations paper: Campbell 1986 (“Neither,” “should be,” 488); Morrell 1990b (“zero”). See also, Campbell 1988; Laughlin 1986.

Geneticists pursued the question: Reviewed in Merriwether 2002.

Mitochondrial DNA indicates multiple migrations: Schurr et al. 1990; Horai et al. 1993.

Wallace and Neel timing estimate: Torroni et al. 1994.

Haplogroup A study: Bonalto and Bolzano 1997.

Size of founding groups: Schurr et al. 1990 (little mtDNA diversity, small group); Ward et al. 1991 (much diversity, big group).

Diverse possible origins: Merriwether et al. 1996 (Mongolia); Karafet et al. 1999 (Lake Baikal); Torroni et al. 1993 (east Asia); Lell 2002 (southern middle Siberia and Sea of Okhkotsk, in two major migrations).

“only one thing”: Cann 2001:1746.

Monte Verde: Meltzer 1997; Dillehay ed. 1989–97 (summary of dig history, vol. 2:1–24). See also Dillehay 2001; Gore 1997; Wilford 1998b, 1997b.

Dates: Dillehay ed. 1989–97 (vol. 1):18–19, 133–45, esp. Table 6.1. Dillehay did not use calibrated radiocarbon dates; I use the calibration in Stuiver et al. 1998. Fiedel says the likely occupation date is 13,500–14,100 years ago, if the data are correct (Fiedel 2000:50).

Hostility: Interviews, Crawford, Dillehay, Fiedel, Meltzer; Morrell 1990a:1.

Site visit to Monte Verde: Meltzer 1997; Adovasio and Page 2003:Chap. 9 (according to Meltzer, an accurate account [interview, Meltzer]); Gibbons 1997; Wilford 1997b (“ball game”). See also, Haynes 1999.

Fiedel’s critique: Author’s interviews, Fiedel; Fiedel 1999a (“virtually every,” 1); Pringle 1999. See also, in general, Haynes 2003.

Haynes’s misgivings: Haynes 1999 (“further testing”).

Corridor critics: Levson and Rutter 1996; Burns 1996; Catto 1996; Jackson, Phillips, and Little 1999.

Lack of evidence in corridor: Driver 2001.

Critique of overkill: Grayson and Meltzer 2003 (“lives on,” 590).

Clovis-firsters in minority: Roosevelt, Douglas, and Brown 2002 (“[T]he tide of public and scholarly opinion has definitely turned against Clovis as the earliest culture,” 159); Lynch 2001 (“Some of our,” 39; “blow the whistle,” “political correctness,” 41).

Three other pre-Clovis sites: Meadowcroft Rockshelter, in Pennsylvania, excavated mainly by James Adovasio; Cactus Hill, in Virginia, excavated by Joseph McAvoy; and Topper, in South Carolina, excavated by Allan Goodyear. See Adovasio and Page 2003.

Kennewick Man: Chatters 2001; Thomas 2001. The European connection links to Smithsonian archaeologist Dennis Stanford’s idea that the Clovis culture descended from the Solutrean culture in Pleistocene Era France and Spain. Because Solutrean spear points resemble Clovis points, Stanford has speculated that they wandered across a northern arch of ice from Ireland to Greenland to northeast Canada, in an Atlantic version of the passage through Beringia. Stanford’s Solutrean proposal was never published in scholarly journals, though it was adumbrated in Newsweekand the New Yorker. Specialists in Solutrean culture have not greeted these ideas with equal warmth (Stanford and Bradley 2002; Straus 2000; see also, Preston 1997; Begley and Murr 1999).

Baja skulls: González-José et al. 2003; Dillehay 2003.

Australians into Brazil: Mattos 1939:105–07.

Fladmark and coastal route: Fladmark 1979 (see references therein to earlier papers); Mason 1894 (early proposal); Easton 1992; Koppel 2003:68–74; Powledge 1999; Hall 1999.

“Even primitive”: Quoted in Chandler 2002.

(Re)settlement of Europe: Tolan-Smith 1998; Rozoy 1998. Before the Ice Age, northern Europe was populated, but there was no cultural continuity between the earlier and later inhabitants.

6 / Cotton (or Anchovies) and Maize

“weft-twining”: My thanks to Nobuko Kajitani and Masa Kinoshita for helping me with textile terminology.

Huaricanga dig: Author’s interviews, Haas, Creamer, Ruiz, Gerbert Asencios, Dan Corkill, Luis Huaman, Kit Nelson.

Discovery of Norte Chico: The ruins were first written up by Max Uhle (1856–1944), a German researcher who is often called the “father of South American archaeology” (Uhle 1925). For Uhle’s life and work, see Menzel 1977; Rowe 1954.

Among the world’s biggest buildings: Huaricanga was built before the Egyptian pyramids, at a time when the only other structures that could be called monumental were in the city-states of Sumer. But at the time even these were smaller than the Huaricanga pyramid, so far as archaeologists can tell. The other main Eurasian culture centers—the Indus Valley, the Nile Delta, and the Shang homeland in China—did not even have cities then. Later the ziggurats of Mesopotamia and the pyramids of Egypt surpassed the Peruvian temples in size.

McNeill book: McNeill 1967.

High-school textbook: Stearns 1987 (“four initial centers,” 16; Indian history, 203–12). It was better than some other histories. A World History, by Mazour and People, gave the Americas just five pages (281–86). R. J. Unstead’s History of the World devoted three and a half pages to Indians: one and a half in the chapter “Other Cultures,” and two pages in the chapter “Europeans in America” (Unstead 1983:58–59, 200–02).

Maize as most important crop: The 2001 maize harvest was 609 million metric tons, whereas rice and wheat were 592 million mT and 582 million mT respectively. Statistics from the FAO agricultural database are online at http://apps.fao.org/default.htm.

Three-fifths of the crops: Weatherford 1988:204.

Olmec as founder of Peruvian societies: This idea was common in the 1920s and 1930s (Wells 1920 [vol. 2]:189–90). Later it fell out of favor, though it continued to be mooted until at least the 1960s (Coe 1962).

Sumer as world’s oldest city: Some densely populated settlements were older, notably Çatalhöyük, in central Turkey, and ’Ain Ghazal, in Jordan. But archaeologists believe that these were not true cities, because they show little evidence of public architecture, strong social hierarchy, and division of labor (Balter 1998; Simmons et al. 1988).

Eurasian trade in ideas: Examples lifted from Teresi 2002.

Pan-American Highway: The roadless gap in Panama and Colombia, once quite large, has shrunk to about fifty miles. Still, the road is so bad that the Lonely Planet guidebook describes the Pan-American Highway as “more of a concept than an actual route.”

Atacama as model for Mars: Navallo-González et al. 2003.

Pizarro’s pilot’s advice: Quoted in Thomson 2003:139.

Possible Paleo-Indian routes to coast: Arriaza 2001.

Two Science reports: Sandweiss et al. 1998; Keefer et al. 1998; deFrance et al. 2001. See also, Pringle 1998b; Wilford 1998a.

Different early adaptations: A fine summary is provided in Moseley 2001:91–100.

First finding of mummies: Max Uhle found the same mummies but didn’t further excavate there (Uhle 1917). I am grateful to the librarians at Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú who hunted down this article for me.

Chinchorro diet: Aufderheide and Allison 1995. My thanks to Joshua D’Aluisio-Guerreri for helping me obtain this article.

Chinchorro mummies: Arriaza 1995 (1983 find, chap. 2); Allison 1985; Pringle 1998a.

Anemia in child mummies: Focacci and Chacón 1989.

Tapeworm eggs: Reinhard and Urban 2003.

Import of Norte Chico: Author’s Interviews, Haas, Creamer, Ruiz, Mike Moseley. Haas and Creamer 2004 (“The complex of sites,” 36); Haas, Creamer, and Ruiz, 2004.

Aspero: Willey and Corbett 1954 (“knolls,” 254); Moseley and Willey 1973 (“excellent, if embarrassing,” “temple-type,” 455); Feldman 1985; 1980:246 (rejecting older dates), cited in Haas, Creamer, and Ruiz, 2004.

Caral: Shady Solis, Haas, and Creamer 2001; Shady Solis and Leyva eds. 2003; Shady Solis, pers. comm. See also, Pringle 2001; Sandweiss and Moseley 2001; Fountain 2001; Bower 2001; Ross 2002.

Dating of other Norte Chico sites: Haas, Creamer, and Ruiz 2004.

Egypt: For dates and sizes I have relied on Algaze 1993 and Spence 2000 (which dates construction on the Great Pyramid of Khufu to begin in 2485–75 B.C.).

Invention of government: Author’s interviews, Haas, Petersen; Haas, Creamer, and Ruiz 2004.

Cotton domestication: Sauer 1993.

Cotton in Europe and the Andes: Braudel 1981–84 (vol. 1):325–27; (vol. 2):178–80 (bans, prostitutes), 312–13; Murra 1964.

MFAC hypothesis: Moseley 2005, 1975b. See the critiques in Wilson 1981, Raymond 1981.

Work parties and music: Author’s Interviews, Haas, Creamer; Shady Solis 2003a, 2003b.

Champ de Mars: Schama 1989:504–09.

Early Staff God: Author’s interviews, Creamer; Makowski, pers. comm.; Haas and Creamer, forthcoming; Spotts 2003; Makowski 2005.

Norte Chico as foundation: In the past anthropologists have sometimes tried to describe Peruvian societies in terms of lo Andino, a being whose special characteristics have uniquely defined those societies throughout time. I am arguing something different, that people who have solved problems in one way will often return to those proven methods to solve new ones.

Domestication of tobacco: Winter 2000.

Itanoní description, plans, history: Author’s interviews, Ramírez Leyva.

Uniqueness of Itanoní: Small tortillerías using local maize persist in rural Mexico, although they are threatened by the industrial production of Maseca, the large, state-affiliated maize and tortilla firm. By contrast, Itanoní is a boutique operation that sells as many as eight different varieties of tortillas, each made from a separate local cultivar. The difference is akin to the difference between an Italian village café that sells liters of unlabeled local wine and an enoteca, a fine wine store featuring the carefully labeled production of the region.

Millet as first cereal: Callen 1967.

Genetic similarity of cereals: Gale and Devos 1998.

Productivity of wild cereals: Zohary 1972; Harlan and Zohary 1966.

Teosinte: Author’s interview, Wilkes; Wilkes 1972, 1967 (I am grateful to Dr. Wilkes for giving me copies of his work); Crosby 2003b:171 (nutritional value).

Wheat and barley nonshattering mutation: Zohary and Hopf 2000:29–30, 59–60; Hillman and Davies 1990.

General maize history: Warman 2003; Anon. 1982 (“not domesticated,” 5).

Paleo-Indian agricultural development and MacNeish’s work: MacNeish 1967, 1964; Flannery and Marcus 2002. MacNeish died in 2001.

Long debate over origin of maize: Kahn 1985:3–82; Galinat 1992.

Mangelsdorf theory: Mangelsdorf, MacNeish, and Galinat 1964. Mangelsdorf first proposed the extinct-wild-ancestor theory in Mangelsdorf and Reeves 1939. I am grateful to Dr. Wilkes for lending me a copy of this document. See also, Mangelsdorf 1986.

Beadle’s theory: Beadle 1939.

Caustic letters: E.g., the exchanges between Beadle and another Nobel-winning biologist, Barbara McClintock, in 1972 (McClintock Papers, “Searching for the Origins of Maize in South America, 1957–1981: Documents,” letters of 22 Jan.–24 Feb. 1972, available online at http://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/LL/Views/Exhibit/documents/origins.htm).

Iltis theory: Iltis 1983.

Teosinte-gamagrass theory and critiques: Eubanks 2001b (McClintock quotes, 509), 1997; Bennetzen et al. 2001.

Teosinte mutations: The development of three of these mutations is elucidated in Jaenicke-Després 2003. See references therein for the discoverers of the genes.

Maize in a decade: Eyre-Walker et al. 1998. Essentially the team argued that in ten years breeders with exactly the right teosinte variants could have created maize if they were as systematic as modern breeders. One assumes that the actual development time was longer.

Locus and timing of development of maize: MacNeish went back to his early maize cobs with new tools and decided they dated to about 3500 B.C. (Farnsworth et al. 1985). Subsequently, researchers did the same for early maize cobs from nearby Oaxaca, pushing back the date to about 4200B.C. (Piperno and Flannery 2001; Benz 2001). Both of these sites contained fully domesticated maize (Benz and Iltis 1990). Pope et al. found teosinte pollen grains as early as 5100 B.C. in a wet Gulf Coast site where teosinte is not native, suggesting that it was moved there from the highlands. By 4000 B.C. the pollen is dominated by modern maize (Eubanks 2001a; MacNeish and Eubanks 2000; Pope et al. 2001).

“arguably man’s”: Federoff 2003.

Diversity of maize: Doebley, Goodman, and Stuber 1998. The reason for the diversity is that the ancestor species were hyperdiverse (Eyre-Walker et al. 1998).

Aragón Cuevas research: Author’s interviews, Aragón Cuevas. The number of landraces varies from study to study, because the term is not precisely defined. It is often claimed that more than two hundred exist in Latin America (e.g., Wellhausen et al. 1957, 1952).

Five thousand cultivars: Author’s interview, Wilkes. This is a widely cited guess by a distinguished researcher with long experience in the field.

Chamula statistics: Anon. ed. 1998a. The data are from 1991, the most recent year for which census results are available.

Perales’s study: Author’s interview, Perales.

Milpa: Here I describe the Mesoamerican variant of an ideal. Milpa-style agriculture occurs in much of South America, though centered often on potatoes or manioc instead of maize. Even in Mesoamerica, plenty of actual milpas are nothing more than maize fields, especially where farmers grow maize for the market. Subsistence-farm milpas I have seen tend to be more diverse. Milpa cultivation is often described—incorrectly, according to Wilkes (author’s interview)—as synonymous with “slash-and-burn,” in which farmers clear small areas for short times and then let them go fallow (e.g., the otherwise useful Ewell and Sands 1987). Slash-and-burn, though, is generally a modern innovation (see chap. 9). A good description of the milpa is Wilken 1987. A classic early study is Cook 1921.

Green Revolution and milpa: Author’s interviews, Denevan, Hallberg, Perales, Wilkes (“most successful”), James Boyce; Mann 2004.

Abundance of wild wheat and barley: Harlan and Zohary 1966 (“square kilometers,” “Over many thousands,” 1078).

“the key”: Coe 1968:26.

Kirkby’s estimate: Kirkby 1973.

Maize iconography: Fields 1994.

Maize in Europe: Crosby 2003b:180–81; Warman 2003: 97–111.

Pellagra in Europe, Goethe: Roe 1973; McCollum 1957:302; Goethe 1962:33–34; Warman 2003:132–50.

Maize and slavery: Author’s interviews, Crosby; Crosby 2003b:186–88; 1994:24; Warman 2003:60–65.

Oaxaca data: Anon. ed. 1998b:532–68. The data are from 1991, the most recent year for which census results are available.

Estimated productivity of Green Revolution maize in Oaxaca: Author’s interviews, Aragon Cuevas, James Boyce. The estimate is roughly confirmed by the calculations of Ackerman et al. (2002:36) that “a 1 percent increase in use of improved varieties was typically associated with an increase in yield of 0.037 tons/ha” and hence a 100 percent switchover is a jump of 3.7 tons/ha.

Economic problems of landrace maize in Oaxaca: Author’s interviews, Aragón Cuevas, Bellon, Boyce, Hallberg, Ramírez Leyva, Wilkes.

7 / Writing, Wheels, and Bucket Brigades

Stirling’s find of dated stela: Stirling 1939 (“knees,” “hurried,” 213), 1940a; Coe 1976b. Stirling’s position was held previously by William Henry Holmes, scourge of amateur “relic hunters.” In his National Geographic article, Stirling says the first giant head was discovered in 1858; others put the find at 1862 (Bernal 1969:29). Following an earlier, mistaken understanding of the Mesoamerican calendar, Stirling believed that the stela was earlier than now thought; I use the modern date. Because carbon-dating had not yet been invented, he had the dates of Maya emergence wrong, too. Still, he was right to be puzzled by the Olmec.

Second Veracruz trip, first Olmec article: Stirling 1940b (“designed,” “‘The ticks,’” 312; “basic civilization,” 333; “mysterious,” 334).

The Olmec: Among the few general book-length overviews are Coe 1996 (especially valuable for its illustrations of Olmec art); Pina Chan 1989; and Bernal 1969 (1968), the last still surprisingly useful despite its age. All espouse the “mother culture” view, which has come under increasing fire.

“enigmatic people”: Baird and Bairstow 2004:727. Similar language can be found in the Eyewitness Travel Guide: Mexico (New York: Dorling Kindersley, 2003), 254. These characterizations are common in the popular press (e.g., Stuart 1993a [“the Olmec stand for many as a kind of ‘mother culture’ to all the civilizations that came after, including the Maya and the Aztec,” 92]; Lemonick 1996 [“More than 1,500 years before the Maya…, the mysterious Olmec people were building the first great culture of Mesoamerica,” 56]).

Olmec emerge abruptly: Some researchers have hypothesized that Olmec society was stimulated into existence by a migration from the Pacific coast, but recent ceramics research in Veracruz casts doubt on this idea (Arnold 2003).

“quantum change”: Meggers 1975:17.

“There is now little doubt”: Coe 1994:62.

Bad name: Bernal 1969:11–12. Actually, the name is even worse than I indicated. “Olmec” doesn’t refer to a people, but to the political phenomenon that began and ended with their cities. The people in those cities may still be around, but called something else.

Mixe-Zoquean: Campbell and Kaufman 1976.

Olmec rubber: Hosler, Burkett, and Tarkanian 1999; Rodríguez and Ortiz 1994.

1800 B.C.: Rust and Sharer 1988.

San Lorenzo: Coe and Diehl 1980; Cyphers ed. 1997.

Olmec theology: Reilly 1994.

Thrones changed into sculptures: Porter 1989.

Africa-Olmec and Shang-Olmec connection: For the Africa-Olmec connection, see Barton 2001; Winters 1979; Van Sertima 1976. Van Sertima’s claims are attacked in Haslip-Viera, Ortiz de Montellano, and Barbour 1997. For the Shang-Olmec connection, see Xu 1996; Meggers 1975; Ekholm 1969. I am grateful to Mike Xu for sending me a copy of his manuscript. Meggers was critiqued in Grove 1977 and responded in Meggers 1977.

Olmec sculptures of fetuses and pathological conditions: Tate and Bendersky 1999; Dávalos Hurtado and Ortiz de Zárate 1953. I am grateful to the Bancroft Library staffers who went to considerable trouble to find the second article for me.

Olmec appearance: Bernal 1969:76–79.

Mirrors: Heizer and Gullberg 1981.

Destruction of sculptures: Grove 1981.

La Venta: Rust and Sharer 1988. A succinct description is in Bernal 1969:35–43.

“not only engendered,” “established the pattern”: Bernal 1969:188. A well-argued contemporary version of this view is Diehl 2005.

Competitive interaction in Mesoamerica: Flannery and Marcus 2000 (“chiefdoms in the Basin,” 33). I thank Joyce Marcus for walking me through these ideas.

Zapotec rise: Blanton et al. 1999; Marcus and Flannery 1996; Flannery and Marcus 2003 (“virtually unoccupied,” 11802; radiocarbon dates, 11804); Spencer 2003.

Oldest writing: Marcus pers. comm. (750 B.C.), 1976 (glyphs and translation); Flannery and Marcus 2003. See also, Serrano 2002. The reason I have called the temple carving the first “securely” dated writing is that two other candidates for the title of first written text exist, but neither can be dated accurately because their archaeological context is unknown. Both are from the Tlatilco culture north of present-day Mexico City; they may have been made as early as 1000 B.C. One seal shows three glyphs that some think resemble Olmec writing. The other, a true mystery, bears what look like letters in a script of which there are no other extant examples (Kelley 1966). A third candidate for earliest Olmec writing exists. In the 1990s a team led by Mary Pohl of the University of Florida discovered a cylindrical greenstone seal two miles from La Venta. Dated to 650 B.C., the seal bears a bas-relief bird with a comic-book speech bubble bursting from its mouth. Pohl and two colleagues identified the glyphs in the bubble as precursors to the Mayan glyphs for the date 3-Ajaw (Pohl, Pope, and von Nagy 2002; Stokstad 2002). The identification is controversial. The text cannot be Mayan, they say, because Maya civilization was not firmly set in place until centuries later. Nor can it be Olmec, because other Olmec texts seem not to be related to Maya glyphs. According to John Justeson, a linguistic anthropologist at the State University of New York in Albany who has deciphered other Olmec texts, “Although many accept the greenstone glyphs as plausibly being writing, what [Pohl’s team] read as a ritual calendar date on the ceramic is scarcely accepted by anyone” (email to author).

Inanna temple example: Urton 2003:15–16.

Zero as number: Teresi 2002:79–87 (GPA example, 80).

Tres Zapotes date: In fact, the initial 7 (the baktun figure) was missing, because the stela was broken. Stirling guessed that it was a 7, a supposition that was proven correct in 1972, when the other part of the stela was discovered (Cohn 1972).

Tentative assignation: In The Olmec World, for instance, Bernal never directly says that the Olmec invented zero. He merely describes the Long Count, remarking that it “necessarily implies knowledge of the zero” (Bernal 1969:114).

More than a dozen systems of writing: Coe 1976a:110ff. Coe lists thirteen forms, but does not include Olmec and whatever is on the Tlatilco seals.

Deciphered Olmec stela: Stuart 1993a, 1993b; Justeson and Kaufman 1993; 1997; 2001 (Chiapas potsherd translation, 286).

Monte Albán dispute: I have borrowed the formulation in Zeitlin 1990. Some argue that not enough data exist to resolve the question (O’Brien and Lewarch 1992).

Slabs as slain enemies: Marcus 1983:106–08, 355–60.

Fight with Tilcajete: Spencer and Redmond 2001.

N ˜udzahui marriage politics: Spores 1974.

8-Deer’s story: Pohl 2002; Byland and Pohl 1994:119–60, 241–44; Caso 1977–79 (vol. 1):69–83, (vol. 2):169–84; Smith 1962; Clark 1912.

Wheeled toys: Stirling 1940b:310–11, 314; Charnay 1967:178–86.

Egypt and wheel: Wright 2005:46.

Moldboard plow: Temple 1998 (“so inefficient,” 16). I am grateful to Dick Teresi for directing me to this book and example (“as if Henry Ford”: e-mail, Teresi to author).

Lack of relation between technology and social complexity: I lift this point bodily from Webster 2002:77. See also Ihde 2000.

Osmore Valley geography: I am grateful to Mike Moseley and Susan DeFrance for guiding me through this area, and to Patrick Ryan Williams and Donna Nash for showing me Moquegua and Cerro Baúl.

Wari and Tiwanaku: A succinct overview is La Lone 2000. Surprisingly little has been written about Wari. Among the few recent books are Isbell and McEwan eds. 1991 and Schreiber 1992. The most widely cited recent works on Tiwanaku are Kolata 1993 and Kolata ed. 1996–2003. William Isbell has pointed out that the two names refer simultaneously to cities, states, and religions. He has suggested that the Spanish names Tiahuanaco and Huari be used for the physical ruins and the Aymara and Runa Suni spellings Tiwanaku and Wari be used for these polities’ political and cultural styles (Isbell 2001: 457).

Sixth-century climatic disaster: Fagan 1999:Chap. 7. The major apparent victims were the Moche, who flourished in a three-hundred-mile strip along the northern coast after 100 A.D. Drought put Moche society in crisis; El Niño rains led to floods that destroyed entire villages and canal systems. El Niño also changed ocean current patterns to deposit river sediments on the shore. These quickly turned to dunes, which winds blew toward the Andes, threatening farmland. The Moche tried to regroup—and failed.

Potato’s advantages and status vis-a-vis maize: McNeill 1991, Murra 1960.

Wari religion: It should be emphasized that the common image of the Staff God did not mean that the deity meant the same thing in every culture (Makowski 2001).

Terracing, arable land, abandonment: Peruvian ecologist Luis Masson has estimated that 1.2 to 1.4 million acres was terraced on just the west side of the Andes, 75 percent of which is now abandoned (pers. comm., cited in Denevan 2001:173–75); Cobo 1990:213 (“flights of stairs”); Moseley 2001:230–38 (“patenting and marketing,” 233; prospering of Wari despite climatic assault, 232).

Isbell-Vranich article: Isbell and Vranich 2004 (“repetitive,” 170).

Wari and Tiwanaku in Cerro Baúl: Interviews, DeFrance, Moseley, Nash, Williams; Williams, Isla, and Nash 2001.

Geertz’s four states: Geertz 1980:121–22.

Chiripa: The major recent work on Chiripa is described in Hastorf 1999. A summary is Stanish 2003:115–17.

Pukara: Stanish 2003:138–48, 156–60, 283–84. Stanish suggests that a drought that began in about 100 A.D. may have induced Pukara’s collapse (157). But the drought may not have occurred—its existence has been deduced from a study of Lake Titicaca bottom sediments (Abbott et al. 1997). But the lake-sediment data, as the authors noted, conflicted with previous ice-core studies; in addition, the depositional processes were sufficiently poorly understood that one could not judge when the putative dry periods began and ended.

Rise of Tiwanaku: Stanish 2003:chap. 8, 2001.

Tiwanaku as predatory state: Kolata 1993:81–86, 243–52 (“predatory,” 243; “lower cost,” 245).

Akapana: Interviews, Nicole Couture, Michael Moseley, Alexei Vranich; author’s visit; Cieza de León 1959:282 (“how human hands”); Kolata 1993:103–29. Wendell Bennett excavated at Akapana in the 1930s, but the first major excavations at Tiwanaku in general did not occur until the late 1960s, with the work of researchers from the Instituto Nacional de Arqueología de Bolivia, led by Carlos Ponce Sanginés. Ponce’s work has come under fire, because he published little of his data and because he “restored” Tiwanaku landmarks inaccurately. In the 1980s Alan Kolata of the University of Chicago led a large team that produced the first comprehensive overview of the city and its environs.

Kalasasaya and Gateway of the Sun: Author’s interviews, Couture, Vranich; Kolata 1993:143–49.

Isbell-Vranich vision of city: Isbell and Vranich 2004.

Lack of markets: Kolata 1993:172–76 (“a city was,” “symbolically,” 173).

Vranich picture of Tiwanaku: Interviews, Vranich; Vranich 2001; Vranich et al. 2001:150–52; Isbell and Vranich 2004.

Cerro Baúl final days: Interviews, deFrance, Moseley, Nash, Williams; Moseley et al. 2005 (“was likely,” “Later,” 17268).

Chimor history: Sakai 1998; Moseley and Cordy-Collins eds. 1990.

Chimor irrigation and canal: Denevan 2001:152–57. Some scholars attribute the uphill sections to tectonic uplift; Denevan finds the regularity of the error difficult to reconcile with tectonic causes (156).

Layout of Chan Chan: Shimada 2000:esp. 102; Moseley 1975a.

Fall of Chimor and execution of Qhapaq Yupanki: Sarmiento de Gamboa 2000:102–03; Rowe 1946:206.

Chimor and Thupa Inka: Rostworowski de Diez Canseco 1999:72–73, 77–79; Sarmiento de Gamboa 2000:102–03, 112–15.

Nazca lines: The original report, which I have not seen, is Mejía Xesspe 1940. Von Däniken’s claims are found in, among many other titles, Von Däniken 1969, 1998. Calendrical and astronomical theories are (to my mind) convincingly dismissed in Morrison and Hawkins 1978. The best explanation I know of the current geology-and-water hypothesis is Aveni 2000. For a variant, see Proulx, Johnson, and Mabee 2001.

Moche: Bawden 1996; Uceda and Mujica eds. 1993. Research on the Moche was greatly stimulated by the discovery of relatively untouched, art-filled tombs in Sipan in 1987. (Accounts of the efforts by Peruvian archaeologist Walter Alva to save the site’s artifacts from looters, include Kirkpatrick 1992 and Atwood 2004.) Since Sipan, much research on the Moche has focused on their art—understandably so, given its high quality (e.g., Alva and Donnan 1993).

Chavín de Huantar: Author’s visit; Burger 1992; Lumbreras, González, and Lietaer 1976 (roaring sounds); Lumbreras 1989; Rowe 1967.

8 / Made in America

Chak Tok Ich’aak’s life and death: Stuart 2000; Schele and Mathews 1998:75–79; Martin and Grube 2000:28–29 (portrait reproduced on 28, “entered the water,” 29); Harrison 1999:71–81. See also Stone 1989.

The four cities are Palenque (Martin and Grube 2000:156), La Sufricaya (Estrada-Belli 2002), El Perú and Uaxactun (Martin and Grube 2000:28–29).

“No words”: Webster 2002:7.

Uniqueness of collapse: Interviews and e-mail, Turner; Turner 1990.

Morley’s theory: Morley 1946:262. The earliest version of the ecological-overshoot theory I know of is Cooke 1931. Cooke claimed that overexpansion of agriculture had caused erosion that filled up Maya water reservoirs.

Pollen studies: Vaughan, Deevey, and Garett-Jones 1985; Deevey et al. 1979.

Environmental degradation, deforestation, floods: Binford et al. 1987; Abrams and Rue 1988; Woods 2003. I am grateful to Prof. Woods for sending me a copy of his article.

Deforestation-induced spiral to collapse: Santley, Killion, and Lycett 1986.

Drought: Curtis and Hodell 1996 (“Our findings suggest a strong relationship between times of drought and major cultural discontinuities in Classic Maya civilization,” 46). See also, Hodell, Curtis, and Brenner 1995.

Green parable: See, e.g., Catton 1982; Lowe 1985; Lutz 2000 (“Environmentalists concerned about the rapid growth of world population repeatedly cite the Maya collapse as an example of what happens if a region’s population growth exceeds its population carrying capacity,” vii); Ponting 1991 (“The clearest case of environmental collapse leading to the demise of a society comes from the Maya,” 78); Diamond 2004: 157–77; Wright 2005: 94–106 (Maya collapse shows that “civilizations often behave like ‘pyramid’ sales schemes, thriving only when they grow,” 83). Part of the appeal, one assumes, is that the Maya fall (like that of Cahokia, which I cover later) was not due to Europe.

“were able to,” “Are contemporary”: Ponting 1991:83; 1990:33.

Examples of spiritual books: Grim 2001; Berkes 1999; McGaa 1999; Durning 1992.

Five Great Values: Derived from Reiten 1995. Reiten, an administrator in a Bureau of Indian Affairs school in New Mexico, gave her list to Tony Sanchez, of Oakland State University, who revised it to broaden the values’ applicability from the Lakota to all Indians—implicitly, and one assumes benevolently, asserting that all indigenous peoples thought alike, thus denying their intellectual and cultural diversity. I quote from Dr. Sanchez’s revised version (Sanchez 2001:420–21).

Van der Donck: Shorto 2004; Van der Donck 1841 (“all free by nature,” 207; “They remark,” 210; “woods, plains and meadows,” 150–51; “several hundred miles,” 138).

“Such a fire”: Van der Donck 1993:n.p. (“Of the Wood, the Natural Productions and Fruits of the Land”). I use this translation here because it is more evocative.

The following discussion of the natural role of fire draws from Mann and Plummer 1995:89–92; Mt. St. Helens from author’s visits.

Nature not in lockstep: Botkin 1990; Pickett and Thompson 1978.

Ecological role of fire: Wright and Heinselman 1973; Komarek 1965 (“The earth,” 204).

Fire and landscape management: Pyne 1982:71–81 (Lewis and Clark, 71–72; Jefferson, 75); Day 1953:334–39; Williams 1989:47–48; Williams 2002; Cronon 1983:48–52; Morton 1637:52–54 (“to set fire,” 52). The impact of fire varied; in Martha’s Vineyard, for instance, it seems to have been negligible (Foster et al. 2002).

Carriages in Ohio: Bakeless 1961:314, cited in Denevan 1992a:369.

“could be”: Wroth ed. 1970:139. See also, Higginson 1792: 117–18 (reporting “thousands of acres of ground as good as need to be, and not a tree in the same”).

Smith’s gallop: Smith 1910 (vol. 1):64. He also saw Indians hunting with fire (70).

Bison range: Roe 1951; Mathiessen 1987:147–52; Cronon 1983: 51–52 (“were harvesting”).

Impact of Native American burning: Pyne 1982:71–83; Little 1974; Dorney and Dorney 1989; Delcourt et al. 1986; Rostlund 1957a, 1957b.

Great Plains and anthropogenic fire: Axelrod 1985; Steuter 1991; Sauer 1975; Williams 1989:46–48; Lott 2002:86–88 (“When Lewis and Clark,” 88).

Fidler’s fires: Fidler 1992 (“Grass all,” “Not a,” “All burnt,” “the grass,” 13–15; “The Grass,” 36; “very dangerous,” 59).

Return of forest to Midwest: Williams 1989:46 (Wisconsin, Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska); Fisher, Jenkins, and Fisher 1987 (Wyoming); author’s visit, Texas (displays of historical photographs).

“disastrous habit”: Palliser 1983:30.

Raup: Raup 1937 (“have been,” 84; “inconceivable,” 85).

“It is at least”: Brown and Davis 1973:116, quoted in Williams 2002:183.

Vale: Vale 2002 (“modest,” 14); 1998. Vale was rebutted in Keeley 2002. An example of how natural scientists continue to dismiss the human presence is Hillspaugh, Whitlock, and Bartlein 2000 (examining long-term fire frequency at Yellowstone National Park, an area inhabited for thousands of years, “offers a natural ‘experiment’ that allows us to consider the sensitivity of fire regimes to climate change alone,” 211 [emphasis added]).

Cahokia description: Author’s visit; author’s interviews, Woods; Dalan et al. 2003:64–78.

Biggest population concentration: Iseminger 1997, cited in Woods 2004:152.

Controversy over mound origins: Silverberg 1968 (Bancroft, 98); Garlinghouse 2001; Kennedy 1994:230–39; Jefferson 1894:query XI (excavation of “barrow”).

Ouachita mounds: Saunders 1997; Pringle 1997 (“I know it,” 1762). The mounds no longer overlook the river, which has changed its course since their construction.

Origins and rise of eastern North American agriculture: Smith 1993 (“the indigenous crops in question,” 14), 1989. See the similar early argument in Linton 1924:349.

Eastern Agricultural Complex: More formally, the Eastern Agricultural Complex consists of squash (Cucurbita pepo); marshelder or sumpweed (Iva annua); erect knotweed (Polygonum erectum); maygrass (Phalaris caroliniana); common sunflower (Helianthus annuus); little barley(Hordeum pusillum); and lambsquarter, aka chenopod or goosefoot (Chenopodium berlandieri). Marshelder, like sunflower, has an edible, oily seed. Erect knotweed is a low plant with starchy, edible seeds; it is not the invasive Japanese knotweed that is a problem in the eastern United States. The grain from maygrass and little barley, both knee-high grasses with tufted stalks, was probably dried and pounded into flour. Lambsquarter is a spinach-like green that unfortunately looks like the toxic western black nightshade.

Hopewell culture: Woodward and McDonald 2002; Romain 2000; Seeman 1979. For the bow and arrow, see Browne 1938. Browne’s long-accepted argument that the bow and arrow arrived relatively late has recently been challenged (Bradbury 1997) and reaffirmed (Boszhardt 2002).

Hopewell religion: Brown 1997.

“stunning vigor”: Silverberg 1968:280–89.

Cahokia chronology: There are many versions of Cahokian chronology, because the radiocarbon calibrations have been revised repeatedly, but they differ more in detail than in substance. I use the chronology in Dalan et al. 2003:69. But see also Fowler 1997: Appendix 1.

London population: Weinreb and Hibbert eds. 1993:630–32.

Cahokia not a city: Woods and Wells 2001.

Big Bang: Pauketat 1994:168–74. Pauketat himself did not use the term “Big Bang,” though it is now in common use.

Synchrony and proximity of mound sites: Emerson 2002.

Engineering of Monks Mound: Woods 2001, 2000. My thanks to Ray Mann for help in understanding the engineering and to Dr. Woods for a copy of these and other papers.

Pauketat’s model: Pauketat 1998; 1997:30–51; 1994:esp. chap. 7.

Burials in small mound: Fowler et al. 1999.

Slow introduction of maize: Riley et al. (1994) dated maize found near Cahokia from 170 B.C.–60 A.D.

Maize not important to Hopewell: interviews, Woods; Lynott et al. 1986.

Woods’s model of Cahokia fall: Author’s Interviews, Woods; Woods 2004, 2003; Woods and Wells 2001. In its basics, this scenario is similar to that in Mehrer 1995:esp. Chap. 5.

Widespread land clearing: Lopinot and Woods 1993.

Sedimentation evidence for flooding: Holley and Brown 1989, cited in Woods 2004:155; Woods 2003. See also, Holden 1996, Neumann 2002:150–51.

Haudenosaunee villages: Day 1953:332–34 (six square miles, Denonville, 333; “hundreds of acres,” 338).

American chestnuts: Kummer 2003; Mann and Plummer 2002.

“They pound them”: Bartram 1996:56. For many groups in the Southeast, milk from mast was the only kind of milk available.

Lack of evidence for deaths or hunger: Milner 1992.

Palisade: Iseminger 1990. In a novel interpretation, Pauketat argues that the Cahokians’ attempt to shut themselves behind a palisade actually could have been “an offensive tactic” that let Cahokia’s rulers “project a larger-than-normal armed force by freeing up people who otherwise would have guarded the capital” (Pauketat 1998:71).

Status gap: Trubitt 2000.

1811–12 earthquakes: Nuttli 1973. According to Nuttli’s estimates, which are based on multiple historical accounts, the earthquake was so powerful that ten miles away from the fault it apparently kicked the ground up at a foot per second, enough to shotput people into the air (table 7). Cahokia, 140 miles away from the center of the 1811 earthquakes, would not have experienced such drastic shaking, but because the soft Mississippi soils readily transmit earthquake waves the impact would still have been devastating.

Lack of Calakmul investigation: Strictly speaking, this isn’t true. Two Carnegie Institution archaeologists visited Calakmul several times after a Carnegie botanist reported its existence, but the site was so remote that they did little other than map the central area (Lundell 1934; Ruppert and Denison 1943).

Calakmul description: Folan 1992; Folan et al. 1995, 2001.

Calakmul population: Culbert et. al. (1990) estimated the population of the entire Mutal (Tikal) city-state at 425,000. Fletcher and Gann (1992) used the same methods for Calakmul, concluding that Calakmul was 37 percent bigger than its rival (see also Folan 1990:159). The resultant population would be 582,250, which I have rendered as 575,000 to maintain a similar level of approximation.

Stuart’s work: Stuart 2000. Tatiana Prouskouriakoff and Clemency Coggins suggested the outlines of the encounter in the 1960s, but later archaeologists rejected the idea of an actual intrusion from Teotihuacán, instead arguing that the evidence suggested an influx of ideas, rather than people. Stuart marshaled enough data to convince most of his colleagues that Prouskouriakoff and Coggins were right to begin with.

Mutal-Kaan war: Martin and Grube 1966. I thank Prof. Grube for sending me a copy of this widely cited and influential work. A recent summary is in Martin and Grube 2000. See also, Martin 2000.

Beginning of Kaan: Folan et al. 1995:325–30 (discussion of chronology).

Views of Maya state organization: Fox 1996. The most prominent early advocate of the small-equal-state position was Morley (Morley 1946:50, 159–61). In the more recent past it was adopted by such prominent Mayanists as Peter Mathews (1991), Stephen Houston (1993), Nicholas Dunning (1992), and William Sanders and David Webster (1988). The most widely cited dissent to the small-state view that I know of came from Joyce Marcus, who argued for four dominant centers in several publications (e.g., Marcus 1973). An unpublished but widely circulated analysis by Martin and Grube (1996) changed many minds (see also, Grube and Martin 1998). I thank Prof. Grube for sending me copies of both. The most accessible summary of their views is Martin and Grube 2000:17–21.

Semblance of empire: This is a revamped version of a sentence in Chase, Grube, and Chase 1991:1.

Decipherment of y-ahaw: Usually credited to Houston and Mathews 1985:27; Bricker 1986:70.

“The political landscape”: Martin and Grube 2000:21. Martin’s comparison of the Maya to the Greeks comes from interviews and email.

Sky Witness: Martin and Grube 2000:90–92, 102–04.

Mutal size and population: Adams and Jones 1981:318–19; Culbert et al. 1990 (arguing for 425,000 as total size).

Possible motives for Kaan-Mutal war: Fahsen 2003 (trade routes); Harrison 1999:121 (commerce, dynasty); Grube, pers. comm. (ideology).

Landscape alteration: The literature is vast. Examples include Darch 1988; Dunning et al. 2002; Fedick and Ford 1990; Gunn et al. 2002 (“geochemically hostile,” 313); Scarborough and Gallopin 1991; Sluyter 1994. See also, Scarborough 2003.

Oxwitza’ (Caracol): Chase and Chase 2001, 1996, 1994 (population, 5).

Star Wars attack on Mutal: Harrison 1999:122; Houston 1991; Freidel 1993. The Chases are skeptical of Kaan’s role, because they think it too far from Caracol and because they are skeptical about the translations by Grube and Martin (Chase and Chase 2000:63).

Maya way of conquest: Grube and Martin 1998.

Dos Pilas: Guenter 2003; Fahsen 2003. Previous attempts at decipherment include Boot 2002a, 2002b; better readings of the glyphs led to corrections. See also, Guenter 2002; Williams 2002.

Stairway quotes: Guenter 2002:39 (flint), 27 (skull).

Morley’s tally of dates: Morley 1946:64. Updated in Sidrys and Berger 1979; Hamblin and Pitcher 1980. I use Sidrys and Berger. A few hard-to-read inscriptions might have been set down as late as 928.

Four lines of evidence: Robichaux 2002 (waterflow evidence); Gill 2000 (ethnohistorical [Gill also uses many other types of data]; “starvation and thirst,” 1); Curtis, Hodell, and Brenner 1996 (oxygen data; “driest intervals,” 45); Haug et al. 2003 (titanium).

Paradoxical survival in the north: Dahlin 2002 (“How and why,” 327); Robichaux 2002. The Maya also fled west, toward Guatemala’s Pacific coast, another dry area in which they thrived during the drought. I leave the western cities out of the main account solely for simplicity.

Chichén Itzá: Milbrath and Peraza Lope 2003.

9 / Amazonia

Orellana’s expedition: The main sources are collected in Heaton ed. 1934 (“by God,” 262). The best histories of the expedition that I have come across are Smith 1990:chap. 2; Hemming 1987:185–94. Still enjoyable to read, though dated, is Prescott 2000 (“Not a bark,” 1075).

Orellana’s betrayal: The case for the prosecution is summed up in Means 1934. For Pizarro’s reaction, see letter, Pizarro, G., to king, 3 Sept. 1542, in Heaton 1934:245–51 (“the greatest cruelty,” 248).

“We were eating”: Heaton ed. 1934:408.

Angry hives: I have borrowed the simile from Smith 1990:68. The next two sentences are essentially reworkings of his sentences.

Carvajal on populousness, Tapajós attacks: Heaton 1934 (“farther we went,” 202; “all inhabited,” “five leagues,” 198; “numerous and very large,” 200; “Inland,” 216; “more than twenty,” 203).

Carvajal publication: Medina ed. 1894.

Carvajal criticism: López de Gómara 1979:131 (“mentirosa”); Myers et al. 1992; Denevan 1996a:661–64; see also, Shoumatoff 1986. Oddly, critics rarely mention that Orellana’s account is similar to those from the second Amazon expedition. This was the Pedro de Orsua expedition of 1559–61, subject of the Werner Herzog film Aguirre, the Wrath of God. The basic sources are collected in González and Tur eds. 1981. It stopped at the Tapajós in 1561, but provided little further information about the region, except for the suggestive fact that the Indian towns’ streets were laid out in a grid and that they had wooden temples with deities painted on the doors (González and Tur eds. 1981:111, 370).

Ecologists’ views: Arnold 2000. For how they fit into the general Western propensity to view the Amazon as a tropical Eden, see Holanda 1996; Slater 1995; and the polemical Stott 1999. German ecologist Andreas Schimper invented “tropical rain forest” as a scientific construct in 1898 (Schimper 1903). It was an example of a new scientific category that included the living community and its nonliving environment together as a single functioning unit—an ecosystem, a term Schimper’s school coined in 1935.

More sympathetic views of Carvajal: Author’s intervews, Balée, Erickson, Peter Stahl, Anna Roosevelt. See also, Porro 1994, Whitehead 1994, for contemporary treatments of early accounts.

Must become priority: E.g., “The time bomb of ecological, environmental, climatic and human damage caused by deforestation continues to tick, and the problem of tropical rainforest clearance must remain a priority within international politics” (Park 1992:162).

“A ceaseless round”: Belt 1985:184; Darwin ed. 1887 (vol. 3):188 (“best of all”).

Richards: Richards 1952. Richards’s ideas drew heavily on the idea of the natural progression of ecosystems toward a final, stable “climax” developed by ecologists Frederick E. Clements and Arthur George Tansley. In this view, the tropical forest was the climax, the ultimate vegetative destination, in hot, humid areas.

“wet desert”: The image of the Amazon as a lush forest growing on a desert was apparently popularized in Goodland and Irwin 1975.

Rainforest soils: This argument is crisply stated in Wilson 1992:273–74.

Counterfeit Paradise: Meggers 1996 (orig. ed., 1971).

Slash-and-burn as ecologically sensitive response: Interviews, Meggers; Meggers 1996: 20–23. See also, Kleinman, Bryant, and Pimentel 1996; Luna-Orea and Wagger 1996.

Unchanged harmony: “In the Western imagination, more generally speaking, the Amazon has stood for centuries as the benchmark of primordial (pure) nature and as a refuge of ‘primitive’ peoples: our contemporary ancestors” (Heckenberger, forthcoming).

Yanomamo as windows into the past: E.g., Brooke 1991 (“a tribe virtually untouched by modern civilization whose ways date from the Stone Age”); Chagnon 1992. In the foreword to the latter, Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson calls the Yanomamo “the final tribes living strong and free in the style of the preliterate peoples first encountered by Europeans five centuries ago.” To Wilson, “the Yanomamö way of life gives us the clearest view of the conditions under which the human mind evolved biologically during deep history”(ix).

“mega-Niño events”: Author’s interviews, Meggers; Meggers 1994; 1979 (other climatic constraints).

El Niño fires: Cochrane and Schulze 1998; Pyne 1995:60–65. Fires from a big El Niño in 1925–26 were described in a short, apparently self-published monograph by Giuseppe Marchesi (Marchesi 1975) that I found in a used-book store in Manaus. According to Marchesi, the fires on the Río Negro were so intense that the smoke blocked out the sun in Manaus, hundreds of miles away.

Recovery time of forest: Uhl 1987; Uhl and Jordan 1984; Uhl et al. 1982.

Upper limit of a thousand: Meggers (1954) says that the rainforest will not permit societies to surpass the “Tropical Forest” pattern of slash-and-burn subsistence (809), which she defines as “villages of 50–1,000 pop[ulation]” (814, fig. 1). The implication is that environmental limits set the maximum village population at one thousand.

Meggers dismisses Carvajal: Meggers 1996:187 (“Evidence [of environmental limits] casts doubt on the accuracy of the early European descriptions of large sedentary populations along the floodplain”). Oddly, Meggers endorsed Carvajal in the same book (“These eyewitness reports of numerous large villages are substantiated by archaeological evidence,” 133). See also, Meggers 1992a, 1992c.

Unchanged lives, population: Meggers 1992 (two thousand years, 199).

Meggers and Marajó: Author’s interviews, Meggers; Popsin 2003; Meggers and Evans 1957. See also Schaan 2004.

Meggers’s law: Meggers 1954 (“There is a force,” 809; “level to which,” 815). Meggers called the stage of slash-and-burn cultivation the “Tropical Forest” pattern. In the brackets, I have replaced references to that term. Her law drew on the environmental-determinist arguments of earlier geographers such as Ellen Churchill Semple, whose Influences of Geographic Environment trained two generations of researchers: “The geographic element in the long history of human development has been operating strongly and operating persistently…[and] is for all intents and purposes immutable in comparison with the other factor in the problem—shifting, plastic, progressive, retrogressive man” (Semple 1911:2).

Marajó as offshoot: Meggers and Evans 1957:412–18. See also, Evans and Meggers 1968. Meggers and Evans were influenced by Julian Steward, editor of the influential Handbook of South American Indians, who also thought that Marajóara culture originated somewhere else—the Caribbean, he suspected (Steward 1948).

Diminishing influence: “Few contemporary scholars accept the hypothesis of environmental limitations and lack of cultural development in the Amazon Basin” (Erickson 2004:457).

“Rather than admiration”: Cunha 1975:1. I thank Susanna Hecht for letting me use her translation, which is from her forthcoming compilation of da Cunha’s Amazonian writings. In the meantime, the original version of this marvelous book can be found at http://www.librairie.hpg.com.br/Euclides-da-Cunha-A-Margem-da-Historia.rtf.

Not a disaster: I paraphrase anthropologist Roland Bergman (Bergman 1980:53, quoted in Denevan 2001:60).

Rock paintings: Author’s visit; Consens 1989.

Roosevelt reexcavates: Author’s interviews, Roosevelt; Roosevelt 1991 (“outstanding indigenous,” 29; “100,000,” 2).

Earlier challenges to Meggers: Author’s interviews, Balée, Denevan, Erickson, Peter Stahl, Woods. Donald Lathrap of the University of Illinois (1970), Michael Coe of Yale (1957), and Robert L. Carneiro of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City (1995, see refs.) mounted the most important ones.

Meggers reaction: Author’s interviews, Meggers; Meggers 1992b (“polemical,” 399; “extravagant,” 403). See also Meggers 2004, 2001.

Montaigne: Montaigne 1991:233–36.

“forest animals”: Condamine 1986, quoted in Myers et al. 2004:22.

“Where man has remained”: Semple 1911:635. The ideas in Influences of Geographic Environment were typical for their day. “The Amazon winds its slow way amid the malarious languor of vast tropical forests in which the trees shut out the sky and the few natives are apathetic with the eternal inertia of the hot, damp tropics,” Semple’s Yale contemporary, Ellsworth Huntington, wrote in 1919 (Huntington 1919:49). “It is generally agreed,” Huntington said, “the native races within the tropics are dull in thought and slow in action. This is true not only of the African Negroes, the South American Indians, and the people of the East Indies, but of the inhabitants of southern India and the Malay peninsula” (Huntington 1924:56). See also, Taylor 1927.

Meggers-Roosevelt dispute: Author’s interviews, Meggers, Roosevelt, Balée, Denevan, Erickson; Meggers 1992a:37 (colonialism, elitism); Baffi et al. 1996 (CIA membership).

Painted Rock Cave excavations: Roosevelt et al. 1996; Fiedel et al. 1996; Haynes et al. 1997. Press coverage was unusually thorough. (Gibbons 1996; Wilford 1997a; Hall 1996). In Science, Roosevelt presented her estimate of initial occupation as [.similar]11,200 to 10,500 uncalibrated radiocarbon years B.P. (380); I converted the mean, 10,600 B.P., into calendar years with Stuiver et al. 1998.

Contemporaneity with Clovis: This is subject to debate, with Clovis-firsters challenging Roosevelt’s earliest radiocarbon dates, and Roosevelt crying foul because (in her view) the Clovisites apply more stringent standards to challengers than they do to Clovis (Haynes et al. 1997). Further confusing the issue is the participants’ disagreement over the best way of calibrating raw radiocarbon dates from this period.

138 crops: Clement 1999a, 1999b.

Stone axes: Author’s interviews, Denevan; Denevan 1992b. I am grateful to Prof. Denevan for sending me a copy of this article, upon which my discussion of stone axes is based. See also the updated version of the argument in Denevan 2001:116–23. To some extent, Denevan was anticipated by Donald Lathrap, who called slash-and-burn “a secondary, derived, and late phenomenon within the Amazon Basin,” which only made economic sense after the introduction of maize (quoted in ibid.:132). Denevan argued for a much later, post-1492 introduction of slash-and-burn.

Experiments with stone and steel axes: Carneiro 1979a, 1979b; Hill and Kaplan 1989 (difference between hardwoods and softwoods). True, Carneiro’s workers had no experience with stone axes, which one assumes unfairly magnified their inefficiency. But Carneiro also did not include the effort required to obtain the stone (often far away), make the ax, and keep it sharp, all of which were time sinks. Girdling, too, has been suggested, but it is also very slow.

Three years: Beckerman 1987. I thank Prof. Brush for helping me get this book.

Yanomamo history: Author’s interviews, Balée, Petersen, Chagnon.

Yanomami and steel tools: Author’s interview, Ferguson; Ferguson 1998 (lifestyle changes, 291–97), 1995; Colchester 1984 (seventeenth-century change, 308–10). Ferguson’s thesis is disputed, in part because it downplays the antiquity of Yanomamo warfare (author’s interview, James Petersen).

Controversy on Yanomami gifts: These and other charges were publicized and amplified in Tierney 2000. Tierney’s charges of exacerbating epidemics seem to have been refuted (see note to p. 102), but the furor over them obscured discussion of uncontrolled gifts of steel tools (Mann 2001, 2000a).

Absence of slash-and-burn in North America: Doolittle 2000:174–90 (“gossamer,” 186; “once fields,” 189).

Small farmer slash-and-burn as contributor to deforestation: Author’s interviews, Clement, Fearnside; Fearnside 2001. Fearnside’s figure is a step down from the estimate that slash-and-burn was responsible for 55 percent of total tropical forest clearing in the Americas in Hadley and Lanly 1983.

Nutrient loss: Hölscher 1997. I thank Beata Madari for giving a copy of this article to me.

Meggers survey: Meggers et al. 1988; Meggers 1996:183–87.

Central Amazon archaeology: Author’s interviews, Bartone, Heckenberger, Neves, Petersen; Heckenberger, Petersen, and Neves 2004; Neves et al. 2004; Mann 2002a. I convert uncalibrated radiocarbon years as per Stuiver et al.1988. The site discussed here is called Hatahara, after its owners.

Rainfall and canopy: Brandt 1988.

Importance of agroforestry: Interviews, Clement. See also, Denevan 2001:69–70, 83–90, 126–27; Posey 1984; Herrera 1992.

Bluffs as preferred sites: Denevan 1996.

More than half are trees: Clement 1998 (80 percent); 1999a:199. I am grateful to Dr. Clement for sending me copies of his work.

Uses of peach palm: Interviews, Clement; Mora-Urpí, Weber, and Clement 1997 (“only their wives,” quoted on 19); Clement and Mora-Urpí 1987 (yield); Denevan 2001:77 (saws).

Domestication of peach palm: Clement 1995, 1992, 1988.

Agricultural regression and fallows forests: Balée 2003 (“These old forests,” 282); 1994.

Anthropogenic forests: Interviews, Balée, Clement, Erickson, Nigel Smith, Stahl, Woods; Balée 1998; 1989 (11.8 percent, 14); Erickson 1999 (I am grateful to Prof. Erickson for sending me a copy of this paper); Smith 1995; Stahl 2002,1996.

“Gift from the past”: I have lifted this phrase from the title of Petersen, Neves, and Heckenberger 2001.

Terra preta: Much of what follows below is taken from the excellent Lehmann et al. eds. 2003; Glaser and Woods eds. 2004; and Petersen, Neves, and Heckenberger 2001. For a popular treatment, see Mann 2002b, 2000b. Lehmann et al. argue that from a scientific standpoint ADE (Amazonian dark earth) is a better term than terra preta. I use terra preta to avoid acronyms.

Terra preta valued: Smith 1980:562. Smith’s fine early article on terra preta was largely ignored on publication—“I got two reprint requests for that article,” he told me. “Nobody was ready to hear it.”

Terra preta distribution estimates: Author’s interviews, Woods, Wim Sombroek; Sombroek et al. 2004:130 (.1–.3 percent); Kern et al. 2004:52–53 (terra preta sites every five kilometers along tributaries).

Maya heartland: The Maya heartland—from Petén, Guatemala, and Belize north to southern Campeche and Quintana Roo in Mexico—covers about fifteen thousand square miles, a third or half of which was devoted to agriculture.

Charcoal: Glaser, Guggenberger, and Zech 2004; Glaser, Lehmann, and Zech 2002. My thanks to Prof. Glaser for giving me a copy of this article.

Microbial activity: Author’s interview, Janice Theis; Theis and Suzuki 2004; Woods and McCann 1999 (inoculation). I thank Joe McCann for giving me a copy of this article.

Charcoal and global warming: Author’s interview, Ogawa; Okimori, Ogawa, and Takahashi 2003.

Kayapó: Author’s interviews, Hecht; Hecht 2004 (“low-biomass,” “cool,” 362–63; “To live,” 364). I am indebted to Prof. Hecht for several fascinating discussions.

Terra preta experiments: Author’s interview, Steiner; Steiner, Teixeira, and Zech 2004.

Río Negro site: Author’s interviews, Bartone, Neves, Petersen; Heckenberger, Petersen, and Neves 2004, 1999.

Timing of terra preta at plantation: Neves et al. 2004:table 9.2.

Xingu and black earth: Heckenberger et al. 2003 (“regional plan,” “bridges,” 1711; “built environment,” 1713). For criticism, see Meggers 2003.

Santarém terra preta: Interviews, Woods, Sombroek; author’s visit; Kern et al. 2004.

Meggers reaction: Meggers 2001 (“without restraint,” 305; “accomplices,” 322). A response appears in Heckenberger, Petersen, and Neves 2001.

“rev up”: DeBoer, Kintigh, and Rostoker 2001:327.

“Rather than adapt”: I swipe this phrase from Erickson 2004 (“Native Amazonians did not adapt to nature, but rather they created the world that they wanted through human creativity, technology and engineering, and cultural institutions,” 456).

10 / The Artificial Wilderness

“all the trees”: Columbus 1963:84. I discovered this quotation, and the ideas around it, in Crosby 2003:3–16, 1986:9–12 (knitting together Pangaea).

Invention of Columbian Exchange: McNeill 2003:xiv.

Kudzu: Blaustein 2001; Kinbacher 2000.

A thousand kudzus everywhere: Crosby 1986:154–56 (spinach, mint, peach, endive, clover), 161 (Darwin), 191 (Jamestown, Garcilaso).

Cod and sea urchins: Jackson et al. 2001.

Keystone species: Wilson 1992:401.

“widowed land”: Chapter title in Jennings 1975.

Passenger pigeons: Schorger 1955 (vomiting, 35; rain of droppings, 54; huge roostings, 10–15, 77–89; excommunication, 51; one out of four, 205).

Muir and pigeons: Muir 1997:78–82.

Audubon and pigeons: Audubon 1871 (vol. 5):115.

Seneca and pigeon: Harris 1903:449–51.

“living, pulsing”: French 1919:1.

Leopold and monument: Leopold 1968.

Mast competition, lack of passenger pigeons: Interview, Neumann, Woods; Neumann 2002:158–64, 169–72; Herrmann and Woods 2003 (I thank Prof. Woods for giving me a copy of this paper).

Seton’s estimate: Seton 1929 (vol. 3):654–56. See, in general, Krech 1999:chap. 5.

Lott’s and other modern estimates of abundance: Lott 2002:69–76 (“primitive America,” 76); Flores 1997; 1991 (“perhaps” twenty-eight to thirty million, 471); Weber 2001 (“more likely” twenty to forty-four million). Shaw (1995) and Geist (1998) suggested the number should be ten to fifteen million.

Inka tree farms: Daniel W. Gade, pers. comm.

De Soto never saw bison: Crosby 1986:213.

La Salle’s buffalo: Parkman 1983 (vol. 1):765.

“post-Columbian abundance”: Geist 1998:62–63.

Elk begin to appear: Kay 1995.

California: Preston 2002 (Drake, 129).

“The virgin forest”: Pyne 1982:46–47. See also, Jennings 1975:30.

“artificial wilderness”: I borrow the phrase from Callicott and Nelson eds. 1998:11.

More “forest primeval” in nineteenth century: Denevan 1992a:377–81 (“pristine myth” article).

Cronon, academic brouhaha: Cronon 1995a, 1995b; Soulé and Lease eds. 1995; Callicott and Nelson eds. 1998 (“Euro-American men,” 2). An abridged version of Cronon 1996b appeared in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, 13 Aug. 1995.

Making gardens: Janzen 1998.

Creating future environments: I have borrowed the phrase and the thought from McCann 1999a:3.

11 / The Great Law of Peace

Nabokov in New York: Boyd 1991:11–12.

Early history of Haudenosaunee, Deganawidah story: Fenton 1998; Snow 1994:58–65; Hertzberg 1966.

Rules of operation: Tooker 1988:312–17. The basic source is Morgan 1901:77ff.

Checks and balances: Grinde 1992:235–40; Tehanetorens 1971 (“especially important,” sec. 93; impeachment grounds and procedures, secs. 19–25, 39 (“warnings,” sec. 19); rights of individuals and nations, secs. 93–98). A modern translation is online at http://www.iroquoisdemocracy.pdx.edu/html/greatlaw.htm.

“they will not conclude”: Williams 1936:201.

Iroquois women: Wagner 2001; Parker 1911:252–53 (“Does the modern American woman [who] is a petitioner before man, pleading for her political rights, ever stop to consider that the red woman that lived in New York state five hundred years ago, had far more political rights and enjoyed a much wider liberty than the twentieth century woman of civilization?”). I thank Robert Crease for helping me obtain this source.

Underwood’s estimate: cited in Johansen 1995:62.

Condolence Canes: Barreiro and Cornelius eds. 1991; Fenton 1983.

Age of council: Mann and Fields 1997. See also, Johansen 1995.

Haudenosaunee as second oldest: Some of the Swiss cantons have continuously functioning parliaments that are older, too. But I did not include them because the individual cantons seem more comparable to the individual nations of Haudenosaunee than to the league as a whole.

Great Law as inspiration: Grinde and Johansen 1991; Grinde 1977; Johansen 1987; Wright 1992:94 (“Their whole”).

Differences between Constitution and Great Law: Venables 1992:74–124 (Adams’s reminiscences, 108).

Franklin: Johansen 1987:40–42.

Indian freedoms: Josephy ed. 1993:29.

“Every man”: Quoted in Venables 1992:235.

“such absolute”: Colden 1747:100.

Perrot, Hennepin, Jesuit on Indian liberty: Quoted in Jaenen 1976:88 (Jesuit), 89 (Perrot), 92 (Hennepin).

Lahontan: Lahontan 1703 (vol. 2):8.

Montaigne: Montaigne 1991:233.

Greater attractiveness of native lives: Axtell 1975; Wilson 1999:67 (fleeing Jamestown). Axtell’s conclusions were sharply critiqued in Vaughan and Richter 1980; Axtell’s response (1981:351) was convincing, at least to me. See also Calloway 1986; Treckel and Axtell 1976.

Pilgrims dismayed by renegades: Salisbury 1982:128–33.

“When an Indian”: Quoted in Axtell 1975:57.

“troubled the power elite”: Jaenen 1976:95.

Appendixes

“I abhor”: Quoted at http://www.russellmeans.com/russell.htm.

Insulting names: This is a separate issue from the use of Indian references on geographical features and U.S. sports teams, some of which have long annoyed Indians. Various efforts have been made to ban the use of “squaw,” for example, as in Squaw Valley, home of a big ski resort in California, on the grounds that the word is a vulgar term for the vagina used to demean native women. Most linguists do not believe this is true. Still, the use of specific terms for the women of an ethnic group rings oddly these days—one can’t imagine a resort called Jewess or Negress Valley. Redskin, as in the Washington Redskins, the football team of the U.S. capital, also seems unhappily anachronistic. According to the team, the name is intended to celebrate Indians’ warrior spirit, a good quality, and is therefore not derogatory. But it seems like calling a dance troupe the New York Pickaninnies and saying the name is intended to extol African Americans’ innate sense of rhythm, a good quality.

“snowshoe,” “people who”: Goddard 1984; Mailhot 1978.

Crosby on civilization: Crosby 2002:71. See also, Wright 2005:32–33.

“‘Tribe’ and ‘chiefdom’”: Kehoe 2002:245.

Khipu: For a brief overview, see Mann 2003.

“resembles a mop”: Joseph 1992:28.

Governor consults khipu: Collapiña, Supno et al. 1921.

Khipu are banned: Urton 2003:22, 49.

Locke and Mead on khipu: Mead 1923 (“the mystery”, n.p.). Locke (1923:32) shared Mead’s view: “The evidence is intrinsically against the supposition that the quipu was a conventional scheme of writing” (italics in original). For another early attempt at decipherment, see Nordenskiöld 1979.

“Inka had no writing”: Fagan 1991:50.

Aschers’ work: Interview, R. Ascher (“clearly non-numerical”); Ascher and Ascher 1997:87 (“rapidly developing”).

Urton and khipu writing: Urton 2003.

Breakdown of khipu meaning units: Urton 2003:chaps. 2–5 (“system of coding information…binary code,” 1; comparison with Sumer, Maya, Egypt, 117–18).

Khipu placename deciphered: Urton and Brezine 2005.

Miccinelli documents: Laurencich-Minelli 2001; Laurencich-Minelli et al. 1998, 1995; Zoppi 2000.

Tentative decipherment: Urton 2001.

Charles VIII and European syphilis epidemic: Baker and Armelagos 1988:708.

“lyen in fire”: Quoted in Crosby 2003:125–26.

Darwinian predictions about diseases: Ewald 1996:chap. 3. More precisely, nonvectorborne microorganisms evolve toward moderate malignity.

Díaz and Las Casas: Williams, Rice, and Lacayo 1927:690 (“origin”). My thanks to June Kinoshita for helping me obtain this article. On the origin of syphilis, Las Casas was unequivocal: “From the beginning, two things did and do afflict the Spanish on this island [Hispaniola]: the first is the sickness of the bubas [pustules], which in Italy is called the French disease. And I know for the truth that it came from this island or from when the first Indians came here, when Admiral Christopher Columbus returned with the news of the discovery of the Indies, which I saw in Seville, and they were stuck rotting in Spain, infecting the air or some other route, or else there were some Spanish with the disease among the first returnees to Castille.” Las Casas also says the epidemic began during the war in Naples (Las Casas 1992 [vol. 6]:361–62).

Recent syphilis findings: Rothschild and Rothschild 2000 (Colorado); 1996 (U.S. and Ecuador); Rothschild et al. 2000b (Caribbean). See also, Rogan and Lentz 1994, cited in Arriaza 1995:78.

Evidence for early European syphilis: E.g., Pearson 1924 (suggesting that Bruce’s recently excavated skeleton and deathmask support a diagnosis of syphilis, rather than leprosy); Power 1992 (I am grateful to Robert Crease for making it possible for me to obtain this source); Stirland 1995:109–15. News reports indicate that other such skeletons exist, too, though some have not yet appeared in the scholarly literature (e.g., Studd 2001; Barr 2000). In the past, though, few of “the numerous cases of pre-Columbian Old World syphilis…have withstood reexamination” (Baker and Armelagos 1988:710).

Universal presence of syphilis: Hudson 1965a, 1965b.

Confusion with Hansen’s disease: Baker and Armelagos 1988:706–07.

Historians’ motives: Crosby, “Preface to the 2003 Edition,” in 2003b:xix.