1491 (96 page)
*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
Hrdlička’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 C
14
formation and intake varied more than Libby had thought. As a result, raw C
14
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 C
14
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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*25
Terra 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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