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landingtreeIf I wait as I was planning to and do supplementary reading before writing about this book, I'll probably not write about it at all, certainly not within the same month that classes start up again. Which is a shame, because I know so little else about the pre-Columbian Americas, and while I was looking for this one in the library I walked back and forth along shelves of tempting-looking books on the topic. And this book presents controversies in every chapter, and I like its writing and its argument so much that I want to take its side on every single one of them, which seems like a good provisional position -- but this is one of those times where I want additional branching and recombining lifetimes, so I could get more detail, and see what's come up in the scholarship in the last fourteen years. Given only the one lifetime: bits and pieces, eventually.
This book is, most broadly, attempting to demolish the European scholarly contention that the indigenous peoples of the Americas had no history, that with a few monument-building exceptions they lived lightly on the land in small numbers and had always done so. That belief (which the book names Holmberg's Mistake) stemmed from non-indigenous scholars looking through racist lenses at unfamiliar technologies and techniques, and from thinking that observations made of indigenous cultures in the aftermath of the apocalyptic plagues of first contact with Europe could reasonably be extrapolated back over all their prior existences.
Filter-feeding on the internet, I'd met some of this, but I'd never actually read a book about it, and there's a huge difference in weight, when for my whole life I've also been filter-feeding on the stereotypes. I felt -- and there's room for this to happen again and again, as I read about places, but maybe not often to this extent -- like I did when I went to Montreal last year, sitting in a cafe feeling overwhelmed because somehow I'd planned a trip to Canada without fully understanding that it would involve actually being in Canada. I didn't exactly not know that the pre-Colombian Americas were populated by more cultures than I'd ever heard named, by an order of magnitude; I didn't exactly not know the scale of the tragedy Columbus brought; and it's not as though I know those things with all that much immediacy now. But it's a damn sight more immediacy than it was before.
Many of the smaller questions the book aims at that larger point are up for debate, to varying degrees, but the larger point isn't. Estimates of what percentage of the Amazon Basin was cultivated vary; things which don't seem up for debate are the fact that it was, and the smaller but regrettably influential fact that considerable intelligence over long careers was devoted to proving that in principle it couldn't have been. Here's the argument against the possibility of cultivating the Amazon Basin: rainforest soil will not yield crops reliably, because soil under conditions of constant rainfall turns into a slurry from which nutrients easily escape. Once high-yield crops replace the tree cover which both sheltered the soil and held within itself most of the system's stock of nutrients, the land remains high-yield for two or three years and then goes dead. Therefore the Amazon Basin could never have supported complex cultures or high population densities. This is an example of the kind of argument which pops up again and again in the book, the kind that seems good until you step outside it or unless you never stepped inside it to begin with, in which case you say: cultivate high-yield trees.*
The degree to which nineteenth and twentieth century estimates of indigenous American population levels fell short is debatable; the fact that they did fall short, for bad reasons, isn't. The precise account of when and how indigenous Americans got to the Americas in the first place is still uncertain and complicated (as of 2005 there was no reigning theory), but the previous reigning theory of a single migration over the Bering landbridge during a brief window when the North American ice sheet had a traversable corridor is out: people reached the Americas earlier than that would account for. Everyone's heard of the Inca, but the cultures which preceded them, not so much. (At least, I hadn't).
There's so much in this book. I could go on and write about things like the quipu, the undeciphered writing system of the Inca which was not recognized as such for a long time on account of being made of knotted cords, but instead I will just say 'I recommend this book' and go have lunch.
*And also, in the long term, you change the soil type using the retentive properties of charcoal, where by 'you' in this case I mean 'some of the peoples of the Amazon Basin who have never in fact stopped doing that.'
This book is, most broadly, attempting to demolish the European scholarly contention that the indigenous peoples of the Americas had no history, that with a few monument-building exceptions they lived lightly on the land in small numbers and had always done so. That belief (which the book names Holmberg's Mistake) stemmed from non-indigenous scholars looking through racist lenses at unfamiliar technologies and techniques, and from thinking that observations made of indigenous cultures in the aftermath of the apocalyptic plagues of first contact with Europe could reasonably be extrapolated back over all their prior existences.
Filter-feeding on the internet, I'd met some of this, but I'd never actually read a book about it, and there's a huge difference in weight, when for my whole life I've also been filter-feeding on the stereotypes. I felt -- and there's room for this to happen again and again, as I read about places, but maybe not often to this extent -- like I did when I went to Montreal last year, sitting in a cafe feeling overwhelmed because somehow I'd planned a trip to Canada without fully understanding that it would involve actually being in Canada. I didn't exactly not know that the pre-Colombian Americas were populated by more cultures than I'd ever heard named, by an order of magnitude; I didn't exactly not know the scale of the tragedy Columbus brought; and it's not as though I know those things with all that much immediacy now. But it's a damn sight more immediacy than it was before.
Many of the smaller questions the book aims at that larger point are up for debate, to varying degrees, but the larger point isn't. Estimates of what percentage of the Amazon Basin was cultivated vary; things which don't seem up for debate are the fact that it was, and the smaller but regrettably influential fact that considerable intelligence over long careers was devoted to proving that in principle it couldn't have been. Here's the argument against the possibility of cultivating the Amazon Basin: rainforest soil will not yield crops reliably, because soil under conditions of constant rainfall turns into a slurry from which nutrients easily escape. Once high-yield crops replace the tree cover which both sheltered the soil and held within itself most of the system's stock of nutrients, the land remains high-yield for two or three years and then goes dead. Therefore the Amazon Basin could never have supported complex cultures or high population densities. This is an example of the kind of argument which pops up again and again in the book, the kind that seems good until you step outside it or unless you never stepped inside it to begin with, in which case you say: cultivate high-yield trees.*
The degree to which nineteenth and twentieth century estimates of indigenous American population levels fell short is debatable; the fact that they did fall short, for bad reasons, isn't. The precise account of when and how indigenous Americans got to the Americas in the first place is still uncertain and complicated (as of 2005 there was no reigning theory), but the previous reigning theory of a single migration over the Bering landbridge during a brief window when the North American ice sheet had a traversable corridor is out: people reached the Americas earlier than that would account for. Everyone's heard of the Inca, but the cultures which preceded them, not so much. (At least, I hadn't).
There's so much in this book. I could go on and write about things like the quipu, the undeciphered writing system of the Inca which was not recognized as such for a long time on account of being made of knotted cords, but instead I will just say 'I recommend this book' and go have lunch.
*And also, in the long term, you change the soil type using the retentive properties of charcoal, where by 'you' in this case I mean 'some of the peoples of the Amazon Basin who have never in fact stopped doing that.'
