Indigenous civilizations are far older and more complex than history suggests

https://lithub.com/david-treuer-on-the-myth-of-an-edenic-pre-columbian-new-world/

by pseudolus • 8 years ago

76 56 8 years ago

oh_sigh• 8 years ago

I wish the article was more in line with the title - the title comes up a little bit, but the article is mostly about white-Indian interaction, and not about Indian civilizations. Which makes sense, because the book this is excerpted from is subtitled "Native America from 1890 to present'.

dlwh• 8 years ago

I highly recommend the book 1491, which goes pretty deeply into what we can infer about the pre-Columbian Americas.

robohoe• 8 years ago

I’m currently reading it. It’s mind blowing to see that there were peoples in Americas further than 13k years ago.

For those looking to read it, make sure to get the 400-some page version of this book. There is a similarly named book aimed at grade school kids.

https://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Colu...

https://www.amazon.com/Before-Columbus-Americas-Charles-Mann...

tux19682• 8 years ago

Aren't all civilizations far older and more complex than history can account for? We don't really know how the pyramids arrived, or a detailed history of England back very far -- who created Stonehenge?

It's interesting that the migration out of Africa and over to the Americas happened so much longer ago than previously thought, but it doesn't change what happened when the European settlers arrived. The author seems to be asserting that this gives the Native Americans more claim than they would otherwise have.

But I don't understand that logic; human history, known and unknown, is littered with people suffering under the hands of conquerors. The story is the same in Asia and Europe as it is in the Americas. The Natives themselves weren't always peaceful and conquered and claimed land from each other. Hopefully we can do better than this going forward, but the past is what it is, a harsh existence for victors and even more so for the vanquished.

garmaine4• 8 years ago

We don't really know how the pyramids arrived, or a detailed history of England back very far -- who created Stonehenge?

We actually know answers to both of those questions fairly well now. Archeology has advanced, and what questions remain are mostly a matter of details.

DiabloD32• 8 years ago

It doesn't seem likely Khufu had actually built the pyramids, but modified them into his own vision. We still don't know what the pyramids were originally designed for, but it seems unlikely the previous owner had intended it to be a tomb.

ZenPsycho2• 8 years ago

The justification frequently used for western colonialism/conquest is the principle of “Terra Nullius”, in short, the native peoples with their primative technology are not fully utilising the land, and we’re doing them a favor by conquering them.

it turns out after the fact that in many respects, particularly with regards to agriculture, land management, diplomacy, and some areas of engineering, the native people were more advanced, and the permanent loss of that knowledge is a tragedy for the world.

tux19682• 8 years ago

For sure. But there are countless other examples of people being conquered too, all over the world, and not just by Europeans. There is no justification needed, other than that's what humans did back then. It was a much more primitive and brutal example of survival of the fittest. And as much as it offends our sensibilities now, it is the very path that leads us to where we find ourselves today.

We can struggle to be more just and compassionate with each other today, but our ancestors lived in a very different and harsh reality. It's not pretty, but it was a reality for a lot longer than this brief period we're living in now.

TomMckenny• 8 years ago

Also, somehow "Terra Nullius" only gets applied after the fact.

I imagine violently chasing off the owner of a deer lease to convert it to more efficient use would not be smiled upon. Even though deer hunting is exactly what Native Americans were doing with the land originally.

And building housing on someone else's golf-course or occupying and building on a long empty city lot you don't own are both unimaginably illegal.

flukus• 8 years ago

The justification frequently used for western colonialism/conquest is the principle of “Terra Nullius”, in short, the native peoples with their primative technology are not fully utilising the land, and we’re doing them a favor by conquering them.

That is debatable (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_nullius#History), the term/concept may not have even existed during the land grabbing periods of colonialism.

pseudolus• 8 years ago

I believe "Terra Nullius" was used primarily with respect to aboriginal lands in Australia. Relative to North America and New Zealand the pattern was usually to maintain the pretext of legality by signing treaties and then violating them to the point where they became meaningless.

Coursera is offering a course on "Indigenous Canada" that starts on January 23 and offers a great overview on the history of the relationship between First Nations/Metis and Canada [0].

[0] https://www.coursera.org/learn/indigenous-canada

rocoso• 8 years ago

Natives where peaceful. Land belongs to the great spirit. They were conquered by the invaders..

Kalium• 8 years ago

It might just be me, but those seem like very broad generalizations over a large number of unique cultures.

kingkawn• 8 years ago

In order to move forward from this cycle of history it is meaningful to look at how the spoils of the conquerors continue to accrue for their descendants in unequal measure. The history you are eager to dismiss as the past is well alive, history in name only.

joecool10292• 8 years ago

I was looking at some of Egypt's history. Kind of interesting the Old Kingdom figured out pyramids, built the biggest only around 100 years after the first, then it was all downhill from there.

Makes me wonder if we hit a high point landing people on the moon, and everything's just going to go downhill for the next few thousand years.

garmaine4• 8 years ago

How was it “downhill” from there? The great pyramid is rather simple as far as art and cultural complexity goes. I would actually say it is quite crude, and later middle and new dynastic period works are much more impressive, even if they are less gargantuan in scale.

joecool10292• 8 years ago

The great pyramid is rather simple as far as art and cultural complexity goes.

That may be so, but it remains as a feat of project unmatched in their history, the one great wonder that survived. I am not sure how many would be able to name the pyramids that came after. There's a huge amount of precision involved and a huge amount of effort required of the culture to complete.

Similarly you could argue that with space exploration we've become significantly more advanced, our probes and instruments can do things the ones in the 60's couldn't. Yet, we haven't sent anymore humans past low earth orbit. In a sense we've advanced, the individual efforts remain great, but our cultural efforts have retreated, the weight of humanity is not where it once was.

What's most going to be remembered of our culture in 5000 years?

angel_j• 8 years ago

Maybe they undertook pyramids too fanatically altogether, and that that was their downfall. The thought-leaders thought pyramids were the best investment, instead of astronomy.

The downfall may have been an effect of the great thing. Pyramids, sweet! There's a drought coming.

I wouldn't go for the moon landing, not because it wasn't great, but it wasn't an all-consuming investment by civilization. There are a lot stronger modern candidates.

redahs• 8 years ago

If the thesis of Progress & Poverty is correct, then the cyclic nature of civilization is due primarily to the tendency of the labor cost of acquiring unimproved land for productive workers to increase faster than the rate at which wages can be accumulated to acquire it. If this is the case, then the decline of our present phase of civilization may have begun in the 1930s, when state governments in the United States begun replacing property taxes with sales taxes, as the share of total government revenues raised from property taxes has now fallen from 40-50% to less than 10%, and the share is even lower in other countries.

However while the Roman Republic relied primarily a 1-3% annual property tax on wealth to fund its early expansion from 509BC, it had abandoned public assessed domestic property taxes by 167BC at the latest, yet the the Roman Empire reached its height in 117AD. So the point in time at which a country eliminates domestic property taxes on landed wealth in order to maximize the private capture of rent for its political class is unlikely to represent the peak or maximum of the civilization, but rather an initial inflection point, in which case a peak of our current phase of civilization during the 1960s may have been possible, with the inflection point occurring earlier.

sonnyblarney• 8 years ago

"acquiring unimproved land "

When land + labour is the primary means of product, maybe, bu since that hasn't been the case for a while and may not either have been the case in aboriginal territories, I'm not sure it applies.

hevi_jos• 8 years ago

You are mixing things that don't have anything to do with each other. Two empires separated by more than a thousand of years.

While talking about an Empire expansion you omit the biggest factor: You expand or grow conquering-stealing-destroying others and the limit for this is geographic, not taxes.

In the particular case of the Roman Empire they needed to communicate all the provinces, and they did that by sea, mainly using the Mediterranean Sea. There was no train, like there is today(which is a tremendous difference as it is several orders of magnitude of difference transporting things).

Once you conquered all the Mediterranean Sea, there was nothing else to conquer, communicating by land was super expensive. Today it is the size of the world, until we get out to other planets.

Also in today's world there are weapons of mass destruction like nuclear weapons. If you try to grow at the expense of others you could get destroyed.

eecsninja• 8 years ago

Major factual error in the article that undermines the significance of these findings:

Like the Meadowcroft site, Monte Verde has been dated to as many as 19,000 years ago. Together the sites are important and do more than help us understand how and when North America was settled; they also show that there were people in North America well before the Bering land bridge formed about 10,000 years ago, throwing into dispute the theory that North America was settled primarily by Asiatic wanderers over the bridge.

The Bering land bridge was NOT formed 10000 years ago -- that's when it was covered by water.

All this proves is that people settled in one place 19000 years ago. They probably still came from Asia. Nothing revolutionary here.

EdwardDiego• 8 years ago

The Bering land bridge was NOT formed 10000 years ago -- that's when it was covered by water.

You're right that Beringia was most recently waterfree from c30000BCE to c11000BCE but that doesn't really detract from the central theme of the article around Indian - settler interaction.

paradoxparalax4• 8 years ago

Just to note that colonization, or the criminal robbing of their lands and destruction of their homes and homelands is Not, Not, a thing from the Past.

An indigenous woman or child was killed or kicked out of their land this week somewhere in the world.

The amazon forest is good place to start looking. But this is happening in other continents too.

mirimir4• 8 years ago

OK, so indigenous civilizations in the Americas go back at least 20-30 kyr before European invasion. And it seems that they had more or less reached equilibrium with their environment.

Sure, they used fire to modify the environment. In the Midwest, for example, they pushed the prairie-forest boundary several hundred miles north. And in the East, they burned to keep down forest undergrowth.

And sure, mammoths disappeared. But the buffalo did OK, until the Europeans. More prairie arguably benefited them.

So it all sounds quite idyllic, in a way.

But, conversely, they didn't invent wheels. Or glass. And only some metalworking. And mostly for decoration, not weapons.

I wonder why that was. I've read Jared Diamond, but it all seems so contrived. Maybe it was just that they didn't trade a lot with China ;)

paradoxparalax4• 8 years ago

"I wonder why that was"

Maybe the old cliché: Necessity

oversimplified: when you already live in Heavens, you don't need to invent the Bible.

I have always Hated cliches since a very early age. At 40, I realized they are underestimated.

As Confucius maybe said ( I wasn't there) :

"The Man stops crawling and stand up to start walking at around age 40"

Confucius

mirimir4• 8 years ago

Were the Americas really that idyllic?

saalweachter2• 8 years ago

Why do you find the lack of domesticatable animals an unsatisfactory explanation? You don't need an oxcart without an ox.

mirimir4• 8 years ago

That is a good point. But people can also pull carts, and often have. And there were wolves, from which Europeans bred dogs. Maybe deer and buffalo aren't amenable to domestication. But I don't recall Diamond's arguments and evidence about that.

And what about iron weapons? I presume that there was meteoric iron lying about, as in Europe. And glass. Why didn't they independently discover glass?

I suspect that there was something generally about indigenous American culture that favored peaceful coexistence. Notwithstanding some ritual warfare, of course. But they just didn't seem as driven as Old World cultures were.

Indigenous civilizations are far older and more complex than history suggests

Related Stories