There are a lot of first hand accounts from the first Spaniards in the New World. I've read them and they are fascinating. They also provide a direct look at the peoples they encountered.
Cabeza de Vaca provided a very interesting account. Marooned, he wandered the New World alone for many years. He often found groups of people living in incredible squalor and constant warfare-- barely able to feed themselves. He ended up surviving, in part, because he acted as a middle-man between tribes who needed to trade with each other but were constantly at war.
Cortes found fairly advanced civilizations with amazing infrastructure that also suffered from warfare, slavery and ridiculous amounts of human sacrifices.
There is also a lot of evidence in the DNA of Native Americans that tell how and when they migrated here.
The point I am making is that Native Americans were and are Native Americans. They had good things and bad things going for them. This article (and book) seems pre-occupied with trying to tell you that everything we've learned up to this point is entirely wrong and that the New World was a utopia before the filthy Europeans arrived. It wasn't, and there is a ton of evidence to support that. It just was what it was. To be honest, I feel like this is trying to re-focus history with a politically correct slant-- which is what bothers me.
> This article (and book) seems pre-occupied with trying to tell you that everything we've learned up to this point is entirely wrong and that the New World was a utopia before the filthy Europeans arrived.
The article might try, but the first pages of the book actually say exactly the point you want to make. No wilderness utopia, and no chaotic barbarism.
> This article (and book) seems pre-occupied with trying to tell you that everything we've learned up to this point is entirely wrong
Not at all. It's trying to communicate that everything we've learned has/had been completely ignored in general education. That is, the book is ambitiously trying to summarize much of several decades of scientific research that had not been very accessible, and was mostly unknown to the general public. It does an excellent job at providing an overview of what is known.
It's tough to try to put forward a truly balanced narrative because there is still a lot of racist anti-native american sentiment and consequently a lot of counter compensation against that. In truth the indigenous pre-Columbian Americans were much like people anywhere in pre-modern times. Constantly at war, constantly struggling, with a few bright spots here and there. So much of the narrative of western history focuses on the bright spots and treats the atrocities, conflicts, and struggles as exceptions, but they are both part of the whole.
There is of course the theory that the reason the Spaniards found it so easy to whoop dat Aztec was because of the hostility caused by so much human sacrifice.
> There is of course the theory that the reason the Spaniards found it so easy to whoop dat Aztec was because of the hostility caused by so much human sacrifice.
The Aztecs weren't unique in the practice of human sacrifice. It seems a lot more likely that resent of the Aztec Empire by its peripheries in general was the reason than human sacrifice specifically, the former exacerbated by general discontent resulting from the wave of disease the region was facing -- as a result of European contact with the Caribbean islands and trade between the islands and the mainland.
The article is pretty old. Do the books, or other articles address the criticisms? eg:
" "I have seen no evidence that large numbers of people ever lived in the Beni," says Betty J. Meggers, of the Smithsonian Institution. "Claiming otherwise is just wishful thinking." Similar criticisms apply to many of the new scholarly claims about Indians, according to Dean R. Snow, an anthropologist at Pennsylvania State University. The problem is that "you can make the meager evidence from the ethnohistorical record tell you anything you want," he says. "It's really easy to kid yourself.""
I just wonder how it's viewed by experts in the field, now.
It's been a very long time since I read the first book, afraid I recall few details. The second book probably not as it covers the biological effects of the 'great exchange' and IIRC doesn't retread the 1491 material.
But I had those sorts of questions while reading, and generally do about books. I wish all were continually revised, or at least the articles on English Wikipedia about them would point out obsolete and incorrect claims.
"The Maya use story.. The advantage to me of stories, like what the Maya used, and the painting onto the patterns of the stars and the Milky Way of images of these great narratives, is you don’t have to be a Ph.D. to understand it. You could be a child and understand it and learn it through stories. In our world, to access that, you either have to be one of the scientists who creates the legend of the Big Bang, or you have to be one of the scientific writers who act as translators for the people in our world."
> the modern species [of maize] had to have been consciously developed by a small group of breeders who hunted through teosinte strands for plants with desired traits…"To get corn out of teosinte is so — you couldn't get a grant to do that now, because it would sound so crazy…Somebody who did that today would get a Nobel Prize!"
The short version is that Europeans really did not have any idea about the civilization they were replacing, and by the time they really arrived European diseases had killed most of the population, leading to the myth that the continent was empty. Can't really do justice with a summary.
There are fascinating parallels between this debate and the debate on the size, economic development and political cohesion of the Palestinian population before the establishment of modern day Israel.
Cabeza de Vaca provided a very interesting account. Marooned, he wandered the New World alone for many years. He often found groups of people living in incredible squalor and constant warfare-- barely able to feed themselves. He ended up surviving, in part, because he acted as a middle-man between tribes who needed to trade with each other but were constantly at war.
Cortes found fairly advanced civilizations with amazing infrastructure that also suffered from warfare, slavery and ridiculous amounts of human sacrifices.
There is also a lot of evidence in the DNA of Native Americans that tell how and when they migrated here.
The point I am making is that Native Americans were and are Native Americans. They had good things and bad things going for them. This article (and book) seems pre-occupied with trying to tell you that everything we've learned up to this point is entirely wrong and that the New World was a utopia before the filthy Europeans arrived. It wasn't, and there is a ton of evidence to support that. It just was what it was. To be honest, I feel like this is trying to re-focus history with a politically correct slant-- which is what bothers me.