1491

by Mann, Charles C. ; Johnson, Peter (nrt)

  Because the tzolk’in was not intended to track the earth’s orbit around the sun, its inventors didn’t have to worry about fitting their “weeks” and “months” into the 365 days of the solar year. Instead they simply set the first day of the year to be the first day of the twenty-day “week” and the thirteen-day “month,” and let the cycle spin. In the language of elementary school mathematics, the least common multiple (the smallest number that two numbers will divide into evenly) of 13 and 20 is 260. Hence, the tzolk’in had a length of 260 days.

  In the Western calendar, a given combination of named and numbered days, such as Wednesday the 15th, will occur a few times in a calendar year. For instance, in 2006 the 15th of the month falls on Wednesday three times, in February, March, and November; in 2007 Wednesday the 15th occurs just once, in August. The irregular intervals are due to the differing lengths of the months, which throw off the cycle. In the tzolk’in, every “month” and every “week” are the same length. As a result, “Wednesday the 15th”—or 1 Imix, to give a real example—in the tzolk’in recurs at precise intervals; each is exactly 13 × 20 or 260 days apart.

  Many researchers believe the movements of Venus, which Mesoamerican astronomers tracked carefully, originally inspired the tzolk’in. Venus is visible for about 263 consecutive days as the morning star, then goes behind the sun for 50 days, then reappears for another 263 days as the evening star. It was a powerful presence in the heavens, as I noted in Chapter 8, and a calendar based on its celestial trajectory would have shared some of that power. Within the sacred year, every day was thought to have particular characteristics, so much so that people were often named after their birth dates: 12 Eb, 2 Ik, and so on. In some places men and women apparently could not marry if they had the same name day. Days in the tzolk’in had import for larger occasions, too. Events from ceremonies to declarations of war were thought to be more likely to succeed if they occurred on a propitious day.

  The Mesoamerican calendar was both more complex and more accurate than the European calendars of the same period. It consisted of a 365-day secular calendar, the haab (right), much like contemporary European calendars. The haab was tied to the second, sacred calendar, the tzolk’in (left), which was unlike any Western calendar. With a “week” of twenty named days and a “month” of thirteen numbered days, the tzolk’in produced a 260-day “year.” Mesoamerican societies used both simultaneously, so that every date was labeled with two names (1 Ix 0 Xul in the drawing). I have not rendered the haab as a wheel-within-wheel like the tzolk’in, even though it, too, had perfectly regular “weeks” and “months.” This is because the haab had to fit the 365-day solar year, which forced Maya calendar designers to spoil their system by tacking on an irregular, extra-short month at the end.

  Because people also needed a civil calendar for mundane purposes like knowing when to sow and harvest, Mesoamerican societies had a second, secular calendar, the haab: eighteen “months,” each of twenty days. (Unlike the tzolk’in, which counted off the days from 1, the haab months began with 0; nobody knows why the system was different.) Simple arithmetic shows that eighteen twenty-day months generates a 360-day year, five days short of the requisite 365 days. Indians knew it, too. Rather than sprinkling the extra five days throughout the year as we do, though, they tacked them onto the end in a special “month” of their own. These days were thought to be unlucky—it was as if the year ended with five straight days of Friday the 13th. Although the ancient Maya knew (unlike their contemporaries in Europe) that the solar year is actually 365¼ days, they did not bother to account for the extra quarter day; there were no leap years in Mesoamerica. The failure to do so seems surprising, given that their astronomers’ mania for precision had led them to measure the length of the lunar month to within about ten seconds.

  With two calendars, every day thus had two names, a sacred tzolk’in name and a civil haab name. Usually the Maya referred to them by both at once: 1 Ix 0 Xul. The two different calendars, each perfectly regular (but one more regular than the other), marched in lockstep, forming what is now called the Calendar Round. After one 1 Ix 0 Xul, there would not be another 1 Ix 0 Xul for 18,980 days, about fifty-two years.

  By describing dates with both calendars Mesoamerican societies were able to give every day in this fifty-two-year period a unique name. But they couldn’t distinguish one fifty-two-year period from its predecessors and successors—as if the Christian calendar couldn’t distinguish 1810, 1910, and 2010. To avoid confusion and acknowledge time’s linear dimension, Mesoamerican societies invented the Long Count, which counts off the days from a starting point that is believed to have been in mid-August, 3114 B.C. Long Count dates consisted of the number of days, 20-day “months,” 360-day “years,” 7,200-day “decades,” and 144,000-day “centuries” since the beginning. Archaeologists generally render these as a set of five numbers separated by dots. When Columbus landed, on Tuesday, October 11, 1492, the Maya would have marked the day as 11.13.12.4.3, with the “centuries” first and the days last. In the tzolk’in and haab, the day was 2 Akbal 6 Zotz.

  Although extant Long Count dates have only five positions for numbers, the Maya knew that eventually that time would pass and they would have to add more positions. Indeed, their priestly mathematicians had calculated nineteen further positions, culminating in what is now called the alautun, a period of 23,040,000,000 days, which is about 63 million years. Probably the longest named interval of time in any calendar, the alautun is a testament to the grandiosity of Mesoamerican calendries. Just as the tzolk’in is one of the most impeccably circular time cycles ever invented, the Long Count is among the most purely linear, an arrow pointing straight ahead for millions of years into the future.

  NOTES

  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 th
e 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). Nomads was 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.