American Holocaust
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At the center of Cuzco was an enormous plaza, large enough to accommodate 100,000 people wrote the Spanish friar Martín de Murúa, and here any sense of the city’s austerity ended. When the pleasure-loving people of this metropolis held their frequent dances and festivals in the square, it was roped off with a fine cable of gold, immensely long and fringed at both ends with bright red wool. Around the ceremonial square stood Cuzco’s palaces, each built by an Inca ruler during his reign. Here lay the dead leaders’ mummified remains, along with all their furniture and treasures. There were no locks or keys and nothing in the palaces was hidden: as John Hemming puts it,” the Incas were too confident of the security of their empire and the honesty of its citizens to hide their dead rulers’ possessions.”70
All the Inca palaces were different—made of various types of marble, rare woods, and precious metal—but each had at least one common characteristic: enormous halls and ballrooms capable of holding up to 4000 people for banquets and dances when the weather prevented such festivities from being held outdoors. One such hall, which “served on rainy days as a plaza for [Inca] festivals and dances . . . was so large,” wrote Garcilaso de la Vega, “that sixty horsemen could very easily play cañas inside it.” More exquisite even than the palaces, however, was the famed temple of the sun, Coricancha. A magnificent masonry structure with precisely curved and angled walls, Coricancha’s majesty was crowned with an eight-inch-wide band of solid gold that encircled the entire building below the roof line. Along with all the other treasure that it held, at the temple’s center was a ceremonial font and a massive altar of gold, surrounded by gold and silver images of the moon, of stars, of thunder—and the great Punchao, a massive golden sun, expertly crafted and encrusted with precious jewels. Of all this, though, it was the garden within its walls that most amazed the chroniclers who wrote about Coricancha: a simple garden of maize—but an artificial garden—with the stem and leaves of each perfect plant delicately fashioned in silver, while each crowning ear of corn was carved in gold.71
Cuzco’s population in pre-Columbian times probably was somewhere between 150,000 and 200,000; beyond the city itself, many more people, living and working on vast maize plantations, filled the surrounding valleys. Although some Mesoamerican cities, such as Tenochtitlán, were larger, few cities in Europe at the time even approached the size of Cuzco. Nor would any of them have been able to compete with Cuzco in terms of the treasures it contained or the care with which it was laid out. For we now know that Cuzco was built following a detailed clay-model master plan, and that—as can be seen from the air—the outline of its perimeter was designed to form the shape of a puma with the famed temple-fortress of Sacsahuaman at its head.72
But if Cuzco was unique within Peru for the lavishness of its appointments, it was far from alone in the large number of its inhabitants. Other cities in other Andean locales were also huge; some are famous today, others are not. Among this latter group was the provincial city of Jauja. Here is a short description of it by Miguel de Estete, one of the earliest Spaniards to set eyes on it:
The town of Jauja is very large and lies in a beautiful valley. A great river passes near it, and its climate is most temperate. The land is fertile. Jauja is built in the Spanish manner with regular streets, and has several subject villages within sight of it. The population of the town and the surrounding countryside was so great that, by the Spaniards’ reckoning, a hundred thousand people collected in the main square every day. The markets and streets were so full that every single person seemed to be there.73
A hundred thousand people gathered in the marketplace of a single provincial city each day? Many historians intuitively have supposed this to be an exaggeration, but after conducting the most detailed and exhaustive of Peru’s population histories to date, Noble David Cook has concluded that the number “does not appear extravagant.”74
To feed a population as enormous as this, and a population spread out over such a vast area, the Incas cut miles upon miles of intricate and precisely aligned canals and irrigated agricultural terraces from the steep Andean hillsides in their mountain home; and to move those foodstuffs and other supplies from one area to another they constructed more than 25,000 miles of wide highways and connecting roads. Both engineering feats astonished the Spaniards when they first beheld them. And for good reason: modern archaeologists and hydrologists are just as amazed, having discovered that most of these grand public works projects were planned, engineered, and constructed to within a degree or two of slope and angle that computer analyses of the terrain now regard as perfect. At the time of European contact, the thickly populated Andean valleys were criss-crossed with irrigation canals in such abundance, wrote one conquistador, that it was difficult, even upon seeing, to believe. They were found “both in upland and low-lying regions and on the sides of the hills and the foothills descending to the valleys, and these were connected to others, running in different directions. All this makes it a pleasure to cross these valleys,” he added, “because it is as though one were walking amidst gardens and cool groves. . . . There is always verdure along these ditches, and grass grows beside many of them, where the horses graze, and among the trees and bushes there is a multitude of birds, doves, wild turkey, pheasants, partridge, and also deer. Vermin, snakes, reptiles, wolves—there are none.”75
Describing the Incas’ “grand and beautiful highway” that ran along the coast and across the plains was something in which all the early chroniclers delighted. From fifteen to twenty-four feet in width, and “bordered by a mighty wall more than a fathom high,” this “carefully tended” roadway “ran beneath trees, and in many spots the fruit laden boughs hung over the road,” recalled Pedro de Cieza de León, “and all the trees were alive with many kinds of birds and parrots and other winged creatures.”76 The great highway and other roads dipped through steep coastal valleys, hugged the edges of precipitous cliffs, tunneled through rock, and climbed in stepladder fashion up sheer stone walls.
Encountering rivers and lakes in the paths of their roadways, the people of the Andes built large ferries or had engineers design floating pontoon bridges: stretching thick, intertwined cables across the water over distances the length of a modern football field, secured on each side to underground foundations, workmen layered huge bundles of reeds with still more taut cables on top of the original bridge platforms, thus creating secure floating highways usually about fifteen feet in width and riding three feet or so above the water’s surface. Even after the Spanish conquest these bridges remained in use, carrying men, horses, and supplies—as did the hundreds of suspension bridges that the Incas had strung across gorges and high mountain passes throughout the Andes. “Such magnificent roads could be seen nowhere in Christendom in country [as] rough as this,” wrote Hernando Pizarro, a judgment echoed by modern scholars and engineers who have had an opportunity to study them.77
Inca roads and bridges were not built for horse traffic, however, but for men and women on foot, sometimes accompanied by trains of llamas. Thus, the ambivalent reactions of many conquistadors—ranging from admiration for Inca ingenuity to terror in the face of their environment—when they had to travel these roads in their quests for riches and power. After crossing a river, wrote one such Spaniard,
we had to climb another stupendous mountainside. Looking up at it from below, it seemed impossible for birds to scale it by flying through the air, let alone men on horseback climbing by land. But the road was made less exhausting by climbing in zigzags rather than in a straight line. Most of it consisted of large stone steps that greatly wearied the horses and wore down and hurt their hooves, even though they were being led by their bridles.78
Under such exhausting conditions, the Spanish and other latter day intruders no doubt appreciated the more than one thousand large lodging houses and hostels and storehouses—some of them multi-storied, some built into hillside terraces—that had been provided for travelers along the Inca roadways. Like most Inca buildings, these gener
ally were constructed by masons working with large, finely worked stones, carefully honed and finished to such a degree of smoothness that even when not secured by mortar the thinnest blade could not pass between them. “In all Spain I have seen nothing that can compare with these walls and the laying of their stone,” wrote Cieza de León; they “were so extraordinary,” added Bernabe Cobo, “that it would be difficult for anyone who has not actually seen them to appreciate their excellence.”79 So massive and stable were the Inca walls built in this way that many of them remain in place as the foundations for buildings throughout modern-day Peru. In Cuzco, after the conquest, the Spanish symbolically built their church of Santo Domingo atop the walls of the ruined Coricancha—and for centuries since, while earthquakes repeatedly have destroyed the church, the supporting walls of the great temple of the sun have never budged.
Although, as we shall see, the early Europeans appreciated the people of the Andes a good deal less than they did those people’s engineering accomplishments, later visitors came to agree with the Spanish historian Jose de Acosta who, after spending many years in Peru, wrote in 1590: “Surely the Greeks and the Romans, if they had known the Republics of the Mexicans and the Incas, would have greatly esteemed their laws and governments.” The more “profound and diligent” among the Europeans who have lived in this country, wrote Acosta, have now come to “marvel at the order and reason that existed among [the native peoples].”80
The life of the mind in the Inca-controlled Andes is beyond the scope or range of this brief survey, but like all the thousands of pre-Columbian cultures in the Americas it was deeply embedded both in the wonders and the cyclical rhythms of the surrounding natural world and in cultural affection for the unending string of genealogical forebears and descendants who had lived and who would live on indefinitely (or so it was thought) in these marvelous mountains and valleys and plains. As one recent analysis of Inca thought and philosophy puts it:
The relationships Andeans perceived between life and death, and between humankind and the natural environment, were . . . profoundly different from Spanish and Christian equivalents. The land surrounding one told the story of one’s first ancestors as much as it told one’s own story and the story of those yet to come. It was right that the familiar dead were seen walking through the fields they had once cultivated, thus sharing them with both the living and with the original ancestors who had raised the first crops in the very same fields. Death was thus the great leveler not because, as in Christian thought, it reduced all human beings to equality in relation to each other and before God. Rather, death was a leveler because by means of it humans were reintegrated into a network of parents and offspring that embraced the entire natural order.81
To the east of the Inca homeland, down from the majestic peaks of the Andes, are the dense jungles of the Amazon, followed by the Brazilian highlands, and then the pampas of present-day Argentina—together, well over four million square miles of earth, an area larger than that of the United States today. Within this land the world’s largest river rushes through the world’s greatest forest—and within that forest lived peoples so numerous and so exotic to the first Western visitors that the Europeans seemed unable to decide whether they had stumbled onto the legendary Terrestrial Paradise or an evil confederacy of demons, or maybe both.
Disappointed that there were no great cities in this boundless part of their New World, the earliest travelers let their imaginations run riot. There was evidence, some of them claimed, that the Apostle Saint Thomas had visited Brazil and preached to the natives a millennium and a half ago; if you looked carefully enough, it was said, you still could see his footprints impressed into rock alongside various river banks. Apparently his preaching was successful, since the natives of this region were so generous and kind, the Jesuit missionary Father Manuel Nobrega reported, that “there are no people in all the world more disposed to receive the holy faith and the sweet yoke of the evangel than these,” adding that “you can paint on the heart of this people at your pleasure as on a clean sheet of paper.”82
Others thought they found evidence of somewhat stranger things. As one historian summarizes some of the first European reports:
There were men with eight toes; the Mutayus whose feet pointed backwards so that pursuers tracked them in the wrong direction; men born with white hair that turned black in old age; others with dogs’ heads, or one cyclopean eye, or heads between their shoulders, or one leg on which they ran very fast. . . . Then there was Upupiara, half man and half fish, the product of fish impregnated by the sperm of drowned men. . . . Brazil was also thought to contain giants and pygmies.83
And, of course, there were said to be Amazons, from which the great river derived its name. In fact, however, apart from the sheer mystery of this fabulous and seemingly primeval world, perhaps the thing that most amazed and unnerved the Europeans had nothing to do with fairy tales. It had to do with the fact that this land was covered with innumerable independent tribes and nations of people who seemed inordinately happy and content, and who lived lives of apparent total liberty: “They have neither kings nor princes,” wrote the Calvinist missionary Jean de Léry in 1550, “and consequently each is more or less as much a great lord as the other.”84
Many of the people of this vast region—including such linguistically distinct cultures as the Tupian, the Cariban, the Jívaroan, the Nambiquaran, the Arawakan, the Tucanoan, the Makuan, the Tupi-Guaraní, and others—lived in cedar planked houses, slept in hammocks or on large palm leaf mats, wore feather cloaks and painted cotton clothing, and played a variety of musical instruments. Very recent and continuing archaeological work in the Amazon lowlands indicates that the people living there have been making pottery for at least 7000 to 8000 years—that is, from about the same time that pottery also was first being made in ancient Iraq and Iran, and around 3000 years earlier than current evidence suggests it was being made in the Andes or in Mesoamerica. Some ancient Amazonian peoples hunted and fished and gathered, others farmed. But there is no doubt that organized communities lived in this locale at least 12,000 years ago, evolving into large agricultural chiefdoms and—more than 1000 years ago—into very populous and sophisticated proto-urban communities, such as Santarém, which, in the words of one recent study, “was a center for complex societies with large, nucleated settlements” in which “people made elaborate pottery vessels and statues, groundstone tools and ornaments of nephrite jade.”85
Because the Amazon climate and land is not conducive to the preservation of the materials of village life, archaeological work is very difficult, and thus retrospective estimates of pre-Columbian population levels are quite controversial here. No one doubts, however, that the population was large—probably at least 5,000,000 to 7,000,000 people in just the Amazon basin within Brazil, which is only one part of tropical South America, although arguments have been made for individual tribes (such as Pierre Clastres’s estimate of 1,500,000 for the Guaraní) that, if correct, would greatly enlarge that regional figure.86
One of the things that has most intrigued some modern anthropologists—Clastres in particular—about the people of the Amazon was their ability to sustain such large populations without resorting to steeply hierarchical political systems, something conventional political theory claims is impossible. In most respects, in fact, these people who appointed chiefs from among their ranks, but made sure that their leaders remained essentially powerless, were the classic exemplars of anthropologist Marshall Sahlins’s “original affluent society,” where people had relatively few material possessions, but also few material desires, and where there was no poverty, no hunger, no privation—where each person’s fullest material wants were satisfied with the expenditure of about fifteen to twenty hours of work each week.87
Life was far more difficult for the natives of Tierra del Fuego, the cold and blustery islands off the southern tip of South America, between the Strait of Magellan and Cape Horn, and as close to the Antarctic Circle as Ketchika
n, Alaska, is to the Arctic. Population densities had to be much thinner in this rugged environment, where the people lived largely off hunted marine mammals, fish, and shellfish that they pried loose from rocky headlands. Unlike the inhabitants of the Amazon, the residents of Tierra del Fuego—the Yahgan, the Alacaluf, the Ona, and the Haúsh—had to struggle constantly to sustain life. Indeed, so important were their sturdy, migratory canoes to them as they made their way through the icy waters, that they maintained permanent fires in beds of clay on board while they searched for the animal life on which they fed their families.
Harsh as life was for these peoples, the land and the water were their home. And, though we know little about them as they lived in pre-Columbian times, it is not difficult to imagine that they revered their homeland much as their relatives all over the hemisphere did, including those in the even more icy world of the far north. The people of Tierra del Fuego, after all, had lived in this region for at least 10,000 years before they were first visited by the wandering Europeans.88
Tierra del Fuego, along with Patagonia, its immediate mainland neighbor to the north, was the geographic end of the line for the great hemispheric migrations that had begun so many tens of thousands of years earlier. No one in human history has ever lived in permanent settlements further south on the planet than this. But those countless migrations did not invariably follow a north-to-south pathway. At various times (again, we must recall, over the course of tens of thousands of years) some groups decided to branch off and head east or west, or double back to the north. There is linguistic evidence, for example, seeming to suggest that during one historical epoch the Timucuan peoples of present-day Florida may gradually have migrated from the south (in Venezuela) across the island Caribbean to their new North American homeland. That also is what a people we have come to call the Arawak (they did not use the name themselves) decided to do a few thousand years ago, although, unlike the hypothesis regarding the Timucuans, they did not carry their travels as far as the northern mainland.89