7. Alfred W. Crosby, Jr., The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1972), p. 31.
8. For a recent example, in brief, of the common assertion that the Native American population collapse was an “unintended consequence” of native contact with Europeans who, in this version of the fiction, actually wanted to “preserve and increase”—as well as exploit—the native people, see Marvin Harris, “Depopulation and Cultural Evolution: A Cultural Materialist Perspective,” in David Hurst Thomas, ed., Columbian Consequences, Volume Three: The Spanish Borderlands in Pan-American Perspective (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), p. 584. Harris here is objecting specifically to my use of the word “holocaust” to describe the native population decline in the Americas in “The Consequences of Contact: Toward an Interdisciplinary Theory of Native Responses to Biological and Cultural Invasion,” ibid., pp. 519–39. See also the recent assertion that “the first European colonists . . . did not want the Amerindians to die,” but unfortunately the Indians simply “did not wear well,” in Alfred W. Crosby, “Infectious Disease and the Demography of the Atlantic Peoples,” Journal of World History, 2 (1991), 122, 124.
9. Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (London: Verso Books, 1991), p. 153.
10. In Sylvia Rothchild, ed., Voices from the Holocaust (New York: New American Library, 1981), p. 4.
11. The dispute over the site of Columbus’s first landing is discussed in John Noble Wilford, The Mysterious History of Columbus: An Exploration of the Man, the Myth, the Legacy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), pp. 129–46.
12. On the number of deaths and disappearances in Guatemala between 1970 and 1985, see Robert M. Carmack, ed., Harvest of Violence: The Maya Indians and the Guatemalan Crisis (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988), p. 295. According to the U.S. Defense Department the number of battle deaths in those wars mentioned in the text was as follows: Civil War—274,235; World War One—53,402; World War Two—291,557; Korean War—33,629; Vietnam War—47,382.
13. For the percentage of rain forest destroyed, see Cultural Survival Quarterly, 14 (1990), 86. On the politics and ecology of rain forest destruction, focused on the Amazon but relevant to tropical forests throughout the Americas, see Susanna Hecht and Alexander Cockburn, The Fate of the Forest: Developers, Destroyers, and Defenders of the Amazon (New York: Verso Books, 1989).
14. This quotation and the one preceding it are from Vanderbilt University anthropologist Duncan M. Earle’s report, “Mayas Aiding Mayas: Guatemalan Refugees in Chiapas, Mexico,” in Carmack, ed., Harvest of Violence, pp. 263, 269. The rest of this volume of contemporary anthropological accounts from Guatemala makes overwhelmingly clear how devastating is the Guatemalan government’s ongoing slaughter of its native Maya peoples—with the United States government’s consent and financial support. For more detailed discussion of U.S. involvement in and support for such activities, see Susanne Jonas, The Battle for Guatemala: Rebels, Death Squads, and U.S. Power (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991).
15. Quoted in Jonas, Battle for Guatemala, p. 145.
16. Ibid., pp. 148-49; Carmack, ed., Harvest of Violence, p. 11.
17. Bernal Díaz del Castillo, The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico, 1517–1521, translated by A.P. Maudslay (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1928), p. 409.
Chapter One
1. Woodrow Borah and Sherburne F. Cook, The Aboriginal Population of Central Mexico on the Eve of the Spanish Conquest, Ibero-Americana, Number 45 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963); Michael Coe, Dean Snow, and Elizabeth Benson, Atlas of Ancient America (New York: Facts on File Publications, 1986), p. 145.
2. Rudolph van Zantwijk, The Aztec Arrangement: The Social History of Pre-Spanish Mexico (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985), p. 281, is one of many recent writers who puts the figure at 350,000. More cautious scholars are likely to accept the general range of 250,000 to 400,000 proposed almost thirty years ago by Charles Gibson, although as Gibson notes, informed sixteenth-century estimates ranged as high as 1,000,000 and more. See Charles Gibson, The Aztecs Under Spanish Rule: A History of the Indians of the Valley of Mexico, 1519–1810 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1964), pp. 377–78. For the population of London in 1500 see Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), p. 147; for Seville, see J.H. Elliott, Imperial Spain, 1469-1716 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1964), p. 177.
3. Bernal Díaz del Castillo, The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico, 1517–1521, translated by A.P. Maudslay (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1928), pp. 269–70. All subsequent references to and citations of Bernal Díaz in this chapter come from this same volume, pp. 269–302.
4. Hernan Cortés, Letters From Mexico, translated and edited by A.R. Pagden (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1971), p. 107. All subsequent references to and citations of Cortés in this chapter come from this same volume, pp. 100–113.
5. Diego Durán, The Aztecs: The History of the Indies of New Spain, translated by Doris Hayden Fernando Horcasitas (New York: Union Press, 1964), p. 183; J. Soustelle, Daily Life of the Aztecs (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1970), pp. 32–33.
6. Venice, even in the middle of the sixteenth century, still had barely half the population of Tenochtitlán before the conquest. See the discussion of Venice’s population in Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), Volume One, p. 414.
7. Bernard R. Ortiz de Montellano, Aztec Medicine, Health, and Nutrition (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990), pp. 127–28.
8. Quoted in Lewis Hanke, Aristotle and the American Indians: A Study in Race Prejudice in the Modern World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1959), p. 49.
9. For discussion of these matters among Europeans up through the eighteenth century, see Lee H. Huddleston, Origins of the American Indians: European Concepts, 1492–1729 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1969).
10. For general discussions of Berengia, see David M. Hopkins, ed., The Bering Land Bridge (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1967); and David M. Hopkins, et al., Paleoecology of Berengia (New York: Academic Press, 1982).
11. The arguments for and against significant post-Ice Age, but pre-Columbian ocean contacts between the peoples of the Americas and peoples from other continents or archipelagoes is bound up with debate between two schools of thought—the “diffusionists,” who believe that cultural evolution in the Americas was shaped importantly by outside influences, and the “independent inventionists,” who hold to the more conventional (and more evidence-supported) view that the cultures evolved independent of such influences. For good overviews of the diffusionist perspective by one of its more responsible adherents, see Stephen C. Jett, “Diffusion versus Independent Invention: The Bases of Controversy,” in Carroll L. Riley, et al., Man Across the Sea: Problems of Pre-Columbian Contacts (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1971), pp. 5–53; and Stephen C. Jett, “Precolumbian Transoceanic Contacts,” in Jesse D. Jennings, ed., Ancient North Americans (New York: W.H. Freeman and Company, 1983), pp. 557–613.
12. See detailed discussion in Appendix I, pp. 261–66.
13. Ibid., pp. 266–68.
14. Ibid., p. 263.
15. Ali A. Mazrui, The Africans: A Triple Heritage (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1986), pp. 23–24, 30–31.
16. W. George Lovell, Conquest and Survival in Colonial Guatemala: A Historical Geography of the Cuchumatan Highlands, 1500–1821 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1985), p. xii.
17. For a critical compilation of these and many more such descriptions from scholarly works and textbooks during the past decade or so, see James H. Merrell, “Some Thoughts on Colonial Historians and American Indians,” William and Mary Quarterly, 46 (1989), 94–119.
18. Oscar and Lilian Handlin, Liberty and Power, 16
00–1760 (New York: Harper and Row, 1986); Bernard Bailyn, The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986); Bernard Bailyn, Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986). For commentary on these works, see David E. Stannard, “The Invisible People of Early American History,” American Quarterly, 39 (1987), 649–55; and Merrell, “Some Thoughts on Colonial Historians and American Indians.”
19. Samuel Eliot Morison, The European Discovery of America: The Southern Voyages, 1492–1616 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 737; Samuel Eliot Morison, “Introduction,” in Douglas Edward Leach, Flintlock and Tomahawk: New England in King Philip’s War (New York: W.W. Norton, 1966), p. ix.
20. Hugh Trevor-Roper, The Rise of Christian Europe (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965), p. 9.
21. Leonard Thompson, The Political Mythology of Apartheid (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), p. 1.
22. Ibid., p. 70.
23. Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975), p. 15.
24. Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978), p. 119.
25. Edward W. Said, The Question of Palestine (New York: Times Books, 1979), pp. 18–23; Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay: An Exploration of Landscape and History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), p. 335. Carter’s specific reference here is to writings about Australia’s native peoples, but it is equally applicable throughout the colonized regions of the globe. For a related piece on anthropology as traditionally “a partner in domination and hegemony,” see Edward W. Said, “Representing the Colonized: Anthropology’s Interlocutors,” Critical Inquiry, 15 (1989), 205–25. For all its colonial underpinnings, however, anthropology always has been a more politically self-critical discipline than history. See, for example, Talal Asad, ed., Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (New York: Humanities Press, 1973); and W. Arens, The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), esp. pp. 16585. On history, among several recent works that have begun to join historiographical analysis with anthropological critique, see Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London: Routledge, 1990).
26. Frantz Fanon, “Mr. Debre’s Desperate Endeavors” [1959], in Toward the African Revolution (New York: Grove Press, 1969), p. 159.
Chapter Two
1. Although much more recent research has been done on the Adena, one of the best general surveys remains William S. Webb and Charles E. Snow, The Adena People (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1974).
2. The physiological distinctiveness of peoples living in different cultural and geographic realms during the centuries of Adena and Hopewell social dominance in northeastern North America has long been recognized. See, for example, Charles E. Snow, “Adena Portraiture,” in William S. Webb and Raymond S. Baby, eds., The Adena People, Number Two (Columbus: Ohio Historical Society, 1957), pp. 47–53.
3. James B. Griffin, “The Midlands,” in Jesse D. Jennings, ed., Ancient North Americans, (New York: W.H. Freeman and Company, 1983), pp. 254–67. For recent discussion of the delicately incised copper, mica, obsidian, pearl, and silver jewelry and artifacts from Hopewell culture, see N’omi B. Greber and Katharine C. Ruhl, The Hopewell Site: A Contemporary Analysis Based on the Work of Charles C. Willoughby (Boulder: Westview Press, 1989).
4. George Gaylord Simpson, Horses: The Story of the Horse Family in the Modern World and Through Sixty Million Years of History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951), esp. pp. 142-50; Peter Nabokov and Robert Easton, Native American Architecture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 150.
5. See Barry Kaye and D.W. Moodie, “The Psoralea Food Resource of the Northern Plains,” Plains Anthropologist, 23 (1978), 329–36.
6. Robert McGhee, Canadian Arctic Prehistory (Toronto: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1978); cited in Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1986), pp. 181, 184. On the varied domestic architecture of the Arctic and Subarctic regions, see Nabokov and Easton, Native American Architecture, pp. 189–207.
7. Richard K. Nelson, Make Prayers to the Raven: A Koyukon View of the Northern Forest (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 245–46.
8. Lopez, Arctic Dreams, p. 265.
9. Noble David Cook, Demographic Collapse: Indian Peru, 1520–1620 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 108; Henry F. Dobyns, Their Number Become Thinned: Native American Population Dynamics in Eastern North America (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983), p. 38.
10. Thomas Blackburn, “Ceremonial Integration and Social Interaction in Aboriginal California,” in Lowell John Bean and Thomas F. King, eds., ‘Antap: California Indian Political and Economic Organization (Los Altos, Calif.: Ballena Press, 1974), pp. 93–110.
11. Dorothy Lee, Freedom and Culture (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1959), p. 8; see also, pp. 43–44, 80–82, 172.
12. Malcolm Margolin, The Ohlone Way: Indian Life in the San Francisco-Monterey Bay Area (Berkeley: Heyday Books, 1978), p. 40.
13. Ibid., p. 57.
14. Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo, “Relation of the Voyage of Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo, 1542–1543,” in Herbert Eugene Bolton, ed., Spanish Exploration in the Southwest, 1542–1706, (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1916), pp. 13–39.
15. Sherburne F. Cook, The Population of the California Indians, 1769–1970 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 69–71; Stephen Powers, Tribes of California [Contributions to North American Ethnology, Volume 3] (Washington, D.C.: Department of the Interior, 1877), p. 416.
16. Cabrillo, “Relation of the Voyage,” p. 14; on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century disease episodes in California, see, for example, Phillip L. Walker, Patricia Lambert, and Michael J. DeNiro, “The Effects of European Contact on the Health of Alta California Indians,” in David Hurst Thomas, ed., Columbian Consequences, Volume One: Archaeological and Historical Perspectives on the Spanish Borderlands West (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989), p. 351.
17. See Carl Waldman, Atlas of the North American Indian (New York: Facts on File Publications, 1985), p. 223.
18. It has long been thought that agriculture in the southwest began even earlier—up to 6000 years ago—but recent research on the radiocarbon datings obtained from agricultural sites in the region put the earliest date at about 1200 B.C. See Alan Simmons, “New Evidence for the Early Use of Cultigens in the American Southwest,” American Antiquity, 51 (1986), 73–88; and Steadman Upham, Richard S. MacNeish, Walton C. Galinat, and Christopher M. Stevenson, “Evidence Concerning the Origin of Maize de Ocho,” American Anthropologist, 89 (1987), 410–19.
19. Emil W. Haury, The Hohokam: Desert Farmers and Craftsmen (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1976), pp. 120–51. Paul R. Fish, “The Hohokam: 1,000 Years of Prehistory in the Sonoran Desert,” in Linda S. Cordell and George J. Gumerman, eds., Dynamics of Southwest Prehistory (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989), pp. 19–63.
20. For good overviews, among many works on the subject, see William A. Longacre, ed., Reconstructing Prehistoric Pueblo Societies (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1970), esp. pp. 59–83; and Robert H. and Florence C. Lister, Chaco Canyon: Archaeology and Archaeologists (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1981).
21. See R. Gwinn Vivian, “Conservation and Diversion: Water Control Systems in the Anasazi Southwest,” in T.E. Downing and M. Gibson, eds., Irrigation’s Impact on Society (Tucson: Anthropological Papers of the University of Arizona, 1974), pp. 95–111.
22. Nabokov and Easton, Native American Architecture, p. 363.
23. For general studies, see Stephen H. LeBlanc, “Aspects of Southwestern Prehistory, A.D. 900–1400,” in F.J
. Mathien and R.H. McGuire, eds., Ripples in the Chichimec Sea: New Considerations of Southwestern-Mesoamerican Interactions (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986), pp. 105–34; and W. James Judge, “Chaco Canyon-San Juan Basin,” in Cordell and Gumerman, eds., Dynamics of Southwest Prehistory, pp. 209–61. The most detailed studies of the ancient road systems are Gretchen Obenauf, “The Chacoan Roadway System” (M.A. Thesis, University of New Mexico, 1980) and Chris Kincaid, ed., Chaco Roads Project: Phase I (Albuquerque: Bureau of Land Management, 1983). For comment on how little of the Grand Canyon has thus far been studied, see Barry Lopez, “Searching for Ancestors,” in his Crossing Open Ground (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1988), pp. 176–77.
24. These and other early Spanish commentators’ remarks on Pueblo egalitarianism and reciprocity are discussed in Ramón A. Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500–1846 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), pp. 8–15.
25. Quoted in Lee, Freedom and Culture, p. 13.
26. For good introductions to these matters, see James M. Crawford, Studies in Southeastern Indian Languages (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1975); Charles M. Hudson, The Southeastern Indians (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1976); and J. Leitch Wright, Jr., The Only Land They Knew: The Tragic Story of the American Indians of the Old South (New York: Free Press, 1981).
27. Wright, The Only Land They Knew, pp. 1–26.
28. Ibid., p. 24. See also the excellent discussion in William H. Marquardt, “Politics and Production Among the Calusa of South Florida,” in Tim Ingold, David Riches, and James Woodburn, eds., Hunters and Gatherers: History, Evolution, and Social Change (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1988), Volume One, pp. 161–88.
29. Marquardt, “Politics and Production Among the Calusa,” p. 165.
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