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U.S. history books have Indians all wrong, says author
By Peter B. LordJournal Environment Writer
SOUTH KINGSTOWN — Much of what most Americans were taught about American Indian life before Europeans arrived is simply not true. Rather than comprising small numbers of nomadic wanderers, many tribes developed cities and agricultural systems so vast some now believe they actually affected the earth’s climate.
That was the message delivered by journalist Charles C. Mann in a lecture that was part of the University of Rhode Island’s 2008 Honors Colloquium “Global Environmental Change.”
Mann completed a book two years ago, 1491 — New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, that has won major awards and been praised for its revisions of commonly accepted history.
Mann displayed a portrait of American Indians that he said was used in a history book he was taught with as a child. Almost every part of the portrait he now knows is wrong, he said.
The Indians didn’t have horses until Europeans arrived. The tumbleweeds in the picture were an alien species introduced from Russia. Indians didn’t wear the headdresses depicted in the picture.
Most people were taught, as was he, that Indians migrated across the Bering Straits 12,000 years ago and lived in small groups, having little effect on the environment.
Mann said researchers now believe Indians migrated to the Americas 20,000 to 35,000 years ago and grew to a population estimated at 40 million to 60 million people. And they lived in cities 800 years ago as big as those in Europe at the time.
One city in Mexico had 215,000 inhabitants who lived on an island in the middle of a man-made lake. Another, near modern-day St. Louis, attracted thousands of inhabitants before it was destroyed by floods. A city in Peru was surrounded by a wall greater than the one built around Rome.
The Inca empire, he said, was the largest in the world at its height. The Incas created a huge network of roads.
In the Amazon, Indians altered thousands of square miles of wetlands, Mann said, so they could live on mounds of dry ground and travel on raised causeways. They also created vast designs of raised earth whose purposes scientists still don’t understand.
In other parts of the Amazon, he said, researchers have found Indians made the dirt more fertile by mixing it with charcoal and millions of smashed pieces of pottery. Some estimate that 12 percent of the Amazon was transformed for agriculture.
Researchers also have found vast arrays of raised mounds and ditches on the west coast of Florida that they believe were built to keep Indian communities dry and safe during high tides and storms.
Other researchers have estimated that the 5,000 members of the Pocumtuck tribe in Massachusetts annually burned about 110 square miles of forest to provide land for corn and hunting.
Most of those societies crashed between 1500 and 1650, when Mann said some 95 percent of the Indians were killed by the zoonotic diseases introduced by Europeans. Zoonotic diseases are those such as influenza, malaria, measles and the plague that are transferred from animals to people. Most Europeans were immune because they lived with their domestic animals. Indians had no domestic animals.
Very recent scientific papers have questioned whether the Little Ice Age from 1550 to 1700 caused the collapse of Indian societies, leading to reforestation of the Americas, which in turn removed from the atmosphere lots of carbon dioxide, which causes global warming, Mann said.
In a related matter, some have wondered whether the Medieval Warm Period from 800 to 1300 may have resulted from the Indians doing so much burning of forests as their populations peaked.
In response to a question from the audience, Mann said Americans have done a “lousy job” of preserving historic Indian sites. Some built a highway through the ancient city outside of St. Louis.
Next Tuesday at 7:30 p.m., URI will host a talk by Stanford University Prof. Stephen R. Palumbi at Edwards Auditorium on the “Impact of Global Environmental Change on Evolution.”
plord@projo.com