1491, Post 1 of 4: "War of the Worlds," in reverse

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, history, western hemisphere

At the climax of H. G. Wells's War of the Worlds, just as the Martians are poised to take over the earth, they are extinguished by a fatal disease against which they have no resistance. I guess we're lucky that Earthlings weren't similarly prone to catching a Martian cold.

Something like the wildfire spread of a "Martian cold" seems to have raged through the Americas in the 16th Century. Only it was worse than a cold: Prior to 1570 AD, five epidemics of smallpox roared through mid-South America, where we have the best documentation (1524, 1533, 1535, 1558, and 1565). The area was also ravaged by Typhus (or a similar disease) in 1546, influenza in 1558—which killed many that survived smallpox—, diphtheria in 1614, and measles in 1618. Nine epidemics, each killing from 20% to 50% of the population then existing...estimates of the proportion that remained range down from 20% to less than 5%, all within about two generations.

Contemporary records by Europeans show the trend. Prior to 1520, from Maine to Yucatan to Peru and Chile, described the land as well-settled, with a dense, active population of agriculturalists. Writings made after 1600 report an empty land covered with the ruins of abandoned villages, and small numbers of people subsisting by hunting and gathering in scattered, roaming bands.

Piecing together many accounts, and the best of recent scholarship, Charles C. Mann opens his new book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus with a study of the de-peopling of the Americas. While our children are taught an outdated view of a nearly empty continent just begging to be settled, scholars for the past generation have determined that the Americas of 1491 rivaled Europe in population, civilization, and sophistication. People are more similar than they are different.

White American culture has two opposed views of Indians, particularly the Indians prior to contact with Europeans (Mr. Mann presents his reasons for using the term "Indians," including the fact that the Indians seem to prefer it. I follow his
example. While it is not accurate, it appears to be the least inaccurate term). They are seen as "noble savages": people who made no cultural or technological progress since the glaciers melted some 12,000 years ago; people without history, mostly without agriculture, without cities or even settled homes, living by hunting and gathering on a land that was edenic and pristine. They are also seen as incurable vicious barbarians: wily, stealthy, warlike bands that kept white armies at bay for generations, only succumbing when nearly annihilated.

Thirty or forty years ago, the pre-1492 population of North America was confidently declared to be "about a million," a figure thought to be little changed for thousands of years. The forests of the East and Midwest and the grasslands of the West were considered nearly pristine. Today, the "low counters" struggle to maintain the plausibility of a pre-Columbus population estimate of around five million, while the "high counters," the majority, support figures in the ten- to fifty-million range, or higher.

Today, there are about 2.5 million Indians in the U.S., and another 1.6 million who are part Indian. I don't think of myself as part Indian, my best estimate of proportion being about 1/64th. The most inclusive tribe, the Cherokees, require 1/32d for membership, so they and I agree I am not "Indian enough to count." Most of those "counted" have one or two full-Indian grandparents.

U.S. census figures show 44,021 "American Indian, Eskimo, and Aleut" in 1860; before that year, they weren't counted. The Census of 1890 shows two figures: 58,806 "excluding Indian Territory and reservations", and 248,253 including them. So the total for 1860 was actually about 186,000. There were 31.44 million people in the U.S. in 1860, so Indians comprised 0.6% of the population. Today they total 0.9% (just the 2.5 million).

I favor a figure for North America of about twenty million in 1492, and fifty million in all of the Americas. The 17th Century estimates of a million or so Indians in North America, north of Mexico, represents a 5% survival after a century of European plagues. Then in the 19th Century we find less than a 20% survival after a century and a half of "Indian Wars," including further plagues caused by weapons such as "smallpox blankets".

Studies of immune system haplotypes indicate that the Indians derive from just four, three of which are found throughout Siberia today (along with many others). By contrast, there are dozens of European haplotypes. This is one indication that their ancestors began with a very small population and multiplied. They went through a "genetic bottleneck". However, it may be that much of the bottleneck occurred in the 1500s, as well. Two successive reductions of population by 90% would have eliminated many minor haplotypes.

The evidence for large populations in South America and Mesoamerica is much more abundant and compelling...to most. "Small counters" still argue against hemispheric populations larger than a few millions. It is hard to ignore the incredibly abundant Mesoamerican ruins. It isn't so easy to determine what happened in the Andes or Amazon areas, but archeologists now recognize very large-scale, widespread evidence for large populations.

Just in the Beni area of northeast Bolivia, the example with which Mann begins the book, there are thousands of raised areas with causeways between, raised areas composed of huge numbers of artifacts that indicate not only long-term occupation by large numbers of people, but deliberate manipulation of the soil to better support their agriculture. In areas with poor soil, broken pottery is a kind of "artifical gravel" that releases mineral nutrients into the soil much as the glacial gravels found in the northern U.S. and Canada do. Admixed charcoal, both fire leavings and charcoal deliberately produced and stirred in, further enrich the soil. Similar accumulations abound in the Amazon area.

Yet, Central and South America were ravaged by European plagues, then felled by Indian-European warfare, just as thoroughly as in the North. Introduced diseases, particularly smallpox, ran through the continents so rapidly that most Indian societies were demolished a generation or two before they saw their first white man.

Let's reconsider the stone-age, naked-savage view of early Indians. Except for a few Spaniards in ~1500, nobody saw Indians in anything like a normal condition or setting. By the early 1600s, Europeans newly arriving in America encountered indigenous peoples who were more like the survivors of a few generations in a concentration camp.

This sets the stage for further investigation of Indian society in 1491. See the successive posts.