Atlantic Unbound | March 7, 2002
interviews
Charles C. Mann, the author of "1491," talks about the thriving and sophisticated Indian landscape of the pre-Columbus Americas
.....
or years the standard view of North America before Columbus's arrival
was as a vast, grassy expanse teeming with game and all but empty of
people. Those who did live here were nomads who left few marks on the
land. South America, too, or at least the Amazon rain forest, was
thought of as almost an untouched Eden, now suffering from modern
depredations. But a growing number of anthropologists and
archaeologists now believe that this picture is almost completely
false. According to this school of thought, the Western Hemisphere
before Columbus's arrival was well-populated and dotted with impressive
cities and towns—one scholar estimated that it held ninety to 112
million people, more than lived in Europe at the time—and Indians had
transformed vast swaths of landscape to meet their agricultural needs.
They used fire to create the Midwestern prairie, perfect for herds of
buffalo. They also cultivated at least part of the rain forest, living
on crops of fruits and nuts. Charles C. Mann, in "1491" (March Atlantic),
surveys the contentious debate over what the Americas were like before
Columbus arrived—a debate that has important ramifications for how we
manage the "wilderness" we still have left, if indeed it really is
wilderness, untouched by the hand of man.
If it is true that the pre-Columbus Americas had tens of millions of
people and highly developed civilizations, what happened? Why were
there so few traces when the conquistadors and the colonists began to
arrive in earnest? One demographer has estimated, according to Mann,
that "in the first 130 years of contact about 95 percent of the people
in the Americas died—the worst demographic calamity in recorded
history." Others think this number is too high. But what is clear from
oral history accounts is that Europeans who arrived early on found
busy, thriving societies. When John Smith visited Massachusetts in
1614, he wrote that the land was "so planted with Gardens and Corne
fields, and so well inhabited with a goodly, strong and well
proportioned people ... [that] I would rather live here than any
where." But by the time the colonists reached Plymouth in the Mayflower
six years later, they found one deserted village after another—the
Indians had been felled by European diseases to which they had little
resistance. Mann writes,
All through the coastal forest the Indians had
"died on heapes, as they lay in their houses," the English trader
Thomas Morton noted. "And the bones and skulls upon the severall places
of their habitations made such a spectacle" that to Morton the
Massachusetts woods seemed to be "a new found Golgotha"—the hill of
executions in Roman Jerusalem.
The debate over how many Indians lived in the
Americas will perhaps never be settled—there is too little
archaeological evidence, and too many variables required to calculate
their population. Mann makes clear, though, that the contributions of
these civilizations were myriad—from corn to tomatoes to ways of
sustainably managing land—and we would do well to learn from them.
Mann is an Atlantic correspondent. We corresponded by e-mail last week.
—Katie Bacon
Within certain communities—archaeological, anthropological,
environmental—there is bitter debate over how many Indians were in the
Western Hemisphere before Columbus's arrival, and how actively they
managed the land. Could you sketch out why this is such a polemical
issue?
The debate over Indian demography gets emotional pretty fast. The
greater the pre-contact population, the greater the tally of
post-contact losses, and the greater the pre-contact human impact on
the environment. Some people don't like scholars who argue for a huge
death tally, because it feels to them like another self-hating spasm of
political correctness—an academic left-wing attack on Western
civilization as inherently murderous. Others don't like the high
numbers because they want to view the pre-contact environment as an
ecological touchstone—nature as it oughta be. Having too many Indians
around interferes with this. They think that arguing that there is no
wilderness, no preferred state, is a right-wing strategy for
legitimizing a corporate assault on the environment.
In the opening scene of your article, you're flying in a small
plane with some scholars over the Beni in Bolivia, a watery plain of
30,000 square miles with islands of forest linked by raised berms. Some
scientists believe that this entire landscape was created by a populous
society that lived 2,000 years ago. Another group sees little evidence
that there was large-scale human habitation of the area. How could
there be two such different interpretations of the same landscape? What
are your thoughts on the problems inherent in trying to research
something where there's so little historical record? And what sort of
archaeological evidence do the various factions use to back up their
claims?
There's actually more historical record than one might think—the
problem is how to interpret it. Many Spanish accounts exist of what the
Americas were like just after contact, and also of what Indians said
life was like in the years before, but scholars differ on how much to
believe these accounts. Similarly, researchers differ on how to treat
ecological questions. Some people say, for instance, that the poor
soils in Amazonia would have made intensive agriculture unfeasible, and
thus there simply could not have been large-scale societies—that would
have been impossible. Others say that the poor soils might have made
things difficult for conventional agriculture, but agriculture based on
trees—remember all those nuts and fruits in the tropics?—could well
have been productive enough to sustain large numbers of people. So
scholars begin from different assumptions.
In the Beni, the area in eastern Bolivia that I visited, the savanna
has scores or hundreds of high, forested mounds where the soil is
literally thick with pottery fragments—you dig six inches and the soil
is half ceramics. To some archaeologists, this suggests (bearing in
mind ecological limits) multiple reoccupations by small groups of
people. In this view, the mounds are based on natural formations or
were built up more or less by accident. To others, this seems
ridiculous—the mounds were of course deliberately constructed, they
say. And that would take many people.
In both cases, how
scientists look at the evidence is deeply influenced by their views on
larger issues like the role of ecological limits and, I think, their
ideas on what humankind is like. Newer archaeologists—to generalize
perhaps too much for a moment—tend to think that people are enormously
energetic and clever about overcoming obstacles in the natural world.
Older ones are more likely to be humbled by ecological limits and
(perhaps) more stringent about interpreting data. (Close-minded, their
opponents would say.) Many scientific arguments eventually devolve into
disputes over details and procedures that are difficult for outsiders
to judge. But the archaeologists and anthropologists who are in favor
of a larger Indian presence seem to be winning the argument within
their disciplines, at least for now. Supposedly Thomas Kuhn (or a
philosopher of science like him) said that disputes between researchers
are never resolved, but the side with more young scientists wins
because it outlives the other side. And it seems that more young people
hold this view.
You talk about the power of the "pristine myth" in the environmental
community—the idea, in your words, that the Americas in 1491 "were an
almost unmarked, even Edenic land." If indeed the landscape of the
Americas was actively managed by Indians, the thinking goes, that may
complicate efforts to restore the Midwestern prairie, for example, to
its original state—because we may not know what that state was. But
does it really matter whether we're restoring something to its original
state, or to a different state that is still in its way Edenic? Do you
see negative repercussions in setting aside conservation land to be
untouched by human management?
To your last question: me, personally, no. But if we want to do
that, we should be mindful of the fact that it is probably highly
"unnatural" to do so. "Negative repercussions," in your question,
implies harm, which in turn implies standards of good and bad. That's
more where the question lies. Many people don't like putting things
this baldly, but if there really has been very little "untouched"
nature for 10,000 years then it is essentially impossible to go
back—conditions have changed too much. But many well-meaning people
find it difficult to come out and say, for instance, "we want
tall-grass prairie because we think it's really nice and we like
it"—especially when they're fighting economic forces. So they tend to
invent standards, states putatively preferred by natural
systems—wilderness. It's like appealing to a deity, an ecological Ten
Commandments that comes from some source outside the fallibly human.
Yet if we truly can't return to pristine wilderness, then there's no
way around it: we're in charge of deciding how, say, the prairies are
going to look. Obviously we don't have absolute control, but we sure
have a lot of influence.
How is this debate playing out in the Amazon, where some scientists
now argue that most if not all of the region's rain forest was created
by humans? If indeed much of this landscape was built, how should we be
managing the rain forest and other landscapes previously thought to
have been pristine wilderness?
Amazonia is such a huge area that one shouldn't generalize about
it all, but I will nonetheless. At the moment, it seems to me that the
impact of these scholarly arguments is pretty small. But it may get
larger. In recent years many of the nations in Amazonia, especially
Brazil, have been cutting back on the subsidies they give to
developers, which has resulted in slowing the pace of development. Some
of the most obviously ludicrous schemes have not come to pass. But
pruning back bad development is not enough. There are too many very
poor people in the area, and they have to be offered something
positive—a meaningful chance at a better life. The great question is
how to improve their welfare without trashing the environment.
Ultimately, I think, the new scholarship may play a role in answering
that question, by suggesting the ways that Indians in the past created
rich urban complexes without stripping the forest bare.
I recently read a book about competing methods of farming in the
1800s. The author, Steven Stoll, argued that those farmers who stayed
behind while most farmers were rushing out to the frontier after
depleting their eastern farm lands felt they had an almost moral
obligation to keep their soil rich and healthy through crop rotation
and soil restoration. In general, did the Indians have a similarly
"conservationist" approach to their management of the landscape, or
would they use up their land and move on?
There's a wonderful book about this very question called The Ecological Indian
by Shepard Krech, a Brown University anthropologist. (I quoted him once
in my article, but if I'd had more space I would have quoted him much
more.) So one answer to your question is "read his book." My own answer
would be to say that in some sense you can't answer the question,
because—and this is something we're not taught in school—the Americas
before Columbus were filled with a staggering variety of cultures with
wildly different attitudes towards practically everything. You can't
say much about Indians "in general," because there were too many
exceptions to every rule. Having said this, let me violate my own
stricture. Many Indian societies seem to have been really, really good
at land management—they make us look like pikers. These groups seem to
have been able to transform their environment in the most profound ways
without making it less productive. That's not exactly being
"conservationist"—the label probably doesn't apply to anyone who burned
down much of the Great Plains—but I think it's something we might be
able to learn from.
Waves of different diseases decimated the population of the
Americas—smallpox, typhoid, bubonic plague, whooping cough, and other
diseases that Indians had no resistance to were all brought here by
Columbus or those who followed in his wake. But why didn't Indian
diseases have a similar effect on Europeans, either directly or
indirectly when the diseases were carried back to Europe?
There just doesn't seem to have been nearly as many Indian
diseases. "The exchange of infectious diseases ... between the Old
World and its American and Australasian colonies has been wondrously
one-sided," wrote Alfred Crosby in Ecological Imperialism,
another terrific book. "Venereal syphilis may be the New World's only
important disease export..." The reason for this epidemiological
poverty is a matter of speculation. Certainly, as I mention in the
article, the relative lack of domestic animals spared the Indians what
are called zoonotic diseases. But really nobody can be sure.
Could you talk about the idea of Native Americans as a keystone
species—a species, in E. O. Wilson's words, that "affects the survival
and abundance of many other species"? How does thinking about them as
the Western Hemisphere's keystone species before the arrival of
Europeans change our conception of the Americas?
I should first make clear that Native Americans were keystone species
in the Americas the same way that Europeans were the keystone species
in Europe. They were the keystone species because they were human
beings, and human beings are incredibly powerful at shaping
environments around themselves. What's interesting is that they seem to
have been so good at their job, and managed environments that Americans
today like so much, that there has been a tendency of white society to
discount the human role.
The implications are multiple, but they perhaps press most closely on
our understanding of environmental goals. Very loosely, you can speak
of having two general types of environmental goals—reducing the amount
of pollutants to avoid consequences to health, and maintaining
biological processes in some desired state. The two are obviously
linked, but they are not the same thing. Taking lead out of gasoline is
an example of the first goal; protecting endangered species is an
example of the second.
Human health is a more or less quantifiable goal—you can say "having
this amount of lead in the air is bad, because it creates the following
bad conditions." (People might disagree with the exact numbers, but
rarely with the goal itself.) But maintaining ecosystems and biological
processes at a desired state is much fuzzier—what ends are we trying to
accomplish, and how will we know when we accomplish them? For one wing
of the environmental movement, the answer has been: return as much of
the nation as possible to its "natural state" of "wilderness." What was
here in 1491 is what we should be striving for.
Problem is, this new generation of anthropologists and archaeologists
is saying that as a matter of cold, hard fact the Americas in 1491 were
not a wilderness. They were a huge, special garden, planned and
maintained by the active efforts of a wildly diverse range of
societies. Environmentalists tend not to like this line of argument,
because to them it implies that there is no preferred "natural"
state—so let the bulldozers rip. And to be fair a lot of anti-green
commentators have drawn just this implication. Personally, though, I
believe both sides are wrong. Knowing more about what the Indians
accomplished suggests that human beings can have a large, long-lasting
impact on the landscape without wrecking everything. To me, at least,
that seems an incredibly hopeful notion to carry along into tomorrow.
As late as 1987, you point out, a standard American history textbook
"described the Americas before Columbus as 'empty of mankind and its
works.'" How do you think the history books fifteen years from now will
read? Will students ever study the lost civilization of the Ancient
Incas or the Caddoans as they now do the Babylonians or the
Phoenicians?
Studying the Incas would really be something, wouldn't it? I can
see the college class: Totalitarianism from Machu Picchu to Moscow.
Myself, I'd hope they would learn something about the Northwest Coast
Indians, who had wonderfully interesting economic institutions; the
Iroquois, who so importantly affected both American history and
Americans' concepts about freedom; the Mayans, whose ruins I always
think of as being more interesting than those of Greek and Rome—by now,
my drift should be obvious. These are fascinating societies and worth
knowing about; I hope our children learn about them. I'd also give a
plug for learning about Indians today, a collection of fast-growing and
interesting groups that add up to far more than casinos and a shameful
history of mistreatment.
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