It's interesting that while South-American pre-colombian construction projects are familiar to many (such as Aztec cities and Nazca Lines, etc), it is perhaps not as well known that North-American pre-columbian populations had massive civil engineering projects as well e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_Point
I've read a bit around this topic and a rather plausible explanation is that in North America, the European settler mentality was that the north was all empty land. Acknowledging the presence of native American towns, cities, farmlands, etc... would have brought up the inconvenient subject of ownership of the land. It was much more convenient to declare the native Americans as barbarians with little culture & society and the land unused and open to be claimed by European settlers. Inaccurate societal tropes about native Americans still persist today and education about their history is still lacking.
South America was more populated but also the European tactic was of conquest of the natives, not total eradication & displacement (although they did an effective job at those as well).
> It was much more convenient to declare the native Americans as barbarians with little culture & society and the land unused and open to be claimed by European settlers.
Wikipedia says:
"The loss of the population [due to disease] was so high that it was partially responsible for the myth of the Americas as "virgin wilderness". By the time significant European colonization was underway, native populations had already been reduced by 90%. This resulted in settlements vanishing and cultivated fields being abandoned. Since forests were recovering, the colonists had an impression of a land that was an untamed wilderness."
Wouldnt some of this disease, if not all of it, be due to their introduction to european americans and in some cases, early versions of biological warfare like smallpox blankets?
Yes, though the diseases traveled much faster than the Europeans did, as Americans had their own trade routes. A whole century could have passed between Columbus’s first voyage and European contact with a tribe, but they would have been decimated centuries before contact. That’s plenty of time for forests to reclaim farmland.
This reminds me of Francisco de Orellana, the first European to navigate the Amazon. He returned to Spain with tales of a grand, prosperous civilization along the banks, saying that in weeks of sailing they didn't find a single stretch of shoreline unsettled, and that the people and the region were richer than any in all of Europe. Decades passed before there was another expedition, which found mostly rainforest and hunter-gatherers in a much regressed ("primitive") state, leading people to believe he was full of it. Now that the Amazon is being deforested to cultivate fodder for livestock, we are finding the remains of this indeed grand civilization, which Orellano probably destroyed by crop-dusting virulent disease throughout the interior of the continent.
That the United States saw Native Americans in the way that altacc described above, an "inferior" race whom Europeans had a God-given right to conquer and subdue.
Thomas Jefferson viewed them as equals and wanted to prevent white settlers from going west of the Mississippi and allow the native Americans to stop warring and enslaving each other, trade and develop schools etc . Perceptions changed later in the 19th century as did policies but the White Americans had been interacting with natives for 250 years by then . It’s not a monolithic attitude and it’s an oversimplification to say they were seen as inferior
How do you explain above reference to Jefferson including the phrase "merciless Indian savages" ... "whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions" into our nation's founding document? A lapse of Jefferson's magnanimity or did he just have a really low opinion of himself?
I'm talking about 1803-1808 Lewis and Clark expedition. He had aged 30 years and experienced new things. There's no need for sarcasm here we can just discuss things you know. It's not reddit.
In that period, Europeans and much of the world felt a God given right to conquer and subdue everyone else.
Europe had some of the nastiest religious wars of conquest they've seen. Christians were fighting each other. Christians and Muslims were fighting each other. Christians and Muslims were enslaving White slavics. African kingdoms were fighting and enslaving each other. African Kingdoms were just starting to export slaves to Europe. It was a nasty time for most of the world, and the treatment that the Native Americans got was no exception. However, they were in a specially poor position to defend themselves.
Many of the Great North American civilizations had just collapsed due to climate change, and shortly thereafter they were ravaged by new diseases that they had no immunity to.
I don't buy this at all. I used to live in Mexico and their native populations are very much alive, well, and fully a part of the national identity. The native populations are much much larger and it's nearly impossible to go anywhere at all without seeing it. As soon as you cross into the US there's no trace to be found unless you go to very specific places. You'd have to believe that disease somehow stopped at the post Mexican American war borders.
México is not the US grassland, different geography, different groups, and therefore different consequences as the populations were wiped out by disease, infighting and war
Not to mention, simply because there still are a non trivial amount of indigenous groups, that doesn't mean that there didn't used to be even more variety that is now extinct
Have you heard of the Cocoliztli epidemics? Three massive waves of a still-unidentified disease resulting in 90+% depopulation of Mexica peoples in the 50 years following Spanish arrival. The reason there are native Mexica people (my own mitochondrial haplogroup is of the Aztec vintage, through my Mexican matrilineage) is because the Spaniards married (or, ahem, otherwise impregnated) native women. The chaste and Christian Anglo-Americans were virtuous enough to simply ethnically cleanse their Indigenous peoples.
One argument for the difference is that the Spanish were much more accustomed to ethno-cultural hybridization as the Reconquista had only ended right before 1492 or so
>Acknowledging the presence of native American towns, cities, farmlands, etc... would have brought up the inconvenient subject of ownership of the land.
I am highly skeptical of these types of sentiments. They are simply projections of modern sensibilities to the period of European settlement.
At the time, might by right was the default in Europe, with near constant wars of conquest. outside of Europe, entire islands in the Caribbean were enslaved and depopulated.
Given this context, I don't think information about Native American towns was suppressed to protect the delicate sensibilities of the settlers.
> Groups of humans have denigrated others and felt better than outsiders since the dawn of History.
Well yes they have. That doesn't answer my question about the need or motivation for doing this.
> We still do it today to different societies
That's true, but disagrees with the original comment's claim: "They are simply projections of modern sensibilities to the period of European settlement."
> Humans have a inclination too think that their in group is superior to others
Yes, that's the dictionary definition of racism. The result of which is often justification to oppress the "inferior" group.
Apache had plenty of knowledge of agriculture. They lived in an agricultural world and interacted with people who were agriculturalists, and even practiced herding (a form of agriculture).
Moreover, it's wise to consider the context of gory incidents described in popular culture. This all took place against a backdrop of devastating war that captured the imagination of 19th century popular media. This is one of the periods of colonization where we can clearly point to genocide in the sense that total eradication was unambiguously a political goal and you could get money by bringing a native scalp/head into a government office.
Despite that, as someone who's worked with primary sources from this period and region, I'll caution you that particularly lurid descriptions of atrocities are often both exaggerated and cherry-picked.
As an aside, the Apache in particular were very well organized as far as first nations go and at the height of their power had thousands of warriors with fairly modern light weaponry. We have sources from the Mexican American war about Mexican commanders refusing to head off American troops because they were more worried about native forces than the Americans. That's also why article XI of the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was such an important point for the negotiations.
Agriculture is an incredibly broad word that includes both crop and animal based production. Feel free to check the dictionary of your choice (webster, oed, etc), an academic definitions paper like [1], or even the relevant wiki page. You're defining cultivation instead.
And not to belabor the point, but the Navajo and the Apache also engaged in crop cultivation. It was simply less important for them in the 19th century, so it's not what I mentioned first.
All you've done here is to repeat lies and propaganda popularized back then.
You would need to explain why so many parts of the US Constitution are based on Iroquois Confederacy law if Native Americans are so barbaric. And you'd need to explain why the Iroquois Confederacy is still in operation today - one of the oldest participatory democracies on earth. Having been founded in 1142, it makes European countries look far far behind in terms of civilization.
Read about what Europeans did to the native populations. Significantly more brutal, especially early on. Entire tribes were wiped out. Considering how everything turned out, I'd say the Europeans fit the definition of savages much more.
> It was much more convenient to declare the native Americans as barbarians with little culture & society and the land unused and open to be claimed by European settlers.
I went to a US public school in the South and also went to a private school. We spent most semesters of history learning about Native American civilizations, construction, and at one point had to build small-scale physical replicas of their cities.
That's to say, I don't really buy your explanation for the broader US. Maybe specific pockets. What I do think is more likely is that people believe that warring kingdoms were still normal back then and view Native American tribes as just that - kingdoms that were conquered. That much I can live with, but the constant lying and taking back promises we made to the Native Americans is absolute trash and should be rectified.
Cities, yeah? Big ones? I know of mesoamerican cities like Tenochtitlan but I am unaware of any north american Indian cities (to be fair, I'm not from the USA), so some pointers would be very welcome indeed.
The first is debatable as it's city-ness. But that is an eye-opener! The second, wow! Thanks. I guess the scale both indicate a large social structure.
I heard a podcast about this I forget which one but they said basically that corn was slowly developing and spreading north but it was not developed to support large civilizations like it did in the central and South America. Had Europeans not come for another 100-200 years I think it would have adapted to northern latitudes and the base for large populations and large cities would have been there. Yes the natives had corn in the north but it was a strain with very few kernels compared to what was being grown in central Mexico. I can’t recall the details but that’s the gist . I think they said only one million natives existed in the continental US when colonists first landed too
Relevant to this question is the story of Cortez and his pigs. Spain immediately set up shop in South America, giving us plenty of stories of vast civilizations, but Cortez made just one minor expedition across Florida and did report large cities, but only the pigs and their disease stayed behind.
I assume it’s because the SA construction projects are more visible today than NA projects. Nazca lines are still visible along with Inca and Maya stone buildings. NA mounds and these canals are not as visible so people just can’t see them and walk around them as well.
The north American equivalent of the Nazca lines (the Blythe intaglios [1]) are just as visible, simply not as numerous and importantly, they don't have a decades-long presence in the public mind as an enduring archaeological mystery.
It's probably because the biggest at Blythe Intaglios is about 50 meters across, while some of the Nazcal Line figures are more than a kilometer across. The former seems like something a handful of people could plausibly do on a whim as a hobby, while the latter seems like something that would require careful planning, maybe some surveying techniques, and a lot more energy expenditure and manhours.
This researcher and a small team re-created a method to make Nazca lines in the 70's with the same tech that the Nazca civilization had. People make very complex crop circles all by themselves, too. It's simply a matter of a bit of math and careful planning and practice.
> It's simply a matter of a bit of math and careful planning and practice.
That lines up with what I suppose above. A few people, careful planning and a bit of basic math/surveying to make the Nazca figures.
But the Blythe Intaglios figures are much smaller, at 50 meters across I think I could probably make a figure like those by kicking around gravel for a day or two. No planning or math needed, I'd just eyeball it.
Drawing is hard enough for me that I can't imagine just kicking some dirt around for a few days to draw even a 10m stick figure, but I do get your point that it would definitely be easier than trying to draw a 50m, and in turn even harder for a 500m figure.
It's kind of unclear. It's also possible that because of the slower exploration and settlement of North America, we simply never saw the large societies before they collapsed from disease (especially true of the Mississippian cultures) — Europeans only came through in force a hundred years later.
I spoke with an archaeologist and interpreter recently at an archaeological park with mounds from the Mississippian people period. They said that the archaeological park might have easily been dozed over if events had turned out differently. I suspect that North American pre-columbian construction is often obscured by a century of modern development and centuries of farming now. Much of what might have been is now crushed under our tractors or buried under our malls, highways, and houses. I wonder what people living here before us were like and what lessons they might teach us.
Native Americans aren't gone, they're just quite a bit less populous post-colonization. You can still find nations like the Natchez and the Choctaw whose ancestors built mounds and ask them.
Indeed speaking in the past tense about indigenous Americans is a long standing artifact of colonial ideology which has the effect of diminishing the present day reality of natives on this land. I was fairly recently shocked upon a trip to the Museum of Natural History in NY where plaque upon plaque in the section about pacific NW peoples spoke about the Haida and related people in the past tense and proudly displayed what were in all likelihood stolen artifacts.
My son was sent home with homework a couple years ago that spoke about the Anishinaabe (Ojibwe etc) all in past tense grammar. Meanwhile we have close family friends who are Ojibwe.
In Canada at least there has been a bit of a reversal in this trend, with more recognition of the present day nations. And in fact there's actually demographic growth among many first nations here, while the broader European settler derived society is in a demographic decline (solved only by immigration).
Situations like these, with the right teacher, are great eye-opening moments for children.
I still remember a unit in US history, in which we were asked to write an essay expounding on the evolving nature of woman's role in American society from the antebellum period through reconstruction (1820s-1890s).
I think just about everybody in the class interpreted the question as being one about "white" women, and wrote their essays accordingly.
The next lecture opened with this meta-fact, and rather than shame us about it, she used it as a wedge to open a discussion on how the overwhelming majority of writing on American history is authored from a male, generally Western European lens.
Most of our essays told of monotonically expanding rights and freedom (Seneca Falls was in 1848, the various feminist movements were gaining steam at the state level around property rights and suffrage). But this time period saw Indigenous women undergo the Trail of Tears and the institutionalization of reservations and forced relocation. It also saw enslaved women experience Emancipation only to be followed with the failure of reconstruction and the installment of Jim Crow.
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This was over 10 years ago, and I still remember the lesson in so much detail! And find it useful when reading history today. Every time we uncover a blind spot and cure some ignorance, we're making progress.
> And in fact there's actually demographic growth among many first nations here, while the broader European settler derived society is in a demographic decline (solved only by immigration).
That's what really would be best, you know, if those whites would get off that stolen land and give it back to the Natives, you know?
I mean, there's just a connection between the historical homeland of a certain People and their blood that just shouldn't be violated, right? Demographically justice will be done when America is inhabited primarily by those who are Indigenous and have a right to the land. Descendents of Colonials should be removed and sent back to their historical homeland to make room for the Natives.
Seems you're new here. But your tone looks more appropriate for Reddit or Twitter. You'll probably find better strawmen to beat up on over there, while you pound your chest for upvotes.
People remember great centralized empires. They remember societies with extensive written records. Cultures that impressed their conquerors. Areas with contiguity of centralized civilization. Monuments that are noteworthy on the global scale. When those things are missing, past societies fade into obscurity.
Even in Europe, ancient cultures are mostly remembered from their interactions with Mediterranean and Middle-Eastern societies. European history effectively begins with the spread of Greco-Roman influence, which in many cases was well into the middle ages. Whatever there was before is now mostly forgotten.
I think straightforwardly the Nazca lines are totally unique and pyramids of Mexico are undeniable in their impressiveness. Poverty Point and the mounds are mistakable as weird hills, and were mostly uninhabited by the time settlers arrived.
Many iconic Mexican pyramids were also weird hills before they were excavated and restored in the 20th century and similarly unused. Here's one example [1]. Even major cities like Tikal were essentially unknown until systematic mapping of the areas around the more obvious pyramids revealed their true extents.
Yea that’s true but Europeans wrote detailed accounts of the structures at their apogee, documenting their use and the culture of their builders.
We’ll, at least in some places.
A simple and concise statement backed by undeniable proof found in monuments around the world of which some modern man still cannot explain as we continue to discover such artifacts as our technology aided exploration expands. My additional comments to this comes from personal experience in this arena in the last decade of my own local discoveries that are directly linked to Native and Paleo occupation on the land of which I live and the surrounding area. Over ten years ago now I found my first artifact laying on the surface behind my house and in that time I have done hundreds of hours of research and well over a thousand hours of walking in which I have discovered many artifacts to date. Several accredited individuals and organizations have visited my location to see my finds as I attempt to get the surrounding areas studied for preservation from what the experts have informed me on my collection. As with anything however someone must take up the preservation battle and while I continue to discover items weekly my professional background is not in artifacts nor land preservation. I'll close with another statement for one to ponder just as shipman05 did: Nearly everything humans have created that is no longer needed either gets buried by another human or by nature in time.
To satisfy my conscience I humbly make this post to save tomcam’s life. Stay with me! ;)
My findings include artifacts that are carved from stone and shell along with relics fired from clay with items that date back 10,000+ years per sources. Off topic and therefore not previously stated I only mentioned pre modern man artifacts given the discussion however I have located so much more. I live in the Eastern coastal mid Atlantic region of the United States of America which has a very long and documented history of human occupation, aka people losing things.
For those reading this that have wanted to find such an artifact I can assure that such things are everywhere however one just needs to invest the time to look and comprehend one's surroundings. Just as the article concludes "There’s more out there to be found, but they have to be looked for".
Just in time. I was fading out there. Now you have me wondering. I have just purchased a farm in what is known to be Indian country next-door to Seattle. I have looked casually but not very methodically for any such artifacts. I do know this area was extensively logged a century ago and I am guessing that is one reason I found nothing.
Thank you so much for the update and for saving my miserable life!
With your knowledge that logging occurred you know at least humans occupied the land with a purpose so tools and other lost modern items are certainly present. Unaware of Washington State land deeds and mappings this is where I would start as a pointer to potential item locations. You should definitely purchase a metal detector and just go for aimless walks because before there were banks people hid their money, some is still buried hint hint. In your walking you will learn the topology and erosion patterns of your land and this is the secret to finding surface items time and again. Of course YMMV with frequency of discoveries but even the remotest places known have had human occupation or at least passage with the opportunity to lose or discard items. Should your curiosity around this topic continue to nag feel free to reach me via smtp at the same domain your about promotes.
No life is miserable if one is motivated and capable of positivity but it is 2022 which is presenting more and more challenges to be that positive.
I think I get what you are saying and certainly not trying to compare you to this horrible villain...
but whenever I hear that sentiment I am usually reminded of this quote from Judge Holden in Blood Meridian:
"What is true of one man, said the judge, is true of many. The people who once lived here are called the Anasazi. The old ones. They quit these parts, routed by drought or disease or by wandering bands of marauders, quit these parts ages since and of them there is no memory. They are rumors and ghosts in this land and they are much revered. The tools, the art, the building — these things stand in judgement on the latter races. Yet there is nothing for them to grapple with. The old ones are gone like phantoms and the savages wander these canyons to the sound of an ancient laughter. In their crude huts they crouch in darkness and listen to the fear seeping out of the rock. All progressions from a higher to a lower order are marked by ruins and mystery and a residue of nameless rage. So. Here are the dead fathers. Their spirit is entombed in the stone. It lies upon the land with the same weight and the same ubiquity. For whoever makes a shelter of reeds and hides has joined his spirit to the common destiny of creatures and he will subside back into the primal mud with scarcely a cry. But who builds in stone seeks to alter the structure of the universe and so it was with these masons however primitive their works may seem to us."
For what it's worth, I live in the four corners area of the US and regularly see stone buildings that are hundreds of years old out in the desert, and the structure I live in is made of wood.
Wood lasts essentially forever in the southwest. We have dendrochronological records going back thousands of years from the Colorado plateau because there's so little decay. There just wasn't much of it to build with out there by the classic period, so they relied more on abundant stone rather than trying to drag more timbers than strictly necessary the tens of kilometers from where they grew to where pueblos were built.
You probably know this as well, but for those that don't, the Anasazi are typically called "Ancestral puebloans" in modern literature because it's been well established that they didn't actually go anywhere, they're pretty direct ancestors of the modern puebloan nations (among others).
Yeah, those are both good points; I brought out the quote as that's what the op's thought reminded me of, but the terminology is more appropriate to McCarthy's villain than the material world.
That said, I am a little up the hill where it's wetter (and will hopefully remain so). If we stopped upkeep on the place I live, I am not confident that obvious traces of it would outlast the cliff dwellings at, say, Mesa Verde.
Much of it was deliberately destroyed and obscured. Large parts of Cahokia were destroyed by highway and suburban development, and it wasn't that city planners and officials didn't know it was there. They often suppressed discoveries and tried to cut archaeologists out of the loop, because the artifacts and etc were in the way of development goals.
Many North American cities were built on top of or near where native settlements were. It was in the best interests of colonials and moderns to suppress or diminish findings.
That and North Americans were engaged in a long running cultural genocide based on a mission of Christianizing a 'primitive' people, which would have been undermined by recognizing this area as previously occupied by a settled agricultural societies.
Several years ago I visited the Cahokia museum and went on top of a large mound with a St. Louis native who had only barely heard of it even though it's just across the Mississippi River from the main part of the city. I'm hoping they're able to dig up a lot of interesting finds before I visit again someday.
European cities (and cities everywhere) are built on top of archaeological sites. It isn't because they wanted to erase the history, it's because the locations of cities are in geographically suitable locations, like ports, transportation nexuses, etc.
Heck, much of medieval Rome was built from salvaged masonry from ancient Rome. This is just pragmatism, not evil intent.
This reminds me of being in the Melbourne Star Ferris wheel in Australia. There's a narration about the history of Melbourne while you're in it that early on says "there was nothing here before this city was built" and then later has you imagine Aboriginal campfires in the area. Who were of course there first, and I very vaguely recall had built irrigation and farming.
(Also, it was built so one of the easiest things to see from it was the cafeteria of the Costco next door.)
Is also worth noting that Cahokia was abandoned 150 years before Columbus landed in North America. That by itself goes a long way and explaining why explorers didn't find such massive cities
I believe you're confusing "genocide" and "cultural genocide." You can argue there was no long running genocide, but it's very hard to deny things like residential schools or forced child abduction aren't cultural genocide.
Smallpox blankets is an urban legend. And with good reason. It would be impossible to control the effects, plus their knowledge of germ theory was limited anyway.
There is tons of stuff out there. Its a thing in construction that you dont have to worry about anything archaeological below X feet because X represents the lowest we have found human remains(Clovis). But everybody involved with digging has stories about finding stuff way below that layer. And they just cover it up because nobody wants the job to be stopped.
For any non-locals coming across this, the large canal going east-west through Mobile and Oyster bay is a recent, man-made canal [0]. Linking Bon-Secour river all the way down to Little Lagoon at that time would have been a significant improvement in ease of access to more abundant fishing grounds.
> But when the canal was dry, it still would have made a good footpath through a heavily forested area, Waselkov says.
I bet the canal would spend a pretty long time in an intermediary state - not deep enough for canoes, but not dry enough to use as a footpath. But maybe there was a footpath beside the canal, as there are for more modern canals (towpaths)?
This area has had a stable sea level for several thousand years, but that's all changing. NOAA predicts a 10-12 inch (25-30 cm) sea level rise by 2050 and perhaps 3-4 times that by 2100.
Of course, during the Last Glacial Maximum, sea levels were 125 meters lower (~25,000 - 20,000 years ago), and there's a lot of evidence that the Americas were inhabitated by at least small human populations by then (although many of their settlements are likely now buried by marine sediments).
But wait; "a canal, nearly a mile long, built for canoe travel". Isn't it relatively easy to carry a canoe for a mile? Especially in those days when they were a lot tougher. Why dig a canal just to float canoes one mile?
Makes me think it was used to float heavier stuff, like goods, wood, maybe even stone. Or for irrigation.
A modern aluminum canoe, or a hide-covered one, sure. A dugout, which is implied in the article, not so much. And, as you say, if transporting goods it would have been much less work. No pack animals, so everything was moved by human power.
I expect that the people who dug this canal did carry dugout canoes over this same route. Knowing the alternative can strongly motivate you to make the improvement.
They were not building it for people going out for a recreational canoe. They would surely have stuff in the Canoe that they don't want to carry a mile along with the canoe.
If you read the article more carefully you'd see that area in question was a marsh, making it difficult to carry. It was only used in wetter seasons. And the people who lived there did not practice agriculture
It was not dredging. It was a sophisticated structure to connect two distinct bodies of water. Per the article > "in its heyday it would have stretched a little less than a mile across most of Fort Morgan Peninsula, from Oyster Bay in the north to Little Lagoon in the south. Both bodies of water are at sea level, but the land between reaches up to six feet in elevation. That means anyone digging a trench across the peninsula would risk draining the water table into those sea-level outlets. The solution in this case may have been two dams at either end of the passageway that canoe travelers would have had to carry their boats around. With a shallow draft, dugout canoes would have only needed a few inches of water to pass through the three-foot-deep canal."
No, this is significant because it’s a man made canal, as opposed to the natural waterways used for trade that we already knew about. It is far longer than the other Native American canal we know of and likely had damns to control the flow of water through it.
Digging | establishing a canal is not the same as dedging .. one is creating a waterway where previsely there wasn't one, the other is removing sediments from an existing waterway | lake | harbour.
what point were you trying to make with your half-sentence response?
To demonstrate to everyone you don't understand what 'dredging' means?
Allow me to google it for you:
Dredging is the removal of sediments and debris from the bottom of lakes, rivers, harbors, and other water bodies. It is a routine necessity in waterways around the world because sedimentation—the natural process of sand and silt washing downstream—gradually fills channels and harbors.
I would guess that the canal they built would need dredging to stay operational. But I think the discovery is about the canal itself not about what they’d have to do to operate the canal. Not sure I understand GP’s statement but trying to find some connection.
I wonder why the latter are not as well known.