By Cruz del Carmen Cota-Wertz

• A.C. ante Christum = B.C. before Christ
• d.C. after Christ = A.D. Anno Domini.
• Now, to avoid mentioning Christ C.E and B.C.E. are used
• C.E. Common Era – B.C.E. Before Common Era

When Thor Heyerdahl was crossing the Atlantic in a reed raft in 1969 trying to proof his hypothesis, that thousands of years before his time it had been possible to cross the Ocean Sea with a raft made of papyrus reeds, he mentions that while contemplating the immense ocean that hide its currents and beautiful stary sky that hide its order, knowledge of both part of the ancients’ guide crossing open sea, a thought settle in his mind: the realization that no matter time period or stage of development the human mind has always been the human mind. That is, it has always had the capacity to hypothesize and creatively find solutions to diverse problems, using its knowledge of the laws of the universe. Heyerdahl had proven first in 1947 the feasibility of crossing the Pacific from America to Polynesia and back, with the Kon-Tiki expedition.

This Pacific crossing happened thousands of years ago, proving that earlier civilizations in America had been the first to populate the Polynesian Islands, argued Heyerdahl. Nowadays, some scientists argue that these travels happened the other way around, that it was the Polynesians who came to America and populated it, not like Heyerdahl believed. But, either way, what probes is that then they were not isolated, with travelling and trading crossing the Pacific.

Then in 1969 came the Ra Expedition of crossing the Atlantic in a reed raft from what is now Egypt to America. In both cases, he replicated the ideas and the solutions – down to the raw materials they used – of extinguished civilizations to prove that it was possible for them to have crossed the oceans in “paper boats’’, even if now we didn’t understand the methods they used or thought it was impossible to have done it with their ‘’limited’’ technologies. [Ra Expedition. Thor Heyerdahl (1)]

Heyerdahl’s idea was so diametrically opposite to the prevailing teachings! What we were taught is that the development of the human species makes an ever-ascending curve with technologies that never existed before. At the beginning human beings were not really human, more beast-like, incapable of thinking, pounded by nature, and little by little they evolved developing some intellect  until they became intelligent beings. Today it’s so much better than in ancient times! We have what in old times or ancient times couldn’t even dream of! etc.

In the long arch of history, we do have an ascending trend due to the fundamental law of self-development of the universe, where natural or physical processes always find new ways of self-organizing, of self-development. That is its inner characteristic. A negato-entropic characteristic. But in the realm of the small, there is another level, in which this characteristic can manifest itself in each stage of development, where humans, by using their creativity reproduce in the small scale the larger tendency of development of the universe and by doing so, are in concordance with the laws of the universe. But, here free will intervenes and the contrary process can also take place.

If we consider that the thinking process has always been the same and is creative and problem-solving, then we see that those ancient civilizations could have been able to solve the problem of navigating long distances or any other problem they encountered for that matter, using the same mental processes by which we, as civilization now, solve the problems we face in our time.

Human creativity is always present, then and now. The knowledge of the laws of physics and of nature and how they are translated into something useful for each society has existed in all civilizations to one degree or another. The difference is the specific way of solving the problem, the details of how that knowledge is applied. They might have solved it in a very different way from the way we generate solutions to problems today.

A second difference is timing. We have had periods where the accumulation of knowledge has led to faster improvements and ever better technologies or techniques, as new knowledge builds up upon the previous advances, making that society in particular advance with richer and more complex knowledge. We are talking about specific civilizations, where some were more successful than others and long lasting. Their success depended on how much they used their knowledge in agreement with the laws of nature. Because here, free will intervenes and it could not happen if that society distances itself and adopts a different policy.

But by not doing so, by going against the fundamental law of self-development of the universe, these societies or civilizations paid, in the short or long run, the consequences. We have then in history periods of backwardness or total collapse of particular civilizations where that knowledge got lost, “disappeared’ completely or from which we only see partial footprints. Most of the time, the collapse of a civilization is due to natural disaster or man-made disaster or a combination of both.

But then, due to the self-development of the universe, there is a new beginning and if the new civilization that struggles to come out of the dark age, is unable to “decipher” the old methods, is going to have to rediscover the laws of the universe anew and maybe come up with a different way of solving problems.

The Neolithic Revolution

Since the human mind is always the human mind, it can also happen that a similar fundamental discovery could be happening in two places at the same time in a kind of parallel way. For instance, the Neolithic Revolution occurred in Mesopotamia around 11,000 years ago. This came about with the invention of farming and the possibility of establishing a permanent settlement. This revolution also gave this population free time, leisure time, that led to other expressions of art, freeing men from having to wander around looking for today’s food, or today’s shelter. The basis of this Neolithic Revolution in Mesopotamia was the genetic modification of wheat. In the next millennia the wheel was invented, and metal tools sprang up in the same area. Seven thousand years later, around 3000 B.C., the Sumerians put all this together, adding writing and in the Third Millennium B.C. created what is believed to be the first great civilization at least for our historical time period.

But at the same time, another independent Neolithic Revolution was occurring in Mesoamerica around 10,000 years ago with the development of farming and the creation of corn with the experimentation and genetic modification that occurred especially in the Mesoamerica Culture, nowadays Mexico and Guatemala.

In the ancient Andean communities in the region of modern-day Perù and Bolivia, near Lake Titicaca, the domestication of potato occurs between 8,000 and 5,000 BCE (@ 10000-8000 years ago) in a gradual process of agricultural development which resulted in a variety of more than 300 different types of potato now. Another Neolithic Revolution.

But then again, new archaeological discoveries in 2003 found ancient seeds from cultivated squashes in coastal Ecuador, which may be older than any agricultural remains in Mesoamerica. We are probably talking about a third Neolithic Revolution that led to the culture of Beni (around Titicaca Lake now Bolivia and Peru), which in turn is supposed to have unleashed the civilizations in what is now Peru, Bolivia and the Amazon region.

So, in these three sites similar processes were taking place at almost the same time – similar “ways of thinking”.

Other cases:

Invention and use of Zero

Different cultures had been using some representation of zero. In the Middle East around 600 B.C. and in Babylon in Mesopotamia a representation (two triangles) was used to represent zero as a place value, to distinguish for instance 11 from 101. The counting was based on 60 -not 10- which offers more possibilities than 10 (10 only divisible by 1,2,5,10). 60 is divisible by 1,2,3,4,5,6,10,12,15,20,30 and 60.

India developed the use of zero as a number besides a place holder around the first century B.C.

In parallel, the Mayas, according to the hieroglyphics, were using the zero as a number AND place holder around the year 357 A.D. that is even before the development of the Sanskrit in India. However, in the Olmec culture in Mesoamerica, Matthew W. Stirling – the one who unearth the Olmec heads around earthen mounds and terraces in Veracruz and Tabasco around 1938- that places their civilization around 1,800 B.C. in San Lorenzo and 1,200 B.C in La Venta and their ending around 350 B.C.- registers a stela using a zero as a number and place holder in their calendar by the year 32 B.C.

In Mesoamerica time keeping provided the stimulus that accounting had in Mesopotamia and the Middle East in the development of numbers.

Two uses of metals, two uses of force

According to Lechtman [History of the Conquest of Peru, William H. Prescott (2)], Europeans sought to optimize metals “hardiness, strength, toughness and sharpness”. Europeans used metal for tools. Andean societies used it as a token of wealth, power and community affiliation. Europe pours molten alloys into shaped molds. Such foundries were not known to Inka.

Andean societies preferred to hammer metal into thin sheets, form the sheets around molds and solder the results. One delicate bust that Lechtman analyzed was less than an inch tall but made of 22 separate gold plates painstakingly joined. Andean metalworkers usually mix gold and silver which are too soft with copper to strengthen them. Then hammer the mixture down to peel out the atoms of copper until they get a stronger plate of gold.

Andean cultures preferred to work with fiber depending more on flexibility to make their tools. Mechanical engineering depends on two main forces: compression and tension. Compression was more common in Europe, by contrast tension was the way of the American Indians, especially in Peru, who worked to solve basic engineering problems, through manipulation of fibers, not by creating and joining hard wooden or metal objects. To make boats, Andean cultures wove together reed rather than cutting up trees into planks.

When the Spaniards saw the suspension bridges made from foot-thick cables of woven reeds across the mountain’s gorges, just hanging with nothing underneath them, they were paralyzed with fear. There was no way the commanders would make them cross those hanging bridges! They are so sturdy that we can still appreciate some of those bridges today.

Andean textiles used the same principle. They were woven with great precision. Some would have thread count of five hundred per inch. Andean soldiers wore armor, made from knitted, quilted cloth that was almost as effective as the hard metal European armor but lighter and breathable. When Europeans saw the indigenous armors, they ditched their heavy armors. They had the precedent in Europe that with their heavy armor in battle if a soldier fell in the mud or water, it was very difficult, if not impossible, to get back on their feet.

So, we have here at least two different ways of solving the same problem. The ancient civilizations in America had their own way of doing it, Western civilization tends to do it differently. We can see it in the case of crossing the Atlantic. Heyerdahl and his crew followed the design left by the Egyptians in their hieroglyphics.

In their first attempt they produce the exact same replica as the drawings in hieroglyphics. The reeds were woven by natives living by the Chad lake in Africa, weaving them the same way they had used to for centuries. They made sure to use papyrus reed too etc. all according to the hieroglyphics. Except for the last thick woven string that went all around the raft from bow to stern and back on the other side. To the engineers and Heyerdahl, it didn’t make sense and concluded that maybe it was just an ornament and/or extra protection for the crew, so they decided not to use it. In his first Ra expedition, they couldn’t make it all the way to their destination, Santo Domingo Island, because the back of the raft was holding so much water that it couldn’t float anymore, slowly sinking the whole boat in the process.

They had to abandon the experiment a few miles before arriving. But Heyerdahl didn’t give up and tried it again. This time he used the indigenous people in Titicaca Lake to weave the reeds in a very dense and thick manner with millions of interwoven threads, and who were also following their own tradition of centuries to do so.

By the way, the third group that Heyerdahl visited because they also had the same tradition for building rafts, canoes and boats in the same interwoven way were the Series, who live in Tiburon Island in Sonora. Interesting, the Seri Tribe is a group whose origins are unknown. It doesn’t seem to be related to any other tribe in the region.

What Heyerdahl had learned from their first failed attempt was that the reason for this line all around the boat had to do with the Indigenous Americans’ way of using mechanical forces: flexibility instead of strength. Their boats didn’t face the waves head-on using force, the European way. Their boats went with the flow of the waves, molding to the waves, going up and down with the wave, but after coming down from the edge of the wave on the other side, the line around the raft (or boat) was meant to pull up the back (stern) of the boat sliding over the wave without picking up water. Without it, the stern of the boat didn’t go up at the last minute, hitting the waves every time collecting water little by little until it dragged the whole boat under.

Use of the wheel

Around the wheel there has been a historical big discussion about how backward the American Indigenous were and the irrefutable evidence is that they didn’t even know or used the wheel. The reason they didn’t use it was not because they didn’t know of it – wheels were found on toys in Mesoamerican Olmec-, but because since the Pleistocene extinction (@12,000- 10,000 ago), the Americas lacked beasts of burden. The biggest animal was the llama (around 300 lbs.) Faced with rough terrain and no beasts of burden they used skids almost as effectively. Even with animals of burden, the Olmec would not have had much use for wheeled vehicles – the soil was wet and marshy. When the Spaniards went there (nowadays Veracruz, Tabasco) their horses sank up to their chests in mud unable to move. At the end, they also ended up adapting to a different nature, leaving aside the use of horses.

In history one can see a lot of cases where some discoveries and their use do not spread right away. Development is not even and steady. Mesopotamia got the wheel in about 4000 B.C., but nearby Egypt did not use the wheel until 2,000 years later, despite being in close contact and trading often.

Agriculture

Large scale human societies tended to arise where geography provided a wider variety of altitudes and topography within a short distance. One such places is the Fertile Crescent, where the mountains of western Iran and the Dead Sea, the lowest place on earth, bracket the Tigris and Euphrates River system.

Another is Peru. Travelers pass through 20 of the world’s 34 main environmental types in what is called a ‘vertical archipelago’ between the coast and The Andes.

But the place selected by the ones that populated this area in what is now Peru thousands of years before the Inca, was adverse, desertic, no rain at all or floodings during El Niño. Their solution to the lack of water and rain for extended periods of time and floodings when El Niño strikes, was to “go up”. The Wari civilization (600 A.C.) created a set of channels that brought water down from the ever-present Andes icecaps to their raised places to produce food. The incline from the dry plains near shore and the Andes can be up to 65 degrees. Their solution (which is something you see in China, Vietnam, Cambodia still today) was to create a series of terraces so well built that they still stand up today. The design was such that each horizontal terrace in an almost vertical plane would get the most amount of sunshine and water from their irrigation system so the prolonged dry spells on the plains or the effects of El Nino with its flooding were not a determined factor in their lives.

Their staple crop was potatoes that can grow at altitudes of 14,000 feet and it doesn’t need storage since it can be left in the ground for a year; or could be processed to a mass that was resistant to freezing. Maize was also a preferred crop for the elites. Terraces soak in more sunlight than steep slopes, so this allowed them to grow maize at higher altitudes than usual.

By the time of the Chimor civilization (900 C.E.-1470 C.E.), built along the northern coast or Peru  from the Moche traditions, the irrigation scale was up to almost 50,000 acres that Peru wouldn’t reach back until the 1960s.

In Mesoamerica, what is now south of Mexico, Guatemala and Belize, the revolution in agriculture that was going to save Europe thousands of years later was the creation of maize. The case of maize or corn is astonishing because it was created by genetic modification that according to some scientists took less than a decade. The creation of maize 6000 years ago took place mainly in the Oaxaca-Puebla region, especially among the Zapotec tribe.

To me, this information was revealing because I understood where the President of Mexico (1858-1872), Benito Juàrez was coming from, from where this 100% Zapotec indigenous got the strength to hold Mexico together in the middle of civil war and French intervention that installed Maximilian of Habsburg as emperor, empire that only lasted 2 years due to  unbreakable resistance lead by Juàrez.

Chapter II

New World or Old World?

Around 12,000 B.C., end of the last Ice Age, all Pleistocene large animals disappeared in the American Continent, including mammals like mammoths, mastodons, saber-toothed Smilodon, giant sloths, bison, and 3 different species of horses and at least two types of camels. Today’s big mammals (caribou, moose, brown bear) are immigrants from Asia. Horses returned home later, with the first Spaniards.

As a point of reference, the Clovis culture in North America dates back to 13,500-12,900 years ago, that is, this and other cultures in the continent were already established and thrive when this mini-ice age occurred.

But was this the oldest culture, as it had been established? With new research technology and looking for archaeological sites, the dating of when our continent was populated has been consistently pushed further back. One research project has been focusing on the mitochondrial DNA, which is transmitted through the female line, from mother to daughter, to granddaughter and so on. The importance of this is that the mitochondrial DNA doesn’t ever change, so it has been possible to trace back the origin of the population in America. This research took the date of when America started to be populated back at least 33,000 years and was able to trace it back to Haplogroup A from Asia.

Until recently, the common explanation of how the Americas were populated is that during the mini-ice age, when half of what it is now the United States was covered with ice, the Bering Strait became passable for a while and several waves of people from Asia crossed it in their hunting excursions. If this was the only means of contact, it would have meant that the cultures to the north of the continent would be the oldest and, as they started to spread southward, the ones in the south would have been the newest.

However, we have some “inconsistencies’ about one sole line of migration via the Bering Strait. Fortunately, the field of research is broader now and includes besides archaeology, linguistics, biology, chemistry, geology, echography etc. and is open to the idea that ancestors of today’s Native-Americans could have been preceded by different waves of immigrations coming not only through the Bering Strait but also by ocean routes. Thousands of years ago we were more connected than we might think, and the oceans were known as highways for travel and trade, as has been now proven by Heyerdahl and others. A recent case involved scientists in Japanese-led expeditions in 2019 and 2025, recreating 30,000-year-old voyages using dugout canoes, proving Paleolithic people could cross from Taiwan to Ryukyu Islands, by navigating the powerful Kuroshio Current using only primitive tools, sun, stars and ocean swells

Investigations in Monte Verde, a boggy Chilean riverbank, showed in 1977-1997 that Paleo-Indians had occupied Monte Verde at least 12,800 years ago. The investigations in Monte Verde, which is 10,000 miles from the Bering Strait, south of Chile near Port Montt almost at the most southern tip of Chile, have recently accumulated more evidence that pushes the date back to at least 16,500 B.C. These inhabitants were used to an ice-age environment. The scientists found stone tools, cooked animals, plant remains, and fire pits. However, there have been recent indications that has scientists thinking that human habitation could have been more than 32,000 years old, but since the possible dating goes so far back, the scientist community in advising caution.

On the other extreme in terms of weather, in Arica on the Atacama Desert, all the way north of Chile bordering with Peru and Bolivia in what is considered the driest desert in the world, a civilization was discovered that radiocarbon dating places around 5000 BCE. This civilization used to mummify its dead and what is known from the 99 mummies discovered is that they had a diet based 90% on seafood, almost no fruit, no vegetables or land animals.

There are not a lot of remains from this civilization but the few details we know about them are precisely because of these mummies, well preserved due to the kind of soil they were interred in, otherwise we wouldn’t know about its existence. Sometime around 5000 B.C. they began mummifying bodies which are so well preserved that the scientists who studied them were able to extract DNA. These mummies were thousands of years older than the Egyptians practice of mummification and pyramids.

In the north of Peru archaeologists discovered the ruins of advance civilized settlements in what was called Norte Chico. This was, according to their radiocarbon dating, an array of cities that had existed 3200 B.C. and possibly before 3500 B.C (featured in the two images below)

Then a 9,400-year-old skeleton turned up near Kennewick, Washington, in 1997, which created a controversy due to the Caucasian features of the skeleton due to the fact that Indian and European mitochondrial DNA are strikingly different.

Another “inconsistency” were the remains found at Lagoa Santa, Brazil, the skulls resemble those of the Australian Aboriginals more than those of Native Americans. Some scientists argue that the Paleo-Indians were crossing down the Pacific Coast by boat. After all, aboriginals had reached Australia by boat thousands of years before.

Given that the mini-ice-age made Europe north of the Loire Valley uninhabitable until some 18,000 years ago, our hemisphere should perhaps no longer be described as the “New World”. Britain and all the northern countries were empty until about 12500 B.C., covered with ice.

So, while civilizations were flourishing in the Equatorial strip, (and the southern part of the “old world”) producing new products, new methods of agriculture, developing numbers and calendars, roads, canals etc. most of Europe was covered in ice and very little development was taking place in what would become Europe.

Chapter III

Civilizations along the Andes Range in what is now Peru, Bolivia, and Chile

• Norte Chico (also called Caral or Caral-Supe) around 3500 B.C.-1800 B.C.
• Chavin culture with Chavin de Huàntar (north highlands) 900 B.C.- 200 B.C.
• Moche culture (100 C.E.-800 C.E), then came the Wari (or Huari) in the north and Tiwanaku in the Lake Titicaca and then the powerful Chimù kingdom that was conquered by the Inca (900A.D.-1470 A.D.)
• Wari or Huari (north of Peru) 600 A.D.- 1100 A.D.
• Tiwanaku (south of Peru) 500 A.D.-1100 A.D.
• Chimor  or Chimù (coastal line of Peru) 900 A.D. to 1470 A.D.
• Inca (conquered all of Peru up to Quito, Ecuador and south to Santiago de Chile) 1438-1533 A.D.

The civilizations that flourished along the Andes expanded greatly and cover a region highly populated and developed. They domesticated a wide variety of crops, like potatoes, peppers, peanuts, manioc, chocolate and coca, The Andean civilizations were noteworthy for monumental architecture, an extensive road system, textile weaving, terrace agriculture.

Norte Chico around 3200 B.C.-1800 B.C.

Norte Chico (also known as Caral-Supe) was discovered and excavated in the 1950s, but the real work didn’t start until the 1990’s when radiocarbon dates trace it back to more than 3000 B.C. Nobody thought that a civilization that old could have existed on the southern continent! Radiocarbon dating was possible due to the findings of reed woven bags (organic material) that were used to filled them with rocks to hold supporting walls for their pyramids that were tested and confirmed dates. The reed bags were part of the support structure designed as an anti-earthquake stabilizer in a highly seismic region. This complex civilization was based on cotton and textiles but was a pre-ceramic culture, no recorded use of ceramic so far. Norte Chico had as many as thirty major population centers in what is now the Caral region in north- central Peru, which meant it was densely populated, the scale of which was previously thought impossible for its time.

Caral had six monumental pyramids and vast sunken circular plaza. It lacked walls, weapons and any sign of fortification, thriving as a peaceful hub of trade, culture and innovation that connected the Pacific Coast with the Andean interior

The coast of Peru, although inhospitable, has more than 50 rivers that carry Andean snowmelt from which widespread irrigation systems were developed.

The time period of Norte Chico places it as one of six global areas with the most ancient indigenous civilizations and one of two, along with Mesoamerica, in the Western Hemisphere. Norte Chico emerged just a millennium after Sumer, was contemporaneous with the pyramids of ancient Egypt and predated the Mesoamerican Olmec by nearly two millennia.

Norte Chico prospered in a littoral that was agronomically a no-go zone: barren, cloudy, almost void of rain. It comprises 4 coastal valleys formed by the rivers in the north, Pativilca, Fortaleza, Supe and Huaura. Their monumental architecture included large earthwork platform mounds, stepped pyramids and sunken circular plazas which makes one of its cities Their constructions were aligned with celestial patterns, featuring plazas and pyramids oriented to astronomical events like solstices and the Milky Way, showing sophisticated knowledge of the cosmos. Huaricanga, one of the oldest cities displays such architectural structures. The building of such monuments required transporting heavy baskets and materials in an organized way, which showed that these cities must have had a centralized government to organize such an enterprise, only seen before in Mesopotamia.

The biggest of their cities was Huaricanga on the Fortaleza River, other big centers were Caral and Aspero, the latter of which is in a salty marsh at the mouth of Supe River. Aspero had 17 artificial mounds and was the first to be excavated. Since it was on the littoral, it was thought that civilization developed more along the ocean littoral, until in 1941 Peruvian archaeologists began excavating inland and what emerged was an imposing 150-acre array of earthworks: 6 large platforms mounds – rectangular terraced pyramids– which seem to be older than the coastal developments.

A few miles from the Fortaleza River archaeologists found three mounds in a rough semicircle that faced a fourth mound. In front of the mound, like a one-eighth scale model of Stonehenge, there was a circle of wak’a: sacred stones.

They had a highly developed textile industry as evidenced by the fact that archaeologists even found remains of quipu – the system of writing and counting using knots and the way the threads are woven, like from left to right or vice versa – which tell us how advanced they were.

Their agriculture was based on cotton, a key element of regional trade. Their diet was almost exclusively based on seafood, especially sardines and anchovies. Their economy was based on trade: people in shoreline settlements like Aspero would catch vast quantities of anchovies and sardines with whom they would trade. Caral and Huaricanga and other inland towns grew cotton, fruit, and vegetables produced under irrigation. They learned to irrigate the soil from the Cordillera Negra, the western part of Los Andes, where the water rushes down so fast that it doesn’t evaporate and doesn’t build up salt on the soil. To this day, one can only reach many archaeological sites in Norte Chico by using these brimming irrigation ditches. Norte Chico was the realm of King Cotton.

Cotton: There are 40 wild species of cotton in the world of which 4 have been domesticated, 2 in the Americas, 2 in the Middle East and South Asia. South American cotton once grew wild along the continent’s Pacific and Atlantic coasts. It may first have been domesticated in Amazonia, presumably near the river’s mouth and from there its cultivation spread to the rest of the continent.

The only staples that they imported were maize from Mesoamerica and tobacco from Amazonia.

Chavin and Chavin de Huantar and Moche civilizations

Chavin civilization that flourished 900 B.C. to 300 B.C. is more well known because of their highly sophisticated religious and political center, Chavin de Huantar in the high Andes Mountains in the north of Peru, a place of pilgrimage from all over the region. It was built strategically in the formation of a triangle formed by two rivers and the third side was formed by the temples of Chavin. It had a sunk plaza, pyramids flat on the top built with precise stone work that was said to have inspire the Incas’ Machu Pichu temple later, an intricated network of tunnels that managed light and sound to make it resonate more, using water to produce sounds and special effects. Stone carving with faces of gods -one of them the so-called smiling god. Very sophisticated use of hydraulics and engineering that was applied to religious control. This center included use of hallucinogenic and human sacrifices.

Moche (o Mochica civilization (100-800 C.E.)in the north littoral of Peru is renowned for its incredible irrigation systems transforming deserts into farmland, monumental adobe pyramids (Huacas)  with two main constructions, a Huaca del sol (sun pyramid) and Huaca de la Luna (Moon Pyramid), and rich pottery using colors and depicting human figures, most of them representing movement.

Wari (or Huari) and Tiwanaku

The Wari civilization in the northeast of Peru was first prominent around the 6 century A.D. This was a bad time because the north Pacific was assailed by the first of several decades-long droughts, interrupted by floodings from El Niño. Many polities disintegrated but Wari thrived due to its innovative techniques of terracing and irrigation.

Peru has more arable land above nine thousand feet than below. By diverting snowmelt from the ever-present Andes icecaps to high farm terraces the Wari were able to literally rise above the drought and flooding of lower elevations. The staple crop of the highlands was the potato, which can grow at altitudes of 14,000 feet. Hundreds of varieties of potatoes were cultivated. Potatoes have the advantage that they can stay on the ground for as long as a year (if the soil stays above 27° F). They also freeze-dried and trampled the potatoes by foot to make chuno a nearly indestructible foodstuff.

Wari extended its knowledge and influence so that by the end of the first millennium A.D. Wari techniques had reclaimed thousands of acres of cropland from mountainsides that almost anywhere else would have been regarded as an impossibility, due to being too dry, steep, and cold.

The Wari extended to the south of Peru, to Cerro Baul around the year 600 A.D. Cerro Baul is a plateau (mesa) on a terraced mountain, 2,000 feet above its surroundings and they also introduced here their system of terracing and long canals to irrigate the land.

At about 750 A.D. Tiwanaku groups infiltrated the region. The Tiwanaku were very different from the Wari. Its capital city, Tiwanaku, was in the southwest side of Titicaca Lake, at an elevation of 2,500 ft which made it the highest city in the ancient world. Although Tiwanaku is believed to have been founded around 110 A.D. it did not become important until about 375-700 A.D.

Different from Wari, Tiwanaku spread its power through “religious preeminence” as a predatory state. Awed by its magnificence, fearful of the supranatural powers controlled by its priesthood, local rulers subordinated themselves to them. Their religious monuments were elaborated using massive sandstone blocks interrupted every 10 feet by rectangular stone pillars 10 feet tall. They were also able to use hollowed out spaces in between the construction which worked as an amplifier of the sound and even built and used internal canals to run water to resemble the sound of the water from the Andes. Their Gateway of the Sun, which is the emblem of Tiwanaku still today attracts people during the winter solstice to contemplate it. The end of Tiwanaku came about around 1100 A.D.

The successors of both Wari and Tiwanaku were first the Chimor, which became then the greatest empire ever seen in Peru. The Chimor grew maize and cotton by irrigating almost 50,000 acres around the Moche River; an amount that modern Peru did not replicate until the 1960s. Chimor, as later the Inca, mummified their kings who continued to live opulently in their own homes with their courtier, interpreters, and servants. As a result, each new ruler had to build his own palace and acquire riches on their own. This deification of their mummies led them to wars among the different houses of mummified kings, using their mummified king as their military banner; fractionalization that ended up weakening Chimor.

At about 1450 A.D. the Inca army, led by Qhapag Yupanki, brother of their ruler Pachakuti, besieged the city-state of Cajamarca, in the foothills east of Chimor and defeated the king of Chimor, who underestimated the enemy for being a small insignificant tribe from Cuzco.

The Inca empire only lasted around 100 years and at that time was known as the Realm of the Four Parts (in quechua Tawantinsuyu). It became the largest empire in pre-Columbian America. The center of the empire was the city of Cuzco. It was able to spread rapidly because it was based on what all the previous cultures had left behind, in terms of infrastructure, agriculture, fishing, administrative system, counting and writing system using the quipu and even religious control. However, they were able to extend their dominions on their own accord. The Inca Empire encompassed almost all of now Chile, the south of Ecuador, plus all of Peru. They built the longest ‘highway’ from Quito to the south of Chile, among other things.

Chapter IV

Amazonia

We are aware, from general knowledge and what we learn at school, that before Columbus’ rediscovery there were two big civilizations in America. The “Inca civilization” in Peru and the “Aztec civilization” in Mexico, but to realize that big civilizations flourished in the Amazonia, transforming it, using technologies and techniques that later became unknown to us, takes the whole picture of what was going on in our continent to a whole new level.

The accepted idea is that the indigenous people in the Amazonia were sub-humans unable to show creativity in anyway and unable to develop any technological improvement, victims of their environment.

Charles C. Mann’s 1491. New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus, argues that both sides, defenders, and critics of Indians, in the end have the same view. On the side of the defenders, one of the best-known, Fray Bartolome de las Casas argues: “they are natural creatures who dwelt, gentle cows, in the terrestrial paradise”. In other words, they were incapable of any human characteristic of transforming nature.

Among the critics, historian Georg Bancroft, in 1834, argued “North America was an unproductive waste…[with a] few scattered tribes of feeble barbarians’’. Alfred L. Kroeber, founder of American Anthropology, in1934, said “America could have no history because their lives consisted of warfare that was insane, unending continuously attritional’’.

Samuel Eliot Morrison, twice Pulitzer Prize, in his book European Discovery of America, argued in 1974 ‘’Indians had created no lasting monuments or institutions…[living in a] changeless wilderness, they were pagans expecting short and brutish lives”.

Allan R. Holmberg lived among the Siriono in the Beni between 1940-1942. In his book Nomads of the Longbow, he argues: “They are the quintessence of man in the raw state of nature’’.

Between 1840 and 1940 the image reverted from important though uncivilized to “lazy, childlike and cruel”. Fortunately, the contrary perspective of considering them as human as any other human being has been reestablishing its authority in the last half century.

But let’s look at what really went on in one of the most backward places on this continent, according to our official history, Amazonia.

When the Dominican missionary Gaspar de Carvajal, author of the first written description of the Amazon, Descubrimiento del Rio de las Amazonas, traveled in 1540 with the then governor of Peru Francisco Pizarro’s half-brother Gonzalo Pizarro to explore the Amazon searching for El Dorado, the strong expedition of 200-280 soldiers, 2,000 pigs and 4,000 highland Indians got lost on the eastern foothills of the Andes. This side, the eastern side of the mountains catch all the moisture from the Amazon winds, and the terrain is as wet as it is steep. They lost all their horses – with mud up to their chest – some soldiers and all of the highland Indians. Finally, they were able to make it to the Napo River where they built some crude boats to transport down the river their weaponry and the few supplies they had left. Hungry and depleted they decided to form a small detachment splitting from Pizarro, that went ahead searching for food. Gaspar de Carvajal, who went with the detachment that Orellana was heading, gives an honest and length description in his writings about this first trip across the Amazon River.

He talks of a crowded and prosperous land near the mouth of the Tapajos River, a major tributary of the Amazon River, 400 miles from the sea, where they came across the biggest Indian settlement. Its homes and gardens lined the riverbank for more than a hundred miles. “Inland from the river, at a distance of 1 or 2 leagues…there could be seen some very large cities. A floating reception of more than 4,000 Indians in 200 war canoes greeted us. Hundreds more stood atop the bluffs on the south bank waving palm leaves. Canoes with a floating orchestra of horns, pipes and relics like three-stringed lutes. When the music played, they attacked’. Only firearms allowed them to escape. [Descubrimiento del Rio de las Amazonas. Fray Gaspar de Carvajal ( )]

Carvajal tried to publish his book with all these descriptions, but nobody believed him. He was mocked for his “exaggerated description of the Amazon” and “unbelievable” descriptions of the “savages” and his work went unpublished until more than 300 years later, in 1894.

In what Darwin called “the best of all natural history journals”, the 19th century naturalist Thomas Belt, describes the Amazonia: “A ceaseless round of ever-active life weaves the forest scenery of the tropics into one monotonous whole”. And since Belt the terms Amazonia and Amazon Basin are used as a single homogeneous entity.

“Amazon basin” refers to the drainage of the Amazon and its tributaries; “Amazonia”, by contrast, refers to the bigger region bounded by the Andes on the west, the Guiana Shield to the north, and Brazilian Shield to the south. It includes the Amazonia Rainforest but about a third of the Amazonia is not forest but rather a savanna of which the Beni, in Bolivia, is the biggest chunk. Only about half of Amazonia is upland forest – vines overhead in a tangled network etc.

To biologists the apparent fertility of the upland forest is a sham. Paul Richards’s classic 1952 study, The Tropical Rain Forest, says that it is unique and diverse, but its exuberant canopy is a mask covering an impoverished base. The base is the region’s poor soil. No matter what its original condition, the intense rain and heat of the forest have eroded its surface, washed out all its minerals, and decomposed vital organic compounds. As a result, much of the red Amazonian soil is weathered, harshly acid and almost bereft of essential nutrients – a “wet desert”.

Correspondingly, most nutrients are stored not in the soil but in the vegetation that covers it.

The book Amazonia: Man, and Culture in a Counterfeit Paradise by Betty J. Meggers, 1971, argues that the only form of agriculture here is “slash-and-burn” – clear a small space, burn off the chaff and refuse and plant the seeds.

Therefore, Meggers concluded: “The environmental potential of a tropical forest is sufficient to allow the evolution of culture that proceeds only to the level represented by slash-and-burn farmers’’.

Her law: “The level to which a culture can develop is dependent upon the agricultural potentiality of the environment it occupies”.

Meggers’ message of limitations published within a year of the first Earth Day, resonated in the ears of the Ecological Movement and she became one of their goddesses.

But in another line of thinking, Brian Ferguson, anthropologist at Rutgers University, shows that metal tools are the ones that largely created the slash-and-burn agriculture in the Amazonia. William M. Denevan a Wisconsin Geographer said: “This picture of swidden [slash-and-burn agriculture] as this ancient practice by which Indians kept themselves in a timeless balance with nature, that is mostly a myth’’. William E. Dolittle – University of Texas – said ‘’Slash-and-burn” was a product of European axes and European diseases, which so shrank the Indian groups that they adopted the less laborious but also less productive method of agriculture”.

In the Amazon the turn to swidden became the driving force behind the loss of tropical forest. The burning sends up in smoke most of the vegetation, almost all nitrogen and half of phosphorus and potassium and pours huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the air.

How the Amazonians Transformed their Environment

Contrary to the concept that the Amazonian ancient civilizations were subject to their limited means of subsistence and unable to prosper, Amazonia at some point was a very prosperous place, where the inhabitants had found their ways to control nature, develop their own means of solving their problems and break the barrier of a scarce population dependent of nature.

The way the archaeologists, geologists and scientists in general who have investigated the Amazonia describe their findings is like walking through the usual reddish unfertile soil when suddenly they just bump into a patch of dark topsoil and enter an orchard with very fertile soil created by humans; and this pattern goes on and on with topsoil patches of different size and different depth, according to their description. This continues through all the Amazonia but especially around river basins.

So far, they have been able to discover three big centers that were densely populated and technologically developed. One is where the Tapajos River disgorges into the Amazon, called Santarem; another going up north to the Guiana, Painted Rock Cave, and the third one was precisely Meggers’ big example of “useless people”, Marajos, the island at the mouth of the Amazon.

 Marajos island is more than twice the size of New Jersey and sits like a gigantic stopper on the mouth of the Amazon. Most of the island is submerged during the rainy season. Yet despite the unpromising setting, the Marajoara created a sophisticated society there from 800 to 1400 A.D. although there are indications of human activity in the region since the year 1000 B.C.

The island’s pottery, some of it very large, is known for its painted and incised representations of animals and plants ornately entangled in a profusion that recalls the forest itself. Meggers’s research in Marajos showed her that the earliest traces of Marajoara culture were the most elaborate. As the centuries advanced the quality of ceramics inexorably declined. A hundred years before Columbus, Meggers argued, they were blasted by a mega-Niño and then overrun by an inferior culture. The history of Marajos was all fall and no rise and this proved to her the validity of her theory.

Anna Roosevelt – Theodore Roosevelt’s great-granddaughter – excavated Marajos in the 1980s using a battery of new remote-sensing techniques and in her publication in 1991 she excoriated Meggers’ ideas. Marajos, she said, was a powerhouse that lasted for more than a thousand years. Rather than damaging the forest, Marajoara built their houses on top of artificial platforms with farm fields on the surface of the platform.

Roosevelt then went on to investigate Painted Rock Cave.

On the opposite side to Santarem, on the northern side of the Tapajos-Amazon rivers, are a series of sandstone ridges that reach down from the Guiana Shield. Five hundred feet high and more, they rise above the canopy like old tombstones.

Digging deeper than Meggers had, passing what looked like the last layer, she found another culture of roughly the same time as that of the Clovis, but they didn’t use to hunt or use the type of arrow heads for which Clovis was known. They plucked wild fruits, painted handprints on the walls and ate at the Amazon’s 1,500 species of fish, especially the 500-pound pirarucu, the world’s biggest freshwater fish. And after 1,200 years these early people left the cave for good. Painted Rock Cave became inhabited again in about 6000 B.C. in what looked like temporary shelter, a refuge from flood but these people brought loads of turtles and shellfish, built fires and red-to-grey-brown ceramic bowls which are considered the oldest known pottery in the Americas.

The third site, Santarem, on the Tapajos River was one of the biggest patches of topsoil on the high bluffs thick with ceramics. The bay it forms is lined up with bluffs. Here is where the Indians lined up along the edge of the rise, taunting Orellana and Carvajal by waving palm fronds. On top of this created rise, they cultivated, turning the soil into topsoil and in times of flooding canoed through the flooded pathways fishing and transporting goods.

By about 4000 years ago, the Indians of the lower Amazon were growing crops – at least 138 of them. The staple was manioc (or cassava), a very resistant root that grows everywhere, still a staple to this day in this region.

How did they create those ‘islands’ of topsoil patches where they cultivated the land? What archaeologists have found is that the papaya orchards were full of broken ceramics carbon dated to around 1000 A.C. and layered them combining the broken ceramics with their created topsoil. But besides transforming the soil they transformed the forest not by clearing it but instead replaced it with domesticated species of trees, especially fruit trees like the papaya orchards that the scientists found every so often, along with the manioc. Of the 138 known domesticated plants species they used, half were trees.

If they had used the slash-and-burn method of taking down trees to clear spaces, they would have been doomed – as Maggers’ argued – because of the physics of the rain drops in the Amazon. The raindrops in the Ecuador hit the ground with stronger force than anywhere else on earth which erodes the soil faster. But by planting trees, they preserved the soil.

One of the trees that is still frequently found in the Amazon, the Peach Palm, was found in abundance, surrounding Painted Rock Cave. It produces a fruit that is rich in vitamins and protein. Originally a wild tree, it came from the Beni culture (in what is now Bolivia) where it was domesticated 1,700-2,300 years ago and once domesticated spread to the rest of the Amazonia.

Instead of slash-and-burn they used slash-and-char. They used to burn wood but left it to burn incompletely, creating in such a way charcoal which is an active carbon that can last up to 50,000 years. They used this charcoal as the base to which organic matter sticks and partly oxidizes, then they kept adding excrement and waste and more charcoal to create what was called Terra Preta.

Terra Preta has more phosphorus, calcium, sulfur, and nitrogen, and more organic matter than common rain forests. This was the basis for their agriculture.

The topsoil found (“Terra Preta”) covers in some parts 10% of the land, in other less, but even that is a few thousand square miles of anthropogenic transformation. The Terra Preta patches are usually 5-15 acres, 1-2 feet deep on average but can reach 6 feet in some cases.

The Beni culture seems to be one of the oldest known so far and the cradle for all those that developed in the northern part of South America. It thrived around the Titicaca Lake – now in Bolivia – at an altitude of 12,000 ft. It seems that not only the culture of Santarem come from Beni but also the Wari and Tiwanaku had their origins here too. And it is in this place that Heyerdahl came looking for the people that had ancient knowledge of how to weave the reed for the raft he needed to cross the Atlantic.

Archaeologist William Denevan studied the Beni culture in 1961 and found roads, causeways, canals, dikes, reservoirs, mounds, raised agricultural fields above the flood plain, more than 60 feet to allow trees to thrive, odd zigzagging ridges used to trap fish during the flood season, using fish-corralling fences. This was a highly developed culture.

The Native-Americans created solutions whenever they faced ecological obstacles. Rather than being at the mercy of nature they improved nature. They were engaged in terra-forming the Amazon when this process was interrupted by the newcomers.

Ecological Explosion and Ecological Release

With the coming of the Europeans and everything they brought with them, America suffered an Ecological Explosion in a magnitude not seen since the Ice Age. In an Ecological Explosion a violent change occurs with the breakdown of the ecological chains by which some species prevail while others decline or disappear and the whole environment changes. In this case the one that suffered the most was the Homo Sapiens, which in a century after Columbus lost at least one fifth of its numbers – some argue a lot more – mainly to disease.

Also, we suffered from an Ecological Release where new species enter a whole new ecological environment. Some species can’t thrive in the new environment and disappear; others find a niche while others find themselves without a natural enemy and spread out of control. That happened with Kudzus, a low vine that helps against erosion, (and that was the reason it was introduced in America), clove and bluegrass peaches which proliferated in the southeast of the U.S. and now are out of control.

South America was especially hit by endive and spinach that escaped and grew into an impassable six-foot thickness in Peru, mint overwhelmed the Andean Valley. In the Pampas, Argentina, and Uruguay, Charles Darwin discovered feral artichoke. Wild peaches were rampant in South America too as well as rats that destroyed crops. An Ecological Release can occur also by over usage or exploitation of one part of the chain, especially when it is the “keystone’ species. Until Columbus the Indians were the keystone species in a lot of the ecological chains in most of the hemisphere.

In what is now the U.S. when for the first time Hernando de Soto traveled in the now U.S. southeast in the early XVI century, he saw hordes of people but apparently didn’t see a single bison – he doesn’t mention them. When Native-American communities were annihilated by disease after that first incursion, the bison vastly extended both their range and number and that’s what the next wave of conquerors saw less than a century later. Same with elk. Charles Kay, a wildlife ecologist at Utah State, said that elk were first shown in great numbers about 500 years ago in Yellowstone National Park, the time of the great human epidemics.

An Ecological Explosion had occurred because humans, the “keystone’ species in the ecological chain had been broken. It created an explosion of animal species and vegetation that didn’t belong to any ecological chain in America or whose ecological chain had been broken.

Chapter V

The Worst Ecological Explosion and Ecological Release: Diseases brought to America

The worst Ecological Explosion and Ecological Release possible were created by the diseases brought by the Europeans. When the colonization started, in some instances more than 100 years had gone by since the rediscover, during which time diseases had been spreading like wildfire creating an unprecedented Ecological Explosion and Ecological Release; and had arrived at places before any European had set foot there or at places where no European have even set foot. Therefore, the first Europeans to explore many parts of America would have encountered places that were already depopulated or with populations already struggling from social disintegration.

In 1619 when Squantum, after his 5 years abduction in England, was coming back from southern Maine – where he was drop from the ship – making his way back to the Narragansett in Massachusetts – neighbors and enemies of the Wampanoag – he and the ones traveling with him describe what they encounter: an “utterly void’’ empty coast. What was once a line of busy communities was now a mass of tumbledown homes and untended fields, covered by scattered skeletons bleached by the sun. The Patuxet – Squantum’s tribe – had been hit with special force. Not a single person remained. The epidemic was probably viral hepatitis, according to a study done by Arthur E. Spies, of the Maine Historic Preservation Commission. The Indians had died in heaps. In their panic, the healthy fled from the sick, carrying the disease with them to neighboring communities.

This epidemic began in 1616, and it took at least 3 years to spread over the territory of New England and killed as much as 90% of the people of New England, according to Charles C. Mann, author of 1491, New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus.

The Wampanoag and all the other alliances of the East Coast came to the obvious logical conclusion: “Our deities had allied against us”, we were being “punished’. By the same token, Governor Bradford attributed the plague to “the good hand of God” that was punishing the infidels. More than 50 of the first colonial villages in New England were located in Indian communities emptied by disease.

The Wampanoag confederation, that once had as many as 20,000 people now reduced to the size of one of its previous villages -around 1,000-, made the decision to allow the pilgrims to stay and make an alliance with them, against their enemies the Narragansett, which turn out to be not a good idea. Groups like the Narragansett which were spared by the 1616 epidemic, were crushed by a smallpox epidemic in 1633.

When Hernando de Soto had landed in Florida on May 30, 1539, with 600 soldiers, 200 horses and 300 pigs, the land was “thickly set with great towns’, and he apparently didn’t see a single bison. Each city protected itself with earthen walls, sizable moats and deadeye archers. In his path Hernando de Soto destroyed everything and was renowned for his cruelty. He made money from slave trade and helped finance Pizarro’s conquest of the Inca.

But less than 150 years later, in1682 when the French, with La Salle, appeared again in the same territory traveled by de Soto, they didn’t see any Indian village for 200 miles. Only found “a solitude unrelieved by the faintest trace of men’’ and on the contrary, everywhere the French encountered bison. When de Soto showed up about 50 settlements existed in his trip to Mississippi, but by La Salle’s time, perhaps 10. The sickness was probably caused by the pig. Unlike Europeans, Indians did not live in constant contact with many animals. They domesticated only the dog, turkey (in Mesoamerica) and the llama, alpaca, Muscovy duck and guinea pig (Andes). With no domesticated animals few Indians carry the gene that permits adults to digest lactose. Between de Soto and La Salle, the Caddo people on the Texas-Arkansas border, and the Coosa people in western Georgia, both disintegrated. The Caddo fell from around 200,000 to around 8,500. In the 18^th century they fell to 1,400. “That’s the reason white people think of Indians as nomadic hunters’’ said Russell Thorton, an anthropologist from the University of California. They were forced to leave and become nomadic again.

Could epidemics kill that many? This is still under debate. If a virus kills all or almost all of its hosts, it has a bleak future. The 1918 Influenza infected an estimated 500 million people in 4 successive waves but killed from 25 to 50 million, and possibly as high as 100 million. The Black Death, 1347-1351, killed one third of its victims (estimated 25 million)

Genetics of Vulnerability. – In the research into the reasons of why the population in America had been affected in such a way by diseases, scientists discovered that the people in Americas had two types of susceptibility. First, a lack of acquired immunity, it was a “virgin land’. In addition, Americans had immune systems that some researchers believe were much more restricted. More than 9 out of 10 Native Americans -and almost all South American Indians have type 0 blood, whereas Europeans evenly split between 0 and A.

Genetic homogeneity could be beneficial only if it involved deleterious (recessive alleles) genes. In 1491, America population was apparently free from cystic fibrosis, Huntington’s, newborn anemia, schizophrenia, asthma, and possibly juvenile diabetes -all with same deleterious genetic component. But genetic homogeneity can be a real problem. A 1960-1970 study among South America Indians of a new improved measles vaccine showed that in general all the subjects responded well, but the Indians as a whole had a limited spectrum of responses, which under the right circumstances, can be a problem.

Francis L. Blake, a virologist from Yale, attributed this limited response to Human Leukocyte Antigens (HLAs), the molecules inside most human cells which are key in the defense system. According to him, the cut-up pieces of viruses that are not recycled in the cell are taken by the HLAs, that transport the snippets to the surface of the cell. Outside prowling are white blood cells -Leukocytes-. When Leukocytes spot an anomaly -a bit of a virus- they destroy it, but it must be transported first by the HLAs to the surface. All people have multiple types of HLAs, but each type is specialized, not all types can carry out of the cell every type of virus or different strains of the virus. People with similar HLA profiles fall victim to the same disease in the same way.

In the 1990s, Blake reviewed 36 studies of South American Indians. Overall, Indians have fewer HLA types than the population of Europe, Asia, or Africa. Europeans have at least 35 main HLA classes. Indians no more than 17. In addition, their HLA are dominated by an unusually small number of types. About 1/3 of South American Indians have identical or near-identical HLA. For Africans it is one in two hundred. In South America the probability that a pathogen in one host will next encounter a host with a similar immune spectrum is around 28%; in Europe the chance is less than 2%.

The closest genetic relatives are indigenous Siberians, who only came in contact with the rest of the world after the Trans-Siberian train. In 1768, smallpox struck Siberia’s Pacific Coast. When a decade later in 1779, the round-the-globe expedition of Captain James Cook reached Kamchatka peninsula, the shoreline was a cemetery. A single epidemic killed more than 3 out of 4 indigenous Siberians.

In 2004, two U.S. anthropologist and a Venezuelan medical researcher proposed a second cause: helper T-cells. T-cells occur in two main types, one that targets microorganisms and one that targets parasites. Since Indians had to deal more with parasites their T-cells were more oriented to fighting them, contrary to Europeans who grew up in germ-filled environments.

Elizabeth Fenn in ‘Pax Americana’, from Duke University studied the waves of epidemics that kept coming into America. Boston was besieged in early 1774 by a second wave of smallpox.

At the time of the proclamation of Independence it was still active coming in waves (few knew about the proclamation more worried about the pandemic), going all the way down to Georgia, where it wreaked havoc among the Cherokee. There were outbreaks in Mexico City in 1779, Guatemala 1780-81, Colombia 1781-83, Ecuador 1783. All the tribes Hopi, Nermernuh, Comanche and along the Rocky Mountains, Mandan, Hidatsa, Ojibwas, Crows, Blackfoot and Shoshone, Lakota (Sioux) were hit by smallpox.

The death of the Hawaiian king and queen when they visited Great Britain and died of measles at the age of 27, was as catastrophic for the Hawaiian kingdom as the death to smallpox of the Inca (Emperor) Wayna Qhapag (1525 or 1527) while campaigning in the north of the Inca Empire, that precipitated a bloody civil war among the two sons, at the time of Pizarro’s landing in America.

By 1520 the Inca (Emperor or King) Wayna Qhapag, had ordered a palace in what is now Ecuador and stayed there instead of in Cuzco or Qosqo. In 1525, he died during a smallpox pandemic that killed his sister-wife and half of the royal family as well as his designated successor, the main generals and much of the corps, and wreaked havoc among the population. Pedro Cieza de Leon, a Spaniard who spent 15 years traveling in Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador and Colombia and later wrote a three-volume survey of the region, is the only one that mentions that Wayna Qhapaq died from “the great plague of smallpox that broke out in 1524 or 1525, so severe that more than 200,000 died of it, for it spread to all parts of the kingdom’’. Wayna Qhapag and his heir died in the first smallpox epidemic, but the virus struck Tawantinsuyu over and over again: 1533,1535,1558 and 1565.

All these deaths with no successor ensured a civil war between two brothers that lasted 3 years and included one of the bloodiest battles in history: 35,000 dead. The winner and new Inca (King) Atahualpa, with his army, was making his way back to Qosqo in Oct-Nov 1532, when they learned of the arrival of the Spaniards in Cajamarca. He never made it to Qosqo. By the way, this was not the first time that the Spaniards had tried to take the Inca Empire, but previously the Inca were strong, united and not affected by pandemics and civil unrest and were able to defeat all the attempts to take over.

The smallpox virus is thought to have evolved from a cattle virus that causes cowpox; a now extinct equine virus responsible for horsepox or, perhaps most likely, the camel pox virus. In Europe the virus was a constant presence, so the population had developed immunity. Because the Western Hemisphere had no cows, horses or camels, smallpox had no chance to develop here. It was what epidemiologists consider a total “virgin soil’.

Thucydides reported that the epidemic that struck Athens in 430 B.C. enveloped the city in “a great degree of lawlessness’’. Charles Mann argues that a thousand years later the Black Death (1347-1351) happened, causing social unrest all over Europe: the Jacquerie (France,1358), the revolt of Ciompi (Florence, 1378), the Peasant’s Revolt (England, 1381), the Catalonian Rebellion (Spain, 1395), and dozens of flare-ups in the German states. Martin Luther’s rebellion was a grandson of the plague.

This was the state of affairs the Europeans found when they started exploring America: social disintegration and depopulation.

Henry Dobyns argued in his 1963 article that the Inca and other indigenous people were not defeated by steel and horses but by disease and factionalism. Pedro Pizarro had argued that if Wayna Qhapaq “had been alive when we Spaniards entered this land, it would have been impossible for us to win it…And, likewise, had the land not been divided by the [smallpox-induced] civil wars, we would not have been able to enter or win the land’’.

Other European pestilences to which the Native-American were equally susceptible: Typhus in 1546, influenza in 1558 (together with smallpox), diphtheria in 1614, measles in 1618.

After 1781 six Creek groups in Western Canada disappeared. The Blackfoot nation blasted with smallpox sent peace emissaries to Shoshone bands only to find that all had vanished. The Omaha was so devastated that they launched a suicidal attack against their enemies. Those who did not die quit their villages and became homeless wanderers.

Chapter VI

Mesoamerica

When the pilgrims were trying to survive in America, they were helped by the Native-Americans who taught them how to cultivate what was called the “three sisters”: corn, beans, and squash as a single unit. This is what saved them from starvation and was the origin of the later Thanksgiving celebration. These three sisters, the system of multi-cropping was something invented in Mesoamerica around the creation of corn, that had extended rapidly to the whole continent and, after the rediscovery of America, extended quickly throughout the world helping other civilizations survive.

By the time of Columbus, the fields of maize had reached to the north all the way to New England. To the south maize had reached Peru and Chile, where it had a high-status even on top of their own agricultural products like potatoes. In the rest of the world, after Columbus introduced it to Europe, Central Europe became especially hooked on it; by the 19th century, maize was the daily bread in Serbia, Rumania, and Moldavia. So dependent did northern Italy and southwestern France become on polenta -a type of cornmeal mush- that pellagra, a disease produced by niacin deficiency which corn lacks, became widespread.

Even greater was the impact on Africa. By the end of the sixteenth century the impact of the introduction of corn from America had transformed agriculture in such a way that there was an explosion in population growth.

But maize (corn) was not the only contribution of Mesoamerica. What had been cultivated here in America came to enrich the options at the table in the Old World. Manioc from Mesoamerica and Amazonia became a staple in Africa. Rubber trees native to the Amazon went to Malaysia; pepper and tomatoes from Mesoamerica went up to Thailand and Italy and became part of the basic Italian cuisine and essential to Thai and Indian food. Squashes of all kinds, many types of beans and hundreds of varieties of potatoes expanded the food options in Europe. Potatoes were going to safe millions of lives in Ireland one day. One writer estimated that 3/5 of the crops now in cultivation world-wide come from Mesoamerica.

But the exchange was not unilateral. For example, the Old World exported bananas (from Africa) that became mostly grown in Central America and other products like coffee, sugar, tobacco, chocolate, wheat, rice, oranges and apples. Also, from Europe came livestock including horses, cattle, pigs, sheep, goats, and chicken.

Maize

In other parts of the world, the uncultivated ancestors of other cereals existed in the wild and resembled their domesticated descendants. People could and did eat their grains from the wild. But once it was discovered how to domesticate these cereals and people started planting non- shattering grains of cereals like wheat and barley, a qualitative change happened, the Neolithic Revolution.

But in the case of maize, unlike other cereals, no wild maize ancestor has ever been found, despite decades of search. The closest alleged relative is Teosinte that looks nothing like maize, and not everyone agrees that this can be the ancestor of corn. In Mesoamerica, scientists believe that maize was created through hybridization although what they used, if teosinte or something else, is still under debate. Some argue that it was not Teosinte but Zea diploperennis, a rare maize relative, and another cousin species, Eastern Gama grass. When species from different genus hybridize, the result can be what biologist Barbara McClintock called “genomic shock”, a whole new reordering of DNA in which “new species can arise quite suddenly’.

Because maize is so far from teosinte, the teosinte theorists argue, the modern species had to have been consciously developed by a small group of breeders. Geneticists from Rutgers University estimated in 1998 that determined, aggressive knowledgeable plant breeders – which Indians certainly were – might have been able to breed maize in as little as a decade.

But aside from the dispute about the origin of maize, both sides of the argument agree that Indians took the first steps towards creating modern maize in southern Mexico, probably in the highlands of Tehuantepec Isthmus, more than six thousand years ago. Both argue that modern maize was the outcome of a bold act of conscious biological manipulation. Nina V. Federoff a geneticist at Penn State commented in 2003 – interviewed by Charles Mann – “To get corn out of teosinte is so… you couldn’t get a grant to do that now, because it would sound so crazy!’’ She added, “Somebody who did that today would get a Nobel Prize! If their lab didn’t get shut down by Greenpeace, I mean’. [Charles C. Mann, author of 1491, New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus. ()]

The variety of Mexican maize is startling. Red, blue, orange, black, pink, purple, creamy white, multicolored. Moreover, while as a rule, domesticated species are less genetically diverse than the wild ones, maize is the exception. It is more diverse than most wild plants.

More than fifty genetically distinguishable maize “landraces’’ have been identified in Mexico, of which at least thirty are native to Oaxaca. A landrace is a family of local varieties, each of which may have scores of “cultivars’ or cultivated varieties. As many as five hundred cultivars may exist in Mesoamerica.

Milpa

The second revolution came from the creation and development of the milpa concept. The term means “maize field’’ but it refers to something more complex. It is still used today, and the concept is a field in which farmers plant a dozen crops at once, including maize, avocado, multiple varieties of squash and beans, melon, tomatoes, chilis, sweet potato, jicama, amaranth and mucuna. The concept being that in nature wild beans and squash tend to grow in the same field as teosinte, the beans use the tall teosinte as a ladder to climb toward the sun; below ground, the beans’ nitrogen-fixing roots provide nutrients needed by teosinte. The milpa is an elaboration of this natural situation.

Milpa crops are nutritionally and environmentally complementary. Maize lacks digestive niacin, the amino acid lysine and tryptophan, necessary to make proteins (maize-diet only can cause pellagra). Beans have both lysine and tryptophan, but not the amino acids cysteine and methionine, which maize provides. As a result, beans and maize make a nutritionally complete meal. Squashes for their part provide an array of vitamins, and avocados provides fats. According to H. Garrison Wilkes, a maize researcher at the University of Massachusetts: “The milpa is one of the most successful human inventions ever created’.

Wilkes was referring to the ecological worries about modern agriculture. It is less diverse now and cannot perform all of its functions. As a result, farm soil can rapidly become exhausted. Farmers try rotating crops or leaving the fields to lie fallow for a year. The farmers use artificial fertilizer which at best is expensive, and at worst may inflict long-term damage to the soil.

The Green Revolution (of the 1950s) had the downfall that the new hybrids are almost always more vulnerable to disease and insects than older varieties. In addition to being too costly for small farmers. Besides, the Green Revolution pushed many traditional cultivars towards extinction which in turn reduced the genetic diversity of crops. According to Wilkes the solution is reproducing features of the milpa in today’s settings so it would be the second time the Mesoamerican techniques would have generated an enormous cultural revolution.

The impact of maize is unimaginable. Just think that in Turkey, Iraq, Syria Mesopotamia- and other places in the Middle East the wild version of wheat was found covering dozens of square kilometers (1960 research), so for them it was less a matter of raising productivity of wheat, barley and other cereals than extending the range in which the domesticated varieties could be grown, that is, developing varieties that could flourish in climates and soils that daunt the wild plant. By contrast, America has no wild maize. It was not a new species, but a new environment that was being created. Wherever maize flourished, so did high culture.

The break-even point to have “free time”, the leisure time to get involved in other artistic activities was achieved when the milpa could produce more than 200 pounds of grain per acre. According to Kirby’s calculations, the harvest broke the magic two hundred pound line sometime between 2000 and 1500 B.C. At about that time, the first evidence of large-scale land clearing for milpas appears in the archaeological records. And with it appeared the Olmec, one of Mesoamerica’s great civilizations.

Based on the Gulf Coast side of Mexico’s isthmus, on the coastal side of the range of low mountains from Oaxaca, the Olmec clearly understood the profound changes brought about by maize and they celebrated it in their art. They placed it at the center represented by a vertical ear with two leaves falling to the side. This became so emblematic that later in the Maya hieroglyphics it became the semantic equivalent of the highest royal title, ahaw. In the Maya creation story, the famous Popul Vuh, humans were literally created from maize.

Olmec ‘‘People of the land of the rubber” (1200 B.C.- 400 B.C.)

The Olmec culture is still something we don’t know a lot about. To start with, it is the wrong name. The first anthropologist that went, in 1939, to investigate the strange gigantic heads found 70 years prior in Veracruz (Mexico), Matthew W. Stirling named them Olmec which is Nahuatl (the language of the Mexicas to the north) but they spoke Mixe-Zoquean, not Nahuatl. Besides, the Mexica called Olmec at another people to the southwest, in Puebla. But the name stuck. The Olmec used rubber and may have invented a way of processing it. Scientists discovered in the 1990s that they made rubber by chemically treating the latex –the sap contained in the tropical rubber tree. It is believed that they were the first to discover the process of vulcanization, that is, they invented it.

Their heartland was the coastal forests of Veracruz which like Norte Chico is bracketed by sea and mountains, but it catches, rather than misses, the prevailing winds and rain. It is swampy but near the coast rises into a fertile plateau. Further inland, there are the Tuxtla Mountains with many rivers cascading down the flanks. During the rainy season the rivers flood, enriching the soil, creating a Nile-like Delta.

The characteristic features of these unearthed heads which are about 6-foot-tall weighing some 40 tons made of basalt boulders brought from the Tuxtla Mountains, was that they showed black African features. The first head was found in the midst of about fifty large, artificial earthen mounds. Each head showed a naturalistic workmanship –different from other stiff sculptures in Mesoamerica– with its own personal expression: smiling, thoughtful or fiercely proud or dismayed. They were monuments of different kings and placed like stone sentinels so as to say: “the king is watching you”.

The first traces of the Olmec dated back to 1800 B.C. At that time there seemed to be little to distinguish them from other groups, but something happened in Veracruz, some spark of excitement, a cultural quickening, because within the next three centuries the Olmec had built and occupied San Lorenzo, one of the large-scale settlements in North America. It covered 2.7 square miles where the stone heads were found. Historians like Clyde Winters and Ivan Sertima claim that the Olmecs were either visited by Africans or had actually migrated from Africa. The African knowledge gained thereby explained the Olmec’s rapid rise.

The recurring images of art of San Lorenzo and other Olmec cities seemed to be focus on medical treatments. They portrayed fetuses, which were not identified as such by European observers because the artistic rendition of fetuses was almost unheard of in European cultures (the first known drawing was by Leonardo). Other frequent themes included lepers, pathologically obese, people with thyroid deficiencies.

Olmec art also featured highly naturalized imagery of babies

and event the Twins of Azuzul in Veracruz which were discovered facing off against a jaguar (see image). The apparent Egyptian stylization in the Twins’ head dresses has been an anomaly of the ages.

Other surviving naturalistic figures of Olmec origin feature masks- some of which were made for human use, and others which lack eye holes that were likely decorative, or for use in religious ritual. Several of the masks unearthed over the past 70 years have been made of exquisite jade and feature facial characteristics which may point to an Asian genetic stock.

One of the most famous Olmec ceramic art pieces is an extremely life-like wrestler created around 1500-400 B.C.

San Lorenzo fell in about 1200 B.C. victim of either revolution or invasion, but another great center prospered, La Venta. La Venta grew up on a swamp island about 40 miles away. Today La Venta is partially buried under an oil refinery but then, between 1150 and 500 B.C. it was a much bigger city than San Lorenzo with a 103-foot-tall clay mound as a center but placed on the south side of the rectangular 100-yard pavilion bordered by two knee-high berms. North of the pavilion was a sunken rectangular courtyard fenced on three sides by a row of seven-foot columns atop low red and yellow adobe walls. The fourth northern side opens onto a fourth mound. The pavilion and courtyard had painted walls and floors of colored sand and clay. Heavy sculptural objects including monumental heads studded the area.

La Venta, too, was destroyed, perhaps deliberately around 350 B.C. when they abandoned the place in a hurry.

However, in a millennium they invented their own writing, astronomy and math including the zero.

The Olmec influence was so widespread that many archaeologists believe that the Olmec were the predecessor of other cultures. However, others believe that they were not the predecessors but had an influence and set the basis for other cultures and were part of at least 4 different but interacting cultures: Tlatilco and Tlacopaya that laid the groundwork for the empires of Teotihuacan and the Toltecs; the chiefdoms of Oaxaca in the isthmus; the Olmec along the Gulf Coast and later the Maya polities in Yucatan and northern Guatemala.

Maya

The Maya, part of the Mesoamerican cultures, developed in the southeastern Mexico, all of Guatemala and Belize and the western portions of Honduras and El Salvador, the lowlands of the Yucatan Peninsula and the highlands of the Sierra Madre, in Chiapas. The first Mayan cities developed around 750 B.C. and by 600 B.C. these cities possessed monumental architecture. Hieroglyphic writing was being used in the Maya region by the 3^rd century BC.

By the year 378 AD Mutal was the biggest, most cosmopolitan center when it was taken over through war by Tenochtitlan.

From that point on, Mutal and Calakmul (Khaan, the kingdom of the snake) engaged in an ongoing war that lasted 100 years. By the year 900 A.D. both places were empty. This war took place at the same time a dry spell was happening – between 800 and 900 A.D., which is why some scientists attribute the fall of these big cities in the south of the Yucatan Peninsula to this extended dry period. However, the cities that were in the drier part prospered while Mutal and Calakmul, which were in the wetter south collapsed.

Why did Chichen Itza, Uxmal and Coba prosper? The peninsula is a gigantic limestone wharf (that’s why it has so many cenotes). The water is so salty that it is ‘geochemically hostile’. The Maya found a way to solve this problem by laying a layer of crushed limestone atop sediments paving over the salt, creating a network of artificially habitable terrestrial islands where they developed their agriculture based on maize, beans, squashes and chili pepper. While the cities in the north continued the work of keeping up these artificial islands, Mutal and Calakmul neglected theirs, engaged in war. When the dry spell happened, they couldn’t survive. Chichen Itza, Uxmal and Coba not only survived but prospered. They changed, confronted with the natural challenge, and became traders, merchants. Chichen Itza imported gold discs from Colombia and Panama and turquoise from Los Cerrillos, New Mexico. Trade routes not only facilitated the movement of people but also of ideas throughout Mesoamerica.

The Maya writing system was the most sophisticated and highly developed of more than a dozen systems that developed in Mesoamerica. The earliest inscriptions date back to 300-200 BC in the Peten Basin.  

 In Mesoamerica, time keeping, and astronomy provided stimulus for the development of writing and counting. Olmec, Maya and Zapotec believed that the phases of the moon and Venus affect daily life. They developed 3 calendars: a 365-day secular calendar, a 260-day sacred calendar like no other and the equally unique Long Count.

The 260-day sacred calendar may be linked to the orbit of Venus; the 365-day secular calendar represented the earth’s orbit around the sun, and they used both notations every time. For example: October 12, 2004, is 2 Lamat 11 Yax where 2 Lamat is the ritual calendar and 11 Yax is the secular calendar. They are both going to coincide in around 52 years. To distinguish one 52-year period from another (like saying 04 for the years 1904, 2004 and 2104) they created the Long Count calendar that tracks time from a starting point calculated on August 3, 3114 B.C. (like the birth of Christ). Long Count dates consisted of the number of days, 20 day “months’’, 360 day “years”, 7,200 day “decades’’ and 144,000 day “millennia’’.

The Maya has some pyramids oriented to the planet Venus, identified as their god Quetzalcoatl. Their calendar begins with the “birth” of Venus August 12, 3114 B.C. Temple 1 at Tikal marks a point in the sky where Venus periodically aligns with Jupiter. (Voyages of the Pyramid Builders by Robert M. Schoch)

Other magnificent Tikal temples which set the stage for later Mayan culture can be found below:

Contrary to the Christian calendar that had to be adjusted (the Julian calendar of the 16^th Century) because it runs directly from 1 B.C. to 1 A.D., the Long Count calendar began with the date 0.0.0.0. The 144,000-day “millennium’ began with 13, rather than 0; so, it was 13.0.0.0.0. Zeros are true zeros, zero as a number and a place holder.

Among the Olmec, Stirling found a stela in Tres Zapotes bearing the Long Count of 7.16.6.16.18 which translates into 32 B.C. The implication is that by 32 B.C., the Olmec already had all three calendars and the use of zero that they used to boot; centuries ahead of its invention in India, which happened during the first centuries A.D.

Contrary to what was happening in America, Europe authorities, fearing some deceptive trick from the Arabs (and therefore the Indians from India) who were introducing the zero into Europe around the12^th century, banned its use until the 14^th Century.

Chapter VII

Civilizations in what is now the U.S.A. before 1492

Barry Fell in his book, America B.C., comments that the U.S. history taught at school, begins with a crash of cymbals announcing the first successful colony. This is where the history of the northern part of this continent begins. Nothing from before this moment is of any significance. Now, to honor the truth, Barry Fell wrote his book in the 1970s and today we see some differences in the textbooks. In today’s textbooks there is a chapter or two dedicated to the ancient original inhabitants of this land. But that is about it. Our scope of the history of this continent is still limited to the last 500 or so years.

But if we go back farther, we’re going to see that thousands of years ago, what is now the U.S. was a very populated and remarkably diverse land of people and nations that had developed very different ways of living and transforming nature with interconnections and trade among the different cultures all across the continent and beyond.

It was so vast that it is difficult to cover everything, so I want to focus on several geographically defined regions: Northeast, Mississippi region, and Southwest.

Southwest

Folsom and Clovis

In 1908, a flash flood in a ranch in the northeast corner of New Mexico, near Folsom, revealed bones that didn’t belong to any extant species. It took some decades to attract the authority’s attention, and it was up until 1926 that the Colorado Museum of Natural History sent somebody to Folsom. Besides the bones, they dug up two elegantly crafted spear points. They also found that a piece from one of the spear points was pressed into the dirt surrounding a bison bone. Since this type of mammal has been extinguished for thousands of years, the spear point and its owner must have been of equivalent antiquity.

In August 1927 they found another spear point, but this time stuck between two bison ribs – no doubt they were related – and this was the decisive proof that this civilization belonged to the Pleistocene era.

Then came the discovery of Clovis, New Mexico, near the state border with Texas. In 1929, a 19-year-old boy, Ridgely Whiteman, noticed immense bones protruding from the dry clay; he sent letters notifying the Smithsonian Institute, but it was not recognized until 1933 when new construction started unearthing more huge bones. Finally, the Smithsonian came in and in the excavations that followed they discovered in Clovis, two ancient societies. One had left relics just like those at Folsom. Below the dirt strata with these objects was a layer of quite different artifacts, bigger, thicker, and not so beautifully made. This second, earlier culture became known as the Clovis culture. The announcement was made at a 1933-34 international symposium with more than 400 scientists, to which Whiteman was not invited.

In the 1950s Willard F. Libby of the University of Chicago discovered carbon dating, a new way of dating the antiquity of organic matter. With carbon dating, Clovis was identified as having existed between 13,500 and 12,900 years ago. In 1964, in the magazine “Science’’, Haynes Vance, drew attention to the correlation between the birth of  “an ice-free trans-Canadian corridor’’ and the “abrupt appearance of Clovis artifacts’’.

Clovis culture had a distinctive set of tools: scrapers, spear straighteners, hatch-like choppers, crescent-moon-shaped objects whose function remains unknown. Its hallmark was the “Clovis point”: a four-inch spearhead with a slightly cut-in, concave tail. Folsom points are smaller and finer and have a less prominent tail.

In the subsequent spree of excavations, more than 80 large Paleo-Indian sites throughout the U.S., Mexico and Southern Canada were found. All had either Folsom or Clovis points that convinced many archaeologists that the Clovis people, the earlier of the two, must have been the original Americans. Besides this, it was also “established” that the only way the continent was populated was by crossing the Bering Strait – no seafaring – which became the official way America was populated: walking across the Bering Straits and a settlement at Clovis as the first settlement ever in America.

Northeast

Wampanoag Confederation

The Northeast had several regions that were populated by different groups and nations which over time had formed alliances and trade links. One of these regions in New England was the Wampanoag Confederation which had been in this area for more than 12,000 years, according to some historians. The Wampanoag was a coalition of several dozen villages that controlled most of Southeastern Massachusetts.

When the pilgrims arrived in Massachusetts, the Wampanoag met them and not only allowed them to stay but also helped them. This was March 12, 1621, and the colony was the Plymouth colony (of Thanksgiving fame but not the first. The first was here in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607).

The translator for the pilgrims was Tisquantum, “Squanto”, who taught them to cultivate maize, totally unfamiliar to the pilgrims and by doing so ensured the survival of the Plymouth Colony. Squanto knew English because he had been taken prisoner in one of the many pirate incursions of the previous years and as a slave he was taken to England where he lived for 5 years and learned the language. He escaped and after much ordeal made it back to his village, only to find it empty, full of exposed cadavers of the last ones to die who nobody was there to bury, due to the epidemics brought by the Europeans. But his Village was not an isolated case. The whole Confederation comprised of tens of thousands of people was now less than 1,000 people, less than one of the villages that made up the Confederation before. With the few remaining of the Confederation, trying to survive, Squanto convinced the chief to make an alliance with the newcomers since now decimated by epidemics they were surrounded by enemies. Squanto became their interpreter and ended up staying to live with the newcomers.

The Wampanoag was part of a tripartite alliance with 2 other confederations: Nauset – 30 groups on Cape Cod – and the Massachusetts – several dozen villages clustered around the Massachusetts bay. All spoke variants of Massachusetts, a member of the Algonquian language, the biggest in Eastern North America at the time.

The pilgrims reported that the Wampanoags had a good diet, the families were closer and more loving than English families. At that time, the English tended to view children moving straight from infancy to adulthood at age 7 and sent them to work in factories. Indians regarded years before puberty as a time of playful development and kept them close until marriage. Boys like Tisquantum explored the countryside, swam in ponds, and played a kind of soccer with a small leather ball. The goal was to mold characters with few words. When Indian boys came of age, they spent an entire winter alone in the forest equipped only with a bow, a hatchet, and a knife.

The Native American people of New England were taller and more robust than those who wanted to move in. For the Indians, the Europeans were weak, sexually untrustworthy, atrociously ugly, and just plain smelly. The British and French, many of whom had not taken a bath in their entire lives, were amazed by the Indian interest in personal cleanliness.

According to Glottochronology – a science that estimates how long ago two languages separated from a common ancestor – all the various Algonquian languages dated back to a common ancestor that appeared a few centuries before Christ. Barry Fell in America B.C. places the Algonquian language as coming from the Celts. [America B.C. Barry Fell ( )]

Haudenosaunee (Iroquois)

Around the Hudson River Valley in what is now New York State, there was another confederation of Native-Americans, the Haudenosaunee. The alliance was made up of the Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, Mohawk, and after 1720, the Tuscarora. According to Adriaen van der Donck, a lawyer who was a bill collector for the Dutch West India Company, and later fall in love with the place and sued the Dutch West India Company for violations of the Indians’ rights to freedom, the Haudenosaunee would set fire to “the woods, plains, and meadows’’ to “thin out and clear the woods of all dead substances and grass, which grow better the ensuing spring’’. The Haudenosaunee, and almost every other Indian group shaped their environment, at least in part, by fire.

His description is what is called “Ecological Succession”, the well-defined sequence by which ecosystems fill in open land. After a fire or any other natural disaster, surviving plants spring up quickly and then other grasses, bushes, and later trees. If ecological succession were unstoppable, the continents would be covered by climax-stage vegetation: a world of great trees, dark and silent. Nature does not move in lockstep. Windstorms, lightning fires, landslides, volcanic eruptions etc. knock down trees and open the forest or prevent open country from turning into forestland. In the Northeast, Indians always carried a deerskin pouch full of flints, reported Thomas Morton in 1637. Rather than domesticate animals for meat, Indians retooled ecosystems to encourage elk, deer, and other animals to graze where they wanted them, keeping their food nearby but at a good distance. Constant burning of undergrowth increased the numbers of herbivores, the predators that fed on them and the people who ate them both. The eastern forest was a kaleidoscope of garden plots, blackberries rambles, pine barrens, and spacious groves of chestnut, hickory, and oak. The first white settlers in Ohio found woodlands of trees mixed with nuts and fruit trees planted by the natives.

Incredible to imagine today but bison roamed from New York to Georgia. A creature of the prairie, bison were imported to the East by Native Americans along a path of indigenous fire as they changed enough forest into fallows for them to survive far outside its original range. The Haudenosaunee practiced a more distant kind of husbandry than keeping domesticated animals.

Around the first millennium A.D. the Haudenosaunee started replanting large belts of woodland, transforming them into orchards for fruit trees and most of all, nut trees. In Colonial times 1 out of every 4 trees between southeastern Canada and Georgia was a chestnut. Hickory was another favorite.

Then the cultivation of maize expanded. The European foreigners, coming from a land of famine, were awed by maize, which yields more grain per acre than any other cereal. It was so extended that by the 1680s when the governor of New France, ordered the destruction of the annual harvest of four adjacent Haudenosaunee villages as a way of deterring them from future attacks, he reported that they burned 1.2 million bushels of maize – 42,000 tons – which meant the villages were surrounded by between 8 to 16 square miles of maize fields.

When Native-American societies disintegrated from disease and exploitation, forests invaded the savannas in Wisconsin, Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, and Texas. Soon, the memory of indigenous transforming fire faded.

By 1937 the memory of their transformation was so forgotten that Harvard naturalist Hugh Raup was arguing that wide-scale Indian burning was “inconceivable’’ and a forestry textbook from 1973 assured “that no habitual or systematic burning was carried out by Indians’’.

The Haudenosaunee confederation tradition speaks of a figure external to the five nations who was born to a virgin from a village to the north who appeared in a canoe to preach among the 5 nations (they also, as other Native-American groups, had a story about a flood that surprised the newcomers). Deganawidah was his name, and he was the peacemaker among all of them. Before him, the Adirondack and Allegheny Forest were a place of constant violence and apparently intermittent cannibalism. Deganawidah who had a speech impediment – severe stutter – teamed up with Ayenwatha (Hiawatha) to preach among the five nations and convinced them that together they were stronger. The convincing argument with the Tododaho was to show them the strength of five arrows together vs one arrow when trying to break them. The chief was able to break one arrow easily but couldn’t break the 5 arrows put together.

The Tododaho council dates from 1142 A.D. – the second oldest in the world – and is still today the council of the 50 sachem who represented the 5 nations. After Deganawidah, from this body emerged the Great Law of Peace. Its 117 codicils were concerned with rulings to keep good relations among nations, as well as defining that the internal affairs were the province of the individual nations and were only decided and voted for by a council of women. Charles Mann argues that this world would have been a feminist dream. Women oversaw all the decisions concerning internal affairs for their nation and regarding external affairs – such as conflicts with another nation- the men had to consult with the women before making any decision.

The law was that everything had to be submitted to the decision of all of their individual people. According to the colonial leader Roger Williams “The League was predicated on the consent of the governed”. Their society was based on social equality.

During the first 200 years of colonization borders were porous, almost non-existent. John Adams comments that the kings of the Punkapaug and the Nepansit in Massachusetts were frequent visitors at his father’s house. Benjamin Franklin commented that they had a big problem with children. If a white boy was adopted by a Native-American family and then brought back, they didn’t want to stay and would often run away back to their Native-American family because of the rigid family environment among the puritans. On the other hand, if a Native-American had been adopted by a white family and went back to their original tribe, they didn’t want to come back again to their white families.

Influenced by their proximity to Indians, European colonists adopted their equalitarian and free attitudes, which “troubled the power elite of France. King Louis XIV gave instructions to the French official to force a French education upon the Indians, complete with lessons in “deferring to their social betters” that were “everywhere unsuccessful’’.

Colonial societies could not become too oppressive, because their members always had the option of moving out to where they were better understood. It is clear, argues Charles Mann, that they were infused by the democratic, informal brashness of the culture of the Native American who couldn’t understand the submission of the many to a few, as was the case in Europe.

There is a reason why the Boston colonists in 1773 who held their anti-British Tea Party decided to dress up as “Mohawks’’. [1491. New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus. Charles C. Mann ()]

Chapter VIII

Origins of these Civilizations

By the end of the 1800s and beginning of 1900s, archaeology was constrained by an ideological explanation of how this continent was populated that took precedence over science. Ales Hrdlicka, the Smithsonian Institute’s most prominent physical anthropologist of his time exercised a hermetic control for over 40 years over any findings and research, not allowing any discussion of early primitive existence in this continent except the authorized version. He so thoroughly discredited all purported findings of ancient Indians that a later director of the Bureau of American Ethnology admitted that for decades it was a career-killer for an archaeologist to claim to have “discovered indications of a respectable antiquity for the Indian”.

When Folsom and Clovis were discovered at the beginning of the 20^th century and there was no doubt of their belonging to the Pleistocene era, when bison were still around, Hrdlicka – according to reports – gave its ultimate accolade: silence. At an international symposium in 1933-34 to announce the discoveries, Hrdlicka chose to talk about how in the last 2 decades archaeological diggings had not been able to find any human remains, which made all discoveries so far “unsubstantiated”. He never mentioned Folsom or Clovis by name.

But after the acceptance of the antiquity of Folsom and Clovis, another phenomenon occurred by which it was “established” and “known” that the oldest culture in the Americas was Clovis and for decades this was not even under discussion. This was the Clovis consensus.

In 1964, the year Haynes announced in a model how Clovis was the first human settlement in America, fellow Archaeologist Alex D. Krieger listed fifty sites that were said to be older than Clovis. By 1988, Haynes and other authorities had shot Krieger and all the others down with such merciless dispatch that the complaints were about “the Clovis police”. But while Archaeology was going through a dark age, other fields started to develop or consolidate. New discoveries started coming from different fields that overlap archaeology but were mainly outsiders: linguistics, molecular biology, and geology. Also, genetics and physical anthropology.

Investigating the origins of these civilizations in America, Barry Fell in his book America B.C. took an innovative approach: he initiated the comparative study of languages and/or hieroglyphics, scripts, petroglyphs etc. to trace down the origin of populations. Fell was originally a marine biologist who because of his study of ancient voyages of people who left scripts and hieroglyphics on remote islands, was led to refine the art of epigraphy in the 1970s and along with other scientists interested in this field, began the Epigraphic Society in the U.S. So, this field is recent, but they were able to put all the information from all over the world together for the first time. Fell had been working before on ancient tablets and cave inscriptions in the Old World, on records of Sea People of the Bronze Age and early Iron Age some 3,000- 4,000 years ago and this helped him connect research both in the Old World and in America, when his investigations spread to America with Epigraphic Society.

One of his discoveries is that all the Algonquian language people in America came from a common root, the Celts. His work and that of the Epigraphic Society show that 3,000 years ago bands of roving Celtic mariners crossed the North Atlantic to discover, and then colonize, North America. They came from Spain and Portugal, by way of the Canary Islands, taking advantage of the trade winds as Columbus did later. But for the Celts the tropical West Indies were no place for a northerner, so they traveled north to New England, where they established a kingdom called Iargalon. They were still there during the time of Julius Cesar, as an inscribed monolith attest since they were using Roman numerals appropriate to the reformed Julian calendar introduced in 46 B.C.

The Celts seem to have settled near the mouths of rivers in New England, at North Salem in New Hampshire, on a branch of the Merrimac River and then the Connecticut River. They sailed as far north as Quechee, Vermont, where a word of Celtic origin, quithe, meaning chasm or pit, is still used in the name that describes the river that flows through the gorge, the Ottauquechee River, which is a tributary of the Connecticut River. In all these places Bell and his team found tools, dolmen, cellars and especially rock with inscriptions.

Barry Fell adds that “in the wake of the Celtic pioneers came the Phoenician traders from Cadiz in Spain who spoke the Punic tongue but wrote in a peculiar style of lettering known as Iberian script. Although these seemed to only settle on the coast and not permanently, other Phoenicians remained here and together with Egyptian miners became part of the Wabanaki tribe of New England. Further south, Basque sailors came to Pennsylvania leaving only grave markers bearing their names. Further south Libyan and Egyptian mariners entered the Mississippi from the Gulf of Mexico penetrating Iowa and Dakotas, and westward along Arkansas and Cimarron Rivers leaving behind inscribed records. Norse and Basque visitors reached the Gulf of St. Lawrence, introducing various mariners’ terms into the northern Algonquian Indians language. ” 

Barry Fell and his team identified two other things. First, in America there are more possibilities of studying the most antique of these cultures because, unlike Europe where the Christian policy was to destroy all pagan relics, in America Christianity never reached the Celts and therefore in America is still possible to find the oldest examples of their monuments, scripts and relics.

The second thing is that since this European people settled and mixed in the eastern part of the continent, the resulting Eastern Native-Americans are very different from the ones more to the west. In the west and center of the continent, the features show more similitude to the Mongols that is more in accordance with migrations crossing the Bering Strait and travels across the Pacific Ocean. [America B.C. Barry Fell ( )]

Chapter IX

Mississippian cultures

• Adena. –800 B.C.-100 B.C.
• Hopewell. – 100 B.C. -400 A.D.
• Cahokia. – 950 A.D.- 1250 A.D.

The earliest known examples of mound builders appeared in northeastern Louisiana about 5,400 years ago, the Ouachita mounds. After this there is a gap of more than a millennium until 1500 B.C. (3,400 years old) when an archipelago of villages, the largest being Poverty Point, grew in the northeast of Louisiana, 50 miles from Ouachita.

Poverty Point was a major trading hub and ceremonial center with sophisticated engineering and artifacts from across the continent. Among its monumental earthworks is an amphitheater with six-concentric, C-shaped ridges, each 5 feet tall, on a bluff facing the river with a width of 3,950 feet. It was designed as an observatory and included being able to observe the Solstices and Equinoxes from different points of view of this amphitheater, where they build mounds at each of the points from where the Solstices and Equinoxes were observed.

Adena

Then another gap of 700 years. Then came Adena, the civilization developed in Ohio Valley. Adena lasted from about 800 B.C. to about 100 B.C. They spoke Algonquian language. Adena’s mounds served as tombs where archaeologists found copper beads and bracelets, pipes in the shape of surreal animals.

After 1949, due to the development of radiocarbon dating, it was possible to trace the emergence of Adena which showed no signs of development but seemed to have appeared full-blown around 1000 B.C., mainly in Ohio, but extended to Minnesota and the upper Midwest and all the way east to the Atlantic. They seemed to have expanded in all directions: New York, Maryland, Michigan, Alabama, and Georgia, besides Wisconsin, Kentucky, West Virginia, Pennsylvania and of course, Ohio.

According to Henry Rowe Schoolcraft in his book Historical and Statistical Information Respecting the Indian Tribes of the United States (1851), the oldest tribe were the Allegheny who lived in what was called much later “Ohio’’ (name of Iroquois origin). The Allegheny were tall and stout. Adena burial sites yield skeletal remains of both men and women of extraordinary stature, often well above 6 feet, occasionally approaching 7 feet. The sudden appearance of the Adena (name given in the 1800s after a farm where remains were found) represented a major break from the primitive Archaic Period due to their pottery making which, from their burial sites, can be seen were not crude. Some are more than a foot across and 18 inches deep. Other burial artifacts include smoking pipes decorated with mostly animal effigies; copper bracelets and necklaces; beads of semi-precious stone and finely crafted chert axes and crescents.

But it was their monuments that were impressive. In 1991 an expedition that included Frank Joseph, author of Advanced Civilizations of Prehistoric America, was able to finally localize with sonar technology the pyramid lying at the bottom of Rock Lake, Wisconsin, whose existence had become a myth told by the Indian elders of the region because it had been under water for so many centuries that nobody living had seen it.

We later learned, said Frank Joseph, that a valley had been carved by a retreating glacier near the close of the last Ice Age, 10,000 years ago, when a lake was created, and the pyramids ended up at the bottom of it. But the pyramid-like mounds at Rock Lake are only a sample of many hundreds or maybe thousands of identical stone mounds. They were built with stones carefully selected by size that were heaped and symmetrically organized into a tent-shaped structure resembling an elongated pyramid with an orientation either north-south or east-west. Another characteristic is that each funerary mound was built in close proximity to the water. [Advanced Civilizations of Prehistoric America. Frank Joseph]

They were also known for their gigantic geoglyphs, giant animal designs.

At Lake Pepin, there is a bird effigy resembling an eagle flying towards the lake. Lake Pepin, part of the Mississippi River, was created at the end of the last Ice Age by a delta of the Chippewa River spreading across the gorge of the Mississippi. Now a sanctuary for bald eagles. Local Dakota Sioux Indians only knew that the geoglyphs had been created by an “alien people” some time, very long ago.

Originally, they were comprised of tens of thousands of white crystals, each one the size of a baseball, brought there from all over the Midwest. Over time the crystals from the geoglyph were looted and have since been replaced with ordinary rocks. Other similar geoglyphs were found in Georgia also made up of white quartz rocks. But no matter where the geoglyphs were built, they all have the same measurement from the head to the tail: 102 feet long and the highest point of the mound (the tumulus) is 7-8 feet.

More monumental constructions included what at the beginning were identified as forts, but now they are believed to be celestial observatories. The local Indians claimed they were built by a nonnative people exterminated in a series of wars long ago. At least 15 similar prehistoric ramparts, all located atop high bluffs overlooking rivers, exist in Illinois, Ohio, Indiana and Tennessee. The most famous of them all is Fort Ancient along the eastern shore of Little Miami River, Ohio. What is left now of that is 3 and a half miles of walls which define a gigantic precinct capable of enclosing 12,000 people at a time; it is made of two main areas joined by a middle section connecting both with a limestone walkway. In the Northeast corner of the complex, four circular stone-covered mounds are arranged in a square. The southwest mound of the four is interpreted to have functioned as a viewpoint that aligned with gateway openings in the embankments walls to mark significant solar and lunar events.

Across the Little Miami River are limestones arranged in a 35-foot-long configuration of a snake. At its head it now has a replica of the original wood pole that cast a shadow along the length of the effigy on the morning of every summer solstice. An identical serpent oriented to the winter solstice sunrise lies a short distance from the riverbank. This has been carbon dated to 580 B.C.

Geoffrey Sea describes an Adena observatory in Morrow, Warren County, Ohio that was excavated by Frank Cowan, called Stubbs Woodhenge. It has 172 post holes, spaced close together arranged along a circle. The southern half has more regular spacing, which makes sense because to the north the zodiacal constellations are below the horizon in the north for much of the year. The two places of greatest irregularity in the post position are the northwest and northeast. This makes sense in this stellar observatory because in those 2 directions, stars appear to move almost vertically in relation to the posts. This makes it virtually certain that this circle was used to measure changes in stellar position over long periods of time.

The Mississippi and Ohio Valleys and much of the Southeast were the center of the Adena’s agricultural revolution with crops now unfamiliar such as marsh elder, knotweed, may grass and little barley; but Adena was also big in the production of tobacco, which was way stronger than now, and it was used for religious purposes. Archaeologists argue that even though there were indications of domestication of some species of herbs and vegetables in spots from Illinois to Alabama by 1000 B.C., agriculture did not begin to flourish until Adena.

The Adena distinguished themselves from the so-called Woodland aborigines, diverse tribes or groups that had been here longer and were more backward, among other things because of their practice of elongating their skulls, particularly in the case of the ruling or spiritual leaders.

Who were the Adena people?  According to Frank Joseph in his book Advanced Civilizations of Prehistoric America, they were descendants from the Celts, who were a composite of many tribes in Asia that were never unified. Joseph goes back to detail the way the Celts migrated to America. Around the year 1200 B.C., Joseph said, “they have been driven in masse from their primeval homelands in the Steppes of Central Russia by catastrophic climate deterioration that was as severe as it seemed interminable. They were victims of a natural disaster that afflicted most of the earth’s Northern Hemisphere, venting itself in conflagrations that incinerated the cities of Mycenaean Greece and Asia Minor, virtually depopulating much of the British Isles and reducing Germany’s Black Forest to a wasteland of ash and cinders. In faraway China, the Shang Dynasty collapsed, while volcanoes of North America’s Cascade Range erupted simultaneously and asteroids the size of castles plunged into the Atlantic Ocean”. [Advanced Civilizations of Prehistoric America. Frank Joseph.]

During an international meeting of scientists in Cambridge, England, in 1997, to answer the question of what brought the Bronze Age to a sudden and violent end, they came to the consensus that a massive comet made a close pass to our planet around the turn of the 12 century B.C. that rained down a barrage of meteoric material that shattered the high cultures of Europe and the Near East as well as more remote cultures like the Celts who, affected by famine and drought, fled to the less affected bogs and swamps of Poland and from there went on to Germany where all these tribes were identified for the first time as Celts around 1000 B.C.

From there they were expelled by the native populations, and another mass migration took place. Frank Joseph argues that due to their skills as sailors and long-distance traders they were able to migrate and establish themselves in America. He uses the description that Julius Caesar gives in his De Bello Gallica of the skills of the Celts’ float that defeated him in a naval battle in the year 55 B.C. Joseph quotes Barry Fell’s discoveries about the Celts in America, to back up his argument.

But there were other similarities between the Adena and the Celts, like physiognomy- long narrow faces, tall and strong. The mound of the Celts in Europe and the mounds in North America and even more, the internal organization of the sepulchers, were similar.

One of the main arguments was that Adena knew the art of melting iron which was not known in America.  When the Ohio pioneers were clearing farmland and obliterating most of the mounds, they found what looked like furnaces, according to William Conner, a former reporter for Ohio’s Columbus Dispatch who has been researching them since 1963. A lot of scientists argued that the furnaces could have been from a later date, so to confirm their dating he appealed to scientists in Europe who have dealt more with antique iron furnaces there. A British historian of metallurgy confirmed that “almost certainly those are the remains of a pit furnace” used to melt iron.

Arlington Mallery a professional engineer who investigated ancient furnaces, declared in 1949 that while researching Spruce Hill “I came upon piles of ancient iron slag”. He and his associates found 20 smelters.

Their capacity to use and melt iron made them some enemies among the less developed tribes who considered this “magic”.

Hopewell

Some authors mention Hopewell as a successor of Adena while others considered Hopewell as a later stage of the same culture. Hopewell, like Adena, was also an Algonquian-speaking group.

Hopewell jumped into prominence around 2,000 years ago – around the birth of Christ – from its base in the Midwest with trade networks that covered most of North America and lasted until 400 A.D. Like Adena, they were great travelers and traders. Into the Midwest came seashells from the Gulf of Mexico, silver from Ontario, fossil shark’s teeth from Chesapeake Bay and obsidian from Yellowstone. In return Hopewell exported ideas: bow and arrow, fire pottery and above all Hopewell introduced monumental earthworks. Different from the Adena culture, they were stratified with a powerful priestly ruler. Their method of conquest was through religion which spread through most of eastern United States in the first 4 centuries A.D.

Hopewell was more focused on effigy animals for their mounds, 90 per cent of which are in Wisconsin. They are noticeable for being monumental. An eagle in Mendota, Dane County, Wisconsin, has a wingspan of about 600 feet, an exact replica in Eagle Township is more than twice as great, 1,400 feet. Near Mendota, at Frank Schadewald’s farm, there is another that is about 5-7 times larger, 7,000 and 9,800 feet across. These bio glyphs (otherwise also identified as geoglyphs) the world’s largest and perfectly proportionate to their gigantism, prove Hopewell mastery of applied geometry on a supremely colossal scale.

In 1881, Theodore Hayes Lewis started accurately copying these tens of thousands of ancient effigy mounds and did it for 14 years. His work is the only existing record of those effigies, most of them already destroyed. In Dodge County, Lewis surveyed the 176-foot-long effigy of a seal whose habitat is restricted to the Arctic Circle. At the north shore of Lake Wingard in Madison, he found the bio glyph of a Bolivian llama 127 feet long and 3 feet high. Also, he surveyed 6 effigy mounds in Wisconsin and Iowa, all representations of elephants, so detailed that it was perceptible that they were of the Asia variety.

How could a people, supposedly confined to the Upper Midwest have been familiar enough with these animals? It suggests that Hopewell connections to the world were more far-reaching than mainstream archaeologists care to admit. Frank Joseph says that the Asiatic elephant was imported from Asia to Japan by the Japanese, who called it Shoden. They featured it as bio glyphs because it was a religious representation of the god Shoden to them.

One of the intriguing discussions is about their geoglyphs of bears used for burials and their representation of the afterlife (bears represent rebirth after hibernation) as well as birds. Some scientists argued that they could also be representation of certain stars and constellations. According to archaeologist Stanley Shepherd “when the first white men came… they found that the Algonquian tribes already identified the same stars with the same name, the Great Bear, as they themselves did. In time, they found that this was true from Nova Scotia westward to Point Barrow and down the Pacific Coast and even among the Pueblo people”.

Among the terra glyphs there are two which are anthropomorphic that have survived. One in Sauk County, near Baraboo, Wisconsin, is the representation of Wakt’cexi – according to the Sauk Native-Americans who still revered the image up to the 1830s – a giant who saved their ancestors by leading them to safety on the eastern shores of Turtle Island – the Sauk name for North America – after a Great Deluge drowned their original lodging place in the Sunrise Sea (Atlantic Ocean).

The Hopewell culture disappeared around 400 A.D. due to civil unrest or war; although others argued that it was due to natural disasters that they couldn’t deal with due to the decline of their civilization. Hopewell disappeared but its trade network remained intact. Along these corridors archaeologists are still finding today remains of shell beads from Florida, obsidian from the Rocky Mountains and mica from Tennessee. Borrowing ideas from the Midwest, the nomadic peoples of New England transformed their societies. By the end of the first millennium A.D. agriculture was spreading rapidly with maize, beans and squash along the Connecticut, Charles and other river valleys.

Who were the Hopewell? To answer this, it is necessary to think differently about these people and the people that lived in the Old Continent. As Thor Heyerdahl said, in ancient history the seas were not sealed off from crossing them but in fact were the superhighways humans navigated from place to place, and he proved it with his recreations from the 1940s to the 1970s of the travels by ancient Eastern Islanders, Egyptians, Mesopotamians and Peruvians. People capable of constructing massive pyramids and mastering astronomy could certainly build a transoceanic vessel and effectively guide its course using celestial navigation.

According to Frank Joseph, Hopewell and Adena didn’t seem to come from the same ancestors. The Adena was tall of stature, big bones, broad shoulders, and fair complexion. Bilateral eminences formed at the strong jaw hinge of their oversized heavy skull. The Hopewell had smaller skulls, finer featured, their jaws missing any bilateral protrusions, lighter body type of much shorter stature, below 5 feet. Yet both and the Allewegi (Algonquian) were genetically separated from the Plains Indians who surrounded and outnumbered them. The Plains Indians lineage stretched back thirteen thousand years to their ancestral homeland in Siberia. It seems that the Hopewell have been traced back to Japanese descendants who arrived via the Pacific Ocean.

Why would they travel all the way to Middle America? The answer is: trade, specifically Jade that they didn’t have and the deposits in China were off-limits. Mexico, especially Yucatan was uncommonly rich in jade mines. These travelers left traces of their art all over the Pacific coast, especially their typical mound building and related funeral rituals. First, for their funeral they laid out flagstone and gravel, then covered them with clay, capped with earth. Prehistoric Japanese mounds included clay-fired figurines as funeral gifts, but the statuettes were broken immediately prior to internment, a practice followed identically throughout North America during pre-Columbian times. The Japanese mound builders’ clay figurines, called dogu, had holes on the dolls’ heads and lower jaws, where feathers were placed. Outside Japan, the only ones to fashion dogus were the Native Americans in the northwest, especially California and Oregon.

According to glottochronology modern Japanese language is fundamentally the same as 5,000 years ago, and the Klamath’s Penutian dialect (from northern California and Oregon), though incomprehensible to other Native Americans, is partially translatable into the Japanese language. Even today, Japanese tourists are able to converse with Klamath Indians in their own language. Asian language scholar Don Smithsana believes most of the coastal plains’ inhabitants used an ancient language called Archaic Japanese. International language scholar Nobuhito Yoshida discovered numerous Japanese words in the daily speech of the Zuni, western New Mexico. Nancy Yaw Davis, a Ph D anthropologist observed: “Some Zuni resemble the Japanese, especially those from the Kyoto region or relocated Tibetans. Old pictures of Zuni depict Tibetan-like houses in recessed clusters of apartments, many stories high, with wooden ladders connecting the rooftops”.

Japanese influence on our continent appears to have extended far beyond the native tribes of the northern Pacific coasts, down into southern Mexico and even to Ecuador. The Maya of the Lowland Yucatan traced their ancestry to somebody who arrived by sea and taught them arts and sciences, good government and a religion that involved flowers sacrifice instead of human sacrifice. He was accompanied by his consort, his sister, and the couple laid the foundation for Mesoamerica civilization. Their names were Itzamna and Ixchel. In Japan, Izanami and Izanagi were brother and sister deities who arrived over the sea to create the Japanese islands. They bestowed the secrets of rice farming and animal husbandry.

According to what Jon Erlandson, an archaeologist from the University of Oregon, told the Japan Times in 2007 “the oldest form of DNA ever recovered from the New World – around 10,300 years old – is a type commonly found in Japan and Tibet. And similar DNA has been found in American Indians all the way down the west coast of North and South America”. Erlandson believes the Japanese arrived in the New World almost six thousand years earlier.

Dr. Theodore Schorr of the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research in San Antonio, Texas, confirmed that the mitochondria traced four major lineages in Native Americans going back more than thirteen centuries to Siberia and northeast Asia, notable to Baikal and Altai-Sayan. But a fifth lineage among Native Americans originates in Europe. The identifying DNA known as haplogroup X, is found among Algonquian-speaking groups, such the Ojibwa.

DNA studies also demonstrated that the Blackfoot and Iroquois and other tribes from Minnesota, Michigan, Ontario, and Massachusetts are partially descended from neolithic Japanese. These North American tribes found their lineage in the Jomon Period, that invented pottery manufacturing after 1000 B.C. and were renowned seafarers. In Japan mound builders began during the middle phase of the Jomon Period (3000 BC -1000 BC), then the Yayoi Period (@ 400 BC), then Kofun Period (AD 250-600). The end of the Jomon Period coincided with Adena Period.

Striving to prove that such prehistoric voyages were possible, six Japanese investigators sailed from Shimoda, Japan in 1980, manning a 43-foot replica of the catamarans depicted in Jomon rock art. In their Yasei-go they followed the Pacific currents to arrive in San Francisco after only 51 days at sea. From there they proceeded south through a storm to land in Guayaquil, Ecuador, then on to Valparaiso, Chile. As Dr. Thor Heyerdahl pointed out, to ancient humans, the seas of our planet were not impassable barriers but, on the contrary, beckoning highways.

According to the records of mound building characterized by being oriented according to the solstices or equinoxes, it seems that the Japanese traveled crossing the continent from west to east, all the way to the Mississippi River and eventually moving across Wisconsin to archaeological sites such a Butte de Mort and Rock Lake, into Michigan’s Heritage Park and southern Indiana, through the Ohio Valley and to the Eastern Seaboard, where the last stone mounds were erected in Maryland and New York as late as 100 B.C.

With the disappearance of Adena and Hopewell, the lamp of civilization went out in North America. Over the next 200 years nature took over the monuments and ceremonial centers that only lived in the memories of the other Native-Americans left here.

Only after the turn of the tenth century did the dark ages fade with the arrival of a very different kind of civilizer. The newcomers showed up in large numbers, settling throughout the Mississippi valley.

Cahokia (also called Mississippians)

Several civilizations of Mount builders developed along the lower half and the Southeast of the Mississippi River at the end of the first millennium A.D., due to their capacity to travel, their trade routes extended from the Upper Great Lakes region to the Gulf of Mexico.

Their center, Cahokia, was a busy port founded around the year 800 A.D. (950 A.D.-1250 A.D.) Cahokia was the biggest city – 15,000– and the first one of this size north of the Rio Grande (Rio Bravo). Nobody knows what they call themselves.

All that is known is that the initial group belonged to a diverse, four-thousand-year-old tradition characterized by the construction of earthen mounds. These societies built tens of thousands of mounds from southern Canada and the Great Plains to the Atlantic coast and the Gulf of Mexico. Most of the earthworks were shaped like big cones and stepped pyramids, but some were sculpted into enormous birds, lizards, bears, long-tailed “alligators”, and in Peebles, Ohio, a 1,330-foot-long serpent.

Cahokia was located near the confluence of the Mississippi with the Missouri rivers. By the year 1100 A.D. it would be easy to see, while traveling along the Mississippi River, a four-level mound, Monk Mound, bigger than the Great Pyramid of Giza, surrounded by as many as 120 small mounds, some tall palisades which were in turn ringed by a network of irrigation and transportation canals, carefully located fields of maize and hundreds of red-and-white plastered wood homes with high peaked, deeply thatched roofs.

Monk Mound was the first and most grandiose of its kind, but the real marvel was how they built it and how they kept it, because they were using clay to build in a zone prone to flooding. The clay, because of its capillary action, will draw up water from the flood plains and swell and when it dries out it will contract again, bringing down any construction. Their solution was to keep the slabs at constant moisture level and they did it by stopping evaporation. To stop evaporation, they encapsulated the slab wrapping it thinly, alternating layers of sand and clay. Sand acts as a shield due to its lack of capillary action. Water rises through the clay to meet it but cannot proceed further because the sand is too loose for further capillary action. Nor can the water evaporate; the clay layer atop the sand presses down and prevents air from coming in. In addition, the sand lets rainfall drain away from the mound. The result covered almost fifteen acres of construction and was the largest earthen structure in the north of the Western Hemisphere. Though built out of unsuitable materials in a floodplain, it has stood for a thousand years. Soil studies where Cahokia was built reveal that the previous landscape was originally undulating but they leveled it before construction -all 4,000 acres!

In terms of agriculture, they cultivated big fields of corn. Maize had been available since the first century B.C. but only started to be used after the Native-American developed landraces that could tolerate a colder climate. Hopewell almost ignored it, but Cahokia developed it around 800 A.D. With plenty of easily cleared and maize-suitable land it was one of the best places to grow maize. Today, the archaeological zone includes 68 mounds, although there are another 41 more mounds outside the park, so it says a lot about the amount of organized work they did.

Cahokia was the center but there were other outposts like Angel Mound in Indiana that shares a common solar alignment with Monks Mound in Cahokia. Both doorways are oriented to sunrise in the summer solstice.

The mounds in Indiana were interspersed with 200 houses, some for winter, some for summer. Their walls were decorated with geometric themes colored red, yellow, and blue. Nearby there were numerous gardens of corn, beans, pumpkin, gourds, and sunflowers. Pecans were gathered in a grove alongside a step pyramid 44 feet high and 4 acres in area. They also had a plaza sunk like a great bowl into the ground, that we have seen in other cultures. Within this broad depression ceremonial, athletic and market activities took place.

Another important location was Aztalan in southern Wisconsin which was surrounded by three enormous walls interspersed with rectangular towers manned by 24 warriors. The front landscape was alive with immense effigy mounds in the shape of lizards, bears, birds and other animals.

Within the enclosure there were three earthen flat-topped pyramids. The pyramid of the sun in its old times had a pole aligned with another across the Crawfish River, at the summit of Christmas Hill, to mark each sunrise of the winter solstice.

Other earthworks at the banks of Crawfish River were oriented to various lunar phases and in consequence dedicated to the moon. They were very careful in selecting their location. In this case it was determined by Upper Michigan’s copper mines, some 250 miles away. Aztalan lies just below the hard-snow line and therefore is as close as possible to the mines during winter. Aztalan was also an observatory. Astronomical information poured constantly into the city, day and night, by way of its numerous stellar, solar, and lunar alignments, providing farmers with the timetables they needed for planting and harvesting. Since the founding of Aztalan around 1100 AD its people prospered and expanded to places like Wisconsin (Gottschall rock shelter), Oklahoma (Spiro Mounds) and Illinois. But in its zenith, Aztalan burst into flames in 1320 AD in what is considered by the scientists an act of self-destruction. For some unknown reason, the Aztalanaean decided to destroy everything. Once burned to the ground they all abandoned the place.

Who were the Mississippians? Where did they come from and where did they go? According to Frank Joseph, around the year 900 A.D. the Mayans, faced already with starvation and wars, had a revelation. Their priests announced that they had come to the end of their last Long Count and needed to migrate, according to their supreme being, the god of time, Hunab Ku. Part of the Maya went to the north of Yucatan, to Chitchen Itza and Uxmal, but the majority pushed beyond Yucatan and into the Gulf of Mexico, voyaging far up the Mississippi River into what is today western Illinois where they reproduced their step pyramids (Monk Mounds) but using different building materials. Cahokia has no limestone for quarrying.

Aztalan was founded in 1100 AD at the time the Mayan abandoned their southern cities. But after several hundred years of growing and prospering in this place another ritual calendar ordered them to migrate again. Aztalan was not the only city that was abandoned around the year 1320, although not all of them were torched by its own inhabitants. Ho Chunk Indian oral tradition relates that the Aztalaners migrated into the south; at the same time that Aztec civilization sprouted in the Valley of Mexico.

In the case of their center, Cahokia, maize also played a role in its disintegration. To obtain fuel and construction materials and grow food, they cleared trees and vegetation indiscriminately from higher elevations which over time created an erosion problem. Besides, they changed the course of a tributary to the Mississippi to get it closer to the city. Sometime at 1200 A.D. Cahokia’s maize fields started to repeatedly flood, destroying the harvests.

But this recurring catastrophe didn’t come alone. At the beginning of the 13^th century a catastrophic earthquake razed Cahokia, knocking down the entire western end of Monks Mound, and probable a mini tsunami from the rivers nearby was created by the earthquake that flooded the land. Archaeologists compare the magnitude of this earthquake to the one in 1811-1812 in the same area caused by the same fault that abruptly lifted or lowered much of central Mississippi Valley by as much as twelve feet. The earthquake of 1811-1812 was so strong that for a while the Mississippi River changed direction and flowed up stream.

Already troubled by the floods, Cahokia never recovered from the earthquake and mini tsunami. Cahokia was abandoned around the same time Aztalan was burned and abandoned.

Chapter X

Southwest: Anasazi and Hohokam   

Sometime between 562 A.D.-594 A.D. a meteorological phenomenon well known today, El Niño, unleashed a deluge on the Moche empire in northern Peru that washed massive loads of sediment into the sea. The sea deposited it as sand along the beach that with strong winds created massive dunes that buried fields and cities. The Moche as an empire disappeared and the surviving population ended up blending in with others and disappearing as distinct people. Huasca del Sol, their capital was abandoned.

The vacuum was filled up by the Huari or Wari who, although not well known where they came from, are said to be the founding fathers of the Andean civilization, the builders of its most important cities, Pachacamba, South America’s leading oracle center, Cuzco, before the Inca made it their capital, and Bolivia’s renowned Tiahuanaco, near Lake Titicaca. Their name derives from Huirococha, -which is less known than the much later Inca Viracocha, which was revered throughout the Andes as the Creator of Life. The Huari named themselves Huiracochas, or “Sea Foam People’ in reference to their transoceanic arrival. They were whiter, taller and had beards and they used to talk of a distant homeland, Pacaritambo, a huagaiusa, or “holy city’ lost in the Pacific Ocean.

The Huari were not the only white minority in ancient South America. According to the conquistador chronicler Pedro Cieza de Leon, the Chachapoya “are the whitest and most handsome of all the people I have seen in the Indies”. The Huari and Chachapoya were joined by a third white-skinned ethnic group. Shortly after the Huari began picking up the pieces of the shattered Moche state, part of their territory was occupied by a migration of fair-haired Llacuaz. The Llacuaz copied Huari feats of monumental irrigation and began to build their own canal networks as important contributions to the new empire as well as an ever-going road-building program to facilitate trade, messengers, and pilgrimages.

The Huari became an empire and as such had a lot of disgruntled subjects and neighbors, among the latter were the Chimor with their capital Chan Chan in the north – remnants of the Moche Empire – who took control of the Spondylus Princeps shell trade coming to Huari from Ecuador-; and the Chachapoyas, whom the Huari could not defeat when they tried to go around Chimor, trying to cross through the Amazonia Andes to get to Ecuador. Spondylus Princeps was used as a mean of trade.

Around the year 1000 A.D. the struggling and surrounded Huari and Llocuaz decided to migrate north using the known commercial routes they have used for trade for 800 years following the Pacific coast all the way to the Gulf of California, up to the end, and the mouth of the Colorado River that in those days ran all the way to the Gulf of California (or Mar de Cortès) and created a rich delta. In the year 1000 A.D. that area was very different from today. Much cooler weather and verdant environment. The Colorado delta has the largest concentration of Spondylus Princeps oysters in the hemisphere, and it had been part of their trade since ancient times.

The newcomers found paradisiacal conditions, but it was already occupied by Trincheras culture, ancestors of the Copacha Indians, with whom they had friendly trading relations. So, they went up the Colorado River to the Gila River and where the Upper and Lower Gila Rivers part company so did the Huari and Llacuaz. The latter followed the low road another 65 miles to a broad marshland. Meanwhile, their compatriots rode the Upper Gila eastward until it connected to river systems that no longer exist. The final 65 miles had to be traveled on foot to get to where they wanted to go: Chaco Canyon. Thus, ancient Peru’s Llacuaz and Huari became the Hohokam and Anasazi.

When the Hohokam as a distinctive people disappeared, the survivors became the O’ odham. The O’odham are the ancestors of, among others, the Pima, part of my ancestors.

Anasazi

The Anasazi-Huari with its center in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, made the desert bloom at the turn of the eleventh century. They settle among several tribes that had not made a lot of progress since crossing over the Bering Straits, holed up in places such as New Mexico’s Atlatl Cave. They flourished around 1000 A.D. until they left 140 years later. Their success attracted other less developed groups, which gave them enough labor for their monumental work.

The Anasazi were known by the other tribes as sorcerers who commanded the forces of nature which were enhanced by the fortuitous increase in rain. Chaco Canyon managed to put a spin on the extraordinary celestial and geological phenomena of the era, such as the appearance of two different supernovas, Halley’s Comet and other comets. Even the massive volcanism that devastated parts of the Southwest was used to manipulate popular perceptions. But it backfired when the bad weather struck and the Anasazi priesthood could not fix the weather, then they were considered “evil wizards’’.

Bumper crops were afforded by exceptionally heavy and regular amounts of rainfall. Maize production became widespread and successful, leading to the bioengineering of whole new strains including a variety still harvested today known as “Hopi blue corn’. The Anasazi built huge dams such as in Animas Valley, New Mexico, or the nearby Tsin Kletzin, a compound near Pueblo Alto, as reservoirs for their irrigation.

The Anasazi built edifices of superb masonry known as “Great Houses’ sometimes rising as high as five stories. One of them besides Chaco Canyon is Pueblo Bonito which covers three times the square footage of the White House and is as large as the Roman Coliseum. The walls are 3 feet thick to support a ceiling weighing 90 tons. It was an important ceremonial center.

They built sunken kivas from which they would emerge after a ceremony to commemorate the Great Flood. A few Pueblo peoples who still claim to be at least partial descent from the Anasazi, such as the Tewa, continue to celebrate their old religion in a Kiva, which they refer to as te’i or “place of the cottonwood tree’’.

Anasazi settlements were connected by a six-road system accurately surveyed and skillfully engineered over ninety-five thousand square miles. The longest surviving is the Great North Road that takes you from San Juan River to Pueblo Alto. This was the center for turquoise-processing industries and chert production. The roads were made of caliche, a hardened deposit of calcium carbonate. It acts as natural cement by bonding gravel, sand, silt, and clay and is still used today in the manufacture of Portland cement. The roads ran unrelentingly in straight lines passing over every obstacle, like cutting stairways into the living rock. From this solar-lunar axis, two roads run straight until they terminate at the badlands where thousands of pieces of deliberately broken pottery can be found in the depth of the canyon, possibly fragments of funeral urns. It seems that this canyon was the end of the road for their dead and they built the roads to take them there, where they would start their afterlife voyage.

But it was not the only purpose. The roads were part of an information superhighway unmatched until the advent of the Internet. Signaling posts were set up at regular intervals. During the day data was flashed from one relay station to the next in code using polished obsidian mirrors. From dusk until dawn, their places were taken by bonfires able to pass on an equivalent amount of news.

In the year 2000, Chaco Canyon was remapped using computers. The scientists put together very old information and plane-table maps of the archaeological zone which were fed into high-powered computers for analysis. The results were far beyond anything expected. The monitors began lighting up with a master plan of alignments that had never been recognized, according to archaeologist Craig Child. One of the geodetic-computer researchers said “nothing is out of place here, nothing is arbitrary. For example, a line from the north portal of Casa Rinconada – best known kiva – runs through Pueblo Alto’s front gate, then proceeds straight through buttes as though they did not exist, to another great house 20 miles away. Chaco Canyon, Solomon Ruins and Aztec Ruins to the north, plus Casas Grandes (Chihuahua) to the south were aligned with absolute precision along a meridian more than 375 miles long”.

They were putting society in accord with the cycles of the universe; tie every individual in concordance into the grand order, an organizing whole of humans and nature.

Hohokam 

The Llacuaz-Hohokam founded Snake town (not because of lots of snakes but because the snake was a symbol of regeneration by changing skin). With their arrival and their successful development, the surrounding backward tribes started gathering around them. This gave them 200 years of progress. They obtained the precious Spondylus Princeps oyster – used even as an exchange mean – from the Colorado delta and traded it through all the kingdoms of the Pacific Coast during pre-Inca times, that is 1000 -1320 A.D.

The Hohokam and Anasazi had different approaches to agriculture. The Anasazi were dry-land farmers who relied on precipitations stored in the soil and upon dams, such as their Animas Valley project, to collect water. The system worked well because, beginning around 1000 A.D. Chaco Canyon enjoyed unusually sufficient rainfall. Not so in southern Arizona where desert conditions prevailed. The Hohokam, on the contrary, were forced to apply their irrigation skills to survive.

They arrived as sophisticated hydraulic engineers and recognized the potential of the Middle Gila River and Lower Salt Lake. They built thousands of miles of canals, long enough – if formed in a single file – to run from their base below Tucson to the Canadian border. Their enterprise entailed the construction of hundreds of ridges uniformly raised above ground leveled in 10-foot-high embankments and organized on a preplanned grid. Their engineering details include: covering part of them with a thick calcareous coat of caliche to render them watertight, make grooves or rifles at particular sections to speed the flow where desired, have different gradients (for example gradients in Canal System Two varied from 4.8 feet per mile to 1.2 feet per mile), at their junction with a river, the main canals grow progressively smaller towards their end, thereby increasing flow velocity to counter evaporation and seepage. This control was additionally important in maintaining a constant water rate. If the rate was too high, it eroded the canal; if it was too slow would develop silt.

According to Arizona authors John P. Andrews and Todd W. Bostick “many modern canals in the Phoenix metropolitan area are located in the same place as the pre-historic Hohokam canals”. All the old canals have been obliterated except for the ones at Park of the Four Waters in the southern portion of the Pueblo Grande Museum and Archaeological Park. Pueblo Grande was situated near Salt River. These canals were used by the Hohokam to produce the salt required to preserve food.

Their houses were made from adobe but for every 29 rooms they used to have pit houses or “kiva”, ceremonial “rebirth” houses, commemorating the rebirth of their people after the great flood. But besides that, they had special ceremonial centers or temples to which they would make pilgrimages. All these ceremonial centers were astronomically oriented, starting with the overall design, the specially designed windows that would let the light in in a certain angle certain days of the year – like equinoxes or solstices – plus the orientation of the entrances designed in such a way that all the doors to these temples had exactly the same orientation. Plus, all the temples were built along a certain coordinate, meridians, that were in harmony with some constellations.

A more substantial indication of Hohokam spirituality is found thirty miles from Snake town, down the Lower Gila River, near Coolidge, in Casa Grande. Casa Grande is a modern name given to the sparse ruins of a once monumental structure erected at the start of the Southwest florescence of the Hohokam one thousand years ago. Originally a rectangular, three-story building of caliche and adobe, it contains five contiguous room tiers. Four rise two stories to enclose a three-storied tier. This unusual arrangement was dictated by the function of the house as a temple for accurate observation and ritual veneration of the sun and moon. The entire edifice rests perfectly level upon a single-story platform to allow these alignments.

From the research that has been done about what they were studying from this astronomical observatory it is known that the alignments at Casa Grande include moonset at minimum northerly, minimum southerly and maximum northerly declinations, sunset of the summer and winter solstices, and sunset at the vernal and autumnal equinoxes. More are not known because of the deterioration of the temple, but scientists suspect there were a lot more.

The resulting agricultural wealth spawned towns throughout Arizona. They were actively trading with contemporary mound builders of the Mississippi valley and as far as the Valley of Mexico. The Alleg Hooked Cross, originally a Celtic sun wheel symbol, was introduced along trade routes from distant Ohio. Swastika variants, including the identifiable Crosog Bride or “Brigid’s Cross’’ dominate Hohokam pottery. To the later Hopi and other regional tribes, the swastika represents the meha flower signifying mass migration and the four great forces of nature – earth, wind, fire, and water – working together as a single universal energy through the Four Cardinal Directions.

Their civilization was based on their water management abilities, which attracted very dissimilar ethnic groups with common roots in the postglacial Clovis aboriginals who existed ten thousand years earlier. Their golden age lasted about one hundred-thirty years.

But these beneficial weather conditions began to change into a new dry spell and these masses of people that for six generations had revered their saviors started revolting against their old sorcerers who were now being punished by the gods. Famine ensued as the arid conditions turned into a full-scale drought.

Violence ran havoc through Hohokam territory of control – as well as in Chaco Canyon – incinerating the great houses and massacring their despised elitists. Snake town was set on fire, and its survivors fled to their allies, the Anasazi, under siege in the north.

Unprepared for such a catastrophe, the Anasazi concluded that the experiment on the Colorado Plateau had come to an end and determined to start a new mass emigration. The goal was evacuating the Four Corners, crossing the Sonora Desert, and going to northern Mexico at the huge and thriving commercial center of Paquime (Chihuahua). Not all agreed with the mass migration and the dissenters decided to retreat to a high land location, Mesa Verde, and became cliff dwellers.

They lasted no more than 40 years. The deluge of violence drowning the Southwest got to them. The Zuni Indian version of what happened along with the archaeological digging tell a horror story of how these people were totally obliterated. At the end, the women that survived were taken as wives by the ancestors of these Hopi and Zuni people and blended with them. For the Hopi and Zuni this is a conflicting story because they have as their ancestors those who destroyed the “evil spirits’ and at the same time their ancestors were these “evil spirits’.

The mass migration made it into Paquime and Casas Grandes, Chihuahua, and for more than one hundred years they prospered until they too were overwhelmed by the same hurricane of hatred. There was yet one more attempt at pulling things together but too much slaughter and forced migration had eroded their numbers and social cohesion. Countless potsherds and burial mounds at Barranca del Cobre (Chihuahua State, Mexico) testify to the final dissolution of a people. Their living descendants, mixed with other indigenous groups, inhabit the canyonlands. They are the Raramuri, “those who walk well’.

Barren lands that had been made to bloom became a full-blown desert by 1928, when the 580-foot-wide Coolidge Dam was completed.

Conclusion

This is an introductory report about Ancient Civilizations in America. I didn’t go into much detail about the ones that are more well known, like the Inca or Aztec. My goal was to experience older cultures, how far back they existed and to see how the spark of creativity was reflected in their accomplishments. As we saw, these ancient societies showed that spark and learned from nature and the laws of physics and developed their own technologies accordingly. The fact that their solutions were different from this civilization’s solutions doesn’t mean they were not sophisticated. As we saw, sometimes they were even more clever.

Our starting hypothesis is that the human mind has always been human, that is, the way we think has always been creative, creating something that didn’t exist before after understanding how a process worked. Here we saw how creative they were, how advanced their solutions were to the problems they faced.

The point is that man, no matter the time-period, or level of development, has been able to have a degree of understanding of the self-development of the universe and use this knowledge of the laws of nature, the laws of physics, to develop their skills accordingly, and, in this sense, have command over nature. By doing this, we saw how successful these civilizations were for as long as they guided themselves by this.

As Vladimir Vernadsky put it, the human species is part of the Noosphere, the biosphere created by the intervention of men, where human beings are the “keystone’’ specie in the ecological chain, what they do is part of the formation of the biosphere,

But we also saw what happens when the opposite takes place, when men do not consider themselves part of this process and violate these laws in a greedy effort to obtain their own gain and exploit others, starting by considering them “inferiors”. When this “imperialistic” idea takes hold, we saw the results repeatedly. It doesn’t matter if they were tribes, clans, groups, societies, or civilizations, in this continent or any other continent. The final result was always collapse, war and destruction.

As Plato said, the collapse of civilizations is due to natural disaster or man-made disaster. Or a combination of both when a society already socially weakened is unable to face a natural disaster. Eventually these societies were doomed. We saw it at Cahokia, Hopewell, Hohokam, Anasazi.

The first approach, studying and getting to know the laws of nature to apply them for the advance of their societies but knowing that these laws are not arbitrary, have boundaries, is acting for your own well-being, your society and nature. Nature has specific ways to follow to develop, what Leibnitz called the “path of least action”.

We are able to understand cosmological events and weather variations and can try solutions within the framework of this understanding of the laws of nature. As civilization, we can and have intervened within this framework and have creatively solved problems.

The second approach is “playing god”, pretending that these laws can be violated, and nothing is going to happen. Some of these civilizations gave us an example of this “imperialistic phase’’ and the result was a dark age. There were consequences.

We face the same dilemma now.

We are suffering a massive media campaign today claiming that we are violating the laws of nature by developing higher-energy technologies and that these advances are the “cause” of an ecological disaster, and the only way to “redeem ourselves” is by going back to the Stone Age, which mean deindustrialization, and “population reduction” that is, killing people. As we saw, the fundamental law in physics and nature is self-development. Even after a disaster nature takes its course again. When societies respect and are in sync with this law, there is an improvement that benefits all. Deviating from this is what causes ecological and social disasters.

Making believe that men by using their creativity and making improvements to their societies are somehow causing a disaster and not the other way around, is like believing that we have the power to cause a solar eclipse or an earthquake and have to be punished for it, as some ancient civilizations in their final phase of disintegration ended up believing. For example, the Aztecs when faced with a total solar eclipse, sacrificed tens of thousands of slaves and prisoners in one day – it was said that rivers of blood ran through the street of Tenochtitlan – because they believed they had “displeased” the sun-god and had to ingratiate him with human sacrifices.

We are told that the social and ecological disasters we’re facing now have nothing to do with the imperialistic looting of natural resources without any replenishment whatsoever, looting of nations, resources, especially human resources, that has a tremendous impact on the environment. We are that it has nothing to do with the big corporations’ greed-based manipulation of everything starting with food production, the financial control over nations that have kept as slaves entire populations with no water, no education, no infrastructure or health care etc., that is causing a devastating human and therefore an ecological disaster. The media control over the creative development of the mind is designed to impede identifying and solving the dangers we face that are real like some natural disaster or the man-made disasters we already have.

For the international oligarch, somehow trying to do better or develop our countries and improve our technologies has become the cause of an ecological disaster, not the other way around. Our imposed stagnation and lack of development is causing ecological and social disintegration and wars.

Let’s go back to being, as Vladimir Vernadsky said, part of the Noosphere, where facing the challenges with creativity took us, human beings, and our surroundings, to a new level with new environmental challenges of a different kind in a new transformed environment and not let the “imperialistic’’ mode destroy this civilization and our planet earth. [ The Biosphere Vol. 1 and The Noosphere Vol II. Vladimir Vernadsky ( )]

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