The First Americans Page 5

  Then, in 1882, a book appeared that had been written by a lieutenant governor of Minnesota and eight-year member of Congress who had also run for the office of vice president of the United States. The book reached a great deal more people than any report from the Smithsonian before or since. Its author was Ignatius T. Donnelly and its title Atlantis: The Ante-diluvian World. It asserted that Plato's report of the existence of the mid-Atlantic continent of Atlantis was not fable but historical fact. Atlantis, Donnelly wrote, had been the site of the Garden of Eden and then the first civilization, a mighty nation some of whose people had gone on to becomethe royal lineages of all the other nations through history. And when Atlantis had sunk, disappearing forever under the waves thanks to a titanic earthquake, some Atlanteans had escaped and made their way to Central America, where they had become Toltecs and Aztecs (the linguistic connection between the words Aztlán and Atlantis was too obvious, he suggested, to be a coincidence). They had then moved north, becoming the mound builders of North America, building mounds as they had always done all over the world. They had withdrawn to Mexico, Donnelly asserted, before 231 A.D., having been attacked by hostile people from the north. In fact, Donnelly threw everything into his account but Jung's racial memory: virtually every minor myth, legend, tall tale, and hoax ever mentioned about the mounds was added to this astonishing stew.

  The book was wildly successful. It remains in print to this day, available in both hardcover and paperback from dot-com bookstores, one of the revered reference works of the Age of Aquarius. And of course there are plenty of such people who prefer to believe that the pyramids of Egypt, the Nazca lines of Peru, and other monumental creations were the work not of ancient humans but of aliens arriving in spaceships—a bizarre permutation of racism, to be sure. And even among the nonloonies today, some people still believe that the mounds were the products of another vanished aboriginal race—but not the Native Americans.

  While Donnelly's book was becoming a publishing sensation, Cyrus Thomas was directing a sizable staff of assistants who were extensively surveying the existing mounds. In a photographic portrait of Thomas, we see a handsome, prosperous-looking white-haired man with an aquiline nose, a generous brow with an eyebrow raised in skeptical inquiry, and a ferocious, doubting frown so intense as to wrinkle his broad and impressive jaw. (It is said that much portrait photography of this era showed rather ferocious-looking people, mainly because they had to hold their expressions for several seconds. But even discounting that, Thomas was clearly not a man to be trifled with.) Initially, he had been of the separate-race school, but the data pouring in over nearly a decade convinced him otherwise. Not only had the mounds been the work of ancestral Indians, but, he believed, different tribal groups had built different mounds. His report, an enormous work of chiefly descriptive material published by the bureau in 1894, once and for all put to rest—for professionals at least—thelost-race theory. Also, it has been said to mark (you guessed it) “the birth of modern American archaeology.”

  THE STATE OF THE ART

  Indeed by this time, near the turn of the century, there were such people as professional archaeologists—which is to say, people who, unlike amateurs and hobbyists, were paid to do archaeological work on at least a part-time basis. Their work was sponsored by scientific societies, museums, the government, and universities, and by the end of the nineteenth century, a few American universities were training people in a more systematic kind of archaeology. This had become possible thanks to many developments—in particular the development of geology as a science and the early understandings of the great depth of time during which the earth had existed and people had lived upon it. Darwin's insights into evolution arose in part as a result of geological developments and would soon open up great vistas in the studies of early humans. These were not, of course, merely academic matters, since they flew in the face of most theological views of the world. It was for many a shocking, wrenching time. These developments originated mostly in Europe and came to American shores later, but with no less force. These developments, to be described in the next chapters, had a profound influence on American notions of who the first Americans might have been and when they might have arrived.

  At the turn of the twentieth century, archaeology per se was still in what one of its historians calls the “Classificatory-Descriptive Period,” meaning mostly cataloguing and mapping such things as the works of the mound builders and sorting such things as pottery into geographical types. No one at this point had much of a handle on such factors as chronology or any way of probing such a question. In fact, many think that truly modern American archaeology emerged from the womb far to the south in Latin America, where archaeologists trained in Europe had begun to create methods that would permit an understanding of the sequences of prehistory. The leader— modern American archaeology's real sire—was Max Uhle, a German.

  Uhle began his academic studies in philology but switched to archaeology and ethnography, then took a job as a curator in the Dresden Museum.There, in the early 1890s, the young Uhle developed a commanding knowledge of Inca and earlier Peruvian pottery as well as sculptural style— from artifacts and photographs that had been brought back by travelers and early antiquarian expeditions. I feel a certain distant kinship to Uhle, having also started out my archaeological career not in the field but in a host of museums.

  When Uhle did get out into the field in Peru and elsewhere along the western coast of South America, he took note of small changes in the artifacts in differing strata and became one of the first archaeologists to make a case for gradual, cumulative cultural change over time. Well ahead of his contemporaries anywhere else in the Western Hemisphere, he developed in the early 1900s an areawide chronology of cultures in Peru that is still in use, albeit highly modified, almost a century later. Uhle wrote, “In Americanist studies, the first thing that had to be done was to introduce the idea of time, to get people to admit that the types [like pottery types and therefore cultures] could change over time.”

  In fact, one of his earliest efforts to chronicle this sort of microchange in culture came not in South America but when, in the first years of the twentieth century, he took some time to excavate the Emeryville shell mound in California's San Francisco Bay. There, excavating stratum by stratum, he noted not only the difference in artifacts from the top and bottom strata but also the continuity among the strata, which he took to represent about a thousand years of habitation and cultural development. At the time, however, one of the grand panjandrums of American anthropology, Alfred L. Kroeber of the University of California, did not approve of Uhle's notion of small, cumulative changes in a culture, preferring to find significance only in huge changes brought on by major technological innovations.

  Kroeber was well meaning enough, but most of his archaeological notions have not held up very well. He believed that Indian cultures throughout North America had changed very little over prehistoric time, even changing little with the arrival of Europeans. From this idea of cultural stasis, Kroeber postulated that there had never been very many Native Americans, perhaps some 3 million all told from coast to coast. This meant, among other things, that the European diseases introduced upon contact had had relatively little effect either culturally or demographically.

  We now know that diseases such as smallpox, to which the aboriginals had little or no resistance, were utterly devastating, killing off as much as 90 percent of many tribes, especially those that lived in close quarters such as large towns or even small villages. These diseases evidently raced ahead of European contact into the interior, scrambling many native cultures like so many eggs. It is medically possible that the widespread cause of such death was not the primary diseases, such as smallpox and measles, but secondary infections, such as pneumonia, lack of nourishment (both food and water), general terror, and, with large numbers of a given population infected simultaneously, lack of healthy individuals to care for the sick or work in the fields to bring in food.


  Certainly, the Aztec empire fell to Cortés and his relative handful of troops in a matter of days not so much because of superior European arms but primarily because the population of Tenochtitlán was reduced to about one-tenth by smallpox before Cortés returned to conquer it. By 1650, the Mexican population had been reduced to one-tenth its precontact size. To the north, descendants of the great mound-building cultures of the American Southeast, which had been thriving before de Soto's excursion in the early 1540s, virtually disappeared before the onslaught of the European pathogens he had inadvertently brought—his only inadvertent violence. Today even conservative estimates of the pre-Columbian population of what is now the United States suggest that at least 11 million native people were here in about 1500, if not twice that many. By 1900, only some 500,000 Native North Americans remained, disease and its aftereffects having accounted for infinitely more deaths over that period than the U.S. Cavalry could ever claim.

  The question here about the size of the pre-Columbian Indian population is not merely an academic matter, of course, but also a question of how great the devastation of native populations (in real numbers) by the arrival of Europeans was, as well as a matter of intent. The fewer killed off, the less blame, and this disputatious matter remains with us today. The broad field of anthropology, and even what would seem to be a somewhat less urgent arena, archaeology, has rarely avoided being hauled into the political realm.

  In any event, not until North American archaeologists began to use Uhleian methods in the American Southwest would they begin to catch upwith the sophistication of the European-trained archaeologists in Latin America and develop proper (and lasting) chronologies of past cultures. While all this was going on, North Americans continued to invent their own brand of archaeology with little reference to the techniques of the Europeans or those working in South America. This odd provincialism on the part of North Americans continues to this day in many quarters—and I would soon run afoul of it, as several of my colleagues have recently.

  To summarize, it is fair to say, however, that if North American archaeology was “born” with Cyrus Thomas's myth-shattering report on the mound builders in 1894, it was still in an almost purely descriptive stage. It had neither the conceptual nor methodological tools to answer most questions one might reasonably ask of the deep American past and the hemisphere's first inhabitants. Perhaps the most intractable question of all at the turn of the century had to do with time. When did the mound builders do their work? When did the first Americans arrive here? Already before the end of the nineteenth century, American antiquarians and professional archaeologists alike—not to be outdone by their European counterparts—were scouring the countryside looking for “our” own Ice Age people. Years later, Clovis Man would prove to have lived at the end of the Ice Age, when the glaciers had been receding northward. When my crew and I came up with our pre-Clovis dates at Meadowcroft, it meant that someone had been in southwestern Pennsylvania when the glacier was only about a hundred miles away.

  In the early 1970s, we prehistorians had collectively come a long way from the early guesses about the mound builders. It wasn't all that much earlier, after all, that the adolescent science of geology had determined that such a thing as an ice age had actually existed, much less Ice Age people.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE GLACIER'S EDGE

  For a long time—no one knows how long—people in the Alps and probably in other mountainous areas in the northern part of the globe were aware of strange features of the land such as house-sized boulders made of nonlocal rock sitting on the ground like uninvited guests, huge natural amphitheaters carved out of rock, and polished rocks with grooves and striations all running in the same direction. To those who wondered about such features, Noah's biblical flood could be invoked as the cause—and, indeed, was so invoked well into the nineteenth century. The great waters had moved the boulders, scoured out the amphitheaters, and pushed angular rock over rock to create the grooves. The biblical version of history was a powerful vise on the minds of people in both Europe and America.

  Generally, it was taken as a matter of certainty that the earth and everything including the life-forms on it had experienced Genesis all at once, about six thousand years earlier, the date having been established by James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh, Primate of All Ireland, and vice-chancellor of Trinity College, Dublin, who determined the date of creation as October 23, 4004 B.C. (a Sunday), by counting all of the Bible's begats backward to the beginning of all things. Shortly after Ussher's date was announced, Dr. John Lightfoot (another vice-chancellor of Trinity College) further pinpointed the moment of Creation to nine o'clock in the morning. There was at the time practically no concept of the earth's antiquity andtherefore no context in which anyone could have imagined the immense amount of time human beings, much less humanlike ancestors or various monsters such as dinosaurs, had been on the earth.

  A few exceptions to this certainty existed. In the latter years of the eighteenth century, a Scot named James Hutton plunged into the realm of geology and, remarkably ahead of his time, concluded that the same processes visibly going on in the present—such as erosion, the silting up of lakes, and flows of lava from erupting volcanoes—could account for all the earth's landforms. He concluded that one did not need supernatural explanations for them, and since these visible processes went very slowly, as well as cyclically, the world had to be very, very old. This notion, that the geologic processes of the past and the present were the same, was called “uniformitarianism,” as opposed to “catastrophism” (meaning a calamitous and sudden flood, for example, or, more recently, meteorite impact). Most people in Hutton's time, including those devoted to science of one sort or another, remained wedded to the biblical timescale and the catastrophic-flood notion. Hutton had been trained as a lawyer and then as a doctor, neither of which professions much interested him, and gave both up in order to pursue his scientific interests, particularly geology.

  At this time in history a great many British naturalists were clergymen. They were educated men, to begin with, and many were located in parishes that called for many trips around the countryside. The best known was Oxford-educated Gilbert White, whose book, The Natural History of Selborne, published in 1798, remains a classic to this day largely because of his keen sense of observation. When these curious men of the cloth found such oddities as primitive human artifacts—stone points, for example—associated with the likes of elephant remains, they had to assume that the period in question lay somewhere this side of Ussher's moment of Genesis. And when it came to many of the features we now associate with the waxing and waning of glaciers, they could still, in the 1830s, be explained by the Flood or by a subsequent cold period when icebergs might have floated from the north over the floodwaters covering Europe, dropping boulders and scouring rock as they went. Not every reverend naturalist's eyes were clouded by dogma, however. A remarkable Catholic priest and antiquarian named Father Joseph MacEnery discovered associations of artifacts and Ice Age animals sealed under an unbroken floor in Kent's Cavern in thetown of Torquay, in southwest England, during the years 1825 to 1829 and recognized them for what they were: evidence of very great human antiquity. But his kind was all too rare.

  Picking up where James Hutton had left off, another Scot, Charles Lyell, scoured Europe for its ample evidence of uniformitarianism and, well armed, began in 1830 publishing Principles of Geology, a three-volume work that would go through twelve editions before his death in 1875. Lyell's work inaugurated the modern science of geology and, among other things, provided the time frame within which Charles Darwin and others would perceive the long evolution of life on earth. Lyell redefined the stage on which life itself had existed and humans had played out their roles: he made it possible to begin, however dimly, to perceive the length of time that had elapsed since the first human habitation of places such as England (and then later America). Darwin would later write of Lyell's work, “it altered the whole tone of one's mind, and
therefore…when seeing a thing never seen by Lyell, one yet saw it partially through his eyes.” But acceptance of all this was hardly immediate: Lyell's perception of the great antiquity of the earth was sufficiently sacrilegious and dangerous that women and children, those highly susceptible creatures, were barred from his public lectures.

  Lyell's work literally made the ice ages conceivable. Generally, the realization that much of the lands of northern Europe, Asia, and North America had once, sometime long ago, been covered by ice is attributed to Louis Agassiz, a Swiss ichthyologist (a student of fish both live and fossil), who in 1836 began looking into the movements and effects of the glaciers of his home country. In 1840, he published Études sur les glaciers, for which he is much better remembered than for his piscine concerns. Agassiz later came to the United States and took a professorship at Harvard, where he not only explored the glacial history of North America and became one of the country's leading scientists but also became its most influential teacher of science. Study nature, he is reputed to have said, not books— which remains pretty good advice. (He was also a polygenist and, as such, an apologist for slavery, and, as we shall also see, an anti-Darwinist— which is a reminder that a scientist who is brilliant in one field can be way off base in others. Beware the Nobel Prize–winning physicist who invents a new diet.)