Entrevista a Charles C. Mann: a globalização que Cristovão Colombo impôs ao Mundo

Quando Cristovão Colombo descobriu a América em 1492, abrindo para os impérios espanhol e português a conquista do novo mundo, seguidos por outros colonizadores europeus, começava uma nova era não só na história da humanidade, mas na própria vida do planeta. A globalização, não só econômica e política, mas principalmente biológica. Uma troca mundial de plantas, animais, germes e doenças que devastou as populações indígenas das Américas. Destruiu culturas e civilizações no hemisfério ocidental e revolucionou a ecologia de todo o planeta. Para dar contas dessa transformação profunda, ainda não contada nos livros de história, o jornalista americano Charles Mann acompanhou o trabalho pioneiro de cientistas de muitas áreas que nos últimos anos trouxeram à tona o passado esquecido dos nossos continentes. Uma das revelações mais fascinantes é a descoberta na Amazônia de vestígio de grandes civilizações ainda desconhecidas. Em dois livros, 1491 e 1493, ele relata o que está sendo descoberto sobre o antes e o depois da chegada de Colombo, uma viagem que começou em casa, no jardim de Charles Mann.
Segue na íntegra a entrevista concedida pelo jornalista americano ao programa Milênio, da Globo News (links introduzidos pelo Conexão) .



Vamos começar falando de algo que achei muito interessante. Toda sua jornada pela História das Américas começou em um jardim, no seu jardim. Conte como foi.
 Eu gosto de jardinagem, mas sou um jardineiro ruim, e eu tenho um jardim onde sempre estou tentando plantar alguma coisa. Principalmente tomates. Eu sou fã de tomates. E, de repente, percebi que não havia nada em meu jardim — moro em Massachusetts — originário de um local a menos de 4.500 km de casa. Eu pensei naquela tarefa doméstica que eu faço, que me faz sentir ligado às raízes. Mas, na verdade, é um objeto cosmopolita moderno exótico. É algo totalmente contemporâneo que representa essa quantidade enorme de pessoas pegando essas entidades botânicas e transportando pelo mundo afora. Isso me fez pensar em como isso aconteceu. Como é possível eu cultivar tomates do México, pimentas da América Central, batatas-doces da América do Sul, batatas dos Andes, além de todas as verduras europeias, aqui, no meu jardim em Massachusetts? Eu comecei a me perguntar sobre isso. Há uma história biológica subjacente à história humana e profundamente ligada a ela. Então, meu pequeno jardim é uma pequena parte dessa enorme convulsão ecológica, que é o maior acontecimento da História da vida desde a extinção dos dinossauros.


Mas essa reunificação da Pangeia não foi um encontro de iguais, não é? Porque Alfred Crosby escreveu sobre isso. Levou ao imperialismo.
Há ganhadores e perdedores. O segundo livro dele... Os dois livros são maravilhosos, mas o segundo afirma que esse intercâmbio afetou fortemente os dois lados, mas alguns lados tiraram maior proveito do que outros. A Europa tirou proveito disso, mas as populações nativas, em especial, são as perdedoras. A razão disso é que a primeira onda desse intercâmbio foi de criaturas minúsculas, como bactérias e micróbios de todos os tipos. E um grande número de doenças existentes na Europa, Ásia e África não existia nas Américas. O resultado disso foi que, quando Colombo aqui chegou, os passageiros mais importantes eram invisíveis, e eles exalaram essa nuvem de bactérias e vírus nas Américas. O resultado foi que, nos primeiros 150 anos após a chegada de Colombo, algo em torno de 60%, 75% e até 90%, em alguns casos, dos povos nativos das Américas morreram. E essa extinção foi a pior catástrofe demográfica da História da humanidade, não houve nada igual antes ou depois. E isso explica, em grande parte, por que pequenos grupos de europeus, ao final de longas cadeias de fornecimento, na maioria das vezes, com poucos equipamentos, conseguiram sobreviver em ecossistemas totalmente diferente de tudo que eles viram antes.

Essa "extinção", como você disse, escondeu o fato de haver uma enorme variedade de civilizações com uma História muito rica nas Américas. Nos livros, lemos que os europeus encontraram um enorme continente intocado, cheio de natureza, mas isso não é verdade, não é? Mas por que isso só foi descoberto recentemente? A verdadeira história do que havia antes de Colombo? 
 Há vários motivos diferentes. Parte deles é por causa das grandes batalhas contra os nativos, pois eles usavam armas por mais de uns 200 anos, como os brasileiros sabem muito bem, mas era muito conveniente minimizar o inimigo. É o que sempre acontece. Mas as pessoas sempre tenderam a olhar em volta e imaginar que o que veem é o que sempre existiu. Por exemplo, uma das coisas que fiz em meu livro 1493 foi trabalhar com pessoas da "National Geographic" e entrar em contato com dezenas de arqueólogos, antropólogos, geógrafos, e perguntar a eles como era a Costa Leste dos EUA no século 16, quando Colombo chegou. E havia áreas enormes abertas que os nativos haviam desmatado para a agricultura. E as florestas haviam sido desbastadas, formando áreas abertas, de modo a encorajar a caça. Portanto, os humanos já haviam deixado grandes rastros, e a paisagem fora afetada tremendamente pelas atividades humanas. E, quando essas pessoas morreram, as queimadas e o desmatamento pararam, e a floresta voltou. Assim, quando os europeus chegaram, um século depois, dois séculos depois, e viram essa floresta imensa, com aquela terra intocada que os escritores descrevem, não perceberam que, na verdade, aquilo era algo recente e que, longe de uma terra intocada, o que eles viam era um cemitério. E parte do motivo pelo qual se demorou tanto para descobrir isso é que os arqueólogos e antropólogos precisaram criar ferramentas para ver isso, em especial na Amazônia, onde há pouquíssimas pedras, pouquíssimos metais, e os artefatos produzidos pelas pessoas seriam feitos de cerâmica, de madeira, de tecido, e muito pouco disso pode ser preservado naquelas condições. É úmido demais, quente demais. Então é preciso conseguir fazer coisas como ver as marcas no solo...


É necessário foto de satélite?
 Isso é muito útil. É preciso uma série de técnicas de tecnologia avançada que não estavam disponíveis até 30, 40 anos atrás. A datação por carbono, que permite saber a data de restos de materiais orgânicos, só surgiram na década de 1950.

Não sei se nossos espectadores já ouviram falar dos geoglifos. Explique para nós o que são. Alguns são imensos e só podem ser vistos por satélite. Quem os construiu e onde estão? 
 É uma ótima pergunta. Nos últimos anos, um grupo de arqueólogos do Brasil, dos Estados Unidos e locais como a Finlândia têm descoberto que, em uma área grande da Amazônia Oriental, que engloba Acre, Rondônia, parte da Bolívia e talvez até mais ao sul, no Mato Grosso, aquele grande território é coberto com centenas e centenas — as estimativas chegam a 2 mil — de desenhos esculpidos na terra. Muitos deles têm centenas de metros de lado. E são tipicamente...

Há quadrados perfeitos.
 Há quadrados, círculos, figuras geométricas. Eles se assemelham às famosas linhas de Nazca, no Peru. Ninguém sabe ao certo quem os fez [VER REPORTAGEM]. Os primeiros relatórios arqueológicos sérios sobre eles, publicados e disponíveis para todos, só surgiram em 2009. E há uma excelente arqueóloga em Belém, Denise Schaan, que pacientemente tem tentado catalogar tudo com o auxílio de paleontólogo do Acre, Alceu Ranzi. E eles têm descoberto essa enorme civilização que existiu e que criou esses geoglifos, provavelmente para algum ritual, embora não tenhamos certeza, deixando, literalmente, suas marcas na paisagem. O que é fascinante é que é muito difícil entender sua utilidade, pois elas são tão grandes, que não é possível percebê-las, a menos que as veja do alto. Mas uma coisa que sabemos é que não faz sentido imaginar esse tipo de coisa no meio de uma floresta. Eles não poderiam ser vistos. Portanto, com certeza, toda essa área foi desmatada, e essa área enorme, grande parte da qual hoje é uma floresta, naquela época, era uma savana. Um arqueólogo chamado Clark Erickson demonstrou como ainda há estruturas remanescentes lá que mostram como as pessoas, nas savanas, que são alagadas temporariamente, construíam essas estruturas elaboradas para pegar peixes e plantavam em áreas elevadas, causando essa enorme transformação na paisagem em uma paisagem simbólica altamente produtiva que era tudo, menos a terra intocada que nós imaginávamos. E isso é importante porque os solos da Amazônia, como aqueles da maior parte das florestas tropicais, é muito pobre, impossibilitando o cultivo, mas eles transformaram grandes trechos do terreno, para torna-lo um solo altamente produtivo, que faz dele, ainda hoje, uma das áreas mais produtivas da Amazônia. E há um estudo publicado recentemente que mostra que as áreas com maior biodiversidade na Amazônia, alvos de programas de conservação, em muitos casos, são as áreas que sofreram mais impacto humano, onde as pessoas mudaram drasticamente a paisagem, mas de maneira que, mais tarde, desenvolveram a biodiversidade. E isso é algo que... Acho que isso permite entender como essas pessoas, que viveram nesses ambientes por milhares de anos, aprenderam a trabalhá-lo de uma maneira produtiva.

Que bom. Voltando à jardinagem, em vez de ser uma terra intocada, uma selva, a Amazônia era um jardim.
 Um jardim, exato. E, quando você costeia o Rio Amazonas e vê essa floresta incrível ao redor, talvez uma maneira de pensar nela é uma grande plantação que os donos foram obrigados a abandonar algumas centenas de anos atrás. E um dos motivos pelos quais, ao entrar na floresta, encontrarmos todas aquelas frutas maravilhosas, palmeiras, castanhas, etc., é porque as pessoas as plantaram. E há pesquisadores do INPA, em Manaus, que... Quando as pessoas plantam algo, sempre pegam a mais produtiva. Se você tem uma árvore que é mais produtiva do que as outras, quando for plantar, você planta essa árvore. E é possível ver esse padrão nessas árvores cultivadas na Amazônia há 160 anos. Muitas árvores são originárias da Amazônia Ocidental, e é possível ver esse padrão, indo do oeste para o leste, aproximando-se da desembocadura do rio, onde as árvores úteis são cada vez mais abundantes. Isso é um sinal da presença humana, que agora, gradualmente, conseguimos observar. E os estudos genéticos que irão confirmar isso estão começando. É uma área muito interessante. Para um jornalista científico, como eu, é muito divertido saber essas coisas, pois as pessoas estão descobrindo essas coisas incríveis todo dia e trazendo à vida essa paisagem. Não essa natureza intocada, mas essas extraordinárias criações humanas, em que as pessoas trabalharam com a natureza para criar algo que é incrível, na minha opinião.


É uma grande tragédia que tudo isso tenha sido destruído, perdido.
 É. E foi uma tragédia todas essas pessoas terem morrido. Não era o que pretendiam ou que queriam os europeus, ou que eles até entendessem, mas isso não é desculpa para o que fizeram depois, pois eles cometeram atrocidades terríveis. Mas a maior parte dessa catástrofe ocorreu fora da vista deles. Como essas doenças não existiam nas Américas... Na verdade, doenças epidêmicas, como um todo, não existiam. Esse tipo de doenças que é passada por uma tosse não existia. Então, os povos das Américas não conheciam essas doenças. Consequentemente, quando chegou a varíola, alguém do povoado adoeceu, e todos foram confortar essa pessoa. Eles não conheciam a quarentena — claro que não —, então todos adoeciam, o povoado todo adoecia, e eles não conheciam os germes, não pensavam: "Este é um vírus novo." Eles pensavam: "Está acontecendo algo horrível aqui, precisamos ir embora." Então eles iam para o povoado vizinho, a cidade vizinha e levavam a doença com eles, e o mesmo acontecia. As doenças se espalharam como um dominó pelo continente, despovoando áreas que nunca tiveram contato com os europeus. Assim, um século depois, quando os primeiro europeus chegaram a essas áreas, viram que não havia ninguém e pensaram que a área nunca tinha sido habitada. Há esses registros extraordinários, na América do Norte e na do Sul, de pessoas que chegam a áreas devastadas por epidemias. Eu fui criado em uma cidade pequena na costa noroeste do Pacífico, perto da fronteira com o Canadá, e os primeiros europeus a deixar registros disso chegaram no século 18, com uma expedição náutica comandada pelo capitão Vancouver. Mas eles chegaram 15 anos após uma terrível epidemia de varíola que varreu as tribos de lá. E eles encontraram corpos por toda parte. Esse tipo de relatos dos efeitos catastróficos das doenças e de europeus chegando depois das doenças é extraordinariamente comum nos arquivos.

Eu achei interessante que a famosa Pequena Era do Gelo, nos séculos 16, 17 — por volta daquela época, não? —, na verdade, provavelmente foi causada pelos humanos, pelo intercâmbio colombiano. Então as mudanças climáticas não são algo novo, não é?
 Não, não são algo novo, e isso é algo impressionante... Eu devo dizer que isso é algo mais teórico, há muitos fundamentos, mas não é um fato comprovado. Mas a ideia, de certo modo, é bem simples. Havia dezenas de milhões de pessoas na Américas obviamente fazendo coisas, e uma das coisas que elas faziam era desmatar grandes áreas...

Com queimadas.
  ...geralmente, com queimadas, para abrir espaço para a agricultura. E isso vale para a América do Sul no meio da Amazônia, como para a América do Norte.

Eles aqueceram a atmosfera. 
 Isso. Aqueceram a atmosfera. E isso se deu de duas maneiras: desmatando essa área e queimando, mas também evitando que as plantas voltassem a crescer ali. Ambas as coisas pararam de acontecer bem rápido no início do século 16, não só porque pararam de enviar dióxido de carbono para a atmosfera, mas, como não havia mais pessoas para limpar a terra, a árvores voltaram, tirando grande parte do dióxido de carbono da atmosfera, e há várias comprovações disso, como bolhas de gás do gelo ártico e esse tipo de coisa. Há também sedimentos no fundo de lagos. Há várias maneiras de registrar quanto carbono havia na atmosfera 500 anos atrás, e também uma boa queda que começou por volta de 1550 e continuou até o final do século 18. E essa também foi a época da famosa Pequena Era do Gelo, que foi uma onda glacial de cerca de 50 anos, com terríveis tempestades de neve, geleiras descendo os Alpes e todo esse tipo de coisa. Na verdade, foi quando surgiu um novo gênero de pintura flamenga, retratando crianças patinando nos canais. Se você já esteve na Holanda, sabe que, hoje em dia, não há crianças patinando nos canais. Eu tenho um quadro — não original, claro, uma cópia — de Pieter Bruegel, um famoso pintor flamengo, mostrando as crianças patinando nos canais. Eu li a biografia de Bruegel, e fiquei pasmo de saber que esse quadro mostrando toda aquela neve, na verdade, foi pintado no final de abril, começo de maio. Faz muito tempo que a Holanda não vê 1 metro de neve e gelo em maio.

Clique sobre o mapa para ampliar

Então a globalização começou com Colombo, certo? Esse intercâmbio colombiano é um fenômeno biológico. 
 É biológico, mas também ecológico e econômico. Nós pensamos na globalização como uma troca de bens, mas há esses passageiros escondidos no caminho. E tudo começou com Colombo, que uniu essas duas partes do mundo. Ele tinha motivações econômicas: queria chegar à China para fazer comércio e ganhar dinheiro, e isso aconteceu, mas ele trouxe várias outras criaturas com ele, sem saber, além daquelas que voltaram à Europa. A Europa é um lugar onde quase não há alimentos para todos, e realmente só se ergueu quando a batata, originária dos Andes, chegou ao norte da Europa, e o milho, originário do México e da América Central, chegou ao sul da Europa. E o mesmo aconteceu quando a mandioca foi para a África. Houve uma mudança enorme naqueles lugares.

A China também foi afetada. 
 Foi. Então, depois disso, os espanhóis tentaram chegar à China e estabeleceram uma colônia espanhola nas Filipinas, em Manila, e foi aí que surgiu esse comércio contínuo. Aí, o mundo se tornou interligado nesse ciclo contínuo de comércio, no qual a prata, descoberta nas grandes minas de Potosí, atravessava o Pacífico para chegar a Manila e ser trocada por seda, porcelanas, escravos e especiarias, que iam para o México, e para o Peru, e então eram mandados à Europa, onde eram trocados por armas e cavalos, usados para comprar os escravos que vinham para as Américas, para o Brasil para trabalhar a plantação, para a Bolívia, para extrair prata... Então havia essa interligação entre todas as partes do mundo. E, com os navios, vinham esses "passageiros". A China, que também não conseguia alimentar sua população viu chegarem a batata-doce, o milho e a batata. E o resultado foi uma enorme explosão populacional na China, que levou a uma expansão para o Ocidente, para áreas onde eles antes não conseguiram cultivar, com vários danos ecológicos em decorrência disso. E tudo isso começou com Colombo e a reunificação do mundo.

Agora estamos vivendo essa nova onda de globalização, que elevou a outro patamar países como Brasil, China e Índia, mas que também é muito destrutiva para as culturas locais. Que lições dessa História que foi desvelada podem ser úteis ao lidarmos com essa nova onda de globalização?
Eu acho que estamos saindo do campo dos fatos para entrar no campo das opiniões. Espero que você não me leve muito a sério, como dizemos. Mas uma das coisas que impressionam é que a globalização certamente tem ganhadores e perdedores, mas, no geral, ela aumenta a renda das pessoas. O mundo está mais rico por causa da globalização, mas ela tem sido imensamente destrutiva do ponto de vista cultural. Então temos um benefício econômico, mas com devastação cultural. Ainda que nossa renda esteja aumentando, línguas estão desaparecendo, e, com elas, modos de vida ou literaturas, que estão desparecendo. Portanto, me parece que uma das coisas que podemos fazer, pelo menos, é ter consciência dessa enorme perda cultural. A maioria das sociedades não tem feito nada para tentar evitar isso, e, mesmo quando pequenos esforços são feitos, como na França, onde as pessoas são encorajadas a fazer filmes franceses e tal, isso é tão devastador para a economia mundial que esse tipo de protecionismo cultural deixa de ser uma boa ideia. E eu não me surpreenderia se, no futuro, o Brasil tomasse medidas para tentar salvaguardar... Uma das coisas maravilhosas do Brasil são essas extraordinárias diferentes culturas regionais, com diferentes tipos de música. Para um estrangeiro que viaja pelo país, é um prazer ir a lojas de discos e ouvir o ambiente musical, que é totalmente diferente de uma parte do Brasil para outra, e seria uma pena se esse reflexo do processo histórico local acabasse desaparecendo. Eu acho que o Brasil, que começou a proteger sua cultura, não deveria desistir disso.


# Para ver na íntegra: AQUI.

Cf. também:

• Sugestão de Leitura: "1491 – New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus"
  
• "The New World's Post-Apocalyptic Landscape"

Mais entrevistas, artigos, reportagens e podcasts disponíveis, clicando no link de expansão de texto que segue em baixo.



Although this book had its origins in an Atlantic Monthly cover story, what was it that first drew you to the subject?
Two things, I think. More than twenty years ago, I wrote an article for Science (I'm a correspondent for the journal's news division) that involved going to the Yucatan peninsula. I visited some of the Maya ruins there and like so many other people was absolutely fascinated. I'd just spent two years living in Rome, and I was struck by how much more extensive—but equally finely built—the Maya ruins were. I also was astonished by how different the aesthetic system was—the vertiginous staircases, the corbel arches, the huge reliefs, etc.
This dovetailed with something else. The summer before seventh grade, my parents moved from the suburbs of Detroit to the Pacific Northwest, an area where the presence of Native Americans seemed much more evident. I was fascinated by the idea that very different peoples had lived in the area in the not too distant past, and that their descendants were still living nearby. But it wasn't until I got to Yucatan that the penny dropped and I grasped, really and truly, that when Columbus landed he had stumbled across an entire **hemisphere** full of people whose cultures had nothing to do with Europe or Asia. Half the world!
It was kind of a Homer Simpson-ish "d'oh!" moment for me. So was realizing that I knew practically nothing about this entire half of the world, and my teachers in school had known practically nothing about it. I decided I would try to find out more when I could.

The book argues that most of what we learned at school about the first people to inhabit the Western Hemisphere is wrong. (We now know that Indians were in the Americas far longer and in far greater numbers than previously believed.) What do you think is the most startling aspect of this re-examination by scientists?
As I was writing the book, friends and acquaintances asked me about what I was working on. Usually, they seemed most surprised when I told them about the extent to which Indians modified the environment. We're taught in school—or, at any rate, I was taught in school—that for all intents and purposes the Americas were a wilderness in 1492, and that is simply not true.
When I tell people that Indians created large chunks of the prairies the pioneers saw by burning down the forests that covered them, they're usually pretty surprised. But you can look in the colonial accounts yourself. Most of those nice deciduous forests that now carpet Ohio and Illinois and the Texas Hill Country didn't exist 400 years ago—they were savannas. My favorite example, though, is the Colca Valley in Peru, which is like South America's Grand Canyon, except that it's much deeper. The big difference is that most of the canyon is full of agricultural terraces that date back as much as a thousand years. Imagine terracing the Grand Canyon!

You write that as the native people have disappeared, the distinction today between anthropologists and archaeologists has blurred. Are there problems with that?
Not necessarily. It simply means that cultural anthropologists (who study present-day societies) need to be well informed about their subjects' usually turbulent recent history, and archaeologists (who study past societies) should try to be as informed as possible about what the descendants of their subjects are doing.

What do you think of the recent scientific study of the "Kennewick Man" who's thought to be 9,000 years old? One reason he may be significant—and this is part of your book—is that he furthers the idea that rather than migrating by foot across the Bering Straits 13,000 years ago, many peoples probably traveled by boat. How did this work and how accepted is this theory now?
The conventional picture—that paleo-Indians (the ancestors of today's Indians) walked across the Bering Strait 12,000 years ago—has been under persistent attack for a couple decades. One problem is that after walking across the strait, which scientists believe was surprisingly hospitable, the paleo-Indians would then have run into the 2,000-mile-long ice sheets that then covered Canada and the northern United States. For a while, geologists believed that the sheets partially melted at just the right time, creating an ice-free corridor that the paleo-Indians walked through. But now the evidence for this corridor seems pretty weak. So how did the paleo-Indians get here?
A currently intriguing theory is that they got here by small boat, skipping along temperate pockets on the shoreline. The pockets were due to the Japanese Current, which still warms coastal British Columbia. There isn't much direct evidence for this idea, but researchers are increasingly interested in it, because it is beginning to seem like the only plausible answer.
Kennewick Man may help answer a related but different question. There is some evidence suggesting that the Americas were settled in as many as five separate waves, with today's Indians being in the second or third wave. It is possible that examining Kennewick Man could give some evidence for or against this notion. He might have been in an earlier wave, for instance, which would mean that he was not directly ancestral to modern Indians.
Incidentally, there has been speculation that Kennewick Man was from Europe, largely based on an early reconstruction of his face that made him look a bit like the actor Patrick Stewart. More recent reconstructions based on better data have eliminated that resemblance. And in any case there is no evidence that I am aware of that solidly suggests a link to Europe—and lots of evidence against it, beginning with the fact that Indians are genetically linked with the peoples of Siberia.

Tenochtitlan, the Mexica (Aztec) capital, was more than twice as big as any European city—as much as six times more populous than London, Rome or Madrid—yet the arrival of Europeans created one of the worst disasters in history, with as much as 90 percent of its population dead within a century. What killed so many people?
One of the biggest changes in historians' understanding since the 1960s is their knowledge of the overwhelming role played by epidemic disease. Most of the really bad epidemic diseases—smallpox, measles, influenza—were originally diseases that afflicted domestic animals. Measles, for example, is a variant of rinderpest, a cow disease. Europeans lived in such close contact with their farm animals that slightly mutated forms of their diseases were able to jump the species barrier. By a quirk of history, the Americas had no domesticable animals to speak of—the dog and the llama, in the Andes, are the main exceptions. So Indians were what epidemiologists call "virgin soil"—their immune systems were utterly unprepared for these diseases when Europeans brought them over.
The results were ghastly beyond imagining. It is widely believed that between 1500 and 1600 nine out of ten Native Americans died. Most of these people had never even seen Europeans—the diseases raced into the interior ahead of the English, French, and Spanish. It was the greatest demographic calamity in the history of the world.
Disease, more than anything else, let Europeans win the hemisphere. Hernan Cortes, who conquered Tenochtitlan and the Mexica (Aztec) empire, is a good example. In what is now called the noche triste (sad night), the Mexica drove him from the city, killing three-quarters of his force and most of his horses. After fleeing, Cortes supposedly collapsed in tears at the ruin of his hopes. The only reason he was able to make good on his determination to come back is that some of his Spanish reinforcements inadvertently brought smallpox with them. The epidemic killed at least a third of the city's inhabitants, including the Mexica leader and much of his army.

Amazonian Indians knew how to farm the rain forest without destroying it to the point where scientists are now studying their process today. Is there any hope this will work and how successful where they back then?
Today when we think of farming we imagine plowed fields and large swathes of grain. The inhabitants of the Amazon came up with entirely different ways of farming. To begin with, they sheltered the fragile soil of the tropical forest from the punishing sun and rain by growing most of their crops as trees—two-thirds of Amazonian crop species, according to one survey, were trees. It was a kind of agroforestry that was unlike anything in Europe.
Equally or more important, they developed techniques to improve the usually poor tropical soils. The Amazon is dotted with patches of terra preta do Indios—Indian black earth—which has kept its vitality for generations. A Brazilian-American-German collaboration of geographers, soil scientists, archaeologists, and agronomists is now trying to understand the processes by which Indians created terra preta, and hopes to apply these techniques to other poor soils in the tropics.

Why do some criticize the ideas put forth here? On the right, detractors charge that they discredit European culture by inflating the scale of native loss here. On the left, environmentalists want to believe that America in 1491 was "an Edenic land . . . untrammeled by man."
I think both of these complaints derive from a peculiarly contemporary compulsion to see everything in red-state, blue-state terms. To begin with, neither Indians or Europeans then had a modern conception of disease. Nor did they have any real ability to prevent the epidemics. In general, they both believed that sickness was a reflection of the will of God. Most of the deaths, as I mentioned before, occurred among peoples who had never seen Europeans—which is to say that Europeans didn't even know that they were occurring. So to claim that the epidemics magnify the culpability of Europeans seems kind of naïve to me. Don't get me wrong—Europeans did lots of bad things to Indians. I'm just not sure how useful it is to think of the epidemics in the same breath.
Similarly, the left tends not to like hearing that Indians heavily managed nature—they did not "tread lightly on the land." Environmentalists fear that admitting that the Amazon forest was largely created by human action—that much of it is, in a sense, a whole lot of old orchards—somehow gives the green light to the bulldozers. I don't see it. Indians were, by and large, quite good land managers. Rather than pretending they were not, we should study their techniques. Some of them may be useful to us, as we face the problem of managing the land wisely.

You write that between 1616 and 1619, an epidemic—possibly viral hepatitus—killed 90% of the people in coastal New England . . . in just 3 years! How did the living survive with such a crippling loss of life?
It was devastating, of course. How could it not be? There is pretty clear evidence that the overwhelming and inexplicable mortality plunged native society into a kind of spiritual crisis. Had their gods failed them? Were they being punished? It was one reason that so many Indians were interested in learning about Christianity.
Something similar happened to Europe after the Black Death, which shook Europeans' faith in the Church. Countless schismatic movements emerged in the aftermath. Many historians believe that one long-term consequence was the emergence of Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation.

You say that, if not for Pizarro and the Spanish, the Inkas "might have created a monolithic culture as enduring as China." What specifically prevented that from happening?
Epidemic disease was a major factor. The same plague of smallpox that overwhelmed Tenochtitlan—the epidemic that gave the Mexica empire to Cortes—swept through Central America and into the Andes. I know I'm sounding like a broken record, but that's because the epidemics were mind-bogglingly important in American history. This epidemic arrived in about 1525 and killed perhaps half of the empire's population, including the Inka emperor, his chosen successor, and much of the court. The result was a devastating civil war for the throne—ruin upon ruin. Pizarro, a very lucky man, came right after the war. A brilliant politician, he was able to play off the two factions against each other and won early, devastating victories from which the Inka never recovered.

Were you surprised to learn about the relative sophistication of various tribes, such as the Olmec who may have had a 365-day calendar and invented the number zero as early as 750 BC (but didn't use the wheel...)?
Yes, I was, at first. Later I've come to realize that cultures develop wildly unevenly, and what comes quick and obvious to one is slow and mysterious to another. Europeans, for instance, knew all about true arches, but the Olmec didn't. Indians understood the engineering principles of suspension bridges centuries before Europeans—for a while conquistadors refused to cross Indian suspension bridges, because they couldn't understand how they could stand up without anything supporting them (must be black magic, the Spaniards thought). The Olmec seem to have invented the zero by at least the time of Christ and maybe much earlier, whereas Europeans didn't use it until 1700—Descartes didn't know about it, for instance. On the one hand, you think, how could Indians not have used the wheel? On the other, you think, how could Descartes—in the running for world's smartest person—not have understood that zero was a number?

Why do you think this is all finally coming to light now and not earlier?
I'm not sure, but I'll give you my guess. Scholars of the 19th century and the first part of the 20th wrote at a time when European nations were flattening everything before their path. It was natural to assume that non-white peoples were history's losers, unimportant in the scheme of things. After the Second World War, in which a nonwhite nation (Japan) proved a difficult adversary, researchers took stock. And then when the great European empires crumbled, they began to look again at the histories of these other societies.
But even then the new techniques necessary to understand some of these ancient histories were mainly confined to archaeology, geography, ecology, and other fields. Few researchers crossed the disciplinary boundaries, so new knowledge in one field didn't percolate to other fields. The first important articles about the devastating impact of the epidemics appeared in the 1960s, but they were in journals like Current Anthropology and the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, and history textbook-writers didn't see them. Now, at last, some of the disciplinary barriers are coming down.

How long did the research for this book take and is there a next project for you yet?
In a way, I've been working on this book off and on since my trip to Yucatan. But I only seriously began collecting material in the early 1990s, when I realized that somebody should write a book about this stuff. I only dared imagine writing that book myself in 1998 or so. As for a next project, I have one in mind, but I don't want to jinx it by talking prematurely.
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Before it became the New World, the Western Hemisphere was vastly more populous and sophisticated than has been thought—an altogether more salubrious place to live at the time than, say, Europe. New evidence of both the extent of the population and its agricultural advancement leads to a remarkable conjecture: the Amazon rain forest may be largely a human artifact

The plane took off in weather that was surprisingly cool for north-central Bolivia and flew east, toward the Brazilian border. In a few minutes the roads and houses disappeared, and the only evidence of human settlement was the cattle scattered over the savannah like jimmies on ice cream. Then they, too, disappeared. By that time the archaeologists had their cameras out and were clicking away in delight.

Below us was the Beni, a Bolivian province about the size of Illinois and Indiana put together, and nearly as flat. For almost half the year rain and snowmelt from the mountains to the south and west cover the land with an irregular, slowly moving skin of water that eventually ends up in the province's northern rivers, which are sub-subtributaries of the Amazon. The rest of the year the water dries up and the bright-green vastness turns into something that resembles a desert. This peculiar, remote, watery plain was what had drawn the researchers' attention, and not just because it was one of the few places on earth inhabited by people who might never have seen Westerners with cameras.
Clark Erickson and William Balée, the archaeologists, sat up front. Erickson is based at the University of Pennsylvania; he works in concert with a Bolivian archaeologist, whose seat in the plane I usurped that day. Balée is at Tulane University, in New Orleans. He is actually an anthropologist, but as native peoples have vanished, the distinction between anthropologists and archaeologists has blurred. The two men differ in build, temperament, and scholarly proclivity, but they pressed their faces to the windows with identical enthusiasm.

Dappled across the grasslands below was an archipelago of forest islands, many of them startlingly round and hundreds of acres across. Each island rose ten or thirty or sixty feet above the floodplain, allowing trees to grow that would otherwise never survive the water. The forests were linked by raised berms, as straight as a rifle shot and up to three miles long. It is Erickson's belief that this entire landscape—30,000 square miles of forest mounds surrounded by raised fields and linked by causeways—was constructed by a complex, populous society more than 2,000 years ago. Balée, newer to the Beni, leaned toward this view but was not yet ready to commit himself.

Erickson and Balée belong to a cohort of scholars that has radically challenged conventional notions of what the Western Hemisphere was like before Columbus. When I went to high school, in the 1970s, I was taught that Indians came to the Americas across the Bering Strait about 12,000 years ago, that they lived for the most part in small, isolated groups, and that they had so little impact on their environment that even after millennia of habitation it remained mostly wilderness. My son picked up the same ideas at his schools. One way to summarize the views of people like Erickson and Balée would be to say that in their opinion this picture of Indian life is wrong in almost every aspect. Indians were here far longer than previously thought, these researchers believe, and in much greater numbers. And they were so successful at imposing their will on the landscape that in 1492 Columbus set foot in a hemisphere thoroughly dominated by humankind.

Given the charged relations between white societies and native peoples, inquiry into Indian culture and history is inevitably contentious. But the recent scholarship is especially controversial. To begin with, some researchers—many but not all from an older generation—deride the new theories as fantasies arising from an almost willful misinterpretation of data and a perverse kind of political correctness. "I have seen no evidence that large numbers of people ever lived in the Beni," says Betty J. Meggers, of the Smithsonian Institution. "Claiming otherwise is just wishful thinking." Similar criticisms apply to many of the new scholarly claims about Indians, according to Dean R. Snow, an anthropologist at Pennsylvania State University. The problem is that "you can make the meager evidence from the ethnohistorical record tell you anything you want," he says. "It's really easy to kid yourself."

More important are the implications of the new theories for today's ecological battles. Much of the environmental movement is animated, consciously or not, by what William Denevan, a geographer at the University of Wisconsin, calls, polemically, "the pristine myth"—the belief that the Americas in 1491 were an almost unmarked, even Edenic land, "untrammeled by man," in the words of the Wilderness Act of 1964, one of the nation's first and most important environmental laws. As the University of Wisconsin historian William Cronon has written, restoring this long-ago, putatively natural state is, in the view of environmentalists, a task that society is morally bound to undertake. Yet if the new view is correct and the work of humankind was pervasive, where does that leave efforts to restore nature?

The Beni is a case in point. In addition to building up the Beni mounds for houses and gardens, Erickson says, the Indians trapped fish in the seasonally flooded grassland. Indeed, he says, they fashioned dense zigzagging networks of earthen fish weirs between the causeways. To keep the habitat clear of unwanted trees and undergrowth, they regularly set huge areas on fire. Over the centuries the burning created an intricate ecosystem of fire-adapted plant species dependent on native pyrophilia. The current inhabitants of the Beni still burn, although now it is to maintain the savannah for cattle. When we flew over the area, the dry season had just begun, but mile-long lines of flame were already on the march. In the charred areas behind the fires were the blackened spikes of trees—many of them, one assumes, of the varieties that activists fight to save in other parts of Amazonia.

After we landed, I asked Balée, Should we let people keep burning the Beni? Or should we let the trees invade and create a verdant tropical forest in the grasslands, even if one had not existed here for millennia?

Balée laughed. "You're trying to trap me, aren't you?" he said.


Like a Club Between the Eyes

According to family lore, my great-grandmother's great-grandmother's great-grandfather was the first white person hanged in America. His name was John Billington. He came on the Mayflower, which anchored off the coast of Massachusetts on November 9, 1620. Billington was not a Puritan; within six months of arrival he also became the first white person in America to be tried for complaining about the police. "He is a knave," William Bradford, the colony's governor, wrote of Billington, "and so will live and die." What one historian called Billington's "troublesome career" ended in 1630, when he was hanged for murder. My family has always said that he was framed—but we would say that, wouldn't we?

A few years ago it occurred to me that my ancestor and everyone else in the colony had voluntarily enlisted in a venture that brought them to New England without food or shelter six weeks before winter. Half the 102 people on the Mayflower made it through to spring, which to me was amazing. How, I wondered, did they survive?

In his history of Plymouth Colony, Bradford provided the answer: by robbing Indian houses and graves. The Mayflower first hove to at Cape Cod. An armed company staggered out. Eventually it found a recently deserted Indian settlement. The newcomers—hungry, cold, sick—dug up graves and ransacked houses, looking for underground stashes of corn. "And sure it was God's good providence that we found this corn," Bradford wrote, "for else we know not how we should have done." (He felt uneasy about the thievery, though.) When the colonists came to Plymouth, a month later, they set up shop in another deserted Indian village. All through the coastal forest the Indians had "died on heapes, as they lay in their houses," the English trader Thomas Morton noted. "And the bones and skulls upon the severall places of their habitations made such a spectacle" that to Morton the Massachusetts woods seemed to be "a new found Golgotha"—the hill of executions in Roman Jerusalem.

To the Pilgrims' astonishment, one of the corpses they exhumed on Cape Cod had blond hair. A French ship had been wrecked there several years earlier. The Patuxet Indians imprisoned a few survivors. One of them supposedly learned enough of the local language to inform his captors that God would destroy them for their misdeeds. The Patuxet scoffed at the threat. But the Europeans carried a disease, and they bequeathed it to their jailers. The epidemic (probably of viral hepatitis, according to a study by Arthur E. Spiess, an archaeologist at the Maine Historic Preservation Commission, and Bruce D. Spiess, the director of clinical research at the Medical College of Virginia) took years to exhaust itself and may have killed 90 percent of the people in coastal New England. It made a huge difference to American history. "The good hand of God favored our beginnings," Bradford mused, by "sweeping away great multitudes of the natives ... that he might make room for us."

By the time my ancestor set sail on the Mayflower, Europeans had been visiting New England for more than a hundred years. English, French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese mariners regularly plied the coastline, trading what they could, occasionally kidnapping the inhabitants for slaves. New England, the Europeans saw, was thickly settled and well defended. In 1605 and 1606 Samuel de Champlain visited Cape Cod, hoping to establish a French base. He abandoned the idea. Too many people already lived there. A year later Sir Ferdinando Gorges—British despite his name—tried to establish an English community in southern Maine. It had more founders than Plymouth and seems to have been better organized. Confronted by numerous well-armed local Indians, the settlers abandoned the project within months. The Indians at Plymouth would surely have been an equal obstacle to my ancestor and his ramshackle expedition had disease not intervened.

Faced with such stories, historians have long wondered how many people lived in the Americas at the time of contact. "Debated since Columbus attempted a partial census on Hispaniola in 1496," William Denevan has written, this "remains one of the great inquiries of history." (In 1976 Denevan assembled and edited an entire book on the subject, The Native Population of the Americas in 1492.) The first scholarly estimate of the indigenous population was made in 1910 by James Mooney, a distinguished ethnographer at the Smithsonian Institution. Combing through old documents, he concluded that in 1491 North America had 1.15 million inhabitants. Mooney's glittering reputation ensured that most subsequent researchers accepted his figure uncritically.

That changed in 1966, when Henry F. Dobyns published "Estimating Aboriginal American Population: An Appraisal of Techniques With a New Hemispheric Estimate," in the journal Current Anthropology. Despite the carefully neutral title, his argument was thunderous, its impact long-lasting. In the view of James Wilson, the author of The Earth Shall Weep (1998), a history of indigenous Americans, Dobyns's colleagues "are still struggling to get out of the crater that paper left in anthropology." Not only anthropologists were affected. Dobyns's estimate proved to be one of the opening rounds in today's culture wars.

Dobyns began his exploration of pre-Columbian Indian demography in the early 1950s, when he was a graduate student. At the invitation of a friend, he spent a few months in northern Mexico, which is full of Spanish-era missions. There he poked through the crumbling leather-bound ledgers in which Jesuits recorded local births and deaths. Right away he noticed how many more deaths there were. The Spaniards arrived, and then Indians died—in huge numbers, at incredible rates. It hit him, Dobyns told me recently, "like a club right between the eyes."

It took Dobyns eleven years to obtain his Ph.D. Along the way he joined a rural-development project in Peru, which until colonial times was the seat of the Incan empire. Remembering what he had seen at the northern fringe of the Spanish conquest, Dobyns decided to compare it with figures for the south. He burrowed into the papers of the Lima cathedral and read apologetic Spanish histories. The Indians in Peru, Dobyns concluded, had faced plagues from the day the conquistadors showed up—in fact, before then: smallpox arrived around 1525, seven years ahead of the Spanish. Brought to Mexico apparently by a single sick Spaniard, it swept south and eliminated more than half the population of the Incan empire. Smallpox claimed the Incan dictator Huayna Capac and much of his family, setting off a calamitous war of succession. So complete was the chaos that Francisco Pizarro was able to seize an empire the size of Spain and Italy combined with a force of 168 men.

Smallpox was only the first epidemic. Typhus (probably) in 1546, influenza and smallpox together in 1558, smallpox again in 1589, diphtheria in 1614, measles in 1618—all ravaged the remains of Incan culture. Dobyns was the first social scientist to piece together this awful picture, and he naturally rushed his findings into print. Hardly anyone paid attention. But Dobyns was already working on a second, related question: If all those people died, how many had been living there to begin with? Before Columbus, Dobyns calculated, the Western Hemisphere held ninety to 112 million people. Another way of saying this is that in 1491 more people lived in the Americas than in Europe.

His argument was simple but horrific. It is well known that Native Americans had no experience with many European diseases and were therefore immunologically unprepared—"virgin soil," in the metaphor of epidemiologists. What Dobyns realized was that such diseases could have swept from the coastlines initially visited by Europeans to inland areas controlled by Indians who had never seen a white person. The first whites to explore many parts of the Americas may therefore have encountered places that were already depopulated. Indeed, Dobyns argued, they must have done so.

Peru was one example, the Pacific Northwest another. In 1792 the British navigator George Vancouver led the first European expedition to survey Puget Sound. He found a vast charnel house: human remains "promiscuously scattered about the beach, in great numbers." Smallpox, Vancouver's crew discovered, had preceded them. Its few survivors, second lieutenant Peter Puget noted, were "most terribly pitted ... indeed many have lost their Eyes." In Pox Americana, (2001), Elizabeth Fenn, a historian at George Washington University, contends that the disaster on the northwest coast was but a small part of a continental pandemic that erupted near Boston in 1774 and cut down Indians from Mexico to Alaska.

Because smallpox was not endemic in the Americas, colonials, too, had not acquired any immunity. The virus, an equal-opportunity killer, swept through the Continental Army and stopped the drive into Quebec. The American Revolution would be lost, Washington and other rebel leaders feared, if the contagion did to the colonists what it had done to the Indians. "The small Pox! The small Pox!" John Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail. "What shall We do with it?" In retrospect, Fenn says, "One of George Washington's most brilliant moves was to inoculate the army against smallpox during the Valley Forge winter of '78." Without inoculation smallpox could easily have given the United States back to the British.

So many epidemics occurred in the Americas, Dobyns argued, that the old data used by Mooney and his successors represented population nadirs. From the few cases in which before-and-after totals are known with relative certainty, Dobyns estimated that in the first 130 years of contact about 95 percent of the people in the Americas died—the worst demographic calamity in recorded history.

Dobyns's ideas were quickly attacked as politically motivated, a push from the hate-America crowd to inflate the toll of imperialism. The attacks continue to this day. "No question about it, some people want those higher numbers," says Shepard Krech III, a Brown University anthropologist who is the author of The Ecological Indian (1999). These people, he says, were thrilled when Dobyns revisited the subject in a book, Their Numbers Become Thinned (1983)—and revised his own estimates upward. Perhaps Dobyns's most vehement critic is David Henige, a bibliographer of Africana at the University of Wisconsin, whose Numbers From Nowhere (1998) is a landmark in the literature of demographic fulmination. "Suspect in 1966, it is no less suspect nowadays," Henige wrote of Dobyns's work. "If anything, it is worse."

When Henige wrote Numbers From Nowhere, the fight about pre-Columbian populations had already consumed forests' worth of trees; his bibliography is ninety pages long. And the dispute shows no sign of abating. More and more people have jumped in. This is partly because the subject is inherently fascinating. But more likely the increased interest in the debate is due to the growing realization of the high political and ecological stakes.

Inventing by the Millions

In May 30, 1539, Hernando de Soto landed his private army near Tampa Bay, in Florida. Soto, as he was called, was a novel figure: half warrior, half venture capitalist. He had grown very rich very young by becoming a market leader in the nascent trade for Indian slaves. The profits had helped to fund Pizarro's seizure of the Incan empire, which had made Soto wealthier still. Looking quite literally for new worlds to conquer, he persuaded the Spanish Crown to let him loose in North America. He spent one fortune to make another. He came to Florida with 200 horses, 600 soldiers, and 300 pigs.

From today's perspective, it is difficult to imagine the ethical system that would justify Soto's actions. For four years his force, looking for gold, wandered through what is now Florida, Georgia, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Texas, wrecking almost everything it touched. The inhabitants often fought back vigorously, but they had never before encountered an army with horses and guns. Soto died of fever with his expedition in ruins; along the way his men had managed to rape, torture, enslave, and kill countless Indians. But the worst thing the Spaniards did, some researchers say, was entirely without malice—bring the pigs.

According to Charles Hudson, an anthropologist at the University of Georgia who spent fifteen years reconstructing the path of the expedition, Soto crossed the Mississippi a few miles downstream from the present site of Memphis. It was a nervous passage: the Spaniards were watched by several thousand Indian warriors. Utterly without fear, Soto brushed past the Indian force into what is now eastern Arkansas, through thickly settled land—"very well peopled with large towns," one of his men later recalled, "two or three of which were to be seen from one town." Eventually the Spaniards approached a cluster of small cities, each protected by earthen walls, sizeable moats, and deadeye archers. In his usual fashion, Soto brazenly marched in, stole food, and marched out.

After Soto left, no Europeans visited this part of the Mississippi Valley for more than a century. Early in 1682 whites appeared again, this time Frenchmen in canoes. One of them was Réné-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle. The French passed through the area where Soto had found cities cheek by jowl. It was deserted—La Salle didn't see an Indian village for 200 miles. About fifty settlements existed in this strip of the Mississippi when Soto showed up, according to Anne Ramenofsky, an anthropologist at the University of New Mexico. By La Salle's time the number had shrunk to perhaps ten, some probably inhabited by recent immigrants. Soto "had a privileged glimpse" of an Indian world, Hudson says. "The window opened and slammed shut. When the French came in and the record opened up again, it was a transformed reality. A civilization crumbled. The question is, how did this happen?"

The question is even more complex than it may seem. Disaster of this magnitude suggests epidemic disease. In the view of Ramenofsky and Patricia Galloway, an anthropologist at the University of Texas, the source of the contagion was very likely not Soto's army but its ambulatory meat locker: his 300 pigs. Soto's force itself was too small to be an effective biological weapon. Sicknesses like measles and smallpox would have burned through his 600 soldiers long before they reached the Mississippi. But the same would not have held true for the pigs, which multiplied rapidly and were able to transmit their diseases to wildlife in the surrounding forest. When human beings and domesticated animals live close together, they trade microbes with abandon. Over time mutation spawns new diseases: avian influenza becomes human influenza, bovine rinderpest becomes measles. Unlike Europeans, Indians did not live in close quarters with animals—they domesticated only the dog, the llama, the alpaca, the guinea pig, and, here and there, the turkey and the Muscovy duck. In some ways this is not surprising: the New World had fewer animal candidates for taming than the Old. Moreover, few Indians carry the gene that permits adults to digest lactose, a form of sugar abundant in milk. Non-milk-drinkers, one imagines, would be less likely to work at domesticating milk-giving animals. But this is guesswork. The fact is that what scientists call zoonotic disease was little known in the Americas. Swine alone can disseminate anthrax, brucellosis, leptospirosis, taeniasis, trichinosis, and tuberculosis. Pigs breed exuberantly and can transmit diseases to deer and turkeys. Only a few of Soto's pigs would have had to wander off to infect the forest.

Indeed, the calamity wrought by Soto apparently extended across the whole Southeast. The Coosa city-states, in western Georgia, and the Caddoan-speaking civilization, centered on the Texas-Arkansas border, disintegrated soon after Soto appeared. The Caddo had had a taste for monumental architecture: public plazas, ceremonial platforms, mausoleums. After Soto's army left, notes Timothy K. Perttula, an archaeological consultant in Austin, Texas, the Caddo stopped building community centers and began digging community cemeteries. Between Soto's and La Salle's visits, Perttula believes, the Caddoan population fell from about 200,000 to about 8,500—a drop of nearly 96 percent. In the eighteenth century the tally shrank further, to 1,400. An equivalent loss today in the population of New York City would reduce it to 56,000—not enough to fill Yankee Stadium. "That's one reason whites think of Indians as nomadic hunters," says Russell Thornton, an anthropologist at the University of California at Los Angeles. "Everything else—all the heavily populated urbanized societies—was wiped out."

Could a few pigs truly wreak this much destruction? Such apocalyptic scenarios invite skepticism. As a rule, viruses, microbes, and parasites are rarely lethal on so wide a scale—a pest that wipes out its host species does not have a bright evolutionary future. In its worst outbreak, from 1347 to 1351, the European Black Death claimed only a third of its victims. (The rest survived, though they were often disfigured or crippled by its effects.) The Indians in Soto's path, if Dobyns, Ramenofsky, and Perttula are correct, endured losses that were incomprehensibly greater.

One reason is that Indians were fresh territory for many plagues, not just one. Smallpox, typhoid, bubonic plague, influenza, mumps, measles, whooping cough—all rained down on the Americas in the century after Columbus. (Cholera, malaria, and scarlet fever came later.) Having little experience with epidemic diseases, Indians had no knowledge of how to combat them. In contrast, Europeans were well versed in the brutal logic of quarantine. They boarded up houses in which plague appeared and fled to the countryside. In Indian New England, Neal Salisbury, a historian at Smith College, wrote in Manitou and Providence (1982), family and friends gathered with the shaman at the sufferer's bedside to wait out the illness—a practice that "could only have served to spread the disease more rapidly."

Indigenous biochemistry may also have played a role. The immune system constantly scans the body for molecules that it can recognize as foreign—molecules belonging to an invading virus, for instance. No one's immune system can identify all foreign presences. Roughly speaking, an individual's set of defensive tools is known as his MHC type. Because many bacteria and viruses mutate easily, they usually attack in the form of several slightly different strains. Pathogens win when MHC types miss some of the strains and the immune system is not stimulated to act. Most human groups contain many MHC types; a strain that slips by one person's defenses will be nailed by the defenses of the next. But, according to Francis L. Black, an epidemiologist at Yale University, Indians are characterized by unusually homogenous MHC types. One out of three South American Indians have similar MHC types; among Africans the corresponding figure is one in 200. The cause is a matter for Darwinian speculation, the effects less so.

In 1966 Dobyns's insistence on the role of disease was a shock to his colleagues. Today the impact of European pathogens on the New World is almost undisputed. Nonetheless, the fight over Indian numbers continues with undiminished fervor. Estimates of the population of North America in 1491 disagree by an order of magnitude—from 18 million, Dobyns's revised figure, to 1.8 million, calculated by Douglas H. Ubelaker, an anthropologist at the Smithsonian. To some "high counters," as David Henige calls them, the low counters' refusal to relinquish the vision of an empty continent is irrational or worse. "Non-Indian 'experts' always want to minimize the size of aboriginal populations," says Lenore Stiffarm, a Native American-education specialist at the University of Saskatchewan. The smaller the numbers of Indians, she believes, the easier it is to regard the continent as having been up for grabs. "It's perfectly acceptable to move into unoccupied land," Stiffarm says. "And land with only a few 'savages' is the next best thing."

"Most of the arguments for the very large numbers have been theoretical," Ubelaker says in defense of low counters. "When you try to marry the theoretical arguments to the data that are available on individual groups in different regions, it's hard to find support for those numbers." Archaeologists, he says, keep searching for the settlements in which those millions of people supposedly lived, with little success. "As more and more excavation is done, one would expect to see more evidence for dense populations than has thus far emerged." Dean Snow, the Pennsylvania State anthropologist, examined Colonial-era Mohawk Iroquois sites and found "no support for the notion that ubiquitous pandemics swept the region." In his view, asserting that the continent was filled with people who left no trace is like looking at an empty bank account and claiming that it must once have held millions of dollars.

The low counters are also troubled by the Dobynsian procedure for recovering original population numbers: applying an assumed death rate, usually 95 percent, to the observed population nadir. Ubelaker believes that the lowest point for Indians in North America was around 1900, when their numbers fell to about half a million. Assuming a 95 percent death rate, the pre-contact population would have been 10 million. Go up one percent, to a 96 percent death rate, and the figure jumps to 12.5 million—arithmetically creating more than two million people from a tiny increase in mortality rates. At 98 percent the number bounds to 25 million. Minute changes in baseline assumptions produce wildly different results.

"It's an absolutely unanswerable question on which tens of thousands of words have been spent to no purpose," Henige says. In 1976 he sat in on a seminar by William Denevan, the Wisconsin geographer. An "epiphanic moment" occurred when he read shortly afterward that scholars had "uncovered" the existence of eight million people in Hispaniola. Can you just invent millions of people? he wondered. "We can make of the historical record that there was depopulation and movement of people from internecine warfare and diseases," he says. "But as for how much, who knows? When we start putting numbers to something like that—applying large figures like ninety-five percent—we're saying things we shouldn't say. The number implies a level of knowledge that's impossible."

Nonetheless, one must try—or so Denevan believes. In his estimation the high counters (though not the highest counters) seem to be winning the argument, at least for now. No definitive data exist, he says, but the majority of the extant evidentiary scraps support their side. Even Henige is no low counter. When I asked him what he thought the population of the Americas was before Columbus, he insisted that any answer would be speculation and made me promise not to print what he was going to say next. Then he named a figure that forty years ago would have caused a commotion.

To Elizabeth Fenn, the smallpox historian, the squabble over numbers obscures a central fact. Whether one million or 10 million or 100 million died, she believes, the pall of sorrow that engulfed the hemisphere was immeasurable. Languages, prayers, hopes, habits, and dreams—entire ways of life hissed away like steam. The Spanish and the Portuguese lacked the germ theory of disease and could not explain what was happening (let alone stop it). Nor can we explain it; the ruin was too long ago and too all-encompassing. In the long run, Fenn says, the consequential finding is not that many people died but that many people once lived. The Americas were filled with a stunningly diverse assortment of peoples who had knocked about the continents for millennia. "You have to wonder," Fenn says. "What were all those people up to in all that time?"

Buffalo Farm

In 1810 Henry Brackenridge came to Cahokia, in what is now southwest Illinois, just across the Mississippi from St. Louis. Born close to the frontier, Brackenridge was a budding adventure writer; his Views of Louisiana, published three years later, was a kind of nineteenth-century Into Thin Air, with terrific adventure but without tragedy. Brackenridge had an eye for archaeology, and he had heard that Cahokia was worth a visit. When he got there, trudging along the desolate Cahokia River, he was "struck with a degree of astonishment." Rising from the muddy bottomland was a "stupendous pile of earth," vaster than the Great Pyramid at Giza. Around it were more than a hundred smaller mounds, covering an area of five square miles. At the time, the area was almost uninhabited. One can only imagine what passed through Brackenridge's mind as he walked alone to the ruins of the biggest Indian city north of the Rio Grande.

To Brackenridge, it seemed clear that Cahokia and the many other ruins in the Midwest had been constructed by Indians. It was not so clear to everyone else. Nineteenth-century writers attributed them to, among others, the Vikings, the Chinese, the "Hindoos," the ancient Greeks, the ancient Egyptians, lost tribes of Israelites, and even straying bands of Welsh. (This last claim was surprisingly widespread; when Lewis and Clark surveyed the Missouri, Jefferson told them to keep an eye out for errant bands of Welsh-speaking white Indians.) The historian George Bancroft, dean of his profession, was a dissenter: the earthworks, he wrote in 1840, were purely natural formations.

Bancroft changed his mind about Cahokia, but not about Indians. To the end of his days he regarded them as "feeble barbarians, destitute of commerce and of political connection." His characterization lasted, largely unchanged, for more than a century. Samuel Eliot Morison, the winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, closed his monumental European Discovery of America (1974) with the observation that Native Americans expected only "short and brutish lives, void of hope for any future." As late as 1987 American History: A Survey, a standard high school textbook by three well-known historians, described the Americas before Columbus as "empty of mankind and its works." The story of Europeans in the New World, the book explained, "is the story of the creation of a civilization where none existed."

Alfred Crosby, a historian at the University of Texas, came to other conclusions. Crosby's The Columbian Exchange: Biological Consequences of 1492 caused almost as much of a stir when it was published, in 1972, as Henry Dobyns's calculation of Indian numbers six years earlier, though in different circles. Crosby was a standard names-and-battles historian who became frustrated by the random contingency of political events. "Some trivial thing happens and you have this guy winning the presidency instead of that guy," he says. He decided to go deeper. After he finished his manuscript, it sat on his shelf—he couldn't find a publisher willing to be associated with his new ideas. It took him three years to persuade a small editorial house to put it out. The Columbian Exchange has been in print ever since; a companion, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900, appeared in 1986.

Human history, in Crosby's interpretation, is marked by two world-altering centers of invention: the Middle East and central Mexico, where Indian groups independently created nearly all of the Neolithic innovations, writing included. The Neolithic Revolution began in the Middle East about 10,000 years ago. In the next few millennia humankind invented the wheel, the metal tool, and agriculture. The Sumerians eventually put these inventions together, added writing, and became the world's first civilization. Afterward Sumeria's heirs in Europe and Asia frantically copied one another's happiest discoveries; innovations ricocheted from one corner of Eurasia to another, stimulating technological progress. Native Americans, who had crossed to Alaska before Sumeria, missed out on the bounty. "They had to do everything on their own," Crosby says. Remarkably, they succeeded.

When Columbus appeared in the Caribbean, the descendants of the world's two Neolithic civilizations collided, with overwhelming consequences for both. American Neolithic development occurred later than that of the Middle East, possibly because the Indians needed more time to build up the requisite population density. Without beasts of burden they could not capitalize on the wheel (for individual workers on uneven terrain skids are nearly as effective as carts for hauling), and they never developed steel. But in agriculture they handily outstripped the children of Sumeria. Every tomato in Italy, every potato in Ireland, and every hot pepper in Thailand came from this hemisphere. Worldwide, more than half the crops grown today were initially developed in the Americas.

Maize, as corn is called in the rest of the world, was a triumph with global implications. Indians developed an extraordinary number of maize varieties for different growing conditions, which meant that the crop could and did spread throughout the planet. Central and Southern Europeans became particularly dependent on it; maize was the staple of Serbia, Romania, and Moldavia by the nineteenth century. Indian crops dramatically reduced hunger, Crosby says, which led to an Old World population boom.

Along with peanuts and manioc, maize came to Africa and transformed agriculture there, too. "The probability is that the population of Africa was greatly increased because of maize and other American Indian crops," Crosby says. "Those extra people helped make the slave trade possible." Maize conquered Africa at the time when introduced diseases were leveling Indian societies. The Spanish, the Portuguese, and the British were alarmed by the death rate among Indians, because they wanted to exploit them as workers. Faced with a labor shortage, the Europeans turned their eyes to Africa. The continent's quarrelsome societies helped slave traders to siphon off millions of people. The maize-fed population boom, Crosby believes, let the awful trade continue without pumping the well dry.

Back home in the Americas, Indian agriculture long sustained some of the world's largest cities. The Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán dazzled Hernán Cortés in 1519; it was bigger than Paris, Europe's greatest metropolis. The Spaniards gawped like hayseeds at the wide streets, ornately carved buildings, and markets bright with goods from hundreds of miles away. They had never before seen a city with botanical gardens, for the excellent reason that none existed in Europe. The same novelty attended the force of a thousand men that kept the crowded streets immaculate. (Streets that weren't ankle-deep in sewage! The conquistadors had never heard of such a thing.) Central America was not the only locus of prosperity. Thousands of miles north, John Smith, of Pocahontas fame, visited Massachusetts in 1614, before it was emptied by disease, and declared that the land was "so planted with Gardens and Corne fields, and so well inhabited with a goodly, strong and well proportioned people ... [that] I would rather live here than any where."

Smith was promoting colonization, and so had reason to exaggerate. But he also knew the hunger, sickness, and oppression of European life. France—"by any standards a privileged country," according to its great historian, Fernand Braudel—experienced seven nationwide famines in the fifteenth century and thirteen in the sixteenth. Disease was hunger's constant companion. During epidemics in London the dead were heaped onto carts "like common dung" (the simile is Daniel Defoe's) and trundled through the streets. The infant death rate in London orphanages, according to one contemporary source, was 88 percent. Governments were harsh, the rule of law arbitrary. The gibbets poking up in the background of so many old paintings were, Braudel observed, "merely a realistic detail."

The Earth Shall Weep, James Wilson's history of Indian America, puts the comparison bluntly: "the western hemisphere was larger, richer, and more populous than Europe." Much of it was freer, too. Europeans, accustomed to the serfdom that thrived from Naples to the Baltic Sea, were puzzled and alarmed by the democratic spirit and respect for human rights in many Indian societies, especially those in North America. In theory, the sachems of New England Indian groups were absolute monarchs. In practice, the colonial leader Roger Williams wrote, "they will not conclude of ought ... unto which the people are averse."

Pre-1492 America wasn't a disease-free paradise, Dobyns says, although in his "exuberance as a writer," he told me recently, he once made that claim. Indians had ailments of their own, notably parasites, tuberculosis, and anemia. The daily grind was wearing; life-spans in America were only as long as or a little longer than those in Europe, if the evidence of indigenous graveyards is to be believed. Nor was it a political utopia—the Inca, for instance, invented refinements to totalitarian rule that would have intrigued Stalin. Inveterate practitioners of what the historian Francis Jennings described as "state terrorism practiced horrifically on a huge scale," the Inca ruled so cruelly that one can speculate that their surviving subjects might actually have been better off under Spanish rule.

I asked seven anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians if they would rather have been a typical Indian or a typical European in 1491. None was delighted by the question, because it required judging the past by the standards of today—a fallacy disparaged as "presentism" by social scientists. But every one chose to be an Indian. Some early colonists gave the same answer. Horrifying the leaders of Jamestown and Plymouth, scores of English ran off to live with the Indians. My ancestor shared their desire, which is what led to the trumped-up murder charges against him—or that's what my grandfather told me, anyway.

As for the Indians, evidence suggests that they often viewed Europeans with disdain. The Hurons, a chagrined missionary reported, thought the French possessed "little intelligence in comparison to themselves." Europeans, Indians said, were physically weak, sexually untrustworthy, atrociously ugly, and just plain dirty. (Spaniards, who seldom if ever bathed, were amazed by the Aztec desire for personal cleanliness.) A Jesuit reported that the "Savages" were disgusted by handkerchiefs: "They say, we place what is unclean in a fine white piece of linen, and put it away in our pockets as something very precious, while they throw it upon the ground." The Micmac scoffed at the notion of French superiority. If Christian civilization was so wonderful, why were its inhabitants leaving?

Like people everywhere, Indians survived by cleverly exploiting their environment. Europeans tended to manage land by breaking it into fragments for farmers and herders. Indians often worked on such a grand scale that the scope of their ambition can be hard to grasp. They created small plots, as Europeans did (about 1.5 million acres of terraces still exist in the Peruvian Andes), but they also reshaped entire landscapes to suit their purposes. A principal tool was fire, used to keep down underbrush and create the open, grassy conditions favorable for game. Rather than domesticating animals for meat, Indians retooled whole ecosystems to grow bumper crops of elk, deer, and bison. The first white settlers in Ohio found forests as open as English parks—they could drive carriages through the woods. Along the Hudson River the annual fall burning lit up the banks for miles on end; so flashy was the show that the Dutch in New Amsterdam boated upriver to goggle at the blaze like children at fireworks. In North America, Indian torches had their biggest impact on the Midwestern prairie, much or most of which was created and maintained by fire. Millennia of exuberant burning shaped the plains into vast buffalo farms. When Indian societies disintegrated, forest invaded savannah in Wisconsin, Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska, and the Texas Hill Country. Is it possible that the Indians changed the Americas more than the invading Europeans did? "The answer is probably yes for most regions for the next 250 years or so" after Columbus, William Denevan wrote, "and for some regions right up to the present time."

When scholars first began increasing their estimates of the ecological impact of Indian civilization, they met with considerable resistance from anthropologists and archaeologists. Over time the consensus in the human sciences changed. Under Denevan's direction, Oxford University Press has just issued the third volume of a huge catalogue of the "cultivated landscapes" of the Americas. This sort of phrase still provokes vehement objection—but the main dissenters are now ecologists and environmentalists. The disagreement is encapsulated by Amazonia, which has become the emblem of vanishing wilderness—an admonitory image of untouched Nature. Yet recently a growing number of researchers have come to believe that Indian societies had an enormous environmental impact on the jungle. Indeed, some anthropologists have called the Amazon forest itself a cultural artifact—that is, an artificial object.

Green Prisons

Northern visitors' first reaction to the storied Amazon rain forest is often disappointment. Ecotourist brochures evoke the immensity of Amazonia but rarely dwell on its extreme flatness. In the river's first 2,900 miles the vertical drop is only 500 feet. The river oozes like a huge runnel of dirty metal through a landscape utterly devoid of the romantic crags, arroyos, and heights that signify wildness and natural spectacle to most North Americans. Even the animals are invisible, although sometimes one can hear the bellow of monkey choruses. To the untutored eye—mine, for instance—the forest seems to stretch out in a monstrous green tangle as flat and incomprehensible as a printed circuit board.

The area east of the lower-Amazon town of Santarém is an exception. A series of sandstone ridges several hundred feet high reach down from the north, halting almost at the water's edge. Their tops stand drunkenly above the jungle like old tombstones. Many of the caves in the buttes are splattered with ancient petroglyphs—renditions of hands, stars, frogs, and human figures, all reminiscent of Miró, in overlapping red and yellow and brown. In recent years one of these caves, La Caverna da Pedra Pintada (Painted Rock Cave), has drawn attention in archaeological circles.

Wide and shallow and well lit, Painted Rock Cave is less thronged with bats than some of the other caves. The arched entrance is twenty feet high and lined with rock paintings. Out front is a sunny natural patio suitable for picnicking, edged by a few big rocks. People lived in this cave more than 11,000 years ago. They had no agriculture yet, and instead ate fish and fruit and built fires. During a recent visit I ate a sandwich atop a particularly inviting rock and looked over the forest below. The first Amazonians, I thought, must have done more or less the same thing.

In college I took an introductory anthropology class in which I read Amazonia: Man and Culture in a Counterfeit Paradise (1971), perhaps the most influential book ever written about the Amazon, and one that deeply impressed me at the time. Written by Betty J. Meggers, the Smithsonian archaeologist, Amazonia says that the apparent lushness of the rain forest is a sham. The soils are poor and can't hold nutrients—the jungle flora exists only because it snatches up everything worthwhile before it leaches away in the rain. Agriculture, which depends on extracting the wealth of the soil, therefore faces inherent ecological limitations in the wet desert of Amazonia.

As a result, Meggers argued, Indian villages were forced to remain small—any report of "more than a few hundred" people in permanent settlements, she told me recently, "makes my alarm bells go off." Bigger, more complex societies would inevitably overtax the forest soils, laying waste to their own foundations. Beginning in 1948 Meggers and her late husband, Clifford Evans, excavated a chiefdom on Marajó, an island twice the size of New Jersey that sits like a gigantic stopper in the mouth of the Amazon. The Marajóara, they concluded, were failed offshoots of a sophisticated culture in the Andes. Transplanted to the lush trap of the Amazon, the culture choked and died.

Green activists saw the implication: development in tropical forests destroys both the forests and their developers. Meggers's account had enormous public impact—Amazonia is one of the wellsprings of the campaign to save rain forests.

Then Anna C. Roosevelt, the curator of archaeology at Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History, re-excavated Marajó. Her complete report, Moundbuilders of the Amazon (1991), was like the anti-matter version of Amazonia. Marajó, she argued, was "one of the outstanding indigenous cultural achievements of the New World," a powerhouse that lasted for more than a thousand years, had "possibly well over 100,000" inhabitants, and covered thousands of square miles. Rather than damaging the forest, Marajó's "earth construction" and "large, dense populations" had improved it: the most luxuriant and diverse growth was on the mounds formerly occupied by the Marajóara. "If you listened to Meggers's theory, these places should have been ruined," Roosevelt says.

Meggers scoffed at Roosevelt's "extravagant claims," "polemical tone," and "defamatory remarks." Roosevelt, Meggers argued, had committed the beginner's error of mistaking a site that had been occupied many times by small, unstable groups for a single, long-lasting society. "[Archaeological remains] build up on areas of half a kilometer or so," she told me, "because [shifting Indian groups] don't land exactly on the same spot. The decorated types of pottery don't change much over time, so you can pick up a bunch of chips and say, 'Oh, look, it was all one big site!' Unless you know what you're doing, of course." Centuries after the conquistadors, "the myth of El Dorado is being revived by archaeologists," Meggers wrote last fall in the journal Latin American Antiquity, referring to the persistent Spanish delusion that cities of gold existed in the jungle.

The dispute grew bitter and personal; inevitable in a contemporary academic context, it has featured vituperative references to colonialism, elitism, and employment by the CIA. Meanwhile, Roosevelt's team investigated Painted Rock Cave. On the floor of the cave what looked to me like nothing in particular turned out to be an ancient midden: a refuse heap. The archaeologists slowly scraped away sediment, traveling backward in time with every inch. When the traces of human occupation vanished, they kept digging. ("You always go a meter past sterile," Roosevelt says.) A few inches below they struck the charcoal-rich dirt that signifies human habitation—a culture, Roosevelt said later, that wasn't supposed to be there.

For many millennia the cave's inhabitants hunted and gathered for food. But by about 4,000 years ago they were growing crops—perhaps as many as 140 of them, according to Charles R. Clement, an anthropological botanist at the Brazilian National Institute for Amazonian Research. Unlike Europeans, who planted mainly annual crops, the Indians, he says, centered their agriculture on the Amazon's unbelievably diverse assortment of trees: fruits, nuts, and palms. "It's tremendously difficult to clear fields with stone tools," Clement says. "If you can plant trees, you get twenty years of productivity out of your work instead of two or three."

Planting their orchards, the first Amazonians transformed large swaths of the river basin into something more pleasing to human beings. In a widely cited article from 1989, William Balée, the Tulane anthropologist, cautiously estimated that about 12 percent of the nonflooded Amazon forest was of anthropogenic origin—directly or indirectly created by human beings. In some circles this is now seen as a conservative position. "I basically think it's all human-created," Clement told me in Brazil. He argues that Indians changed the assortment and density of species throughout the region. So does Clark Erickson, the University of Pennsylvania archaeologist, who told me in Bolivia that the lowland tropical forests of South America are among the finest works of art on the planet. "Some of my colleagues would say that's pretty radical," he said, smiling mischievously. According to Peter Stahl, an anthropologist at the State University of New York at Binghamton, "lots" of botanists believe that "what the eco-imagery would like to picture as a pristine, untouched Urwelt [primeval world] in fact has been managed by people for millennia." The phrase "built environment," Erickson says, "applies to most, if not all, Neotropical landscapes."

"Landscape" in this case is meant exactly—Amazonian Indians literally created the ground beneath their feet. According to William I. Woods, a soil geographer at Southern Illinois University, ecologists' claims about terrible Amazonian land were based on very little data. In the late 1990s Woods and others began careful measurements in the lower Amazon. They indeed found lots of inhospitable terrain. But they also discovered swaths of terra preta—rich, fertile "black earth" that anthropologists increasingly believe was created by human beings.

Terra preta, Woods guesses, covers at least 10 percent of Amazonia, an area the size of France. It has amazing properties, he says. Tropical rain doesn't leach nutrients from terra preta fields; instead the soil, so to speak, fights back. Not far from Painted Rock Cave is a 300-acre area with a two-foot layer of terra preta quarried by locals for potting soil. The bottom third of the layer is never removed, workers there explain, because over time it will re-create the original soil layer in its initial thickness. The reason, scientists suspect, is that terra preta is generated by a special suite of microorganisms that resists depletion. "Apparently," Woods and the Wisconsin geographer Joseph M. McCann argued in a presentation last summer, "at some threshold level ... dark earth attains the capacity to perpetuate—even regenerate itself—thus behaving more like a living 'super'-organism than an inert material."

In as yet unpublished research the archaeologists Eduardo Neves, of the University of São Paulo; Michael Heckenberger, of the University of Florida; and their colleagues examined terra preta in the upper Xingu, a huge southern tributary of the Amazon. Not all Xingu cultures left behind this living earth, they discovered. But the ones that did generated it rapidly—suggesting to Woods that terra preta was created deliberately. In a process reminiscent of dropping microorganism-rich starter into plain dough to create sourdough bread, Amazonian peoples, he believes, inoculated bad soil with a transforming bacterial charge. Not every group of Indians there did this, but quite a few did, and over an extended period of time.

When Woods told me this, I was so amazed that I almost dropped the phone. I ceased to be articulate for a moment and said things like "wow" and "gosh." Woods chuckled at my reaction, probably because he understood what was passing through my mind. Faced with an ecological problem, I was thinking, the Indians fixed it. They were in the process of terraforming the Amazon when Columbus showed up and ruined everything.

Scientists should study the microorganisms in terra preta, Woods told me, to find out how they work. If that could be learned, maybe some version of Amazonian dark earth could be used to improve the vast expanses of bad soil that cripple agriculture in Africa—a final gift from the people who brought us tomatoes, corn, and the immense grasslands of the Great Plains.

"Betty Meggers would just die if she heard me saying this," Woods told me. "Deep down her fear is that this data will be misused." Indeed, Meggers's recent Latin American Antiquity article charged that archaeologists who say the Amazon can support agriculture are effectively telling "developers [that they] are entitled to operate without restraint." Resuscitating the myth of El Dorado, in her view, "makes us accomplices in the accelerating pace of environmental degradation." Doubtless there is something to this—although, as some of her critics responded in the same issue of the journal, it is difficult to imagine greedy plutocrats "perusing the pages of Latin American Antiquity before deciding to rev up the chain saws." But the new picture doesn't automatically legitimize paving the forest. Instead it suggests that for a long time big chunks of Amazonia were used nondestructively by clever people who knew tricks we have yet to learn.

I visited Painted Rock Cave during the river's annual flood, when it wells up over its banks and creeps inland for miles. Farmers in the floodplain build houses and barns on stilts and watch pink dolphins sport from their doorsteps. Ecotourists take shortcuts by driving motorboats through the drowned forest. Guys in dories chase after them, trying to sell sacks of incredibly good fruit.

All of this is described as "wilderness" in the tourist brochures. It's not, if researchers like Roosevelt are correct. Indeed, they believe that fewer people may be living there now than in 1491. Yet when my boat glided into the trees, the forest shut out the sky like the closing of an umbrella. Within a few hundred yards the human presence seemed to vanish. I felt alone and small, but in a way that was curiously like feeling exalted. If that place was not wilderness, how should I think of it? Since the fate of the forest is in our hands, what should be our goal for its future?

Novel Shores

Hernando de Soto's expedition stomped through the Southeast for four years and apparently never saw bison. More than a century later, when French explorers came down the Mississippi, they saw "a solitude unrelieved by the faintest trace of man," the nineteenth-century historian Francis Parkman wrote. Instead the French encountered bison, "grazing in herds on the great prairies which then bordered the river."

To Charles Kay, the reason for the buffalo's sudden emergence is obvious. Kay is a wildlife ecologist in the political-science department at Utah State University. In ecological terms, he says, the Indians were the "keystone species" of American ecosystems. A keystone species, according to the Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson, is a species "that affects the survival and abundance of many other species." Keystone species have a disproportionate impact on their ecosystems. Removing them, Wilson adds, "results in a relatively significant shift in the composition of the [ecological] community."

When disease swept Indians from the land, Kay says, what happened was exactly that. The ecological ancien régime collapsed, and strange new phenomena emerged. In a way this is unsurprising; for better or worse, humankind is a keystone species everywhere. Among these phenomena was a population explosion in the species that the Indians had kept down by hunting. After disease killed off the Indians, Kay believes, buffalo vastly extended their range. Their numbers more than sextupled. The same occurred with elk and mule deer. "If the elk were here in great numbers all this time, the archaeological sites should be chock-full of elk bones," Kay says. "But the archaeologists will tell you the elk weren't there." On the evidence of middens the number of elk jumped about 500 years ago.

Passenger pigeons may be another example. The epitome of natural American abundance, they flew in such great masses that the first colonists were stupefied by the sight. As a boy, the explorer Henry Brackenridge saw flocks "ten miles in width, by one hundred and twenty in length." For hours the birds darkened the sky from horizon to horizon. According to Thomas Neumann, a consulting archaeologist in Lilburn, Georgia, passenger pigeons "were incredibly dumb and always roosted in vast hordes, so they were very easy to harvest." Because they were readily caught and good to eat, Neumann says, archaeological digs should find many pigeon bones in the pre-Columbian strata of Indian middens. But they aren't there. The mobs of birds in the history books, he says, were "outbreak populations—always a symptom of an extraordinarily disrupted ecological system."

Throughout eastern North America the open landscape seen by the first Europeans quickly filled in with forest. According to William Cronon, of the University of Wisconsin, later colonists began complaining about how hard it was to get around. (Eventually, of course, they stripped New England almost bare of trees.) When Europeans moved west, they were preceded by two waves: one of disease, the other of ecological disturbance. The former crested with fearsome rapidity; the latter sometimes took more than a century to quiet down. Far from destroying pristine wilderness, European settlers bloodily created it. By 1800 the hemisphere was chockablock with new wilderness. If "forest primeval" means a woodland unsullied by the human presence, William Denevan has written, there was much more of it in the late eighteenth century than in the early sixteenth.

Cronon's Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (1983) belongs on the same shelf as works by Crosby and Dobyns. But it was not until one of his articles was excerpted in The New York Times in 1995 that people outside the social sciences began to understand the implications of this view of Indian history. Environmentalists and ecologists vigorously attacked the anti-wilderness scenario, which they described as infected by postmodern philosophy. A small academic brouhaha ensued, complete with hundreds of footnotes. It precipitated Reinventing Nature? (1995), one of the few academic critiques of postmodernist philosophy written largely by biologists. The Great New Wilderness Debate (1998), another lengthy book on the subject, was edited by two philosophers who earnestly identified themselves as "Euro-American men [whose] cultural legacy is patriarchal Western civilization in its current postcolonial, globally hegemonic form."

It is easy to tweak academics for opaque, self-protective language like this. Nonetheless, their concerns were quite justified. Crediting Indians with the role of keystone species has implications for the way the current Euro-American members of that keystone species manage the forests, watersheds, and endangered species of America. Because a third of the United States is owned by the federal government, the issue inevitably has political ramifications. In Amazonia, fabled storehouse of biodiversity, the stakes are global.

Guided by the pristine myth, mainstream environmentalists want to preserve as much of the world's land as possible in a putatively intact state. But "intact," if the new research is correct, means "run by human beings for human purposes." Environmentalists dislike this, because it seems to mean that anything goes. In a sense they are correct. Native Americans managed the continent as they saw fit. Modern nations must do the same. If they want to return as much of the landscape as possible to its 1491 state, they will have to find it within themselves to create the world's largest garden.

publicado no The Atlantic Monthly; March 2002; 1491; Volume 289, No. 3; 41-53.

Outros artigos de Charles C. Mann: AQUI.

Charles C. Mann (19th of October 2011)

Charles Mann's interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air (NPR) about his new book "1493:Uncovering the New World that Columbus Created": PODCAST


From Atlantic Unbound: Interviews: "The Pristine Myth" (March 7, 2002)
Charles C. Mann talks about the thriving and sophisticated Indian landscape of the pre-Columbus Americas

Indian Country Today interview with Charles C. Mann about his new book: 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus –  published in Indian Country Today 20 & 25 December 2005

New York Times list of the 100 Notable Books of the Year: "This sweeping portrait of pre-Columbian civilization argues that it was far more populous and sophisticated than previously thought."

Between the Lines With Charles C. Mann – Time Magazine / Aug. 17, 2005

Bestselling Book Challenges Long-held Theories About Life in America Before Columbus – WorldNewsSite.com / October 2005

Charles Mann's mission: How the Amherst-based author seeks to influence the telling of history – Gazettenet.com / Friday, July 15, 2011

Drastic Ecological Change Brought About by Columbus – Part 1 | Part 2

Ancient Earthmovers of the Amazon  (PODCAST) – Science Magazine  
The Western Amazon's "Garden Cities" – Science Magazine
Pre-Columbian Urbanism, Anthropogenic Landscapes, and the Future of the Amazon – Science Magazine