by Peter Watson
José de Acosta’s De Procuranda Indorum Salute was written a little later than Las Casas’ treatise, in 1576. His most original contribution, which advanced the understanding of anthropology, was, first, to divide barbarians into three categories, and then to distinguish three kinds of native. At the top, he said, were those who, like the Chinese and Japanese, had stable republics, with laws and law courts, cities and books. Next came those who, like the Mexicans and Peruvians, lacked the art of writing and ‘civil and philosophical knowledge’, but possessed forms of government. Lowest were those who lived ‘without kings, without compacts, without magistrates or republic, and who changed their dwelling-place, or–if they were fixed–had those that resembled the cave of a wild beast.’49 Acosta based his work heavily on research, as we would say, which enabled him to distinguish between the Mexica and the Inca, who formed empires and lived in settlements and did not ‘wander about like beasts’, and the Chuncos, the Chiriguanes, the Yscayingos and all the peoples of Brazil who were nomadic and lacked all known forms of civil organisation.50 He also thought that the Indians lived in fear of their gods–an important difference, he said, between Christianity and paganism. The fact that Indians had some laws and customs, but that they were deficient or conflicted with Christian practices, showed he said that Satan had beaten Columbus to it in the discovery of the New World.51
Again, these arguments are more important than they look at first sight. The old theories, that geography and climate were primarily responsible for cultural diversity, were being replaced. A new issue was migration. ‘If the inhabitants of America were indeed descendants of Noah, as orthodox thought insisted that they must be, it was clear that they must have forgotten the social virtues in the course of their wanderings. Acosta, who held that they came to the New World overland from Asia, believed that they had turned into hunters during their migration. Then, by degrees, some of them collected together in certain regions of America, recovered the habit of social life, and began to constitute polities.’52 The importance (and the modernity) of this argument lay in its hypothesis or assumption that there was a sequence of development from barbarism to civility. This further implied that the ancestors of modern Europeans had once been like the fifteenth and sixteenth-century inhabitants of America. The natives of Florida, according to Las Casas, were still ‘in that first rude state which all other nations were in before there was anyone to teach them…We ought to consider what we, and all the other nations of the world were like, before Jesus Christ came to visit us.’53 By the same token, the existence of primitives in the New World appeared to support the Judaeo-Christian idea of time, that it was linear rather than cyclical.54
A final element in the discovery of America was the notion that the moderns had achieved something that had not been achieved by antiquity. The idea of a distant golden age was thus undermined, at the same time that the discoveries demonstrated incontrovertibly the value of first-hand experience over inherited tradition. ‘The age which they call golden,’ wrote Jean Bodin, the sixteenth-century French philosopher, ‘if it be compared with ours, would seem but iron…’55
So much for the European perspective, and the immediate effects of the discovery of America (some longer-term effects are discussed later, in Chapter 28). But, in the realm of ideas, what exactly did the Europeans discover? It took many years–centuries–to answer that question but, in 1986, the D’Arcy McNickle Center for the History of the American Indian, which had been created in 1972 to improve the quality of research and teaching in Indian history, commissioned an inquiry into just this subject, America in 1492, to mark the 500th anniversary of the discovery of the New World in 1992. Much of what follows is based on the findings of that project.56
In 1492, there were around 75 million Indians living in the Americas. Figures for what is now the continental United States vary. The D’Arcy McNickle figure is 6 million but Douglas Ubelaker, of the Smithsonian Institution, in the Handbook of North American Indians, says the most accurate estimate is 1,890,000 at an average density of eleven people per 100 square kilometres.57 Whichever figure it was, the spread of the Indians was not what it became. The Plains Indians, for example, had as yet no horses–because these were introduced by Europeans. ‘Far from being the stereotype of war-bonneted warriors, they were essentially farmers who planted gardens along the Plains rivers and hunted game on foot.’58
Many of the customs of the Indians were very much at variance with what Europeans were used to. The subarctic people, the people we call Eskimos or Inuits, invariably shared meat among other members of the tribe because they believed that animals would be more co-operative with hunters who were themselves generous.59 On the Pacific coast the tribes were distinguished by huge totem poles. They used more than a hundred herbs and plants and were familiar with their nutritional and medicinal properties.60 They had special lodges, or houses, used for ceremonial purification and for curing illness.61 Many tribes had gruesome initiation ceremonies, rites of passage by means of which adolescents became adults. Tobacco was widely used for ceremonial purposes–a practice that had devastating consequences for mankind. Then there was the practice of creating kivas–huge underground halls used for ritual and as club-rooms for men. Sometimes the kivas had their walls adorned with ritual paintings, though it was common practice for them to be painted over once the ceremony was finished. Art in America had a different meaning than in Renaissance Europe.
There were, however, many parallels with practices in the Old World. The Indians had evolved the concept of the ‘soul’, though members of some tribes had multiple souls. Likewise, they had evolved marriage and agriculture (strip-farming run by families, slash- and-burn, floodplain farming, terraced fields in the mountainous regions). As in other areas of the world, the women gathered the local plants while the men hunted. Death was surrounded by elaborate ritual and many tribes had discovered how to mummify bodies. In certain places, widows were killed alongside their husbands, recalling a similar practice, suttee, in India. Cooking was advanced (‘barbecue’ is a Taino word), and fasting developed–as in the Old World–in connection with religious observance. A variety of beer existed, brewed from manioc. Obsidian was used and revered as much as in the Old World. There was a form of counting (but see page 452), taxation and some tribes even had a class of people ‘who could only be described as civil servants’.62
The most obvious difference, in terms of everyday life, was the widespread practice in the Americas of living in ‘longhouses’. Among the Iroquois these houses might be as much as 300 feet long, and were occupied by several families all at the same time, each of whom belonged to the same clan. Men married into these longhouses, which, if all the existing quarters were taken, were simply made even longer. ‘As many as thirty nuclear families, or between one and two hundred people, related by blood and marriage, occupied each dwelling. Traditionally, the centre aisles of the longhouse split the buildings lengthwise. Paired family quarters faced each other, like compartments in a sleeping car, with a shared cooking hearth in the central aisle.’63 Only two wall posts separated each family, which had its own fire that was always smouldering. ‘Family hammocks (a New World word) were hung in a way that also served as a symbolic division of space.’64
The Tupinamba, in Brazil, were cannibals. They, together with the Caribs and Cubeos, believed in consubstantiation, and eating human flesh was part of the ritual, important to maintain the survival of the race and ensure the goodwill of ancestral spirits.65 No less barbaric, so far as the early explorers were concerned, was the practice of headhunting, carried out by the Mundurucú, who inhabited the dense forests of the Amazon basin. These Mundurucú were feared for their aggressiveness and enforced their will by the gruesome practice of severing the heads of their enemies. However, any warrior who performed this act took on a heavy burden, for it sparked its own ritual that could last up to three years. ‘When a head was taken its preparation was begun immediately. Long before the men’s return to the village,
the brains were removed and the teeth knocked out and retained. The head was then parboiled and dried, making the skin like parchment. A cord was strung through the mouth and out of one of the nostrils. The gaping eyes were closed with beeswax. The successful headhunter was considered an awesome hero with sacred status. He had to abstain from everyday activities, including sexual relations with his wife or any other woman. He took a ritual bath in the morning so as to avoid the sight of a woman. Spending most of his days in a hammock in the men’s house, he talked sparingly and only on serious subjects. When he did eat he sat next to his wife but back to back…On the anniversary of the “catch” the skin was stripped from the skull, in another elaborate ceremony, and a year later the teeth were strung together and hung in a basket in the hero’s house in a final celebration. After three years of this, the hero resumed his normal station in life.’66
In the early years, the amassing of new facts was haphazard. As time passed, however, and scholars followed the merchant-explorers, a more systematic picture began to emerge. We may start with the position in regard to languages. ‘In 1492 as many as two thousand mutually unintelligible languages were spoken in the Western hemisphere. Of these approximately 250 were spoken in north America, some 350 in Mexico and central America, and no fewer than 1,450 in south America.’67 Native American languages were no less sophisticated than Old World tongues; they lacked some features but others were more common than in Eurasia. ‘Rare among Indian languages, for instance, was the employment of suffixes on nouns to express such cases as nominative, accusative and dative (as occurs in Latin, for example), or of nominal and pronominal gender references (like the English “he” and “she” or the Spanish “el” and “la”).’68 At the same time, many Indian languages distinguish between nouns representing animate and inanimate entities and between objects possessed by definition (such as kin relations and body parts) and those incidentally owned (knives or tools, say). Inevitably, perhaps, there was a good number of sounds unknown in the Old World–in particular, glottal stops (an interruption of breath produced by a sudden closing of the vocal cords, as in the pause between ‘uh’ and ‘oh’ in the English phrase ‘uh-oh’).69 Some words lacked vowels and there was too the unfamiliar practice of repeating or doubling a word, or part of a word, so as to alter its meaning. The Washo Indians of North America’s Great Basin, for example, used gusu to mean ‘buffalo’, whereas gususu meant ‘buffalo here and there’.70 In other cases, verbs varied according to the validity of the information–for example, whether the information being communicated was personally known to the speaker, was mere gossip, or had occurred in a dream.71
Other differences seem more fundamental. In Europe, for instance, the main division of language was into nouns and verbs. In contrast, the Hopi of Arizona treated entities of short duration–lightning, say, or a wave or flame–as verbs, while entities that endured longer were nouns.72 In Navajo, the English sentence ‘He picks something up’ can be translated in twelve different ways, ‘according to whether the object is round and solid, long and slender, animate, mud-like etc’.73 Metaphor was not so different from European usage (poetry was described as ‘flower songs’, a woman was ‘a skirt’) but the absence of speech was replete with meaning. For example, Apaches observed silence when meeting strangers, during the initial stages of courtship, or with relatives after a long period of separation.74 Some tribes had trade languages, never spoken at home but only when merchants engaged in exchange with strangers.
Except in a few celebrated cases, the Indians lacked writing. This meant they had no written histories, philosophies or scriptures to fall back on.75 But that did not stop them having religions, a concept of the soul and a number of origin myths, which often involved the sun, the moon and subterranean worlds, which had different layers. Childhood was acknowledged, since puberty and menstruation were marked with rites of passage. Interestingly, in some tribes the puberty rite seemed intended to shake adolescents out of their childish environment. In the case of the Hopi, for example, children were never allowed to see certain religious figures without their elaborate masks, and were encouraged to think of them as spirits. At the ceremony of puberty, however, they were shown the figures behind the masks, as if to warn the newly-emergent adult to put away childish beliefs.76
The New World religions often had a priestly caste and sometimes ‘Virgins of the Sun’, selected when they were just ten, were chosen for roles ‘that ranged from temple service to sacrificial victims’.77 Sacrifice was widespread and could be very bloodthirsty: Pawnee virgins took part in a four-day ceremony before being shot through the heart.78 But probably the most fundamental difference in a religious sense was the widespread use of hallucinogens. Here the tribes were led by shamans who had a medico-religious function, as in the Old World. Tribes had chiefs (though some only in times of war), who might serve also as shaman. Certain tribes recognised six types of gender: hyper-men (warriors), men, berdaches (androgynous), amazons, women, and hyper-women (who excelled at, say, female crafts). Berdaches and amazons were sometimes used as mediators in disputes.79 The heart, not the brain or face, was considered the essence of a person, and shamans would sing ‘heart songs’ to sick people to cure them.80 Many tribes conversed with animals and plants and assumed they were understood.
Native Americans had a very different understanding of the ‘self’ or ‘person’.81 Basically, they emphasised selflessness because people took their identity from various subgroups in society and had no separate status. People who behaved in a selfish way turned into witches, who were as likely to be men as women.
Babies were born with contributions from father, mother, and spirits. The father contributed hard substances, like bone, and the mother soft ones like flesh and blood. In the Pacific Northwest it was believed that unborn infants inhabited a special place, where they lived like other humans until they sought out parents here on earth. In general, they were not given names until the trauma of birth was over and it was safe to assume the child would live.82 Girls were given flower names, whereas boys were named after carnivores. But extra names were added in celebration, to mark a child’s first laugh, or whistle, its first word, or even its first haircut.83 The biggest celebration was reserved for the first occasion when a child fulfilled an economic function, such as collecting berries. On occasion the coming of age of a daughter was marked by the removal of her clitoris. This, it was believed, removed any male aspects of her character.84 Men, it was said, did not become fully ‘adult’ until they had grandchildren, a fairly transparent device to keep families together.85
Arguably the most important difference between the two hemispheres lay in ideas concerning economics. In the case of the Aztecs and the Incas, the two most prominent civilisations at the time of the conquest, the death of any ruler placed a great strain on the society. The bodies of the emperor and his queen were mummified and deposited in richly ornamented, specially built palaces. Vast numbers of slaves and concubines were sacrificed to be on hand for the emperor in the hereafter. But that wasn’t all. Great estates were appointed to guard the palaces of the dead and to serve the mummies for ever after. This all meant that, at the end of every reign, a huge new drain on the empire’s resources was added to those already existing.86 In other words, every new dead king made a wasteful situation worse.87 The end result was that labour lost to ‘mummy service’ could only be made up for by the conquest of more people, more land, which was not without risk. One major effect of all this was that the capital necessary to advance individual enterprise never evolved.88
There was such a thing as science in the New World, and a primitive technology, but native Americans had few theories about phenomena as the Old World Europeans did. Both peoples thought that the sun went round the world, and was linked with the growing season. The Indians had the same kind of simple machines that Europeans used, similar to the five simple machines of classical Greek mechanics: the wedge, the inclined plane, the lever, the pulley, and the screw. (The advant
age of a machine is that it augments the force used on it.) Each of these devices were known to the native Americans, who used them in activities from tree-felling to canoe-building. Yet whereas Europeans by the fifteenth century were searching for ultimate causes, whose outcomes could always be predicted, native Americans preferred to control the forces of nature by means of intimate relationships with the spirits that controlled these forces–achieved through ritual or dreams.89 ‘To Europeans the natural world was ruled by laws; to native people, it exercised will…The major point at which European and native science diverged was in the matter of experimentation. It would not have occurred to the Hopis to cease their ceremonies to see if the sun would indeed continue north rather than turning in its path.’90
Several peoples, such as the Navajo, characterised plants as male and female, depending on size and hardness or softness. This notion was based on analogy with men and women, rather than on the actual sexual organs of the plants themselves. Plant names among the Aztecs, for instance, contained a suffix that indicated whether they were food, medicine, or could be used for clothing or building.91 In fact, classification of the natural world was often made on a basis very different from European ideas. The Navajos put insects and bats into the same category because of an ancient myth in which these two types of animal had lived together in a previous world.92
For Europeans the stars in the night sky were the basis for astrology but in America the horizon was more important.93 This was a widespread idea and throughout the continent tribes built their temples to align with features on the horizon that coincided with notable celestial events. ‘Casa Rinconada, a large circular kiva in the Chaco Canyon region of northwestern Mexico, has twenty-eight niches spaced equally around the interior of its stone wall. It also has six somewhat larger and irregularly spaced niches below those. At the time of the summer solstice, for four or five times around that date, light from a window placed high on the northeastern side of the kiva shines on one of the six niches.’94 But the stars were used by Indians to devise their calendar, in the course of which they conceived their own system of counting. Originally this was a Mayan idea but it was improved upon by the Aztecs.95 Calendrical calculations were the main–in fact, the only–use of mathematics among the Mayans, though in the Inca empire mathematical knowledge seems to have been recorded in the quipu.96 This was an information storage system contained on a series of strings knotted together. The strings, some of which had dependent strands, were of different colours and these colours and knots were arranged in sequences. The ‘language’ or code of the quipu has never been deciphered but support for the notion that they were some sort of religious record comes from two pieces of woven fabric that have survived. The weaving on both is very intricate: one has ten rows of thirty-six circles and the diagonal arrangement of circles into groups adds up to 365. In the other piece the rectangles add up to twenty-eight. These pieces surely have some sort of calendrical significance.97
