The Great Divide

by Peter Watson

  Judging from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century eyewitness accounts, bison are not particularly fearful of humans provided they are left alone. But they quickly become skittish. ‘They can be gently herded a mile or so without trouble, but after that they begin to break and run, when it is almost impossible to stop them.’33 The eyewitness accounts report that the hunters would slowly ease the animals in the required direction, taking several days about it and sometimes using bison hides as a disguise. They could shout at the animals to move them about, provided they didn’t do it too often. Then, when there was nowhere for the bison to go but to their death – over a cliff, into a dead-end gully, into a sand dune – the hunters would capitalise on the propensity of bison to panic. Amid the stampede, and after the animals had fallen over a cliff, or been stuck in soft sand, each hunter would pick out a single beast, and thrust his spear through his target’s rib cage into the heart.34 George Frison, a palaeo-archaeologist from the University of Wisconsin, took a projectile point that had been found in Hell Gap, north of Guernsey, also in Wisconsin, and bound it to a slotted pine shaft with sinew sealed with pine pitch. By either thrusting or throwing the eleven-foot spear he found that he could puncture the hide of a domesticated ox, and that a hard thrust would sometimes penetrate to the heart.

  In some ways, killing was the easy part. Once the stampede was over, the hunters faced many hours of arduous labour, sweating in teams, cutting up several animals at once. At first, they rolled the bison on to its belly, cut the hide down the back, and pealed it along the flanks to form a carpet for the flesh. Each animal produced about 470 lbs of meat, 45 lbs of fat and 35 lbs of edible internal organs. One stampede could sustain more than a hundred people for more than a month.35

  These details, it is true, are based in part on eyewitness accounts from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But it is unlikely that there was much change since the 9000–6000 BC period. The fact that bison hunting endured for so long must mean that it was a successful adaptation to local conditions. And in many areas of North America, as we have seen, agriculture didn’t take hold until five hundred or so years before the Europeans appeared. This all shows that there is nothing inevitable about the advent of agriculture. Many archaeologists and palaeontologists regard the invention of agriculture as man’s greatest idea, his most innovative invention. Yet, by definition, whole swathes of the New World never had any need for it. The coincidence of a warm, dryish climate, the right type of grass, and an undomesticable but abundant large mammal, conspired to produce in North America the largest area on earth where agriculture never developed. This had enormous consequences for the development of civilisation – indeed, it has consequences for the very concept of civilisation itself.

  SALMON AND CEMETERIES

  Around 6000 BC another change, profound but slow, took place. After thousands of years of rising and falling, as the inflow of glacier melt-waters was counteracted by the raising of the land as it was freed from the weight of ice bearing down on it, sea levels at last stabilised. One result was that vast shoals of salmon began to swarm up the great rivers of the north-west Pacific coast to reproduce and die. We know this because, at this date, salmon bones begin to overwhelm all others in the middens, and slate points (for spearing fish) replace microliths. There were rich pickings: the regular arrival of the salmon, in such colossal numbers, was like a harvest, no less abundant and therefore hardly less difficult to bring in than corn.

  People learned how to fillet the fish and lay them out on racks to be dried in the sun and wind; or they were suspended from ceilings and preserved in the smoke from the communal hearths. In addition to the salmon, north-west coast Indians hunted seals and otters as well as deer and bear and they collected berries, acorns and other nuts.36 The sheer abundance of wild foods, and the reliable regularity of the salmon meant that the Native Americans of ‘Cascadia’ (derived from the Cascade Mountain range which extends from British Columbia to northern California) were among the first on the continent to occupy permanent villages. We know that they were sufficiently successful and sedentary to afford specialist craftsmen and there is evidence that they traded (obsidian). Their populations increased and leaders emerged but the societies achieved this level of complexity only after 500 BC.37

  Other than a few post holes, however, the Cascadia villages show no sign of houses.38 Presumably, this is because the houses were seasonal and therefore too flimsy to leave any traces. Theirs was a semi-sedentary way of life.

  Over the following few thousand years, the salmon catches became bigger, as new technology was invented to harvest them in ever greater numbers. Very likely, some clans tried to claim ownership of the best fishing rivers: we infer this because there is evidence of regular fighting between clans – remains of bodies with wounds of violence. (And also with arthritis, a risk from marine diets.)39

  The Namu site on the central British Columbia coast, near Bella Bella, opposite Hunter Island, is dated to 10000 to 5000 BC with microblades appearing at about 7000 BC, the same time as numerous sea-mammal bones. By 5000 BC, however, their diets had changed to salmon and herring, ‘to the point where semi-sedentary winter occupation of the site was the likely norm’. Shellfish came in at about 3000 BC and this salmon and shellfish diet persisted for 2,000 years.

  Fish diets, naturally enough, were not as dominant inland as they were on the coast, but along most rivers fish bones are represented more and more after about 5800 BC. Pit-house settlements, semi-sedentary, are usually associated with salmon remains.

  The remains of houses and camps do become better documented at about this date. The Koster site in the Illinois River Valley, which famously has fourteen stratified occupation levels, dating from about 8500 BC until AD 1200, shows a seasonal camp that covered about 0.75 acres, with temporary dwellings at horizon eleven, dating to 6000 BC. An extended family group of about 25 people returned to the same location repeatedly, the stone of their tools suggesting they also occupied sites in West Virginia and Missouri, thousands of miles away. Oval graves were found, containing four adults and three infants, buried with three dogs in nearby shallow pits.40

  Horizon Eight (5600–5000 BC) had evidence of four occupations, with houses measuring 20–35 by 12–15 feet and covering 1.75 acres. The long walls of the houses were made up of wooden posts up to ten inches in diameter, which were laid out in trenches about eight to ten feet apart. Branches and clay filled the gaps in between. Analysis of fish scales (which grow throughout the year) suggests the inhabitants occupied the site from late spring through summer. They harvested only those plants that were easier to cull and this shift, to a narrower range of foods, is mirrored at other Midwestern sites.41

  An unusual configuration at Windover, near Titusville in Florida, provides a different perspective on the 6000–5000 BC period. Windover was an Early Archaic burial area, where artefacts were deposited in a pond, the dead being immersed within forty-eight hours of death, in peat and water whose neutral chemistry ensured near-perfect preservation. Seven different textile weaves used for clothing were found in the peat, the thread coming from the Sabal Palm and/or Saw Palmetto. Garments – bags, matting and ponchos – were produced, using weaves with as many as ten strands per centimetre – very fine. They also used bottle gourds (Lagenaria siceraria), perhaps the earliest example of this type of container to be discovered in North America.42

  Around this time, too, as well as the remains of the first houses, we see a change from ‘free wandering’ to ‘centrally based wandering’. In other words, instead of wandering from one makeshift campsite to another, clans now started returning to the same base location year after year. This change, at about 4500 BC, went with clans ranging up and down their own segments of river valleys. After this time, however, rivers themselves changed: enough years had passed since the Ice Ages for backwaters and oxbows to form. As a result, aquatic resources became very rich in some areas, so much so that it paid to stay put in one place for months at a time. We know thi
s because middens now began to grow in size.43

  There are two other clues that sedentary settlement was growing – more substantial dwellings, and cemeteries. Koster has provided the best evidence of relatively permanent houses but elsewhere specially prepared clay floors are seen (Upper Tombigbee River Valley in Mississippi). These floors, we know, were built before 4300 BC.

  Formal cemeteries now occur, particularly in the central Mississippi drainage. These cemeteries are usually large, shallow pits with as many as forty people laid out with no particular spacing. The grave goods do not appear to be associated with specific individuals. ‘Everything points to egalitarian societies in which individual status was unimportant, where leadership and authority were reflected more in age and experience or skill as a hunter, than in material possessions.’ Little differentiated male from female, or social rank, though eight people – mostly men – were buried in clay-capped grave pits, suggesting they were especially important. Another grave contained a bundle of eagle talons, the remains of a bear’s paw bones and other objects. A shaman?44

  The sudden appearance of cemeteries and burial mounds in fertile river valleys almost certainly marks a dramatic change in prehistoric Indian life. Once people mark their lineages and do so by interment, they are laying a claim to the land and the vital food resources it generates. They are saying, in effect, that the land was once owned by their ancestors, that it belongs to them, and that, in order to keep it, they must remain on it.45

  In the central Mississippi drainage, sedentism had emerged as early as 4000 BC. Moreover, with the identification of fixed territories, fixed boundaries may have emerged for the first time, sparking at least sporadic tribal warfare and it is this which may have produced a characteristic form of territorial marking – burial mounds, cemeteries at the top of ridges which could be seen from miles away. This practice continued for 5,000 years, until maize agriculture was introduced throughout the Mid-west, and it remained important in some locations up until historic times.46

  At about this time too, the proportion of newborn and young animals found among the remains in excavations doubles from about a quarter to a half of the total. This may reflect choice on the part of more sophisticated animal breeders and/or the increase in infant mortality that occurs when animals are corralled in crowded conditions and infectious diseases are more likely (a dilemma that is still with us today).

  We see here, then, a picture that is substantially different from that in Eurasia. In the Americas we see the development of sedentism, just as we did in western Asia, but this time it takes the form, mainly, of temporary villages or hamlets, base-camps which are used (and, later on, regularly returned to) for part of the year, culminating in the identification of territory, not by houses as such, permanent houses, but by cemeteries.

  Agriculture is invented in the New World not much later than (and maybe simultaneously with) agriculture in the Old World, and with much the same kind of plant (which ‘waits for the harvester’), but it does not appear to have been at all the momentous – epoch-changing – event that it was in the Old World, certainly not everywhere. It did not lead, anywhere near as rapidly, to the invention of pottery, metallurgy, and the evolution of villages into cities. This did happen in some locations, which are considered in more detail later, but elsewhere part-year sedentism, herding and hunter-gathering continued for centuries, even millennia, even until historical times.

  Almost certainly, this had to do with the abundance of game and other food supplies, and the relatively sparse population, in North America at least. Given this state of affairs, there simply was no need for agriculture: part-time sedentism, herding and hunter-gathering were quite efficient enough as enduring ways of life.

  But this did have enormous consequences. Hunter-gatherers, constantly on the move, have no need of permanent, still less monumental architecture. They have no need of ceramic pots, which are far too heavy, and too brittle, to carry around from place to place. On top of that, the gods of hunter-gatherers will be different: by definition they inhabit many different landscapes and depend on animals, as much as on plants. The weather and rivers are less important to them, or important in different ways. Their gods therefore differ.

  Material goods are no less important to hunter-gatherers and herders but, since they are always on the move, they need lighter, less rigid, more flexible goods, easy to roll up and carry away. So instead of ceramics, they will turn to bags, pouches, nets, ropes, blankets and in turn that means that weaving, sewing and knotting are more important to them than clay working or metallurgy. Of course, it so happens that bags, pouches, sandals (the earliest carbon-dated to 7500 BC), tailored clothing, blankets, nets (if not their sinkers), baskets and textiles are more perishable. And of course, not only the objects are lost; so too are the decorations that adorned them, and any symbolic meanings they may have had.

  What we have here, then, in the New World is a clear but gradual change in human development: early man responded to the natural world around him, adapting, and with no real need for agriculture. As far as his relationships were concerned, he had to cope with wild creatures. They were less malleable but also very different from one another: goats and sheep, or horses and cattle, are more alike than jaguars and bison and salmon. So societies in the Americas differed far more from one another than societies in the Old World, which lived off cereals and domesticated mammals.

  America was then, as now, a land of abundance. This has more implications for the Old World than the New. It returns us to the old question, never satisfactorily answered: why agriculture developed when it did in the Old World?

  • Part Three •

  WHY HUMAN NATURE EVOLVED DIFFERENTLY IN THE OLD WORLD AND THE NEW

  • 15 •

  ERIDU AND ASPERO: THE FIRST CITIES SEVEN AND A HALF THOUSAND MILES APART

  In chapter 7 we followed Jacques Cauvin’s account of the developments in the worship of the Great Goddess and the Bull in the Natufian and Khiamian cultures of the Middle East, at around 10000– 9500 BC, before domestication proper had emerged. Cauvin made it clear that this development was a response to new conditions which had emerged in that part of the world – the Great Goddess was an old, traditional object of worship, but the Bull, as a representative of the male principle, and of sheer power, was also a prominent member of new types of animal that warmer conditions had brought early peoples into contact with. And, as we shall see, these images remained in force – in one form or another – for thousands of years.

  In the New World, the earliest evidence we have of religious activity is somewhat later – 7000–5000 BC – but here too the influence of environment was all important, and these images lasted for almost as long. The thought processes were, however, very different.

  This early evidence of religious activity in the New World occurs among the Chinchorros of Chile. It would appear that these people had a sedentary maritime existence very early on along the Pacific coast and for specific reasons: there were several unique environmental features to be found in this arid region – a stable landscape with mild seasonal changes, pleasant year-round temperatures, ready access to sources of fresh water and plenty of marine food (they were particularly dependent on sea lions). If they had arrived from the north, from coastal Peru, they would already have had a maritime technology of one kind or another; if they had arrived from inland, from the Andean highlands, then at that latitude they may well have come from Lake Titicaca and, again, would have had some knowledge of fishing techniques.

  The Chinchorros used throwing sticks, harpoons, weights for fish-hooks, stone knives and basketry. Trace mineral analysis of their remains show that they subsisted on fish, sea mammals and coastal birds, and their skulls show evidence of external auditory exostoses, a pathology related to diving in cold waters. They had a sedentary way of life from a very early time, settlements ranging from a few huts at the site known as Acha 2, to about 180 huts at Caleto Abtao at Antofagasta. But it is their practice of mu
mmification that particularly attracts our attention: the Chinchorro practised mummification two thousand years before the more well-known tradition in Egypt. Many coastal sites of South America – from Ecuador to Peru, and dated as early as 8000 BC – show maritime adaptation but nowhere else is there evidence of artificial mummification. This practice began in the valley of the River Camarones and extended to Arica, at the very northern tip of Chile, on the border with Peru, both being part of the Atacama desert which is, according to NASA, the driest desert on Earth. It is these arid conditions that were all-important in a religious context because it is in such circumstances – as in Egypt thousands of years later – that mummification occurs naturally. What a shock these early peoples must have had, to discover that some ancestors, apparently, did not die and putrefy, as most people did, but continued to exist, in a state that appeared to be somewhere between life and death.

  Having observed natural mummification, the Chinchorros developed their own artificial mummification procedures, which were exceedingly elaborate, involving a detailed knowledge of anatomy, dissection and desiccation (even facial details and genitalia were intact thousands of years later), according to Bernardo T. Arriaza, an anthropologist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and at the University of Tarapacá, Arica, in Chile. They also showed other cultural innovations, such as post-mortem trepanation, bows and arrows and intentional skull deformation (generally regarded as a device to enhance group identity). The average skull capacity was 1400 cc, the same as is normal today.1

  There were three forms of artificial mummification, as developed over time. Black mummies were disassembled and reassembled with the soft tissues removed, without leaving any visible signs, and with wooden sticks replacing the longer limbs. A few were left unclothed. In a sense they were as much like statues as cadavers, some showing signs of repainting, suggesting that they were kept on show for a considerable time, before they were buried in groups. Red mummies came later and were painted with clay. Mud mummies, the third type, seem to have been covered in mud, rather than painted, and ‘glued’ to the floor of the grave pit, using the mud that, in effect, attached the figure seamlessly to the floor, making it part of the ground beneath, suggesting they were buried straight away and never moved. Arriaza speculates that this represents a change in ‘theology’, that mummies were now seen as ‘belonging’ to the land, perhaps because the community was under threat from outside.