John M. Marzluff and Tony Angell, "In the Company of Crows and Ravens"

From my old web site:

I feel awe toward wolves, lions, tigers, buffalo, and the rest of the great and noble animals that we have driven near to extinction. I support all our efforts to keep them alive and set aside places for them to live. But the animals I like the best are the clever little creatures that thrive despite our best efforts to get rid of them, often moving into niches left vacant by the mighty beasts we have driven away: animals like coyotes, rats, and especially crows. Crows are wonderful beasts, fearless, adaptable, as smart as monkeys, as hard to get rid of as cockroaches. There is nothing like watching a family of crows drive a hawk away from their nest, seeing how they defeat superior strength and speed with their own brash cleverness. So when I read a glowing recommendation for In the Company of Crows and Ravens (2005) I rushed to the library and snatched up their copy.

Marzluff, a biologist, and Angell, a wildlife artist, know a great deal about crows, and when they relate their own experiences of crows or summarize the research of other biologists their book is fascinating. If you were ever confused about the relationships and distinctions between crows, ravens, rooks, and the rest of the corvid tribe, Marzluff and Angell will set you straight. There are 46 species in the genus Corvidae, all closely related. The larger species, which are scavengers and live mostly in northern forests, we tend to call ravens. The medium-sized birds, which are generalists, we tend to call crows. Smaller species are called jays or jackdaws. All of the larger species have much in common, including high intelligence and complicated relationships with the large predators they live with, such as humans.

The cleverness of these birds is legendary and still excites our admiration. Some ravens in Canada have learned to haul up the lines at ice fishing holes to steal the fish on the ends. New Caledonian crows fashion tools from leaves and twigs and use them to extract insects from logs, just as chimpanzees do. American crows that have been regularly hunted learn the range of a shotgun and sometimes taunt people from just beyond it. They also learn the boundaries of towns where hunting is forbidden and modify their behavior accordingly, acting boldly in town and more prudently outside it. They recognize themselves in mirrors and can even use mirrors to preen themselves. Ravens removing food from a kill site employ elaborate stratagems to put each other off, sometimes pretending to hide their bits of flesh in two or three false caches before finally depositing it. (It is hard to fool a raven, though, and the caches are usually raided anyway.) Crows learn to recognize people who give them trouble, like Marzluff, who regularly traps and bands birds and so has become known to all the crows on the University of Washington campus; they shadow him as he walks around, calling out warnings to their fellows. Crows in Japan have learned to put walnuts under the wheels of cars while they are stopped at traffic lights, and they return to recover the nutmeat the next time the light changes, when traffic stops again. Crows learn from each other, developing local and regional cultures. Corvids have versatile voices and seem to have fairly elaborate "languages." They modulate their alarm calls depending on the kind of danger and how immediate it appears. Marzluff thinks the University of Washington crows have a special alarm call just for him.

Ravens have a fascinating relationship with wolves. Ravens gather around every wolf kill in the north woods, snatching bits of flesh from under the wolves' noses. Even when there is no food around ravens will sometimes harass wolves, sneaking up and grabbing the tails of resting wolves or trying to peck their ears. This "play" may help young ravens learn how aggressive they can afford to be around an elk carcass. Many Indian groups believe that ravens lead both wolves and human hunters to wounded or injured animals; this behavior has not been documented by biologists, buy why not? If the much less intelligent honeyguide can lead people to bees, why can't ravens lead hunters to an elk with a broken leg? The interactions of wolves and ravens may also explain part of the reason wolves hunt in packs. Studies have shown that wolves do best for themselves, in energy terms, when they hunt in pairs; larger groups do only a little better at hunting, not enough to make up for the greater division of the spoils. But it takes a larger group of wolves to keep ravens from eating most of their catch.

One of the best sections of the book describes how corvid populations have changed in response to changes in human behavior. When we were hunters, we were mostly accompanied by ravens. Crows were probably rare in most of North America and Europe, living mainly along the coasts and major rivers. But crows have thrived and spread with agriculture, which remakes the landscape into something much more to their liking. Suburbs and cities are even more welcoming to crows. Ravens are forest birds and their range has generally contracted as agriculture and cities have spread. On the other hand ravens have recently colonized the Mojave Desert, where telephone poles provide them with nesting sites and roadkill a reliable source of food.

Despite all of these wonders, I have to say that I found In the Company of Crows and Ravens disappointing. It is disorganized, repetitive, and it places the writing is just plain bad. The section on the mythology of crows and ravens reads like a bunch of note cards strung together, and it only touches the surface of themes like the trickster myths and the role of ravens as messengers of death. I kept wishing that this book had been written by Berndt Heinrich, whose Ravens in Winter has long been one of my favorite biological books. If someone had given me an electronic draft of Marzluff and Angell's manuscript, in a week I could have cut out a quarter or so of the text and turned the rest into a much tighter and better structured book.

A few years ago I read another science book with the same strengths and the same problems, The Search for the Giant Squid by Richard Ellis. Squid are incredibly cool, but this was a tedious, disorganized, repetitive, long-winded book that I only finished because I had nothing else at hand to read instead. That no one bothered to turn either one of these manuscripts into a good book tells you something important about the publishing industry. Commercial nonfiction books are generally bought before they are written, on the basis of a prospectus and one or a couple of sample chapters. The effects are particularly obvious in The Search for the Giant Squid, in which all of the best stuff is in the first chapter. I suppose somebody at the publisher looks over the finished manuscript and thinks, well, this isn't so great, but quite likely it's the best we're going to get from this science nerd, and since it won't make that much difference to sales anyway we can't be bothered to fix the thing ourselves, so let's just bring it out in the spring list and see what happens.

Which is really too bad, because hiding somewhere inside In the Company of Crows and Ravens is a great book. With some creative, ruthless editing, and perhaps some input from a folklorist, that greatness could have been brought out, and we could have read a classic instead of this occasionally fascinating but disappointingly shapeless book.

January 10, 2008 

Mark Twain on Crows:

In the course of his evolutionary promotions, his sublime march toward ultimate perfection, he has been a gambler, a low comedian, a dissolute priest, a fussy woman, a blackguard, a scoffer, a liar, a thief, a spy, an informer, a trading politician, a swindler, a professional hypocrite, a patriot for cash, a reformer, a lecturer, a lawyer, a conspirator, a rebel, a royalist, a democrat, a practicer and propagator of irreverence, a meddler, an intruder, a busybody, an infidel, and a wallower in sin for the mere love of it. The strange result, the incredible result, of this patient accumulation of all damnable traits is that he does not know what care is, he does not know what sorrow is, he does not know what remorse is, his life is one long, thundering ecstasy of happiness, and he will go to his death untroubled. 

Mound Cities of the Mississippian Indians

Timothy R. Pauketat, Cahokia: Ancient America’s Great City on the Mississippi. New York: The Penguin Library of American Indian History, 2009.

Robert V. Sharp, Ed. Hero, Hawk, and Open Hand: American Indian Art of the Ancient Midwest and South. The Art Institute of Chicago, 2004.

When scholars first explored the mound cities the dotted the American landscape, they wondered who built them. Some believed they were the work of ancient Native Americans, but others thought that some completely different civilization must have been responsible – Phoenicians, Egyptians, the Lost Tribes of Israel. These days it is commonplace to mock those theorists for their ignorant racism, but really it was a hard problem. The Indians of the 1700s and 1800s not only didn’t build mound cities, they had no memory of their ancestors building them nor even any stories about them. Many Indian men were openly contemptuous of the kind of work needed to build massive earthworks. When looters dug into the burial mounds at those cities, they found artifacts of a type and quality unlike anything made by post-contact Indians. So far as I can tell, no white man ever met an Indian who moaned about the olden days when his people lived in cities and drank from jade cups. On the contrary, those Indians prone to ideology liked to brag about the great freedom of their lives in the woods, and they regularly claimed that while the regimented life of a city might be fine for white men, it was totally unsuitable for forest-dwelling Indians. It was often the scholars who knew the most about Indians who refused to believe that their ancestors had built the enormous mounds.

Thanks to modern archaeology, we now know that the mounds were built by Indians. We also know that the mound-building habit arose at several different times in different parts North America, mainly in the Southeast and the lands drained by the Mississippi River. The first massive earthworks in North America were built at Poverty Point in Louisiana as early as 3500 BC. Two distinct mound building cultures arose in the Ohio Valley, the Adena of 1000 to 200 BC, and then the Hopewell of 200 BC to AD 500, who covered the Sciotto Valley with a stupendous series of earthworks aligned to the sun and the stars. But not all Indians built mounds. At some times the habit was confined to a small area, at others it was widely distributed. But in every case the habit eventually faded away, and by 1720 it had completely disappeared. It seems that Indians embarked many times on experiments in “high” civilization, with big towns, massive earthworks, elaborate celestial observatories, and workshops of professional artisans turning out fabulous regalia for a powerful elite, and then a few generations later just walked away from it. They not only didn’t seem to regret giving up civilization, they proudly embraced life in the woods. One wonders if there was a long-standing tension between the power that the elites of a mound city could amass and the desire of others to live free. When disease wiped out the last of the mound cities in the late 1500s, only the freedom-loving, anti-city people remained. And not only did they hate cities and central power, they forgot about their existence as quickly as they could.

The greatest of the mound cities were built by a civilization we call Mississippian, which we can date from AD 1050 to the arrival of Spanish conquistadors in the mid 1500s. Actually one Mississippian people, the Natchez, kept up their old ways into the early 1700s, long enough for French explorers to leave descriptions of their society. Those descriptions are a key source for figuring out what Mississippian civilization was like. But all the other mound cities seem to have been abandoned by 1600, and none of them lasted for more than 200 years.

Cups from Cahokia for the Black Drink, a Holly Extract with Crazy Amounts of Caffeine

The first and greatest of the Mississippian cities was Cahokia, on the floodplain of the Mississippi River just across from modern St. Louis. Timothy Pauketat’s excellent little book is a good introduction to the site, its history, and the history of archaeological efforts to explore and understand it. Pauketat is one of the top scholars of Cahokia, and in this book he does a fine job of presenting his knowledge in a brief, accessible format. My only complaint is that the book lacks illustrations, but I suppose including pictures of even a tiny sample of the most important and spectacular finds from Cahokia would have kept the book from being the inexpensive volume the editors of the Penguin Library of American Indian History obviously wanted.

The most striking thing about Cahokia is that it appeared almost instantaneously, arising from the preceding villager cultures in less time than the margin of error in our most sophisticated dating techniques. Some time within a few years of 1050 AD, a large village on the Cahokia site was razed and the people relocated. In its place arose a vast complex of mounds, surrounding a 50-acre plaza that had been carefully leveled and given a consistent slope so slight you can’t notice it, but sufficient that water drains off easily. The largest of the more than 100 mounds, the Monk’s Mound, was the largest pyramid north of Mexico and the third largest in the New World. The mounds were built of carefully layered earth, in alternating colors, each layer compacted by pounding with wooden poles. Surrounding the mound complex were residential neighborhoods that held 10,000 to 20,000 people. Nor was this all. Three smaller mound cities were built nearby, one in modern St. Louis, one at East Louis, and one along the Mississippi a few miles to the south. These also contained great complexes of mounds, and so far as we can tell they were built at the same time as the mounds at Cahokia, by the same people. The inhabitants of some outlying villages seem to have been serfs, or slaves; their artifacts include many spindle whorls but few weapons, and their skeletons show that they lived on a mostly corn diet, with inadequate protein. Taken together, the Cahokia metropolis spread out across 200 square miles and had a population of more than 50,000. For about 150 years, Cahokia lorded it over the middle Mississippi Valley, growing ever grander and more populous. Then, around 1200 AD, it entered into a rapid decline. A defensive palisade was built that surrounded less than half of the original city center. By 1300 Cahokia had been almost completely abandoned.

Effigy Tobacco Pipe from Cahokia

Pauketat terms the founding of Cahokia a “big bang.” By this he means that it was an event, happening in one place in a brief interval of time, that had repercussions across much of North America for centuries to come. But what was the event, and why did it happen? Archaeology has trouble answering this sort of question, but Pauketat makes a valiant effort. One intriguing possibility is that the event was related to the supernova that was visible across the world in 1054 AD. Like many ancient cultures, the Mississippians were much concerned with celestial events, and they built huge, circular “wood henge” observatories laid out with lines of site that led toward significant celestial events, like the midwinter sunrise. The supernova of 1054 is depicted in several surviving pieces of Native American art, including rock paintings and decorated pottery, so we know Indians were much impressed by it. 

Another possibility concerns the connections between Mississippian civilization and the Toltec civilization of Mexico. Some of the motifs used by Mississippian artists seem to be copied from Mexican objects, some North American myths seem to reflect Maya influence, and more broadly the whole tone of life in the Mississippian mound cities seems too much like that of Maya and Toltec cities for coincidence. On the other hand, next to no actual Mexican objects have been found at North American Indian sites (only one that everyone accepts), so direct contact cannot have been common. Could the connection have been in the form of one person, who traveled to Mexico, saw the Toltec cities, and then came home to Cahokia, where the new star helped him persuade his people to embark on a new way of life? Pauketat seems to believe that there was such a person, a charismatic war leader who built up the Cahokian state from a collection of allied villages into a mighty nation and made a city rise from the marshes.

Copper Plate Depicting Red Horn (Note the Rigid Braid)

The best evidence for the existence of such a founding hero is certain myths preserved by later Indians, especially the Osage and the Winnebago, which have been used to interpret Mississippian cult art. Many of the most elaborate objects depict one semi-divine hero, known variously as Red Horn, He-who-wears-human-heads-as-earrings, or Slapped-with-deer-lungs. Red Horn was connected to the Morning Star; in some traditions he was the Morning Star, in others he was its son. The cult art of Cahokia seems to imply that the ruler was the avatar, or even the actual reincarnation, of Red Horn. (When George Armstrong Custer took the Indian name “Son of the Morning Star,” he was associating himself with this same myth.) Among the Natchez, that late surviving Mississippian kingdom, each ruler was considered to be the reincarnation of the previous one, stretching back to an original who was the Son of the Sun. His coronation took the form of an elaborately staged resurrection, the new ruler at some point slipping into the regalia of the old, so that he appeared to be the old ruler’s corpse brought back to life.

The Natchez king was an absolute ruler with the power of life and death over all his subjects. Or so his ambassadors told the French, and certainly the king’s power was very great. From what we can tell of other Mississippian peoples, power among all of them seems to have been focused in the hands of one man, the scion of a divine lineage. It seems simplest to imagine that this tradition began with an actual great founding king, a man who appropriated for himself the identity of Red Horn and was able to exert great power through his military and religious charisma.

We may even have found this great man’s tomb. One of the most spectacular discoveries at Cahokia was made in a low, ridge topped mound called Mound 72. (Ah, those wildly clever archaeologists and their poetic names!) Here archaeologists uncovered the burial of a large man, probably in his 50s. His skeleton was found on a platform of 20,000 shell beads that may have been the remains of a bead cloak in the shape of a thunderbird (above). Radiocarbon dating places the whole assemblage at around 1080 AD. He was buried just above another person of similar age and size. The excavors thought this was another man and suspected a connection to those myths that give Red Horn a twin brother who was a dark, murderous trickster figure. Recent restudy, however, suggested that the second person was a woman; still waiting for DNA study to settle the question.

A spectacular array of offerings accompanied these burials, including two bushels of mica sheets and more than 700 arrows, their stone points among the mostly finely crafted stone tools ever found in North America. It may be significant that the historic Winnebago offered arrows in tribute to Red Horn.

Many other skeletons were also found in the mound, including those of 52 young women who were almost certainly the victims of human sacrifice. Their skeletons bore no signs of violence, so they were probably strangled, or else their throats were cut, before they were laid carefully in rows in a log-lined tomb. In another pit were 39 other victims who were treated even more harshly. Their bodies were lying haphazardly in their burial pit, and most seem to have been killed by a blow to the head. Many had other wounds, though, and arrowheads were found in two. Perhaps they were prisoners of war. It looks as if they were lined up along the edge of the pit, dispatched with a club, and pushed in, one after another. The finger bones of a few were found digging into the soil, showing that they did not die at once. Given the date of this burial and its extraordinary nature, it seems to me that Pauketat may be right, and it may be the remains of the great city's founding king and those killed to accompany him to the night lands.

As I said, the one problem with Pauketat’s book is that it lacks illustrations. This problem can be solved by turning to Hero, Hawk, and Open Hand, a magnificently illustrated collection of essays on American Indian Art prepared to accompany a 2004 exhibition at the Chicago Art Institute. Not only are the pictures amazing, I found the art historical approach taken in these essays to be very helpful in understanding what Mississippian culture was about. Mississippian culture was an elite, courtly affair, and elaborate rituals accompanied by impressive costumes and splendid cult objects were central to that court culture. So the surviving cult objects are among our best windows into the Mississippian world. For example, you can get a good idea of the importance of warfare in this society by contemplating the many images that depict a divine warrior or human king with a club or mace in one hand and a severed head in the other. 

Numerous other images depicted cosmological scenes, and by putting them together with scraps of Indian myth, we can learn a great deal about how the Mississippians viewed the universe and their place in it. We can also learn something about the connections between the various cult centers, since objects made at Cahokia have been found at other centers such as Etowah, Moundville, and Spiro Mound. I very much recommend this book for anyone who wants to recover the excitement old-style archaeology, when it meant digging beautiful things from the ground and learning from them about forgotten peoples.

And yet for all that we have learned about the Mississippians, the disconnect between their world and that of Indians in the 1700s remains a problem. It seems bizarre that the great city of Cahokia, with its huge mounds, powerful rulers, and villages of serfs, makes no appearance at all in the oral history, folklore, or legends of any tribe. Even the later centers of Moundville (AD 1200 to 1450) and Etowah (AD 1200 to 1375) were forgotten so quickly that by 1700 no Indian could tell Europeans anything about them. I think the causes of this disconnect can be found in the nature of nineteenth-century Indian societies, the Mississippian world itself, and in the problems the people of the mound cities must have had feeding themselves.

Consider, first, the question of why no Mississippian center remained powerful and populous for more than about 150 years. This may have had political causes we can only guess at, but it also had ecological causes we understand very well. Mississippian Indians were farmers, but of a rather primitive sort. Outside a few favored river bottom locales they practiced swidden or "slash and burn" agriculture. That is, they cleared an area by girding the trees to kill them and burning off the brush, grew crops on it for three or four years, and then abandoned the land to grow up naturally for about 20 years until its fertility was restored. Many historic Indians moved their villages about every ten to twenty years, when the local soils were exhausted. A mound city like Cahokia would draw food from a much larger area than a village, but even so the soils within easy reach would become depleted over time. Also, Mississippian agriculture seems to have focused very heavily on corn (maize). Corn is a great crop in terms of calories per acre, but it is not a very good base for human nutrition. Historic Indians reduced this problem by planting beans together with the corn (this also helps keep the soil fertile), but there is not much evidence of beans on Mississippian sites and the corn-beans-squash triad seems to have developed rather late in prehistory. North American Indians had no domestic animals other than dogs, and they always relied on hunting to provide them with animal protein. Trash pits at Cahokia that may be the remains of great public feasts contain the remains of thousands of deer and turkeys. Such consumption would inevitably, over time, deplete the game near the mound city, leaving its inhabitants dependent on an inadequate corn-based diet. These economic facts help to explain why the mound cities were always rather ephemeral, and this lack of continuity at particular sites may help explain why the Mississippians did not develop an enduring historical tradition.

Between the Mississippian cities and historic Indians lay a great historical chasm, the die-off caused by European disease. Our best guess is that between 1540, when Hernando De Soto explored the southeast and brought the first European microbes to the region, and 1800, disease killed at least 90 percent of the Indians in North America. This catastrophe led to the disappearance of many tribes and cultures, and even those that survived suffered huge cultural losses with the deaths of so many knowledgeable people. Across the Mississippi Valley, the surviving cultures seem, by comparison to Mississippians, to be stripped down and simplified. Mississippian ritual was mainly a phenomenon of the highest elite tier, with rather little connection to the lives of most people. It was the peak of the social pyramid. When the base of that pyramid was drastically cut back by death, its pinnacle crashed and disappeared.

But why didn't the Indians remember what they had lost? Perhaps, as I said, because many of them always hated the mound cities and their despotic kings. Perhaps, though, it was simply because they had very little interest in history of that kind. It is a characteristic of most traditional Indians that their sense of time has two poles, the here-and-now and the eternal. They are interested in their living memories, stretching back two or three generations, and in the doings of the gods in the beginning times. This pattern is characteristic of hunter-gatherer and other simple societies worldwide, and it is sometimes used (for example by Vine Deloria) to explain why Indians have little interest in the work of archaeologists. Comparison of Mississippian cult art with later Indian myths shows that the Mississippian cosmology endured, along with many of their stories about gods and heroes. In fact, comparison of American Indian cosmology and shamanistic practice with those of central Siberia shows that some of these ideas are more then 13,000 years old. So the oral culture of the Indians was fully capable of passing down ideas that were important to them. The past of a few hundred years ago, it seems, was not important enough to be remembered.

It has been therefore left to Euro-American scholars to learn about the Mississippian world, and to bring its great treasures to light. Rather unfortunately, most of those treasures have been found in tombs, and the uncovery of Mississippian civilization has therefore come about by the massive looting of Indian graves. At times this has been the accidental byproduct of development, as with the mounds of St. Louis and East St. Louis, flattened to make room for growing modern cities. In some cases it was a frankly commercial enterprise; in the 1930s a business partnership was formed to loot Spiro Mound in Oklahoma and sell off the fabulous artifacts found there. At other times, as with Cahokia's Mound 72, the excavation was done by archaeologists seeking to learn about the past. I certainly have no personal feelings about disturbing graves; I can't imagine any better fate for my remains than that they might one day help archaeologists understand my own time. But many Indians do care. They see the desecration of their ancestors' bones as just another chapter in the long, sorry tale of their conquest, exploitation, expulsion from their homes, and near destruction. I wish this weren't so, but there it is. What, then, is one to make of museum cases or book full of looted grave goods, and arguments about the past based on the desecration of tombs? I think that for the world to know about the mound cities is a great thing, and I don't think that the Mississippian kings, their victims, or contemporary Indians are hurt by the presence of grave good in museums. What we know of the kings tells us that they sought fame, and now they have it. Their victims have also now had their stories told, and they can at least stand along with all the others as witnesses to the evil that can occur when power, narcissism, contempt for others, and religion come together. Modern Indians can point to the Mississippians as the doers of great and terrible deeds, just like the conquering kings who have such a prominent a place in European history. I support the reburial of the bones from those tombs, if there are Indians who want to receive them and give them an honored place. But I think the great works of art, and the knowledge that comes from archaeology, should remain in the public eye, so we can all learn about the Indian past. How can we honor something about which we know nothing at all? 

September 1, 2009; Revised August 9, 2022

Horoscope of Prince Iskandar

Horoscope of Prince Iskandar, grandson of Tamerlane, the Turkman Mongol conqueror. This horoscope shows the positions of the heavens at the moment of Iskandar's birth on 25th April 1384. It was created in 1411 in Shiraz, Iran. The chief astrologer was Imad ad-Din Mahmud al-Kashi, but the names of the artists are not recorded. Huge file at wikimedia commons.

Mark Rothko Lists the Ingredients of Art

Mark Rothko:

The recipe of a work of art – its ingredients – how to make it – the formula.

1. There must be a clear preoccupation with death – intimations of mortality. Tragic art, romantic art, etc. deals with the knowledge of death.
2. Sensuality. Our basis of being concrete about the world. It is a lustful relationship to things that exist.
3. Tension. Either conflict or curbed desire.
4. Irony. This is the modern ingredient – the self-effacement and examination by which a man for an instant can go on to something else.
5. Wit and play . . . for the human element.
6. The ephemeral and chance . . . for the human element.
7. Hope. 10% to make the tragic concept more endurable.

I measure these ingredients very carefully when I paint a picture. It is always the form that follows these elements and the pciture results from the porportions of these elements.

From Daily Rothko

LInks 12 August 2022

The man with the best helmet: Jan Anthonisz van Ravesteyn, Portrait of an Officer, 1612

People have paid up to $50,000 to be interviewed on popular podcasts. Fees in the $2,000 to $5,000 range seem common.

The latest from Pompeii is the excavation of a sort of utility closet in the House of the Enchanted Garden.

The history of messages in bottles, with cool examples.

For your amusement, the Polish Female Winged Hussars.

The decade of sore winners. Victimhood is the favorite drug among Americans these days, no matter how rich and famous.

Who is more skeptical in general, atheists, agnostics, or religious believers?

Education in New Zealand is in turmoil over how to teach Maori culture and history, and, in particular whether Maori traditional knowledge should be taught side by side with western science. The latest blow-up was over an article claiming, on the basis of oral tales about a great ancestor who sailed in a canoe made of human bones, that the Maori reached Antarctica in the 7th century. Jerry Coyne is outraged.

The hoax of the frozen man, supposedly thawed out in 1826 after centuries in the ice.

Oxtankah is a Maya site in coastal Mexico that is being investigated to learn more about Maya seafaring; they certainly traded with Caribbean Islands, at least.

Spitalfields Life on the Watermen's Stairs of London. And Stationers' Hall.

There is much less lightning over the sea than on land. These scientists say the reason is the sea salt in ocean spray. Basically, water droplets containing salt are bigger are have a lower freezing point, so they freeze less often, and it is mainly interaction among ice particles that creates lightning.

Vox reminds us that for a century, major bouts of inflation in the US are closely tied to increases in fossil fuel prices. Yet another reason to put that technological era behind us. In general the era of cheap oil (1920 onward) has been a environmental, political, and moral disaster and the sooner we can stop, the better. This is true regardless of possible climate effects.

The dank complexity of the "Dark Brandon" meme.

Ukraine Links

Ukrainian surprise attack on Russian air defense radars in the south, August 5-7, using American HARM missiles.

And the possible connection between those HARM attacks and the spectacular attack on the Saki naval air station in Crimea. Analysis of the first satellite images here; at least 10 modern jet aircraft destroyed, probably more damaged, plus large quantities of ammunition and fuel lost. One of the blasts was so powerful that cars 360m away were charred wrecks, all their glass gone; buildings 1.6 km away were damaged. On the other hand, some people say this was a special forces attack, not a missile at all. 

Russian officer notes that all of the casualties in his unit have been caused by artillery fire, none by small arms. I've noticed that military guys devote a lot of attention to rifles, but the evidence is that except for snipers, the fire of infantry has little effect on combined arms battles. I think the main point of giving infantry really nice rifles is to raise morale.

The fate of the 64th Separate Guards Motor Rifle Brigade, the unit responsible for many of the atrocities in Bucha: "at least several hundred dead" out of 1500, so likely most of  the unit is dead or wounded, especially when you consider that the source says around 100 refused to join the war in the first place.

HIMARS strike on the night of July 8-9 wiped out the leadership of the 20th Motor Rifle Division.

US Defense Department press conference, mostly Ukraine and Taiwan, quite interesting.

LPR fighter rants about why Russia's advance is so slow: poor strategy, poor artillery support, and the new recruits are really the bottom of the barrel. Interesting to me that the main complaint of infantry on both sides is that they have inadequate artillery and air support. 

A Medieval Kitchen Unearthed in the Czech Republic

Czech archaeologists working in the town of Nový Jičín, in Moravia, dug down through a paved courtyard dating to the 16th or 17th century. Underneath they found something rather remarkable, an amazingly well preserved kitchen dating to the early 1400s. The intact dishes were so clean the excavators thought they had just been washed and then put on the hearth to dry. (The hearth is the semicircle in the excavation floor; the firebox would have been within the stone walls.) This was a log house with stone foundations. It belonged to a burgher family, but not a rich one:

Since the house was located near the town walls, this would have been a less wealthy burgher family. The richest burghers would have lived in so-called ‘beer court’ houses around the town square.

Pots.

Iron grill deformed by the heat of the fire that destroyed this house. As to why the house was abandoned, the archaeologists have a theory:

The working hypothesis is that the house was destroyed during the conquest of the city by the Hussites in 1427, when Hussite forces campaigned in Moravia and Silesia. Several independent historical sources mention the siege and conquest of the town, including the massacre of some of its citizens.

The first time this happens to you – you find something amazing because people got massacred or what have you – it can be a very disturbing experience. But most of us get used to it. Great stuff almost always ends up buried because somebody died.

Politics and Science Don't Mix

From Science:

A major controversy in marine biology took a new twist last week when the University of Delaware (UD) found one of its star scientists guilty of research misconduct. The university has confirmed to Science that it has accepted an investigative panel’s conclusion that marine ecologist Danielle Dixson committed fabrication and falsification in work on fish behavior and coral reefs. The university is seeking the retraction of three of Dixson’s papers and “has notified the appropriate federal agencies,” a spokesperson says.

Among the papers is a study about coral reef recovery that Dixson published in Science in 2014, and for which the journal issued an Editorial Expression of Concern in February. Science—whose News and Editorial teams operate independently of each other—retracted that paper today.

The investigative panel’s draft report, which Science’s News team has seen in heavily redacted form, paints a damning picture of Dixson’s scientific work, which included many studies that appeared to show Earth’s rising carbon dioxide (CO2) levels can have dramatic effects on fish behavior and ecology. “The Committee was repeatedly struck by a serial pattern of sloppiness, poor recordkeeping, copying and pasting within spreadsheets, errors within many papers under investigation, and deviation from established animal ethics protocols,” wrote the panel, made up of three UD researchers.

This is always a grave danger whenever scientists work in a politically charged environment. I have worried about this sort of thing for decades now, ever since the political pressure to find worrisome things about climate change became intense. In a field where political positions are so strongly entrenched, science needs to be perfect to persuade anyone. But right now the rewards for findings that support climate change alarmism are so large that of course some people will give in and shade their results.

On the other hand, Dixson was eventually caught, and the paper retracted, which puts science as a field way above most. If only political pundits were held to this standard. . . .

August Flowers

A Long Expected Party

 

Piracy and Life

From my old web site:

I. The Madness of Life

As I drive around these days I am listening to a pretty good book about the Caribbean pirates of the 1710s and 1720s – Blackbeard, Bellamy, Calico Jack, and the rest. I am always struck by how miserable life was on those little wooden ships: the awful crowding, the diet of rancid salt beef and worm-ridden biscuit, the constant danger of accident, disease, and shipwreck, the dictatorial power of sadistic captains, the injustice that almost all of the profit went to investors and the captain, whose share even on the most dangerous privateering voyages was as much as 14 times that of a common seaman.

And yet thousands of men chose this life. One thing that always amazes me is how many sailing ships there were in the 18th-century world: 2,000 ships were destroyed in one Caribbean hurricane. It comes home to me how many people were involved in what was really a desperate venture. Sailors who died at home of old age were a small minority. On slave ships the mortality rate of the crew was as high as 40% on each voyage, which means that after five voyages only 8% would still be alive. Well, probably there was a "seasoning" factor, so the death rate was lower for men who had done it once before, but still it can't have been common to survive a decade of slave trading. In the 17th century the death rate was nearly as bad on ships sailing to Indonesia. In the 18th century the East Indiamen took the lead in improving safety conditions, using limes and sauerkraut to fight scurvy, and the like, but the death rate was still staggering by our standards. And those ships were so small that it took thousands and thousand of them to carry on any sort of commerce.

Other professions were just as bad. Gunflint makers died of silicosis after only a decade or two of work, coal miners of black lung or cave-ins, pearl divers of ruptured lung or the bends. And if work wasn't killing enough men there was always war.

There is in our species an astonishing restless vitality that is spendthrift of life. We breed like rats, doubling or tripling in each generation if there is enough food. Our swelling numbers press constantly outward, filling every available niche. We live in desert tents, igloos on the sea ice, and reed huts in malarial marshes; we take on any work no matter how dangerous.

Think of African slaves, seized from their villages, sold to strangers, stacked like barrels in the holds of ships, crossing the ocean in a lake of piss and shit, put to work on sugar plantations with inadequate food and frequent whippings. Some gave up and died, but most struggled on, mated, had babies, raised children, and dreamed of redemption. Now their descendants number a hundred million.

But it is not just us. Ants swarm to attack an anteater even as he sucks them down by the tens of thousands. The maple trees in my back yard must drop a hundred thousand seeds every spring, not one of which will ever grow into a tree, unless for some reason our suburb is abandoned and reverts to woodland. Against that one-in-a-thousand chance the trees are prepared. There is a sort of madness about life, like vines that thrust their way into any crack, no matter how many times they are pruned back, no matter that the crack leads only into a dark space where their leaves will wither and die. This is why I have never believed that there might be life hiding somewhere on Mars, in deep caves or underground lakes. Life as we know it is so powerful and adaptable that it would find a way to live everywhere on the planet, building shields against the ultraviolet radiation and insulation against the cold.

We are part of this madness. We like to imagine ourselves creatures of reason, but by taking to stormy seas in tiny ships, by marching into canon fire, by mining deep into the earth, we act out the part of swarming ants and vines that cannot stop climbing. We are part of the relentlessness of life. We cannot stop. We can only force onward and outward until every place is full, even the places that doom us to misery and death. And we do it with joy. Life loves living; we are living things, and we love our lives. In the face of death we erect monuments to our heroism; in the depths of despair we find spiritual comfort. We take pleasure from pain and toil. When pain and toil give way to victory, we know ecstasy. The beauty of the world moves us, because we are meant to live in it. The pulse and force of life is the greatest wonder we know, and that wonder, the gift given to all living things, is our greatest treasure.

II. Violence and Freedom

When I first read about pirates, as a teenager, I was not much moved by their stories. They seemed to me nothing more than criminal scum. Which, of course, many of them were. But now that I know something about the ruthless injustice of 18th-century life, I am more sympathetic to those who warred against it. Sailors did difficult, dangerous jobs for miserable pay, yet their bosses took every opportunity to cheat them even out of the meager wages they had been promised. If their ships wrecked, or if pirates seized their cargoes, they received nothing. If their employers went bankrupt, they received nothing. Sometimes their masters simply refused to pay them. A few tried to sue in court for what they were owed, but the judges were all shipowners, and the sailors never won anything. In wartime they might be impressed into the navy, forced to do years of dangerous service. If they complained, they were whipped senseless. If they tried to desert, they were hanged.

When war came, many sailors rejoiced. If they could avoid the navy, they could take service on privateers and earn a share of any plunder they could take from their nations' enemies. In war, the strong could take from the rich with impunity. As medieval troubadour Betran de Born, wrote,

Trumpets, drums, banners, pennons,
standards, horses white and black,
we'll soon see, and the times will be good,
as we'll part usurers from their money,
and mule drivers will not dare to go on roads
in broad daylight, nor townsmen without fear,
nor merchants on their way from France.
Those who gladly rob will be rich.

Of course, most did not get rich, but a few did, and that was much more of a chance than any of them had in peacetime. Betran de Born's zeal for war has a sadistic quality, but it still points toward the grim reality of life in an aristocratic society. Most of the wealth was in the hands of the aristocrats, and the only way poor people would ever get any was by taking it. When the law is controlled by the oppressors, the only possibility of freedom may be as part of a criminal gang.

Violence shook up society, and since in the normal run of things society was grotesquely unfair, that meant that poor people might gain from war and turmoil what they could not hope to get in peace. Of course the poor were also the main victims of war, and most of them ended up poor no matter what happened, but violence at least gave some the hope of getting more for themselves. Who can read about one of those protocol-bound courts, like those of the French kings or Chinese emperors, places where outsiders were doomed by embarrassing public miscues or done in by backstairs whispering, without fantasizing that a barbarian horde would ride in and sweep them away?

Nor was violence only a matter or war or piracy. I have lately been working on the history of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, which was built in the 1830s by thousands of workers, most of them Irish immigrants. The canal was constantly on the verge of bankruptcy, and the workmen's pay was often short or months behind. Excluded from most kinds of work by "no Irish need apply" rules, the Irish canallers badly needed to be paid for the backbreaking work they did. To get the wages they were owed, some groups rioted and threatened to dynamite the dams and culverts they had spent months building. It worked; faced with the prospect of losing their investment, the Canal Company paid up. When work on the canal wound down and jobs were short, the canallers formed associations based on their counties of origin and tried to drive all the other workers off the canal. Non-Irish workers were their first targets, but they also fought against each other. Work on the canal was so important to them that they fought to keep it. Again, it worked, at least for a while. When the Canal Company finally called in the state militia and arrested the leaders of the associations, wages on the canal fell from $1.25 a day to 87 cents. By banding together and using illegal force, or the threat of it, the workers got much more for themselves than they would have by meekly obeying the law.

Those societies most deeply devoted to freedom are often very violent, for example the plains Indians. In some borderlands peasants who were often needed as soldiers paid much lower rents than their counterparts in peaceful regions. Because of the constant threat of violence, their lords had to offer them good terms to get them to stay. The Roman tradition records that their commoners won political rights by refusing to serve as soldiers in wartime. The patricians tried to argue that in time of war the whole community had to stick together, but the commoners were not moved by this argument. During war was the only time the patricians really needed them, so it was then that they had their only real leverage.

So are violent societies more free? Not necessarily. The Spartans managed to combine regimentation with violence, as did many others. Oppressors can use violence, too, and usually have. It is also important to note that those able to take advantage of the freedom that war and violence brought were mostly men, and that women were more likely to be victims. Some of those free, violent societies, like the Bedouin and the Plains Indians, were particularly harsh to women. Yet when men won power with swords and guns, the women's world was shaken up, too, and they rose and fell with their men.

So violence was an ambiguous force but until modern times it was the one thing able to undermine the fixed and grotesquely unfair order of the world. Before the rampant technological progress of the modern age, civilization tended toward a hereditary hierarchy. In an old civilization, each person's place was fixed when he or she was born, and only extraordinary effort, or extraordinary luck, could ever change it. During long periods of peace, like the heyday of the Roman empire or Ming Dynasty China, social stratification could reach absurd heights, with a tiny minority controlling almost all the wealth. But then the barbarians came, the rulers were cast down, and the deck was reshuffled. The men who overturned the old order were no better than the men they replaced, but they, like the pirates, understood that only hope for change was in violent upheaval.

III. Demography and Destiny

Why did the sailors do it, or the gunflint makers, or the slaves? Because they had no choice. The only real freedom the poor of pre-industrial Europe had was the freedom to starve. If they wanted to stay alive, they had to accept one of the slots the system allowed them. The political science of the 17th and 18th centuries is full of the fear that if poor people ever got too comfortable, they would refuse to do the miserable, badly paid jobs on which society depended. Only people threatened with starvation, the philosophers reasoned, would make gunflints or mine coal. No one in that era seems ever to have considered that such jobs could be made safe and profitable enough to tempt free, well-fed people to take them.

From the founding of civilization to the twentieth century, people took dangerous jobs and lived in horrific places and died early deaths because there was nowhere else for them to go. Because the world was full, and every decent spot was taken. Because there were simply too many people.

In every age, advances in technology that should make us all better off lead instead to population growth, so that the mass of people are as poor and miserable as they were before. Many of my students are puzzled to discover that although Egypt was the richest place in the ancient world it had some of the poorest people – we read of peasants whose estate was one sixth of an olive tree. The riches of the Nile were paltry compared to our power to breed and consume. The technological progress of the 17th and 18th centuries could have allowed a small population to live very comfortably, but instead it set off a great wave of population growth, so that by 1810 the world was again troubled by famine and revolutionary unrest. Since then our technology has advanced so rapidly that much of the world has managed to keep ahead of the Malthusian scissors, but it has been a desperate race, and along the way many have been trampled into the coal dust. Whole peoples, like American Indians and Australian Aborigines, have been crushed, and millions of miners and factory workers used up and cast aside. Yes, there has been progress, but imagine if all that economic progress had taken place in a world with a stable population. Of course growth would have been slower, but its benefits for each person would have been vastly greater.

George Orwell once wrote that the best time in history to have been a working man was during the opening of the American frontier. "If you didn't like the boss, you socked him in the jaw and moved further west." To Orwell the availability of empty lands was the best defense against oppression. If people have somewhere else to go, there is a limit to how much they can be abused. The availability of desert islands in the Caribbean, empty because disease and enslavement had wiped out their natives, certainly helped poor sailors in the 18th century. If they could not find acceptable work, they could row to some remote islet and live for years by catching turtles and raiding sea-birds' nests. Once the region became crowded again, every bit of land claimed as somebody's property, the sea turtles hunted near to extinction, that option was gone, and it was once again work for the shipowners or starve.

In 17th-century Virginia, the authorities imposed draconian penalties on any white or black man who went to live with the Indians. If such reversion to nature ever became common, the possibility of flight would make it too hard for the rich to control their laborers. It was imperative, for Virginia's would-be aristocrats, to convince their servants that Indians were savage heathens with whom no European or African could ever be at home. If men could flee into the great wilderness whenever they felt cheated or used, there would be no keeping them down. Because their own numbers had been decimated by disease, many Indian groups welcomed fugitives who were willing to learn the ways of their hosts. This had to be stopped; scan the letters passed back and forth between Indian chiefs and colonial governors, and you see that one of the main themes is the demand by the governors that runaway slaves and servants be returned.

But the example of colonial America shows the complexity of these interactions. The outcome of the New World experiment was, not freedom for all, but freedom for whites and slavery for blacks. The desire of colonial elites to become aristocratic landowners was extraordinary strong. When they found they could not dominate their own people, they brought in foreigners to rule over. By fanning racism and respecting the basic freedoms of poor whites, they kept the masses from uniting against them, built their plantations, and found their way to riches despite the availability of cheap land on the ever-moving frontier. And consider the effect of the Black Death in Europe. In the west, the sudden death of 1/3 or more of the working people led to a great rise in wages and the disappearance of serfdom. But in the east, the authorities were able to keep control of the situation, and they forced the surviving peasants into even more burdensome servitude. We are not sure why, but part of the reason is probably the availability of alternatives. In the west, town life was more fully developed, and migration from the country to the city was already a common thing. Peasants who did not like the terms of their tenements simply left, going to town or to other regions. In the east, towns were fewer, farther apart, and less welcoming of strangers, so movement was much more difficult. With no place else to go, and fewer men to fight against oppression, the eastern serfs could not turn their increased value into freedom.

I think the greatest achievement of the modern world is our creation of representative democracy. This marvelous system allows the teeming masses of our crowded nations to have some degree of freedom and some degree of control over our fates. Technological progress has kept economic growth ahead of population growth, so that our incomes have risen even as our numbers have swelled. But I do not think we have escaped from the tyranny of demography. Wages are still set by the laws of supply and demand, so more workers means lower pay. These equations are not simple, as the debate over immigration in America shows, but it still must be true that the wages of shirt-sewers and plastic molders are kept low by the enormous number of people in the world who could do the same work. In rural India and parts of Africa, population growth is fast undoing the gains of the "green revolution," and hunger is still a threat to millions.

As the low birth rates of the modern world, which have already spread across east Asia and South America, reach Africa and India, we may at last achieve something unprecedented in human history: a stable population not limited by famine and early death. The great race between population and food supply may finally end, and humanity enter a new era. There may be some loss of vitality in our world, as we are less in the grip of that living madness and less driven to live anywhere and do anything to stay alive. But I do not think we will ever find life boring -- we are made to live, and so we will. We may even find that without the press of ever-growing populations, we have the time and resources to build a more just and reasoned world. 

July 22, 2008 

Charles C. Mann, "1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus"

From my old web site:

In 1539, Hernando de Soto landed a small Spanish army in Florida and marched them a thousand miles overland to Louisiana. An account of the expedition by one of its officers gives us our first glimpse of the Indian societies of the southeastern US and the Mississippi Valley. As de Soto and his men passed down the Mississippi from somewhere near Memphis, they saw a landscape "thickly set with great towns," "two or three others to be seen from any one." When they stayed too long in one place they were sent on their way by volleys of arrows from armies they numbered in the thousands, and their crossing of the river was shadowed by a fleet of hundreds of war canoes brimming with warriors. In 1682 another European passed the same way. The Marquis de La Salle canoed the length of the Mississippi from modern St. Louis to its mouth, and he saw no towns, no armies, no fleets of boats. South of Memphis where de Soto saw so many towns, La Salle passed 200 miles without seeing so much as a campfire. The land was deserted.

What happened? Did de Soto lie? What about Cortes, who peopled the Aztec empire with 20 million souls, or Gaspar de Carvajal, who sailed down the Amazon in 1537 and said it was lined with fields and cities? How many Indians were there in 1491, and where did they go?

I have read few best-selling books that I can recommend as enthusiastically as Charles Mann's 1491, published in 2005. Mann, a journalist, has done an amazing amount of work: visited hundreds of archaeological sites, talked to hundreds of experts, read widely; there cannot be many professionals who have as sound a grasp of the current state of such a broad swath of scholarship as Mann. Mann's writing is very clear, and he tells many great stories. Even more impressive is Mann's understanding of the ideological underpinnings of what he is told. All debates about Indians and Europeans are intensely, bitterly political, and Mann always clearly lays out the agendas of the scholars and activists he talks to. But he does not use politics to dismiss anyone; after explaining their ideological or professional agendas, he goes on to discuss their ideas about the past in a remarkably balanced way. Because of his sensitivity and judgment, and the breadth of his research, Mann's book is the best available introduction to pre-Columbian America.

I do have one complaint about Mann, which is that he doesn't give a sufficient sense of how hard archaeology is. People tell him that, say, the Zapotec region of Mexico was a group of small independent towns, but because of increasing warfare they came to form two competing states, which were finally conquered by Monte Alban and joined into one empire, and I think, how on earth do they know? As Mann himself notes, now that we can decipher the Mayan script we know that the politics of the central Mayan region were quite different from the way they had been imagined just from looking at the monuments. My experience of archaeology is that even the most basic questions can be all but impossible to answer. Is that a defensive ditch and bank, or just an eroded gully? Is that spear point in that hearth, or is it in the layer above the hearth? Were those houses occupied at the same time, or in sequence? Archaeologists ought to be more humble. They are not because making bold claims is the way to get publicity, tenure, and funding from National Geographic, but the rest of us ought to approach their claims with more caution than Mann does.

What does archaeology seem to be telling us about pre-Columbian America? In brief, that there were a great many Indians, and that they greatly modified the landscape within which they lived. No one ever doubted that there were many people in the Inca empire, because they filled the Andes with their terraced fields built of stone. Many of those fields were abandoned after the conquest, and despite modern population growth some have still not been brought back into use. Equally certain, if not so obvious, is the change that has taken over the Maya heartland of Guatemala and eastern Mexico. Today the Maya cities are surrounded by jungle, and the small clearings around the temples had to be hacked out with machetes before the modern world could appreciate their wonder. The populations of those cities, estimated at as much as 100,000 for the larger metropolises, were not supported by a bit of slash-and-burn agriculture in the forests. The Maya had cleared hundreds of square miles of the rain forest for intensive farming. Especially impressive are the thousands of acres of terraced fields in swamplands, built by digging drainage canals and piling the muck onto the adjacent plots. Today those old fields are celebrated for the great richness and diversity of the forests that grow on them, but there is really nothing natural about them, and a twelve hundred years ago they were covered with carefully tended plots of corn, squash, beans, and cotton.

More controversial are the histories of eastern North America and the Amazon. North American Indians now claim that their ancestors lived lightly on the land, and that when Europeans arrived the vast forests of their hunting grounds stretched from the Atlantic to the Mississippi. There have always been hints, though, that this was not so. When Samuel de Champlain explored Massachusetts Bay, he saw no forests at all along the shore, only Indian fields.

Accounts of the Chesapeake region are similar; one English pamphlet promoting emigration said that settlers would not have to clear their own fields, "for there are already great reaches of champion country cleared by the natives." Certainly much of the eastern landscape was forested, but those forests were not exactly "natural". Indians set fires in the woods for many purposes: to drive deer in great fall hunts, to clear land for farming, and to manage the woodland. The evidence of the burning is preserved as charcoal layers in the sediments of many ponds and bogs throughout the region. The charcoal becomes much thicker when corn-based agriculture was introduced to the region around 900 AD, but the first evidence of excessive burning goes back much further, to around 2500 BC. The burning changed the composition of the forests, encouraging species the Indians found useful, especially nut-bearing trees, which provided food for them and sustained larger deer herds. Because of the intensive burning, prairies spread into the eastern woodlands. Tracts measuring thousands of acres were described in colonial land patents as "range" or "desert," and according to one account the entire Shenandoah Valley was grassland. Animals from the west such as bison and elk migrated eastward as far as the Atlantic, where European explorers saw and described them. The vast stretches of wild forests that figure in our memory of the frontier seem to have grown up after European disease reached the Indians around 1600, wiping out millions of them and disrupting their management of the land.

Indian land management may have had other, more subtle effects. I have always been puzzled by John Smith's glowing account of the fruits he saw around Jamestown, including strawberries and several kinds of plum trees. I have spent years of my life wandering the forests of the Chesapeake without seeing a single strawberry or native plum. One has to make allowances for the promotional side of Smith's writing, but he was a very astute observer and if he said he saw thickets of plum trees, I believe they were there. What happened to them? Most likely they had been created by the Indians, who encouraged the growth of the trees they wanted and cleared the others until they turned parts of the woodland into semi-wild orchards, much like Indians in the Amazon do today. As for the strawberries, they are plants of open fields, and they were growing in old corn fields that the Indians burned every year to keep trees from growing on them during the 10- to 20-year fallow period that restored their fertility in the Indian agricultural system.

As I said, the extent of Indian forest management in the U.S. is controversial, but the argument is muted and professional compared to the war that has broken out over the extent of Indian settlement in the Amazon. Gaspar de Carvajal, the conquistador who described cities along the river, was not a reliable observer like Smith or La Salle; it was his fanciful account of bow-wielding female warriors that gave the river its name. Besides, everyone knows that the soil of the rain forest is too poor to support intensive agriculture. Except that some of it isn't. All along the major rivers are stretches of what locals call "terra preta," deep, fertile loamy soil where gardens of manioc, beans and other staples thrive. Geologists have never been able to explain terra preta, but now a group of archaeologists thinks that these soils represent ancient Indian gardens. The Indians, in this view, learned how to burn the forests in a careful way that turned most of the wood into charcoal, which they worked into the soil. The soil was further enriched with regular loads of hearth ash, night soil, and every other kind of domestic trash, in effect turning hundreds of square miles of forest into enormous compost heaps. The evidence for human activity is in the form of potsherds, millions of which are mixed into the deep soils of some stretches of terra preta.

The Amazon, alas, is about the worst place in the world to do archaeology. The intensity of growth and rot obliterates almost all human artifacts in decades, ravaging bone, metal, wood, and fiber, and since the natives never made much use of stone, only pottery remains. If you found a large prehistoric settlement, how would you know? With such a paucity of data, investigators have to rely on educated guesswork, and when their results are challenged they fall back on the time-honored tradition of all scientists in data-poor fields: rhetoric, political posturing and savage personal attacks. Anna Roosevelt, who won a MacArthur "genius" grant for her work promoting a large pre-Columbian Indian population, and Betty Meggers, leader of the "low count" faction, have become such bitter personal enemies that conflict between their supporters is poisoning the whole field of South American archaeology.

Of course, the argument about the Amazon is not just about its past, but about its present and future. Environmentalists working to preserve the rain forest have made powerful use of the argument that the rain forests are an irreplaceable treasure that could easily be lost forever, and that must be maintained to preserve the balance of the earth. What becomes of those arguments if we accept that a six hundred years ago the river was home to a thriving civilization with large towns and hundreds of thousands of acres of fields? "Low count" archaeologists frequently accuse high counters of promoting development in the Amazon, or just of promoting the destruction of the earth.

I think that whoever is right about the Indian population of the Amazon, there is something wrong with our whole notion of the "wilderness." If "wilderness" means a place that has not been changed by people, there are no wild places and there haven't been since people entered the Americas more than 13,000 years ago. The re-introduction of wolves to the American west has been hailed as a return to the "natural" state of affairs, when hunting by wolves, grizzly bears and cougars regulated the population of herbivores. Except that this is, in fact, the first time in the history of the world that such an ecosystem has ever existed. For the past 13,000 years the dominant predator throughout the Americas has been us. Before that, the dominant predators were, not timber wolves and grizzles, but saber-toothed cats, dire wolves, short-faced bears, and lions. The dominant herbivores were mammoths, mastodons, horses, camels, ground sloths, glyptodons, and other extinct beasts. Grizzly bears, moose, and elk are not native to North America, but emigrated here in the wake of humans, occupying the niches left by extinct animals. The ecosystem taking form in Yellowstone is fascinating, but it is not ancient, and if "natural" means "without human influence", then it is natural only in a very limited sense.

I think we should discard the whole notion of "wilderness" as a place where the ecosystem excludes people. I don't mean that we shouldn't provide space for wolves, bear and elk in our world, but that we should be very careful of the idea that just staying away from a place will make it "natural." For example, the US National Park Service has for decades prohibited almost all hunting in national parks. The result, though, is not necessarily natural. In the eastern US, parks are now overrun with herds of deer numbering in the hundreds, something that the world may never have seen before 1970. Wolves not being a feasible deer control measure in the suburbs, there is really no alternative in those parks to human intervention. Debates over fire management have long been in the news, because when you get right down to it there is no way of even knowing how much fire is "natural" in a North America crowded with humans.

For good or ill, the world is in our hands. We can pretend to step away from certain parts of it, but sooty rain falls even on Antarctica. We should give less emphasis to leaving the "wild" parts of the world alone and more to our own role as stewards of the planet. We should consider the approach taken by North American Indians and think about how to manage the wild parts of the world. We should work out ways to promote biodiversity; if regular fires keep parts of the American west as a patchwork of different ecosystems instead of an endless pine forest, then perhaps we should encourage fires. There may be other ways we can encourage rare wild species, as the Indians encouraged plums, or as the old Maya terraces support fabulous tracts of rain forest. We should continue our efforts to limit the spread of invasive species, so the whole world doesn't end up with one ecosystem. In some areas forests may be weak because repeated logging has stripped the soil of manganese; perhaps we should think about ways to fertilize those areas and undo the damage we have done. As soon as our technology permits it we should work out how to clone extinct animals and bring them back into the world, starting with the aurochs and the Columbian mammoth. After all, noone stopped us from playing God when we caused their extinction, and reviving them would, to me, only be restoring a balance that we ourselves destroyed.

April 8, 2006

Update, 2022

Over the past 14 years I have regularly reported here on the archaeological revolution in the Amazon, which has spectacularly confirmed the view of high populations and a much-modified landscape. Estimates of the region's population in 1500 now go as high as 8 million, which is more than some people used to think lived in all of the Americas.

Evidence has also continued to accummulate concerning the great impact American Indians had on the landscape of North America; I recently discovered a colonial property deed for 5,000 acres in Anne Arundel County, Maryland known as "the Range."