Moments of Permanence - In which the History Wars go cross-continental

From: sami Date: May 11th, 2009 01:05 pm (UTC) (Link)

Heh. That Star Trek essay I posted about actually covered some of that - the science fiction/frontier mythology thing is... interesting.

I actually explained things a little badly in my last comment. (We're outside my medicated hours, I'm afraid.) The idea is that the explorers who came around the same time Columbus himself did, like, say, Francisco Pizarro and other conquistadors, visited huuuuuge civilisations etc, and *they* left diseases behind that killed everybody over the course of the 16th century; when 17th-century settlement started taking place (and, you know, started killing everybody) they were actually dealing with only a tiny remnant of the initial civilisation.

His argument is sort of that "real" natives were much more "civilised" than the ones found later - because, you know, they lived in large, dirty cities just like real people Europeans. (Which implies that the way of living they had was of course vastly inferior.) But it's seriously unsupportable.

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From: delfinnium Date: May 11th, 2009 01:11 pm (UTC) (Link)

(And Star Trek, a vision of the future, is full of white people. I dunno, i found it kind of sad that Sulu is supposed to represent All Of Asia. THanks, Star Trek people.)

I see. I hate that idea that civilised people live in giant dirty cities. Hell, if that was the case they would have had a couple of diseases to hand over themselves.

And just where is the remanents of these vast cities I'd like to know? Or were they movable cities? damn. THem Indians, so sneaky, hiding it all. >.<

No wonder the Native Americans don't trust the white scientists. I don't trust a lot of white scientist hypotheses (like 95% of East Asians are lactose intolerant! Where did they get THAT from?)

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From: (Anonymous) Date: May 11th, 2009 07:42 pm (UTC) (Link)

Well, de Soto met the Mound Builders (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mound_builder_(people)) himself. Then, the next time someone went though, they were gone. Hidden megacities aren't the argument. The argument is that existing large village sites and their fields were historically underpopulated, undercultivated, and sometimes abandoned when settlers arrived.

There are some primary sources in there - the abandoned villages the Pilgrims found that they cheerfully assumed God killed for them, early colonial records of how bad the epidemics were, recorded death rates in central America, the de Soto expedition, early Pacific Northwest sea explorers finding the area decimated by smallpox...and smallpox did become endemic in the Americas. If smallpox comes along and wipes out 60% of the population every forty years or so, leaves the survivors disfigured/blind/somewhat infertile, and there's another couple of epidemics in the meantime with 10% mortality, not to mention the psychological toll from all that, yes that level of population crash over 130 years is plausible. The particular percentage claimed may be on the high end, but population crash happened.

Civilized people don't starve their children when they have the capacity for more intensive food production on their existing land (and they did). The Native Americans expanded to fill two continents. They didn't suddenly say "okay, that's enough kids" and start practicing draconian birth control. The way European settlers found the New World wasn't the way it had Always Been Since Time Immemorial (tm), and assuming that is ridiculous. Central American empires rose and fell. New crops were developed. Tribes and cultures split, merged, killed each other and displaced each other. The Navajo colonized the Southwest from northern Canada only a couple centuries before whites arrived. Etc.

Europeans were not any -less- obnoxious, murderous, etc to settled populations in Africa, India, or Asia. The reason they were able to displace Native Americans and smaller island populations as opposed to people on Old World continents is generally considered to be the vast and disproportionate impact of disease.

As for lactase deficiency in adults of some populations, this isn't a "white" hypothesis, it's something that can be directly measured by scientists of all races. It doesn't always translate into severe intolerance of smaller amounts of milk, but it's not something people made up for giggles either.

-Yrf

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From: (Anonymous) Date: May 11th, 2009 08:23 pm (UTC) (Link)

Wait, so the vast pre-Columbus North American population lived in giant crowded permanent cities... that left no archeological record? What?????

The problem with this theory isn't the hypothetical virulence of smallpox, the problem is that it's demonstrably idiotic. Huge settlements don't vanish without a trace- no trace means no huge settlements.

But the lactose intolerance thing is true. Different populations have different alleles, and most people in the world who aren't of Northern European, Middle Eastern, Mongolian, Fulani or Masai descent decrease their lactase production in adulthood to the point where it becomes difficult to metabolize large quantities of milk. This isn't a racist idea any more than the idea that there's a higher prevalence of sickle cell anemia in people of East African descent.

~ Another Mouse

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From: (Anonymous) Date: May 11th, 2009 09:42 pm (UTC) (Link)

Nobody is claiming "Giant crowded permanent cities" in North America, just a reasonable density of towns and townsites. Sheesh. The high end population estimates for pre-contact North America (1491, Mann's stuff) are around .5 natives per square km or lower. The low end estimates are .04 natives per square km, which is nearly Greenlandic sparseness and even more ridiculous.

-Yrf

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From: lolaraincoat Date: May 12th, 2009 01:51 am (UTC) forgive me for jumping in here when I totally agree with your larger points about Wrede, but ... (Link)

Well ... it depends what you mean by "North America," right? Tenochtitlan - one of the biggest cities in the world, around 1500, and one of the biggest cities in the world right this minute, except that now we call it Mexico City - is right smack dab in the middle of the continent. It's just that the continent includes Mexico, you know? And nobody had to hide a damn thing. There were quite large cities in the Andes as well, and good-sized ones elsewhere. Not much north of the Rio Grande, though, was much larger than maybe 10,000 people. One of the several things that is driving me crazy about this latest episode of FAIL is that Wrede appears to have taken the bits of the Americas colonized by Brits as her unit of analysis. But we don't need to replicate that conceptual error.

Sami, your logic here is good and 1491 sounds almost Jared Diamond-esque in its dopiness. However, it is widely accepted among scholars of colonial and pre-colonial Latin American history (not my field - I'm a 20th-c specialist myself - but some of my best friends ...) that the Americas as a whole did indeed suffer what's delicately known as a "demographic collapse" after coming into sustained contact with Europeans, so, somewhere around 1500. This was mostly caused by diseases, though social chaos (from invasion, or more often as a consequence of the breakdown of complex systems of food production and distribution, etc., due to epidemic disease) played a part too. There were islands in the Caribbean that were entirely depopulated between the first and second trip Columbus made, perhaps because the breeding pairs of pigs Columbus left behind carried flu. Outside of islands, and very densely populated areas, the catastrophe was milder and happened more slowly. But yes, there certainly were large parts of the Americas which lost 95% of their populations.

I tell the undergraduates in Intro to Latin American History that the earliest dates of settlement in the Americas keep getting revised backward - I heard recently of settlements excavated in northern coastal Brazil that can be dated back 20,000 years - while estimates of the total population figure for the Americas before 1492 keep rising. So we can't say for sure how terrible the devastation over both continents was, between say 1500-1750. But 75-80% seems more or less plausible to me.

The best fast guide to most of this for English language users remains Alfred Crosby, The Colombian Exchange. It's quite outdated by now (I think he's been proved completely wrong about tuberculosis, for example) but nice and clear, anyway.

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From: sami Date: May 12th, 2009 01:55 am (UTC) Re: forgive me for jumping in here when I totally agree with your larger points about Wrede, but ... (Link)

I'm not denying demographic collapse - I'm denying that it could have happened in such a way that there would be no record of it, and such that the Americas were in a state of reclaimed wilderness when European settlement took place.

I have noticed there's a strong assumption apparent that South America would be just like, say, Virginia. Which: no.

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From: (Anonymous) Date: May 12th, 2009 03:24 am (UTC) Re: forgive me for jumping in here when I totally agree with your larger points about Wrede, but ... (Link)

Yeah, that was a poorly phrased post at best, and the math was wrong too (though not by much). I think the relative estimates are Aztecs and south at 90% of the pre-Columbian population, and north of Aztecs 10% of the population.

My main point is that all four of the counterarguments in the above post about Native Americans and plague are at least slightly wrong, and for a lot of the pre-colonization dieoffs there is certainly evidence. The one in Massachusetts before the Pilgrims landed is very well attested.

As for megafauna, etc. - It's like the Neanderthals in Europe, or the hobbits in SE Asia. Sure, it's possible humans had nothing to do with all that, but it doesn't seem very plausible for animals that had survived a multitude of prior ice age cycles. Mammoths indeed survived many thousands of years past mainland extinction on an island north of Russia that was devoid of human habitation - until humans showed up. Much of the surviving non-domesticated megafauna in the world is in Africa, where it evolved alongside humanity. To blame overhunting specifically and exclusively seems invalid, but humans change their environment in other ways than mere hunting.

-Yrf

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