(The historian Francis Jennings has wondered how "Iroquois propagandists," as he calls them, can cite Benjamin Franklin's words about Indians, as I did, given his oft-expressed "contempt for 'ignorant Savages.'...But people believe what they want to believe in the face of logic and evidence." The argument is baffling; it is like claiming that African-Americans had no impact on European-American culture, because the latter was racist and systematically oppressed the former.) To Europeans, Indians were living demonstrations of wholly novel ways of being human-exemplary cases that were mulled over, though rarely understood completely, by countless Europeans. Colonists and stay-at-homes, intellectuals and commoners, all struggled to understand, according to the sociologist-historian Denys Delage, of Laval University, in Quebec, "the very existence of these relatively egalitarian societies, so different in their structure and social relationships than those of Europe." Montaigne, Rousseau, Locke, Voltaire, Jefferson, Franklin, and Thomas Paine were among the writers who mulled over the differences between native and European ways of life; some pondered Indian criticism of European societies. The result, Delage explained, was to promote a new attitude of "cultural relativism" that in turn fed Enlightenment era debates "about the republican form of government, the rearing of children, and the ideals of freedom, equality, brotherhood, and the right to happiness."

Cultural influence is difficult to pin down in documents and concrete actions. Nevertheless it exists. In 1630 John Winthrop led what was then the largest party of would-be colonists from Britain-some seven hundred people-to Massachusetts, where they founded the city of Boston. As the expedition was under way, the deeply religious Winthrop explained his vision of what the new colony should become: "a citty upon a hill." The city would be ruled by the principles of the Pilgrim's God. Among these principles: the Supreme Deity loves each person equally, but He did not intend them to play equal roles in society: GOD ALMIGHTY in his most holy and wise providence, hath soe disposed of the condition of mankind, as in all times some must be rich, some poore, some high and eminent in power and dignitie; others mean and in submission.

Winthrop's ideal community, that is, was not a place of equal opportunity, nor a place where social distinctions were erased; the "mean" circumstances of the poor were "in all times" part of God's plan, and could not be greatly changed (if poor people got too far behind, the rich were supposed to help them). The social ideal was responsible adherence to religiously inspired authority, not democratic self-rule.

The reality turned out to be different. Instead of creating Winthrop's vision of an ordered society, the Pilgrims actually invented the raucous, ultra-democratic New England town meeting-a system of governance, the Dartmouth historian Colin Calloway observes, that "displays more attributes of Algonkian government by consensus than of Puritan government by the divinely ordained." To me, it seems unlikely that the surrounding Indian example had nothing to do with the change.

Accepting that indigenous societies influenced American culture opens up fascinating new questions. To begin with, it is possible that native societies could also have exercised a malign influence (this is why the subject is not necessarily "pious" or "romantic primitivism," as the Oxford historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto has complained). Look to the Southeast, where, as Taylor has noted, "colonial societies sustained a slave system more oppressive than anything practiced in Europe" and "the slave-owners relied on Indians to catch runaways." There, too, the native groups, descended from Mississippian societies, were far more hierarchical and autocratically ruled than the Algonkian- and Iroquoian-speaking groups in the Northeast. As Gallay has documented, indigenous societies cooperated fully with the slave-trading system, sending war captives to colonists for sale overseas. In the Northeast, by contrast, the Wendat (Huron) and Haudenosaunee either killed or, more common, adopted captives; involuntary servitude, though it occurred, was strikingly rarer.

On the map, the division line between slave and non-slave societies occurs in Virginia, broadly anticipating the Mason-Dixon line that later split slave states from free. The repeated pattern doubtless has to do with geography-southeastern climate and soil favor plantation crops like tobacco and cotton. And southern colonists' preference for slavery presumably reflected their different ethnic, class, and religious backgrounds. But can one readily dismiss the different Indian societies who lived in these places? And if not, to what extent are contemporary American conflicts over race the playing out, at least in part, of a cultural divide that came into being hundreds of years before Columbus?

A few personal remarks: After the first publication of this book, a number of readers and researchers contacted me with observations and criticisms, many of which made their way into this updated and corrected edition. Some book reviewers, too, drew my attention to errors, which I have tried to fix. For this help, I thank T. Chad Amos, David B. Bieler, Alfred W. Crosby, Todd Follansbee, Daniel W. Gade, Berl Golomb, Bob Hart, Bruce Johansen, Jeff Kellem, Elias Levy, Barbara Mann, William H. McNeill, Daniel N. Paul, Victor Sanchez, Jeffrey Shallit, Ted Slusarczyk, Michael M. Smith, Rev. Steve Thom, Rick Uyesugi, and Ronald Wright. I am sure I have left out some names-not until relatively late in the process did I begin keeping records. A couple of people read all or part of the published book a second time after having read it a first time in manuscript. One of these gluttons for punishment, Frances Karttunen, gave my Nahuatl orthography a second critique (it is still imperfect, but I hope improved); I also profited from her other insights. William Denevan, too, went through everything again with blue pencil in hand. I am indebted to both. A number of bloggers weighed in, for which my especial thanks to James Hannam (Venerable Bede), Chris Price (Layman) and Laura Gjovaag (Tegan).

My gratitude to the Conference of Latin Americanist Geographers, which, under the direction of Antoinette WinklerPrins and Narciso Barrera Bassols, organized a special panel on 1491 at their annual congress in Michoacan, Mexico. On the panel were William Doolittle, Suzanna Hecht, George Lovell, Billie Lee Turner, William I. Woods, and again William Denevan. Through the auspices of Jerry Dobson (to whom my thanks) the proceedings will be published in the Geographical Review. Finally, I am saddened to note that just before this book appeared the archaeologist Jim Petersen, whom I had come to consider a friend, was murdered during a stupid robbery in the Amazon. I hope that in a small way this book reflects the infectious delight he took in unveiling the human story, and in explaining his discoveries-and those of his colleagues-to anyone who wanted to learn.

APPENDIX A.

Loaded Words.

Anyone who attempts to write or even speak about the original inhabitants of the Americas quickly runs into terminological quicksand. And the attempt to extricate writer and reader by being logical and sensitive often ends with both parties sucked deeper into the mire. The difficulties fall into two broad categories: names for individual groups of Indians, and names for social categories used to classify those groups. Most well known among the former is "Indian," a term so long recognized as absurd that in the 1960s and 1970s social scientists moved to change it to "Native American" or, sometimes, "Amerindian."

The change was well meaning, but not entirely successful. On a literal level, the replacement name is as problematic as the original. "Native American" is intended to refer to the peoples who inhabited the Americas before Columbus arrived and their descendants today. Literally, though, it means something else: as the activist Russell Means has complained, "Anyone born in the western hemisphere is a Native American." Worse, the term introduces an entirely new set of confusions. "Indian" does not refer to the Inuit, Aleut, and other peoples of the far north, whose cultures, languages, and even physical appearance are so different from their neighbors to the south that researchers generally argue they must have come to the Americas in a separate, much later wave of migration (though still many centuries ahead of Columbus). But all of them are Native Americans, which eliminates a distinction found useful by both scholars and indigenous peoples themselves.

In conversation, every native person whom I have met (I think without exception) has used "Indian" rather than "Native American." One day I said "Native American" when speaking to a Bolivian graduate student of indigenous descent. She shook her head dismissively at the phrase. "Aqui somos indios," she explained. "Los 'americanos nativos' viven solamente en los Estados Unidos." We are Indians here. "Native Americans" live only in the United States. "I abhor the term Native American," Means declared in 1998. Matching his actions to his words, Means had joined and become prominent in an indigenous-rights group called the American Indian Movement. "We were enslaved as American Indians," he wrote, "we were colonized as American Indians, and we will gain our freedom as American Indians, and then we will call ourselves any damn thing we choose." (At the same time, the common British usage of "Red Indian" to distinguish American natives from "East Indians" is unwelcome.) Historically speaking, both "Indian" and "Native American" are remote from the way America's first peoples thought about themselves. Much as the inhabitants of the tenth-century Carolingian Empire did not describe themselves as "Europeans," a name coined in the seventeenth century, the inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere in that same era did not think in terms of "Indians," "Native Americans," or any other collective hemispheric entity. Instead they regarded themselves as belonging to their immediate group-the Patuxet village in the Wampanoag confederation, for instance.

To a considerable extent, the same holds true today. When Russell Thornton, the UCLA anthropologist, kindly sent me some copies of his work, he enclosed his curriculum vitae, which identified him as a "registered member of the Cherokee Nation," not as an Indian, Native American, Amerindian, or indigenous person. When I mentioned this to Thornton, he responded that only one experience united the diverse peoples of the Americas: being flattened by European incursions. "'Indians' or 'Native Americans' as a category both owe their existence to Europe," he said.

For all these reasons, this book uses "Indian" and "Native American" interchangeably, with the latter serving mainly to avoid repetition.

Note, though, that I use these terms as cultural and geographical categories, not racial ones. "Indian" is the Western Hemisphere's equivalent to "European," not to "white" or "Caucasian." Racial categories are inevitably problematic, because they are ostensibly biological-that is, they are supposed to be based on heritable physical characteristics like skin color-but in fact are heavily cultural, as demonstrated by the infamous "one drop" rule in the nineteenth-century southern United States, which proclaimed that men and women were Negroes, even when they could not be distinguished by whites from appearance, if any of their ancestors, no matter how remote, were African. Avoiding such inconsistency and ambiguity is easier if one eschews categorizing by race, which I have tried to do, except for the occasional rhetorical flourish.

In referring to particular groups of Indians-the Wampanoag or the Maya-I use a simple rule of thumb: I try to call groups by the name preferred by their members. This approach, which seems only courteous, is sometimes attacked as condescending. After all, the argument runs, people in the United States use the English labels "French" and "German" rather than francais and Deutsch. To insist on using "proper" names for Indians is thus to place them in a special category of fragility. But this objection is not well thought out. Although English-speakers do speak of "Germans" rather than Deutscher, "French people" rather than les francais, they tend to avoid insulting terms like "Kraut" and "Frog." Many common names for Indian groups are equally insulting, or descended from such insults. Unsurprisingly, they are slowly being changed.

My "simple" rule of thumb to call people by the name they prefer is more complex than it may seem. The far north, for example, is home to a constellation of related societies generally known as "Eskimo," but in the 1980s this term was replaced by "Inuit" in Canada, where most of these groups live, after complaints that "Eskimo" came from a pejorative term in Algonquian language that meant "eater of raw flesh." Why this would be bothersome seems unclear, because raw meat is a preferred part of northerners' diet, much as sushi is favored by the Japanese. In any case, linguists believe that "Eskimo" actually stems from the Algonquian terms for "snowshoe netter" or "people who speak a different language," neither of which seems especially derogatory. Worse for contemporary purposes, "Inuit" is also the name of a specific subgroup of Arctic societies, to which such northern indigenous peoples as the Aleutiiq in the Aleutian Islands and Innu in Labrador do not belong. If that weren't enough, the Inupiat in Alaska, who belong to the Inuit subgroup but speak a different language than their cousins in Canada, have generally resisted the term "Inuit" in favor of "Alaska Native" or, sometimes, "Eskimo."

An additional source of confusion occurs when indigenous languages have different romanization schemes. Runa Simi (Quechua), the group of languages spoken in the former Inka empire, has several; I have tried to follow the one promulgated by the Peruvian Academia Mayor de la Lengua Quechua in 1995, which seems to be slowly gaining popularity. The choice is more difficult for the three dozen languages grouped as "Maya." As an example, the name of the ruler slain at the beginning of Chapter 8 has been rendered as, among other things, Toh-Chak-Ich'ak, Chak Toh Ich'ak, and Chak Tok Ich'aak; his title, "lord," has been romanized as ahau, ahaw, ajau, ajaw, and even axaw. In 1989 the Ministry of Culture and Sports in Guatemala published a standardized orthography for Maya. Unfortunately, Mexico has a different one. Indeed, it has several. Various Mexican agencies have issued putatively official orthographies, most based on Alfredo Barrera Vasquez's classic Diccionario Maya Cordemex, all intended to "help save these languages from extinction." In this book, I throw up my hands and spell Maya names as they appear in the most authoritative recent source I have come across: Chronicle of the Maya Kings and Queens, by the epigraphers Simon Martin and Nikolai Grube. (None of this is to say that I have not made mistakes or sometimes failed to follow my own rules. I'm sure I have done exactly that, though I tried not to.) The second type of problem, that of categorization, is equally knotty. Take the word "civilization"-"a saltpeter of a word, often triggering explosive arguments," Alfred Crosby has written. The arguments occur when cultures are deemed not to be civilizations; are they therefore "uncivilized"? Archaeologists and anthropologists have proposed dozens of definitions and argue about whether the existence of a written language is essential. If it is, there may have been no Indian civilizations outside Mesoamerica. Yet other parts of the Americas are filled with ruins (Tiwanaku, Marajo, Cahokia) that would be described as the product of a civilization if they were anywhere else in the world. The distinction seems to me unhelpful. Like Crosby, I use the word "not in moral comment, but simply in reference to peoples settled in cities, villages, hamlets, and to the kinds of political, economic, social, and military structures associated with such populations."

Sometimes researchers attempt to avoid the whole debate by substituting the term "complex society." Not much is gained thereby, because it implies that hunters and gatherers have simple lives. A century ago, anthropologist Franz Boas demonstrated the contrary as he struggled to fathom the mind-bogglingly elaborate patterns of Northwest Coast Indian life. Still, the term has some resonance. As societies grow larger, their members become more encrusted by manufactured goods, both standardized for the mass consumer and custom-made for the elite. Along with this growth comes a growth in the size and variety of the technological infrastructure. It is in this material sense that I use the words "complex" and "sophisticated."

In this book I tend to marshal terms like "king" and "nation" rather than "chief" and "tribe." Supposedly the latter refer mainly to kin-based societies whereas the former are for bigger societies based on a shared group identity. In practice, though, "chief" and "tribe" have historically been used to refer disparagingly to frontier cultures conquered by larger societies. In textbooks the Roman emperors, heroic custodians of Greco-Roman civilization, are always fighting off the "barbarian chiefs" of the "Germanic tribes." But these "tribes" had rulers who lived in big palaces, held sway over sizable domains, and had to abide by written codes of law. The Burgundian "tribe" even conquered Rome and set up its own puppet Roman emperor in the fifth century. (He was killed by another "tribe," which installed its own emperor.) Maps of fifth- and sixth-century Europe usually depict the "Celtic kingdoms," "Kingdom of the Lombards," and so on, their borders marked by the solid lines we associate with national frontiers. But entities of equal or greater size and technological sophistication in the Western Hemisphere are routinely called "chiefdoms" and "tribes," implying they are somehow different and of smaller scale. And fuzzy lines mark their borders, as if to indicate the looseness with which they were organized and defined. "'Tribe' and 'chiefdom' are not neutral scientific terms," archaeologist Alice Beck Kehoe has declared. "They are politically loaded." I have mostly avoided them.

In general, I have tried to use the terms that historians of Europe or Asia would use to describe social and political entities of similar size and complexity. This approach risks obliterating the real differences between, to cite one example, the court in Qosqo and the court in Madrid. But it supports one of the larger aims of this book: to explain in lay terms researchers' increasing recognition that the Western Hemisphere played a role in the human story just as interesting and important as that of the Eastern Hemisphere.

A final note: throughout the text, I use the European terminology of B.C. and A.D. Many researchers object to them as ethnically bound. In truth, it is a little odd to be talking about "years before Christ" in reference to people whose cultural traditions have nothing to do with Christianity. But no plausible substitutes are available. Some historians use B.C.E. to mean "before the Common era," but because the Common Era calendar is just a renamed Christian calendar that still places past events in reference to Christianity, the main objection. One could switch to a neutral calendar, like the Julian calendar used by astronomers (the latter at least doesn't get tripped up by zero-it is the first European calendar as sophisticated as the Mesoamerican Long Count). This doesn't seem useful; to discharge their informational content, readers will have to translate Julian dates back into what they know, the familiar A.D. and B.C. It seems only kind to save them the bother.

APPENDIX B.

Talking Knots All known written accounts of the Inka were set down after the conquest, most by Spaniards who had, of course, never experienced the empire in its heyday. Because many of the chroniclers tried to do their job conscientiously, most scholars use their reports, despite their deficiencies, as I do in this book. For obvious reasons historians of the Inka have never liked being forced to rely exclusively on post-conquest, non-native written sources, but there seemed to be no avoiding it.

Recently, though, some researchers have come to believe that the Inka did have a written language-indeed, that Inka texts are displayed in museums around the world, but that they have generally not been recognized as such. Here I am referring to the bunches of knotted strings known as khipu (or quipu, as the term is often spelled). Among the most fascinating artifacts of Tawantinsuyu, they consist of a primary cord, usually a third to a half an inch in diameter, from which dangle thinner "pendant" strings-typically more than a hundred, but on occasion as many as 1,500. The pendant strings, which sometimes have subsidiary strings attached, bear clusters of knots, each tied in one of three ways. The result, in the dry summary of George Gheverghese Joseph, a University of Manchester mathematics historian, "resembles a mop that has seen better days."

According to colonial accounts, khipukamayuq-"knot keepers," in Ruma Suni-parsed the knots both by inspecting them visually and by running their fingers along them, Braille-style, sometimes accompanying this by manipulating black and white stones. For example, to assemble a history of the Inka empire the Spanish governor Cristobal Vaca de Castro summoned khipukamayuq to "read" the strings in 1542. Spanish scribes recorded their testimony but did not preserve the khipu; indeed, they may have destroyed them. Later the Spanish became so infuriated when khipu records contradicted their version of events that in 1583 they ordered that all the knotted strings in Peru be burned as idolatrous objects. Only about six hundred escaped the flames.

All known writing systems employ instruments to paint or inscribe on flat surfaces. Khipu, by contrast, are three-dimensional arrays of knots. Although Spanish chronicles repeatedly describe khipukamayuq consulting their khipu, most researchers could not imagine that such strange-looking devices could actually be written records. Instead they speculated that khipu must be mnemonic devices-personalized memorization aids, like rosaries-or, at most, textile abacuses. The latter view gained support in 1923, when science historian L. Leland Locke proved that the pattern of knots in most khipu recorded the results of numerical calculations-the knotted strings were accounting devices. Khipu were hierarchical, decimal arrays, Locke said, with the knots used to record 1s on the lowest level of each string, those for the 10s on the next, and so on. "The mystery has been dispelled," archaeologist Charles W. Mead exulted, "and we now know the quipu for just what it was in prehistoric times...simply an instrument for recording numbers."

Based on such evaluations, most Andeanists viewed the Inka as the only major civilization ever to come into existence without a written language. "The Inka had no writing," Brian Fagan, an archaeologist at the University of California in Santa Barbara, wrote in Kingdoms of Gold, Kingdoms of Jade, his 1991 survey of Native American cultures. "The quipu was purely a way of storing precise information, a pre-Columbian computer memory, if you will."

But even as Fagan was writing, researchers were coming to doubt this conclusion. The problem was that Locke's rules only decoded about 80 percent of khipu-the remainder were incomprehensible. According to Cornell archaeologist Robert Ascher, those khipu are "clearly non-numerical." In 1981, Ascher and his mathematician wife, Marcia, published a book that jolted the field by intimating that these "anomalous" khipu may have been an early form of writing-one that Ascher told me was "rapidly developing into something extremely interesting" just at the time when Inka culture was demolished.

The Aschers slowly gained converts. "Most serious scholars of khipu today believe that they were more than mnemonic devices, and probably much more," Galen Brokaw, an expert in ancient Andean texts at the State University of New York in Buffalo, said to me. This view of khipu can seem absurd, Brokaw admitted, because the scientists who propose that Tawantinsuyu was a literate empire also freely admit that no one can read its documents. "Not a single narrative khipu has been convincingly deciphered," the Harvard anthropologist Gary Urton conceded, a situation he described as "more than frustrating."

Spurred in part by recent insights from textile scholars, Urton has been mounting the most sustained, intensive attack on the khipu code ever performed. In Signs of the Inka Khipu (2003), Urton for the first time systematically broke down khipu into their grammatical constituents, and began using this catalog to create a relational khipu database to help identify patterns in the arrangement of knots. Like cuneiform marks, Urton told me, khipu probably did begin as the kind of accounting tools envisioned by Locke. But by the time Pizarro arrived they had evolved into a kind of three-dimensional binary code, unlike any other form of writing on earth.

The Aschers worked mainly with khipu knots. But at a 1997 conference, William J. Conklin, a researcher at the Textile Museum, in Washington, D.C., pointed out that the knots might be just one part of the khipu system. In an interview, Conklin, perhaps the first textile specialist to investigate khipu, explained, "When I started looking at khipu...I saw this complex spinning and plying and color coding, in which every thread was made in a complex way. I realized that 90 percent of the information was put into the string before the knot was made."

Building on this insight, Urton argued that khipu makers were forced by the very nature of spinning and weaving into making a series of binary choices, including the type of material (cotton or wool), the spin and ply direction of the string (which he described as "S" or "Z," after the "slant" of the threads), the direction (recto or verso) of the knot attaching the pendant string to the primary, and the direction of the main axis of each knot itself (S or Z). As a result, each knot is what he called a "seven-bit binary array," although the term is inexact because khipu had at least twenty-four possible string colors. Each array encoded one of 26 24 possible "distinct information units"-a total of 1,536, somewhat more than the estimated 1,000 to 1,500 Sumerian cuneiform signs, and more than twice the approximately 600 to 800 Egyptian and Maya hieroglyphic symbols.

If Urton is right, khipu were unique. They were the world's sole intrinsically three-dimensional written documents (Braille is a translation of writing on paper) and the only ones to use a "system of coding information" that "like the coding systems used in present-day computer language, was structured primarily as a binary code." In addition, they may have been among the few examples of "semasiographic" writing-texts that, unlike written English, Chinese, and Maya, are not representations of spoken language. "A system of symbols does not have to replicate speech to communicate narrative," Catherine Julien, a historian of Andean cultures at Western Michigan University, explained to me. "What will eventually be found in khipu is uncertain, but the idea that they have to be a representation of speech has to be thrown out."

Not all researchers embrace Urton's binary theory. In an interview, Brokaw argued that "there is no way to reconcile it with the decimal code in which the khipu [also] clearly participate." In addition, he said, Urton's ideas have little support in ethnographic data. But Brokaw was much more enthusiastic about other Urton khipu work. Working with Harvard mathematician-weaver Carrie J. Brezine, Urton used the new khipu database in 2005 to identify seven khipu that seem to represent a hierarchy of accounting records. Found half a century ago in the home of a khipukaymayuq in Puruchuco, an Inka administrative center near modern-day Lima, the khipu seemed to be created in levels, with the numerical values on lower-level khipu adding up to those on higher-level khipu. Fascinatingly, some of the knots in the top-level khipu seem not to be numbers. Urton and Brezine argued that these anomalous introductory knots most likely served to indicate the origin of the seven khipu, Puruchuco. The knots, if Urton and Brezine are correct, would be the first-ever precisely deciphered "words" in khipu "writing."

Writing and reading are among the most basic methods of transmitting information from one person to another. In cultures throughout the world, this procedure is fundamentally similar. One reads a parade of symbols, taking up information with the eyes; emphasis and context is provided visually, by changing the size and form of the symbols (printing in italics or boldface, increasing or diminishing the font size, scattering words or characters around the page). All European and Asian cultures share the common experience of reading-sitting in a chair, the book in one's lap, wagging the head from side to side (Europe) or up and down (Asia).

Because Tawantinsuyu existed only for a few centuries, it is widely assumed that the Inka khipu built on other, earlier forms of writing that had been developed in the region. And these cultures were unique, if Urton is right. Their books were loose bundles of string-more practical, in some ways, than paper scrolls or books, because less susceptible to water damage and physical pressure. They were read both tactilely, by running the fingertips along the knots, and visually, by looking at the colors of the strings. And whereas the choice of letters and words at the beginning of a sentence or paragraph exercise little constraint on physical connection to those at the end, the choices made by the khipu maker at the beginning of a string could not be undone halfway through. As a result, each khipu pendant provided a burst of information at the beginning that was refined further down the string.

However anomalous to European eyes, this form of writing has deep roots in Andean culture. Knotted-string communication was but one aspect of these societies' exploration of textile technology (see Chapter 3). In these cultures, Heather Lechtman, of MIT, has argued, cloth "was the most important carrier of status, the material of choice for the communication of message, whether religious, political, or scientific." Similarly, Urton told me, binary oppositions were a hallmark of the region's peoples, who lived in societies "typified to an extraordinary degree by dual organization," from the division of town populations into complementary "upper" and "lower" halves (moieties, in the jargon) to the arrangement of poetry into dyadic units. In this environment, he said, "khipu would be familiar."

At the same time, Urton and other khipu specialists have been searching for an Inka Rosetta stone-a colonial translation of an extant khipu. One candidate exists-maybe. In 1996, Clara Miccinelli, an amateur historian from the Neapolitan nobility, caused a stir by announcing that she had unearthed in her family archives both a khipu and its Spanish translation (it encoded a folk song). But because the putative khipu isn't made the same way as other surviving khipus and the same documents also claim that Pizarro conquered the Inka empire by poisoning its generals with arsenic-adulterated wine, many U.S. scholars have questioned their authenticity. Angered by the doubts, Miccinelli has thus far refused to let non-Italian researchers examine the documents, although she did allow an Australian laboratory to evaluate their age with a mass spectrometer. (The results, published in 2000, suggest that they are from the fifteenth century.) Because of the controversy, most researchers have been, according to Brokaw, "strategically ignoring" the Italian documents, at least for the present.

More widely accepted are the thirty-two khipu found in a tomb in the Peruvian Amazon in 1996, one of which Urton tentatively deciphered as a census record for the area in late pre-Hispanic times. With the help of a MacArthur fellowship he received in 2001, he has been searching Peruvian archives for something with more narrative content to match against the other khipu-a quest, according to Julien, that "has a chance of bearing fruit." If Urton's quest or others like it are successful, she told me, "We may be able to hear the Inkas for the first time in their own voice."

I asked what she thought that voice might sound like-the voice of people attuned to tension and cloth, people who saw the stones of the world charged with spirit, people who had never seen animals larger than a llama, people who broke the world into complementary halves and thought more in terms of up and down than north and south, people who took in information about the world through their fingers.

"Foreign," she said.

APPENDIX C.

The Syphilis Exception No one doubts today that European bacteria and viruses had a ruinous effect on the Americas. So, too, did African diseases like malaria and yellow fever when they arrived. The question inevitably arises as to whether there were any correspondingly lethal infections from the Americas, payback to the conquistadors. One candidate was long ago nominated: syphilis.

Syphilis is caused by Treponema pallidum, a wormlike bacterium that writhes in corkscrew spirals on microscope slides. The disease occurs in four different forms, and syphilis researchers disagree about whether the various forms are caused by different subspecies of Treponema pallidum or whether Treponema pallidum is not actually a single species but a brace of slightly different species, each responsible for a different set of symptoms. One form of infection is bejel, which creates small, coldsore-like lesions inside and around the mouth; it mainly afflicts the Middle East. The second, yaws, found in tropical places worldwide, infects cuts and abrasions and causes long-lasting sores. Neither disease spreads to bone or nerves, and they rarely kill their victims. Syphilis, the third form, is another matter. Passed on mainly by sexual contact, it inflicts genital rashes and sores before it apparently disappears, relieving sufferers but silently-and often fatally-infecting their hearts, bones, and brains. (The fourth form, which exists mainly in Mesoamerica, is pinta, a mild skin infection.) The first recorded European epidemic of syphilis erupted in late 1494 or early 1495. In the former year, Charles VIII of France led fifty thousand vagabond mercenaries from every alley of Europe to attack Naples, which he desired to rule. (He used mercenaries because even at the dawn of the sixteenth century most European states did not have the resources to support a standing military.) Charles conquered the city only to learn after he had occupied it for a few months that the various Italian statelets were massing against him, aided by a big contingent of Spanish troops. Struck with fear, the king ignominiously fled with his men in the spring of 1495. Both entry and exit were accompanied by sack, pillage, wanton slaughter, and mass rape. Somewhere along the way Treponema pallidum wriggled into the bloodstream of Charles's retreating mercenaries. The most widely suggested source is their Spanish attackers, with transmission occurring via the women violated by both sides. Whatever the case, Charles's army disintegrated as it fled, shedding companies of venereal soldiers along the way. A more effective means for spreading syphilis over a large area is hard to imagine. Within a year cities throughout Europe were banishing people afflicted with the disease.

Did Columbus bring the disease from the Americas, as the timing of the first epidemic suggests? There are three main arguments to support an affirmative answer to this question and an equal number against it. The first on the pro side is the sheer deadliness of the disease-early records indicate that syphilis then was even more ghastly than it is now. Green, acorn-size boils filled with stinking liquid bubbled everywhere on the body. Victims' pain, one sixteenth-century observer noted, "were as thoughe they hadde lyen in fire." The fatality rate was high. Such deadliness fits in with the notion that Treponema pallidum was new to Europe. Orthodox Darwinian theory predicts that over time the effect of most transmissible diseases should moderate-the most lethal strains kill their hosts so fast they cannot be passed on to other hosts. Thus syphilis, then wildly virulent and lethal, acted like a new disease.

A second argument is that Europeans at the time believed that the disease had "its origin and its birth from always in the island which is now named Espanola [Hispaniola]," as the prominent Spanish doctor Ruy Diaz de Isla put it in 1539. Diaz claimed that he had observed and tried to treat syphilis in the crew from Columbus's first voyage, including, it seems, the captain of the Pinta. Apparently the man picked up the parasite in Hispaniola, brought it back to Europe, and died within months-but not before passing it on to some luckless bedmate. Diaz de Isla's testimony was backed by the pro-Indian cleric Bartolome de Las Casas, who was in Seville when Columbus returned.

Syphilis seems to have existed in the Americas before 1492-the third argument. In the mid-1990s Bruce and Christine Rothschild, researchers at the Arthritis Center of Northeast Ohio, in Youngstown, inspected 687 ancient Indian skeletons from the United States and Ecuador for signs of syphilitic disease. Up to 40 percent of the skeletons from some areas showed its presence. To nail down the chain of transmission, they subsequently discovered-working in concert with researchers from the Dominican Republic and Italy-that syphilis was equally common in Hispaniola when Columbus arrived. Indeed, the disease seemed to date back about two thousand years-it may have originated as a mutated form of yaws on the Colorado plateau.

The three main counterarguments against the America-as-origin theory are, first, that Treponema pallidum may have existed in Europe before Columbus. Archaeologists have turned up a few medieval skeletons, most of them in Britain, carrying what look like the marks of syphilis. Although pre-1492 syphilitic skeletons exist in the Americas, even a few European exemplars would undermine the Columbus-as-Typhoid-Mary case. Indeed, some medical researchers propose that syphilis has always existed worldwide, but manifested itself differently in different places. Second, the 1495 outbreak may not have been the introduction of a new disease but the recognition of an old one, which until then had been confused with Hansen's disease (or, as it was known, leprosy). Descriptions of syphilis during and after the 149495 epidemic and Hansen's before it are surprisingly similar; both were "treated" with mercury. In 1490 the pope abolished all of the leprosaria in Europe, allowing hordes of sick people to return home. Could that humanitarian gesture also have unleashed a storm of syphilis? At least some researchers think it likely.

The third counterargument is psychological. In part, as Alfred Crosby admitted, he initially devoted attention to the possible American origin of syphilis "because I was uneasy about so many diseases crossing west over the Atlantic and none going east." He thought there must be some sort of "epidemiological-geographical symmetry." Other historians followed suit. Later Crosby realized that examining the evidence in the hope of redressing the infectious balance was a mistake. "They want pox in Europe to balance the scales for smallpox in Mexico," Vine Deloria Jr. told me. "They're all hoping to find there's a real Montezuma's Revenge."

Yet even if syphilis did originate in the New World, the scales would not be balanced. Syphilis is fascinating, "like all things venereal," Crosby wrote in 2003, "but it was not a history-maker" like smallpox. Treponema pallidum, awful as it was and is, did not help topple empires or push whole peoples to extinction. "There was little symmetry in the exchange of diseases between the Old and the New Worlds," Crosby said, "and there are few factors as influential in the history of the last half millennium as that."

APPENDIX D.

Calendar Math Dictionaries define the calendar almost as if it were a machine: "a system for fixing the beginning, length, and divisions of the civil year." But in every society calendars are much more than that. People experience time as both linear and circular. On the one hand, it marches remorselessly from birth to death, a vector with fixed endpoints and a constant velocity. On the other hand, time is cyclical, with the wheel of the seasons endlessly spinning, and no clear end or beginning. Calendars are records of a culture's attempt to weight and reconcile these different visions.

In early European societies, the end of the year was regarded as dangerous: a period when the calendar literally runs out of days, the landscape is blanketed by night and cold, and nobody can be truly certain that the heavens would usher in a new year. Embodying that mysterious time when the end of the calendar somehow looped round and rejoined itself at the beginning, Romans celebrated Saturnalia, an upside-down week when masters served their servants and slaves held the great offices of state. The Christian calendar bracketed the strange, perilous final days of the year on one end with the birth of Christ, symbol of renewal, on December 25, and on the other with Epiphany, the day when the three kings recognized the infant Jesus as the Savior, another symbol of renewal, on January 6. Christmas and Epiphany bridge the dangerous gap between the end of one year and the beginning of the next.

The Mesoamerican calendar also tied together linear and cyclical time, but more elaborately. In its most fully developed form, at the height of Maya power, it consisted of three separate but interrelated calendars: a sacred tally known as the tzolk'in; the haab, a secular calendar based, like the Western calendar, on the rotation of the sun; and the Long Count, a system that, among other things, linked the other two.

The sacred calendar is both the calendar most dissimilar to Western calendars and the most important culturally. Each day in the tzolk'in had a name and a number, in somewhat the same way that one might refer to, say, "Wednesday the 15th." In the Western calendar, the day names (e.g., Wednesday) run through cycles of seven, making weeks, and the day numbers (e.g., the 15th) run through cycles of 28, 30, or 31, making months. The tzolk'in used the same principle, but with less variation in the lengths of the cycles; it had a twenty-day "week" of named days and a thirteen-day "month" of numbered days. The analogy I am drawing is imprecise; what I am describing as the tzolk'in "week" was longer than the "month." But just as Thursday the 16th follows Wednesday the 15th in the Christian calendar, 10 Akbal would follow 9 Ik in the tzolk'in. (The Maya had a twenty-day "week" in part because their number system was base-20, instead of the base-10 in European societies.) Because the tzolk'in was not intended to track the earth's orbit around the sun, its inventors didn't have to worry about fitting their "weeks" and "months" into the 365 days of the solar year. Instead they simply set the first day of the year to be the first day of the twenty-day "week" and the thirteen-day "month," and let the cycle spin. In the language of elementary school mathematics, the least common multiple (the smallest number that two numbers will divide into evenly) of 13 and 20 is 260. Hence, the tzolk'in had a length of 260 days.

In the Western calendar, a given combination of named and numbered days, such as Wednesday the 15th, will occur a few times in a calendar year. For instance, in 2006 the 15th of the month falls on Wednesday three times, in February, March, and November; in 2007 Wednesday the 15th occurs just once, in August. The irregular intervals are due to the differing lengths of the months, which throw off the cycle. In the tzolk'in, every "month" and every "week" are the same length. As a result, "Wednesday the 15th"-or 1 Imix, to give a real example-in the tzolk'in recurs at precise intervals; each is exactly 13 20 or 260 days apart.

Many researchers believe the movements of Venus, which Mesoamerican astronomers tracked carefully, originally inspired the tzolk'in. Venus is visible for about 263 consecutive days as the morning star, then goes behind the sun for 50 days, then reappears for another 263 days as the evening star. It was a powerful presence in the heavens, as I noted in Chapter 8, and a calendar based on its celestial trajectory would have shared some of that power. Within the sacred year, every day was thought to have particular characteristics, so much so that people were often named after their birth dates: 12 Eb, 2 Ik, and so on. In some places men and women apparently could not marry if they had the same name day. Days in the tzolk'in had import for larger occasions, too. Events from ceremonies to declarations of war were thought to be more likely to succeed if they occurred on a propitious day.

The Mesoamerican calendar was both more complex and more accurate than the European calendars of the same period. It consisted of a 365-day secular calendar, the haab (right), much like contemporary European calendars. The haab was tied to the second, sacred calendar, the tzolk'in (left), which was unlike any Western calendar. With a "week" of twenty named days and a "month" of thirteen numbered days, the tzolk'in produced a 260-day "year." Mesoamerican societies used both simultaneously, so that every date was labeled with two names (1 Ix 0 Xul in the drawing). I have not rendered the haab as a wheel-within-wheel like the tzolk'in, even though it, too, had perfectly regular "weeks" and "months." This is because the haab had to fit the 365-day solar year, which forced Maya calendar designers to spoil their system by tacking on an irregular, extra-short month at the end.

Because people also needed a civil calendar for mundane purposes like knowing when to sow and harvest, Mesoamerican societies had a second, secular calendar, the haab: eighteen "months," each of twenty days. (Unlike the tzolk'in, which counted off the days from 1, the haab months began with 0; nobody knows why the system was different.) Simple arithmetic shows that eighteen twenty-day months generates a 360-day year, five days short of the requisite 365 days. Indians knew it, too. Rather than sprinkling the extra five days throughout the year as we do, though, they tacked them onto the end in a special "month" of their own. These days were thought to be unlucky-it was as if the year ended with five straight days of Friday the 13th. Although the ancient Maya knew (unlike their contemporaries in Europe) that the solar year is actually 365 days, they did not bother to account for the extra quarter day; there were no leap years in Mesoamerica. The failure to do so seems surprising, given that their astronomers' mania for precision had led them to measure the length of the lunar month to within about ten seconds.

With two calendars, every day thus had two names, a sacred tzolk'in name and a civil haab name. Usually the Maya referred to them by both at once: 1 Ix 0 Xul. The two different calendars, each perfectly regular (but one more regular than the other), marched in lockstep, forming what is now called the Calendar Round. After one 1 Ix 0 Xul, there would not be another 1 Ix 0 Xul for 18,980 days, about fifty-two years.

By describing dates with both calendars Mesoamerican societies were able to give every day in this fifty-two-year period a unique name. But they couldn't distinguish one fifty-two-year period from its predecessors and successors-as if the Christian calendar couldn't distinguish 1810, 1910, and 2010. To avoid confusion and acknowledge time's linear dimension, Mesoamerican societies invented the Long Count, which counts off the days from a starting point that is believed to have been in mid-August, 3114 B.C. Long Count dates consisted of the number of days, 20-day "months," 360-day "years," 7,200-day "decades," and 144,000-day "centuries" since the beginning. Archaeologists generally render these as a set of five numbers separated by dots. When Columbus landed, on Tuesday, October 11, 1492, the Maya would have marked the day as 11.13.12.4.3, with the "centuries" first and the days last. In the tzolk'in and haab, the day was 2 Akbal 6 Zotz.

Although extant Long Count dates have only five positions for numbers, the Maya knew that eventually that time would pass and they would have to add more positions. Indeed, their priestly mathematicians had calculated nineteen further positions, culminating in what is now called the alautun, a period of 23,040,000,000 days, which is about 63 million years. Probably the longest named interval of time in any calendar, the alautun is a testament to the grandiosity of Mesoamerican calendries. Just as the tzolk'in is one of the most impeccably circular time cycles ever invented, the Long Count is among the most purely linear, an arrow pointing straight ahead for millions of years into the future.

NOTES.

Every book is built on other books, the adage says, and this one is an exemplary case. Think of the list of texts below as the architect's specifications for 1491. Except that this list is more selective, consisting as it does only of the works consulted necessary to make a particular point, not everything used in the construction of the book. If at all possible, I have cited printed, English-language versions of each source; many texts can be found online, too, but URLs change so fast that I have avoided listing them whenever possible. Texts available on the Web as of early 2005 are indicated by a star (); most can be found through search engines or in such collections as Early English Books Online, Project Gutenberg, the Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, the University of Virginia's Electronic Text Center, the University of Maryland's Early American Digital Archive, and the Virtual Cervantes Library.

Perhaps paradoxically, some works were so important to this book that my notes give short shrift to them; they are in the background everywhere, but rarely summoned to make a specific point. For the first section, these would include Terence d'Altroy's The Incas; William Cronon's Changes in the Land; Alfred W. Crosby's Columbian Exchange and Ecological Imperialism; John Hemming's Conquest of the Incas; Karen Ordahl Kuppermann's Indians and English; Maria Rostworowski de Diez Canseco's History of the Inca Realm; and Neal Salisbury's Manitou and Providence.

As I stitched together the second section, books that kept my keyboard constant company included Ignacio Bernal's The Olmec World; Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel; Brian Fagan's Ancient North America; Stuart Fiedel's Prehistory of the Americas; Nina Jablonski's edited collection, The First Americans; the special issue of the Boletin de Arqueologia PUCP edited by Peter Kaulicke and William Isbell; Alan Kolata's The Tiwanaku; Mike Moseley's marvelous Incas and Their Ancestors; and the historical writings of David Meltzer, which I hope he will someday combine into a book, so that people like me won't have to keep piles of photocopies.

The third section sometimes seems like an extended riff on the three Cultural Landscapes books assembled by William Denevan and written by Denevan; Thomas M. Whitmore and B. L. Turner II; and William E. Doolittle. But I depended also on the special September 1992 issue of the Annals of the Association of American Geographers edited by Karl Butzer; the essays in The Great New Wilderness Debate, edited by J. Baird Callicott and Michael P. Nelson; Michael Coe's sturdy sourcebook, The Maya; Melvin Fowler's Cahokia Atlas; Shepard Krech's Ecological Indian; the amazing Chronicles of the Maya Kings and Queens, by Simon Martin and Nikolai Grube; and two books on terra preta (and much else besides), Amazonian Dark Earths: Explorations in Space and Time, edited by Bruno Glaser and William Woods, and Amazonian Dark Earths: Origin, Properties, Management, edited by Johannes Lehmann et al. (Full citations are in the Bibliography.) Even a book of this length must leave out many things, given the magnitude of the subject matter. Thus I ignored the inhabitants of the Americas' northern and southern extremes and barely touched on the Northwest Coast. The most painful decision, though, was to omit, after it had been written, a section on the North American West. My qualms were soothed by the recent appearance of Colin Calloway's One Vast Winter Count, a magnificent synthesis of practically everything known about the subject.

1 / A View from Above Erickson and scope of Beni earthworks: Erickson 2005, 2001, 2000b, 1995; see also Denevan 2001: chap. 12.

Old view of Indians: Ward Churchill, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado in Boulder, mockingly summed the paradigm: "How many Indians were there?-One million; Where did they come from?-Across the Bering Strait land bridge; When did they come?-15,000 years ago (plus or minus 15 minutes); How did they live?-They were squalid Stone Age hunter-gatherers wandering nomadically about the landscape at the bare margins of subsistence, waiting hopefully, millennium after millennium, for Europeans to show up and improve their quality of life" (Churchill 2003:44).

Smithsonian-backed archaeologists: Dougherty and Calandra 1984 (small numbers needed for causeways, 180; natural origins of mounds, 18285). Their discussion has been dismissed as "improbably interpreted" (Myers et al. 1992:87). Roughly similar conclusions appear in Langstroth 1996.

Snow's critiques: Interviews, Snow.

Pristine myth: Denevan 1992a, 1996b.

Wilderness Act: P.L. 88577, 3 Sept. 1964 ("untrammeled," section 2c); Callicott 1998:34950 (act embodies "the conventional understanding of wilderness").

Obligation to restore natural state: Cronon 1995a:36.

Fish weirs: Erickson 2000a.

Future options for Beni: Interviews, Erickson, Balee, CIDDEBENI. By leasing their land to loggers and miners, the Kayapo in the southeast Amazon basin demonstrated how Indians can disappoint environmentalists (Epstein 1993; the article is reproduced and discussed in Slater 1995:12124). Some environmentalists propose tucking the eastern Beni into a nearby UNESCO biopre-serve, one of the 350 such preserves the agency sponsors worldwide.

Devil tree: Interviews and email, Balee. I found no published work on this specific form of obligate mutualism, but see, generally, Huxley and Cutler eds. 1991.

Ibibate and pottery: Interviews, Balee, Erickson; Erickson and Balee 2005; Balee 2000; Erickson 1995; Langstroth 1996.

Holmberg's view of Siriono: Holmberg 1969:17 ("brand," "culturally backward"), 37 ("sleepless night"), 3839 (clothing), 110 (lack of musical instruments), 116 ("universe," "uncrystallized"), 121 (count to three), 261 ("quintessence," "raw state"). After Holmberg's death, Lauriston Sharp introduced Nomads as a study of "lowly but instructive" "survivors" who "retained a variety of man's earliest culture." The book, he said, "discovered, described, and thus introduced into history a new and in many respects extraordinary Paleolithic experience" (Sharp 1969: xiixiii). Nomads was a widely used undergraduate text for decades (Erickson, pers. comm.).

Holmberg's work and career: Interviews, Henry Dobyns; Doughty 1987; Stearman 1987 (account of his blind walk, Chap. 4).

Lack of study of Beni and Langstroth: Interviews, Erickson, Langstroth; Langstroth 1996.

Siriono epidemics: The chronology is uncertain. Holmberg (1969:12) describes smallpox and influenza epidemics that forced the "decimated" Siriono into mission life in 1927. Citing other sources, Swedish anthropologist Stig Ryden, who visited the Siriono briefly ten years after Holmberg, reports epidemics in 1920 and 1925, which he interprets as episodes in a single big flu epidemic (Ryden 1941:25). But such heavy casualties are less likely from a single source.

Siriono population: Holmberg 1969:12 (fewer than 150 during his fieldwork). Ryden (1941:21) estimated 6,00010,000 in the late 1920s, presumably a pre-epidemic count. Today there are 6002,000 (Balee 1999; Townsend 1996:22). Stearman (1986:8) estimated 3,0006,000.

Stearman returns, bottleneck, abuse by army and ranchers, Holmberg's failure to grasp: Stearman 1984; Stearman 1987; author's interviews, Balee, Erickson, Langstroth. Holmberg (1969:89) noted the incidence of clubfoot and ear marks, but made little of it.

Migration of Siriono: Interviews, Balee; Barry 1977; Priest 1980; Parssinen 2003. A Spanish account from 1636 suggests that they had arrived only a few decades before (Metraux 1942:97), but this is not widely accepted.

First Beni research and Denevan thesis: Nordenskiold 1979a; Denevan 1966.

Baure culture and Erickson's perspective: Interviews, Erickson; Erickson 1995, 2000b, 2005; Anon. 1743.

Las Casas ethnography: Casas 1992a; Wagner 1967:28789 (publication history).

"lyve in that goulden": Arber ed. 1885:71 (letter, Martire, P., to Charles V, 30 Sept. 1516).

"Indian wisdom": "[W]e cannot know truth by contrivance and method; the Baconian is as false as any other, and with all the helps of machinery and the arts, the most scientific will still be the healthiest and friendliest man, and possess a more perfect Indian wisdom" (Thoreau 1906 [vol. 5]:131).

Crying Indian campaign: Krech 1999:1416.

Indians without history: "In North America, whites are the bearers of environmental original sin, because whites alone are recognized as laboring. But whites are thus also, by the same token, the only real bearers of history. This is why our flattery...of 'simpler' peoples is an act of such immense condescension. For in a modern world defined by change, whites are portrayed as the only beings who make a difference" (White 1995:175). The phrase "people without history" was popularized in an ironic sense in Wolf 1997.

"unproductive waste": Bancroft 183476 [vol. 1]:34.

Kroeber on warfare and agriculture: Kroeber 1934:1012 (all quotes).

Conrad on Indian dyspepsia: Conrad 1923:vi.