Captured with the royal couple were their two sons, the elder of whom, 4-Wind, was heir to the throne. Seizing him by the hair, 8-Deer forced the teenager to grovel before him. But he also made what seems to have been a sentimental decision: he spared the life of his lover's son. The folly of this action became apparent when 4-Wind and his brother escaped from confinement.

Seeking revenge, 4-Wind approached the Zapotec empire for help. With Zapotec backing, he linked rebels in Red and White Bundle and a host of other cities defeated by 8-Deer. They besieged Tilantongo in 1115. The battle lasted six months and ended in total defeat for Tilantongo. In a mirror image of the past, the captured 8-Deer was forced to bow to 4-Wind. He was fifty-five years old and had six official kingships and dozens of petty states under his control. Victorious and vengeful, 4-Wind personally disemboweled him. Then he married 8-Deer's daughter.

In 4-Wind's first exercise of statecraft, he abandoned the Zapotec allies who had helped him achieve the throne, aligned Tilantongo with the Toltec empire to the north, and attacked the Zapotec. Ultimately the nudzahui under his lead took over much of Oaxaca, forcing the Zapotec states to pay tribute. The empire he established, far bigger than 8-Deer's, lasted until the fifteenth century, when the Mexica invaded. And then came Cortes.

WHEELED INTERLUDE.

As Matthew Stirling and his team were dodging ticks and unearthing stelae in Tres Zapotes, they found a cache of fifteen upside-down pottery bowls tucked into the ground six feet below the surface. The bowls protectively covered thirty-five toy-size, decorated figurines and twelve small, painted clay discs. Among the figurines were two dogs and a jaguar, each of which had thin tubes joining its two front feet and its two back feet. The discs lay beside them. Similar finds have been made further north, near Mexico City.

In the 1980s I saw the Tres Zapotes animals, or ones like them, at a museum in the Yucatan Peninsula. I was there with an Italian engineer whom I had met by chance a few hours before. Well before me, the engineer figured out the significance of the tubes between the figurines' feet. "Those are for axles," he said. "And those"-pointing to the discs-"must be the wheels." Looking at the little figures, it seemed obvious that they had been equipped with wheels in precisely the form he suggested.

The engineer scrunched up his face with incredulity. Tres Zapotes dated back to at least 1000 B.C. So the Olmec and their successors must have had the wheel for more than two thousand years. "Why didn't they use it for anything other than little toys?" he asked in Italian. "How could they not have understood that you could make bigger wheels and put them on carts? Hanno fatto proprio una stupidaggine, quei tipi."

The word stupidaggine (an absurdity), similar enough in Italian and Spanish, rang out in the room, drawing stares. The engineer seemed not to care. He looked positively offended at the Olmec failure to see the world in the same way as a contemporary European engineer.

I'm giving my acquaintance a hard time, but his bafflement was easy for me to understand. In Mesopotamia, the wheel dates back to at least the time of Sumer. It was a basic part of life throughout Eurasia. Chariot wheels, water wheels, potter's wheels, millstone wheels-one can't imagine Europe or China without them. The only thing more mysterious than failing to invent the wheel would be inventing the wheel and then failing to use it. But that is exactly what the Indians did. Presumably countless thousands of people rolled the toylike figurines back and forth. How could none of them have thought of making their wheels bigger and more useful?

Some reasons are apparent. Because of the Pleistocene extinctions, the Americas lacked animals suitable for domestication into beasts of burden; without animals to haul carts, individuals on rough terrain can use skids almost as effectively. Even with animals, though, the Olmec would not have had much use for wheeled vehicles. Their country is so wet and boggy that Stirling's horses sank to their chests in mud; boats were a primary means of transportation until recently. In addition one might note that Mesoamerican societies were not alone in their wheel-blindness. Although Mesopotamia had the wheel in about 4000 B.C., nearby Egypt did not use the wheel until two thousand years later, despite being in close contact. Still, none of this explains why no Mesoamerican society ever used wheels to make ceramics and grind maize. After all, every society in Eurasia eventually employed pottery wheels and mill wheels.

A better answer might be one implicit in Robert Temple's book, The Genius of China, a history of Chinese science and technology published in 1998. According to Temple, the Chinese invented the moldboard plow by the third century B.C. Made of cast iron, the plowshare was shaped like a V, with the blade carving into the ground and the two arms arcing away like gull wings. Because the arms were curved, they turned the earth away from the blade, which both reduced friction and more effectively plowed the soil. (The "moldboard" is the curved plowshare; the name comes from mold, the Old German word for soil.) The design of the moldboard plow is so obvious that it seems incredible that Europeans never thought of it. Until the Chinese-style plow was imported in the seventeenth century, farmers in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and other states labored to shove what amounted to a narrow slab of metal through the earth. "The increased friction meant that huge multiple teams of oxen were required, whereas Chinese plows could make do with a single ox," Temple explained. The European failure to think up the moldboard, according to science historian Teresi, was "as if Henry Ford designed the car without an accelerator, and you had to put the car in neutral, brake, and go under the hood to change speed. And then we did this for 2,000 years."

European agricultural production exploded after the arrival of the moldboard plow. The prosperity this engendered was one of the cushions on which the Enlightenment floated. "So inefficient, so wasteful of effort, and so utterly exhausting" was the old plow, Temple wrote, "that this deficiency of plowing may rank as mankind's single greatest waste of time and energy." Millions of Europeans spent centuries behind the plow, staring at the blade as it ineffectively mired itself in the earth. How could none of them have thought of changing the design to make the plow more useful?

The complexity of a society's technology has little to do with its level of social complexity-something that we, in our era of rapidly changing, seemingly overwhelming technology, have trouble grasping. Every society, big or little, misses out on "obvious" technologies. The lacunae have enormous impact on people's lives-imagine Europe with efficient plows or the Maya with iron tools-but not much effect on the scale of a civilization's endeavors, as shown by both European and Maya history. The corollary is that widespread and open trade in ideas is the best way to make up for the lacunae. Alas, Mesoamerica was limited in this respect. Like Europe, it was an extraordinarily diverse place with a shared cultural foundation. But where Europe had the profoundly different civilizations of China and Islam to steal from, Mesoamerica was alone in the world.

Or seemed to be, anyway.

A SLICE OF PERU.

About a hundred miles north of the Peru-Chile border, the coastal highway passes by an uninhabited beach ringed by a tall chain-link fence. The fence has an entrance with a gigantic, stylized statue of a woman with huge earrings. By the statue hangs a faded banner: Bolivia Mar.

When Bolivia declared its independence it had a territorial pseudopod that extended southwest from its Andean heartland through the Atacama Desert to the sea. The land was useless for agriculture but had four plausible seaports and huge underground deposits of prehistoric guano, which Chilean companies mined and shipped to Europe for fertilizer. (Bolivia, then as now impoverished, didn't have the capital for this industry.) In 1878, Hilarion Daza, the illegitimate son of an Italian acrobat, seized power in Bolivia. Immediately he raised taxes on the Chilean-owned guano mines, which the previous Bolivian government had promised not to do. Outraged, Chile rolled its army into the area. In vain did Bolivia counterattack with its ally, Peru; Chile simply repelled their incompetently led forces and took over the entire territory, as well as a chunk of southern Peru. Ejected in an outburst of popular anger, Daza fled to Europe, taking most of Bolivia's treasury with him.

Chile finally returned most of Peru's territory in 1929 but never gave back any land to Bolivia-an outcome that nation has never accepted. To this day, Bolivia's parliament has a representative from the lost maritime province. The Miss Bolivia contest always includes a contestant ostensibly from the coast. Maps are sold in which the conquered land is still part of Bolivia.

In a gesture to its longtime, long-suffering ally, Peru symbolically gave two miles of its shoreline to Bolivia in 1992. Bolivia Mar-Bolivia-by-the-Sea-is a little island of Bolivia entirely surrounded by Peru. It has no facilities of any kind, so far as I could tell when I passed by. Private enterprise was supposed to build an industrial duty-free port in Bolivia Mar. Thus far the free market has not accepted the challenge. Every now and then parties of Bolivians drive down to Bolivia Mar to swim-a political gesture.

The main highway from Bolivia Mar to Bolivia itself follows the Osmore Valley, cutting a perfect sectional slice through Peru on the way. For the first fifteen miles the road climbs through a desert landscape almost devoid of settlement and prone to fog. Then the road hits a plateau and the fog dissipates. The landscape that comes into view is so dry that in most years the Osmore River simply disappears into the desert.

Around the small city of Moquegua the river hoves back into view and the highway abruptly pitches into the Cordillera Negra. The windshield fills with enough canyons, bluffs, mesas, and cliffs for a dozen Road Runner cartoons. Standing higher than its neighbors, at an altitude of about eight thousand feet, is a wide pillar of rock with a rounded, convoluted top that vaguely resembles the rounded, convoluted top of a human brain. The pillar is called Cerro Baul. For about two hundred years, it was the sole meeting ground of two of the Americas' largest societies-societies similar in scale to, say, the Maya realm, but much less well known.

The two states, Wari and Tiwanaku, were probably the greatest of the Inkas' forerunners, and certainly the predecessors from whom they took the most. In their separate ways, both were children of Norte Chico. They worshipped figures in Staff God poses, lived in networks of vertical exchange, and had public architecture with designs based on templates from the coast. But in other ways they were as different from each other as Sicily and Scandinavia. Of the two, Wari was the more conventional, centralized state. Based east of Lima in the Andes heights, it first became prominent in the sixth century A.D.-a bad time to be launching a nation on the Pacific side of South America. At about that time, Andean societies were assailed by the first of several decades-long droughts, paradoxically interrupted by El Ninoinduced floods. Some polities may have disintegrated beneath the climatic assault, but Wari thrived. The principal reason for its success was its innovative techniques of terracing and irrigation, the latter being used to implement the former. Surprisingly, Peru has more arable land above nine thousand feet than below. By diverting snowmelt from the ever-present Andes icecaps to high farm terraces, Wari was able literally to rise above the drought and flooding of lower elevations.

An anomaly in the southern Andes foothills, the great stone of Cerro Baul dominates the neighboring slopes. On its summit are the remains of a Wari city.

The staple crop of the highlands was the potato, which unlike maize regularly grows at altitudes of 14,000 feet; the tubers, cultivated in hundreds of varieties, can be left in the ground for as long as a year (as long as the soil stays above 27F), to be dug up and cooked when needed. Even frozen potatoes could be used. After letting freezing night temperatures break down the tubers' cell walls, Andean farmers stomped out the water content to make dried chuno, a nigh-indestructible foodstuff that could be stored for years. (The potato's cold tolerance spurred its embrace by European peasants. Not only did potatoes grow in places where other crops could not, the plant was an ally in smallholders' ceaseless struggle against the economic and political elite. A farmer's barnful of wheat, rye, or barley was a fat target for greedy landlords and marauding armies; buried in the soil, a crop of potatoes could not be easily seized.) Maize, though, was what people wanted, the grain of choice for the elite-it was what you made chicha from. Its prestige was another reason for Wari's success. Because terraces soak up more sunlight than steep slopes, maize can be grown at higher than usual altitudes on them; irrigation similarly increases the area available for maize farming.

In a process that Michael Moseley has likened to "patenting and marketing a major invention," the Wari passed on their reclamation techniques to their neighbors, bringing a thousand-mile-long swath of the Peruvian Andes under their cultural sway. A sign of their influence was the spread of the Wari religion, in which the figure archaeologists call Staff God was dominant-though the Wari transformed the staff, as if to remind others of their agricultural beneficence, into a stalk of maize. By the end of the first millennium A.D., Wari techniques had reclaimed more than a million acres of cropland from mountainsides that almost anywhere else would have been regarded as impossibly dry, steep, and cold. Today three-quarters of the terraces are abandoned, and the alpine landscape has not regained the productivity it had a thousand years ago. But until the Spanish conquest Andean valleys were so thoroughly punctuated by Wari-inspired terraces that to the Jesuit Bernabe Cobo they looked "as if they were covered with flights of stairs."

Wari's capital city, also named Wari, occupied an alpine plateau near the modern city of Ayacucho. Construction began in the first few centuries A.D. The city ultimately spread across two square miles, an array of two- and three-story buildings in compounds behind massive walls. Both peasant homes and great palaces were built in similar styles, according to William H. Isbell, an anthropologist at the State University of New York at Binghamton, and Alexei Vranich, an archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Everything was enclosed behind high, white walls, in what the two researchers described in 2004 as a hive of "repetitive, modular cells organized in high-walled geometric blocks." There were no standout public buildings, no great public spaces, no spectacular vistas-only a thicket of walls and narrow streets strewn with garbage (archaeologists have turned up so few clean floors and surfaces, Isbell and Vranich wrote, "that it is apparent that Wari people experienced domestic refuse as benign and unthreatening"). Apparently the walls ringing and crisscrossing the city were intended for privacy, not protection; Wari was not located in an easily defended spot. Along the spine of the Andes the empire set up a string of a dozen administrative centers that were like smaller versions of the capital. These were not built with defense in mind, either. Indeed, there is little record of Wari warfare. Its supremacy was commercial and intellectual; it was based less on infantry troops than on innovative technology. All of which may explain some of its behavior in Cerro Baul.

Wari emissaries arrived in Moquegua around 600 A.D., according to Patrick Ryan Williams and Donna V. Nash, Field Museum archaeologists who have been working there since the early 1990s. A simpler culture had already staked out the best farmland in the area. The Wari neither aggressively threw them out nor withdrew in dismay. Guided, one imagines, by instructions from headquarters, they quickly set up living quarters on Cerro Baul itself. The big mesa is to this day regarded as an apu, an ancient spirit transfigured into rock. Thus putting a city directly on top of it was an arresting statement: Here we are.

On a practical level, living on a five-hundred-yard-long mesa was a daunting task. To supply water, the Wari carved a fifteen-mile canal through the mountains from the peaks to the bottom of Cerro Baul, an engineering feat that would be a challenge today. "And even that got water only to the bottom of the hill," Williams told me. "After that, it was bucket brigades." As I huffed and puffed on the wickedly steep, thirty-minute hike to the summit, he invited me to imagine a continuous line of servants exchanging ceramic jugs (slopping, brimful ones going up; light, empty ones going down) along the path, working day in and day out to provide water for the priests and princes above.

Small, rudely fashioned models of farmhouses and farmyards covered the top of the butte. Most of the models simply outlined walls, fences, and doors with loose stones, but some were elaborate constructions complete with plastic model cars, toy animals, and thatch roofs. People were climbing Cerro Baul, building their maquettes, and praying that the heavens would give them the real-life equivalents. The miniature farms extended for hundreds of yards in all directions. Here and there, makeshift crosses and pictures of saints added a veneer of Catholicism to indigenous Andean belief. Some of the ruined Wari walls were covered with ruined model walls. "This is getting out of hand," Williams said. "I don't want to knock down somebody's dream house to get to an archaeological site."

WARI AND TIWANAKU, 700 A.D.

In about 750 A.D., about a century after Wari came to Cerro Baul, Tiwanaku groups infiltrated the region around it. In most places on earth, this encounter would have been fraught with tension. And perhaps if Tiwanaku had been more like Wari there would have been immediate war. But Tiwanaku was so different in so many ways that ordinary expectations rarely apply to it. The celebrated anthropologist Clifford Geertz has half-jokingly suggested that all states can be parceled into four types: pluralist, in which the state is seen by its people as having moral legitimacy; populist, in which government is viewed as an expression of the people's will; "great beast," in which the rulers' power depends on using force to keep the populace cowed; and "great fraud," in which the elite uses smoke and mirrors to convince the people of its inherent authority. Every state is a mix of all of these elements, but in Tiwanaku, the proportion of "great fraud" may have been especially high. Nonetheless, Tiwanaku endured for many centuries.

Tiwanaku's capital, Tiwanaku city, was at the southwest end of Lake Titicaca. Situated at 12,600 feet, it was the highest city in the ancient world. Today visitors from lower altitudes are constantly warned that the area is very cold. "Bring warm clothing," Williams advised me in Cerro Baul. "You're going to freeze." The warnings puzzled me, because Lake Titicaca, which is big enough to stay at a near-constant 51 degrees Fahrenheit, moderates the local climate (this is one reason why agriculture is possible at such height). On winter nights the average temperature is a degree below freezing-cold, but not any colder than New England, and considerably warmer than one would expect at 12,600 feet. Only when I traveled there did I realize that this was the temperature indoors. The modern town of Tiwanaku is a poor place and few of its buildings have any heating. One night there I attended a performance at a family circus that was touring the Andes. It was so cold inside the tent that for the first few minutes the audience was shrouded in a cloud of its own breath. My host that night was an American archaeologist. When I woke the next morning in her spare bedroom, my host, in parka, hat, and gloves, was melting water on her stove. The cold does not detract from the area's beauty: Tiwanaku sits in the middle of a plain ringed by ice-capped mountains. From the ruin's taller buildings the great lake, almost ten miles to the northwest, is just visible. The wide expanse of water seems to merge into the sky without a welt.

The first important settlement around Titicaca was likely Chiripa, on a little peninsula on the lake's southwest coast. Its ceremonial center, which may date to 900 B.C., was built around a Norte Chicostyle sunken plaza. Chiripa was one of half a dozen small, competitive centers that emerged around the lake in that time. Most depended on raised-field agriculture, in which farmers grow crops on flat, artificially constructed surfaces created for the same reason that home gardeners grow vegetables on raised beds. (Similar but even larger expanses of raised fields are found in the Beni, the Mexican basin, and many other places.) By the time of Christ's birth, two of these early polities had become dominant: Pukara on the northern, Peruvian edge of the lake and Tiwanaku on the opposite, Bolivian side. In the third century A.D., Pukara rather abruptly disintegrated politically. People still lived there, but the towns dispersed into the countryside; pottery making, stela carving, and monument building ceased. No one is certain why.

Although Tiwanaku has been occupied since at least 800 B.C., it did not become an important center until about 300 B.C. and did not expand out from southern Titicaca until about two hundred years after Pukara's decline. But when it did reach out to its south and west, Tiwanaku transformed itself to become what Alan Kolata, an archaeologist at the University of Chicago, has called a "predatory state." It was not the centrally administered military power that term conjures. Instead, it was an archipelago of cities that acknowledged Tiwanaku's religious preeminence. "State religion and imperial ideology," Kolata argued, "performed much the same work as military conquest, but at significantly lower cost." Awed by its magnificence, fearful of the supernatural powers controlled by its priesthood, local rulers subordinated themselves.

Central to this strategy of intimidation was Tiwanaku city. A past wonder of the world, it is badly damaged today. In the last two centuries, people have literally carted away many of its buildings, using the stones for churches, homes, bridges, public buildings, and even landfill. At one point the Bolivian government drove a railroad through the site (recently it laid a road through another part). Hands more enthusiastic than knowledgeable reconstructed many of the remaining buildings. Still, enough remains to get a sense of the ancient city.

Dominating its skyline was a seven-tiered pyramid, Akapana, laid out in a pattern perhaps inspired by the Andean cross. Ubiquitous in highlands art, the Andean cross is a stepped shape that some claim is inspired by the Southern Cross constellation and others believe represents the four quarters of the world. Whatever the case, Akapana's builders planned with a sense of drama. They constructed its base walls with sandstone blocks, the array interrupted every ten feet by rectangular stone pillars that are easily ten feet tall. So massive are the pillars that the first European to see Tiwanaku, Pedro Cieza de Leon, later confessed himself unable to "understand or fathom what kind of instruments or tools were used to work them." Rising from the center of a large moat, Akapana mimicked the surrounding mountains. A precisely engineered drainage system added to the similarity by channeling water from a cistern-like well at the summit down and along the sides, a stylized version of rainwater plashing down the Andes.

The Andean cross.

Atop an adjacent, somewhat smaller structure, a large, walled enclosure called Kalasasaya, is the so-called Gateway of the Sun, cut from a single block of stone (now broken in two and reassembled). Covered with a fastidiously elaborate frieze, the twelve-foot gateway focuses the visitor's eye on the image of a single deity whose figure projects from the lintel: the Staff God.

Today the Gateway of the Sun is the postcard emblem of Tiwanaku. During the winter solstice (June, in South America) hundreds of camera-toting European and American tourists wait on Kalasasaya through the entire freezing night for the sunrise, which is supposed to shine through the Gateway on that date alone. Guides in traditional costume explain that the reliefs on the lintel form an intricate astronomical calendar that may have been brought to earth by alien beings. To keep themselves warm during the inevitable longueurs, visitors sing songs of peace and harmony in several languages. Invariably the spectators are stunned when the first light of sunrise appears well to the side of the Gateway. Only afterward do they discover that the portal is not in its original location, and may have had nothing to do with astronomy or calendars.

If those tourists had come to Tiwanaku at its height, walking through the miles of raised fields surrounding it to the city's carefully fitted stone walls, they would have been delighted by its splendor. But it might also have seemed curiously incomplete, with half the city falling down and in need of repairs and the other half under construction. Modern drawings of ancient cities tend to show them at an imagined apogee, the great monuments all splendidly arrayed together, perfect as architectural models. But this is not what Tiwanaku looked like, nor even what it was meant to look like, according to Isbell and Vranich. From the very beginning, the two men wrote in 2004, the city was partly in ruins-intentionally so, because the fallen walls bequeathed on Tiwanaku the authority of the past. Meanwhile, other parts of the city were constantly enveloped in construction projects, which testified to the continued wealth and vitality of the state. Sometimes these projects acquired construction materials by cannibalizing old monuments, thereby hastening the process of creating ruins. In the Andean tradition, labor was probably contributed by visiting work parties. Periodically ritual feasts that included much smashing of pottery interrupted the hubbub of construction. But it always continued. "They build their monuments as if their intent was never to finish them," the Spanish academic Polo de Ondegardo marveled in 1571. Exactly right, Isbell and Vranich said. Completion was not the object. The goal was a constant buzz of purposeful activity.

As our hypothetical modern visitors wandered through the hurly-burly of construction and deconstruction, they might have felt that despite the commotion something was missing. Unlike Western cities, Tiwanaku had no markets-no bazaars full of shouting, bargaining, conniving entrepreneurs; no street displays of produce, pottery, and plonk; no jugglers and mimes trying to attract crowds; no pickpockets. In Africa, Asia, and Europe, Kolata wrote, "a city was a place of meeting and of melding for many different kinds of people.... Through trade and exchange, through buying and selling of every conceivable kind, the city was made and remade." Tiwanaku was utterly different. Andean societies were based on the widespread exchange of goods and services, but kin and government, not market forces, directed the flow. The citizenry grew its own food and made its own clothes, or obtained them through their lineages, or picked them up in government warehouses. And the city, as Kolata put it, was a place for "symbolically concentrating the political and religious authority of the elite." Other Andean cities, Wari among them, shared this quality. But Tiwanaku carried it to an extreme.

On Lake Titicaca, the reed boats known as totora are still in use, as they have been for two thousand years. This replica of a large totora was built in 2001 to prove the vessels could have hauled the big stones used in Tiwanaku's walls.

The so-called Gateway of the Sun attracts pilgrims by the thousands who seek astronomical meaning in its location. Unfortunately, it was moved to its present site in the twentieth century.

Tiwanaku has been excavated for a century, and the more archaeologists delve into it the less there seems to be. To Vranich, the capital's lack of resemblance to European imperial cities extends well beyond the absence of marketplaces. Far from being the powerful administrative center envisioned by earlier researchers, he says, Tiwanaku was a combination of the Vatican and Disneyland, a religious show capital with a relatively small population-almost a staff- that attracted pilgrims by the thousand. Like the tourists at the solstice today, visitors came to this empire of appearances to be dazzled and awed. "In the central city, buildings and monuments went up and down, up and down, at an incredible rate," Vranich told me at Tiwanaku, where he had been working since 1996. "Nothing ever got finished completely, because they were just concerned with the facades. They had to keep changing the exhibits to keep the crowds coming."

The encounter between Tiwanaku and Wari at Cerro Baul seems to have gone remarkably smoothly. At any rate, a study of more than a thousand Wari and Tiwanaku graves found no evidence of the trauma associated with violence. Instead, the two societies split the region between them. Wari camped atop Cerro Baul and a neighboring hillock, Cerro Mejia. Between them was a steep valley with Tiwanaku settlements scattered throughout. Because Wari and Tiwanaku pottery differed, Williams and Nash have been able to map which group lived in which neighborhood by the distribution of ceramic fragments. The Wari canal provided drinking water, but had to pass through Tiwanaku territory at the base of Cerro Baul. Tiwanaku let the water through, but took enough to irrigate more than seven hundred acres of terraces.

At the same time, Wari and Tiwanaku kept themselves separate. Although they shared resources, there is little evidence that people from one culture visited the other often, or had friendships across the political lines. Wari homes were furnished with Wari goods; Tiwanaku homes, Tiwanaku goods. Despite living next to each other, people continued to speak their different languages and wear their different clothing and look for inspiration and instruction from their different capitals. The social-science word for such intermingling without intermixing is "interdigitization." For two centuries at Cerro Baul, Wari and Tiwanaku were like people in parallel worlds, sharing the same time and space but implacably separate from each other. It is a small reminder that Indians were neither the peaceful, love-thy-neighbor types envisioned by some apologists or the brutal, ceaselessly aggressive warriors decried by some political critics.

The end came in about 800 A.D., Williams told me. He was part of a Peruvian-American team that in 2005 reconstructed Cerro Baul's last days. As many as twenty-eight high-ranking nobles and priests gathered in the Wari colony's biggest palace for a final feast at a great reception hall, thirty feet on a side, each wall lined with a stone-faced bench. The chamber opened onto what the archaeologists believed "was likely the chief executive's office for conducting statecraft," the Andean equivalent of the Oval Office in the White House. To judge by the scattered food remains, the goodbye party was a Rabelaisian affair, with platters of llama, alpaca, vizcacha (Andean hare), and seven types of fish, all washed down with fresh chicha, this last being served in huge ceremonial mugs, many heraldically decorated, that held up to half a gallon apiece of brew. At the end the drunken crew staggered through the palace, smashing the crockery and setting the whole place afire. "It looks like they had a really wild time of it," Williams said. Last to go was the chicha brewery with its elite female staff. The lords torched the thatched milling room and then threw their great mugs into the flames. "Later, when the embers had cooled," archaeologists wrote, "six necklaces of shell and stone were placed atop the ashes in a final act of reverence."

The retreat was part of a general fall. Tiwanaku may have declined first, leading Wari to shut down its embassy in Cerro Baul. Or perhaps Wari was pulling back for its own internal reasons. Both declines have been laid to drought, but this is contested. For one thing, Wari had already survived drought. As for Tiwanaku, Vranich said, "How much would drought matter to Disneyland?" Its ability to retain its audience would be far more important.

The successors to both Wari and Tiwanaku combined the former's organizational skills and the latter's sense of design and razzle-dazzle. First came Chimor, then the greatest empire ever seen in Peru. Spread at its greatest extent over seven hundred miles of the coastline, Chimor was an ambitious state that grew maize and cotton by irrigating almost fifty thousand acres around the Moche River (all of modern Peru only reached that figure in 1960). A destructive El Nino episode in about 1100 A.D. made irrigation impossible for a while. In response, the government forced gangs of captive laborers to build a fifty-three-mile, masonry-lined canal to channel water from the Chicama River, in the next valley to the north, to farmland in the Moche Valley. The canal was a flop: some parts ran uphill, apparently because of incompetent engineering, and the rest lost nine-tenths of its water to evaporation and seepage. Some archaeologists believe that the canal was never meant to function. It was a PR exercise, they say, a Potemkin demonstration by the Chimor government that it was actively fighting El Nino.

When the bad weather ended, Chimor looked outside its borders. Armies went out and returned victorious to Chan Chan, the Chimor capital, a seaside metropolis with a dense center that covered four square miles. Dominated by nine high-walled imperial palace-tombs and five cathedral-like ceremonial complexes, the city was both exemplary in its grandeur and oddly empty, because its streets were restricted to the elite. Commoners were barred, except for a few specialized technicians and craftworkers. Each palace was hundreds of feet on a side and many were three stories tall. They were filled with storage space-living quarters were almost an afterthought. Their great beams adorned with splendidly worked gold and silver, the huge structures were jammed together around the center of town like people huddling in the shelter of an awning.

Chan Chan suffered a palace surfeit because dead rulers were regarded as divine figures. As with the Inka, the kings' mummified bodies continued to live opulently in their own homes and could not be displaced; indeed, the mummies were necessary presences at important state occasions. As a result, each new ruler had to build his own palace and acquire the riches necessary to maintain it till the end of time. The system almost guaranteed imperial ambitions and exuberant construction plans.

The biggest of Chan Chan's surviving palaces may have belonged to Minchacaman-the eleventh king in the Chimor dynasty, according to one Spanish account-who reputedly conquered much of the coastline. Minchacaman was a powerful figure who could have taken over even more land than he did. Unfortunately for him, he lived at the same time that a previously little-known group, the Inka, acquired a new ruler, Pachakuti. In about 1450 the Inka army, led by Qhapaq Yupanki, Pachakuti's brother, besieged the city-state of Cajamarca, in the foothills east of Chimor. Cajamarca's leader had allied himself with Minchacaman, who rushed to his aid with an army. He does not seem to have known what he was in for, possibly because he viewed the Inka as a gang of rustic thugs. Qhapaq Yupanki awaited him in an ambush. Minchacaman and his army were forced to flee as Cajamarca fell to the Inka. Qhapaq Yupanki covered himself with so much glory that when he returned home to Qosqo his brother, sensing future trouble, promptly executed him.

In this rare aerial photograph-taken in 1931, before modern looting blasted the site-the ruined Chimor capital of Chan Chan sprawls across the northern Peruvian coast. One of the wonders of the fifteenth-century world, Chan Chan abruptly fell to the Inka in about 1450; eighty years later, Spanish diseases and Spanish soldiers destroyed much of what had survived the Inka.

A decade or so later-in 1463, if Spanish chronicles are correct-the emperor sent out another army led by his son and designated successor, Thupa Inka Yupanki. By that time nobody thought of the Inkas as hicks. Thupa Inka descended the Moche River and paralyzed Chimor's defenses by the simple expedient of threatening to destroy its water supply. Minchacaman was captured, taken to Qosqo, and forced to watch Thupa Inka's victory celebration. Chimor's conquerors were quick studies. Liking the courtly magnificence of Chan Chan, they hauled away what they could and, more important, forced the city's gold, silver, and gem workers to accompany them to Qosqo. They were instructed to transform the city into a new Chan Chan, only more impressive. Seven decades later, when Pizarro held his victory celebration in Qosqo, it was equal in grandeur to any city in Europe.

MAKING THE WAK'A.

Jonathan Haas and Winifred Creamer took me to Caballete, a narrow, dusty bowl, perhaps half a mile long and a quarter mile wide, a few miles up the Fortaleza River from the Peruvian coast. At the mouth of the bowl were three mounds in a rough semicircle that faced a fourth mound. In front of one mound, like a one-eighth scale model of Stonehenge, was a ragged circle of wak'a: sacred stones. Not far from the wak'a looters had dug up an ancient graveyard, pulling out the bodies and unwinding them from their sheets in a search for gold and jewels. When they didn't find any, they threw the bones down in disgust. In a square perhaps fifty yards on a side the ground was carpeted with broken human bones and scraps of thousand-year-old fabric.

We walked a little further and were greeted by a curious sight: skulls from the cemetery, gathered into several small piles. Around them were beer cans, cigarette butts, patent-medicine bottles, half-burned photographs, and candles shaped like naked women. These last had voodoo pins stuck in their heads and vaginas. Local people came to these places at night and either dug for treasure or practiced witchcraft, Haas said. In the harsh afternoon light they seemed to me tacky and sad. I imagined that the families of the people who had been buried at Caballete so long ago would have been outraged if they could have known what would happen to the bodies of their loved ones.

The history of Andean societies is so rich and complex that it often leaves archaeologists feeling overwhelmed-there is so much to learn that they can never keep up. A single example: scientists did not confirm the existence of the Great Wall of Peru, a forty-mile stone rampart across the Andes, until the 1930s. And it still has never been fully excavated.

But then it occurred to me that my views may not have been shared by either the present or the past inhabitants of Norte Chico. I had no idea what people in Wari or Chimor would have thought of the scene before me. So far in this section, I have mainly described the economic and political history of Andean Indians. But people live also in the realm of the affective and aesthetic-that's why they bury bodies and sometimes dig them up and pour love potions on them. Despite all the knowledge gained by scientists in the last few decades, this emotional realm remains much harder to reach.

An obvious example on the southern coast is the Nazca, famous for the huge patterns they set into the ground. Figures of animals and plants, almost a thousand geometric symbols, arrow-straight lines many miles long-what were they for? Peruvian anthropologist Toribio Mejia Xesspe first brought these famous drawings to the attention of the outside world in 1927. Four decades later, the Swiss writer Erich von Daniken set off an international furor by claiming that the Nazca Indians could not have made these symbols, because they were too big for such "primitive" people to construct, and because they are visible only from the air. Instead, he said, the giant figures were landing signals for space travelers; the whole plain was a sort of gigantic extraterrestrial airport. Expanded in a series of bestselling books, this notion turned the lines into a major tourist attraction. Exasperated scientists pointed out that a) small groups could have constructed the images by moving the dark surface stone to expose the lighter-colored earth beneath, and b) the Nazca did not have to see the figures to experience them, for they can be understood by walking the lines, which it is believed the Indians did. The prevailing theory today is that the straight lines mapped out the area's many underground faults, which channel water. But nobody knows why the Nazca made the animal and plant figures, which seem less likely to have a direct function. What were the Nazca thinking as they created them? How did they feel when they walked them? To this day, the answers remain frustratingly far away.

Or consider the Moche, leaders of a military state that overran much of the northern coast, submerging the identities of its victims in its own. Huaca del Sol, the Moche capital, contains the largest adobe structure in the Andes, still hauntingly evocative despite centuries of systematic looting. (Unwilling to laboriously dig their way through the palace's tombs, the Spaniards diverted the Moche River through it, washing out the riches in orthodox Augean-stable style; contemporary thieves have contented themselves with picks and shovels.) After about 300 A.D., Moche artists confined themselves to perhaps half a dozen subjects, painting stories of supernatural figures on pottery and murals with ever more naturalistic technique. Actors reenacted the same stories in grand pageants and ritual celebrations. Individual combat is a common theme; losers were formally stripped of their garments and forced to parade naked. Another oft-repeated tale involves the death and burial of a regal figure. Many of the people in the paintings are sharply individuated. Great effort has gone into studying the Moche, but as Moseley says, their identities and motives often remain "elusive." The Moche polity broke up around 800 A.D., taking with it our chance to understand.

One of the few moments when I imagined I could encompass something of the inner lives of these long-ago people occurred in Chavin de Huantar, a city of several thousand people that existed between about 800 B.C. and 200 A.D. Its most important feature, a ceremonial temple shaped in a Norte Chicostyle U, was a masterpiece of architectural intimidation. Using a network of concealed vents and channels, priests piped loud, roaring sounds at those who entered the temple. Visitors walked up three flights of stairs, growls echoing around them, and into a long, windowless passageway. At the end of the corridor, in a cross-shaped room that flickered with torchlight, was a fifteen-foot-high stone figure with a catlike face, taloned fingers, fierce tusks, and Medusa hair. Nobody today is sure of the god's identity. Immediately above it, hidden from visitors' eyes, sat a priestly functionary, who provided the god's voice. After the long, torchlit approach, walking straight into the gaze of the snarling deity, mysterious bellows reverberating off the stone, the oracular declamation from above must have been spine-chilling.

Most of the complex is open to tourists. Many of the sculptures have been put into museums; others presumably have been looted. Yet walking into the temple still felt to me like entering a mountain of solid rock. Over and over again, Andean stories tell of spirits embodied in stones and giants transformed into natural features. The landscape has an intricate numinous geography; it is charged with meaning that must be respected and heeded. The earth, in this view, is not something to be left alone; the wak'a that litter Peruvian anthropological sites are often partly sculpted, as if they had needed some human attention to manifest their sacred qualities. Thus the human-made tunnels into the temple were part of what made it embody the power of a mountain. As I walked down the dimly lighted corridor toward where the torchlit deity had stood, my fingers ran along the walls created by Chavin craftworkers. They were fit beautifully into place and as cold and hard as the mountains they came from. But they did not gain their power without my hand to close the circuit. The natural world is incomplete without the human touch.

PART THREE.

Landscape with Figures.

Made in America.

ENTERING THE WATER.

At some point, Chak Tok Ich'aak must have realized that January 14, 378 A.D., would be his last day on earth. The king of Mutal, the biggest and most cosmopolitan city-state in the Maya world, he lived and worked in a sprawling castle a few hundred yards away from the great temples at the city's heart. (Now known as Tikal, the ruins of Mutal have become an international tourist attraction.) Audience seekers entered the castle through a set of three richly carved doors in its eastern wall. Inside was a receiving room where petitioners waited for the king's attention. An inner portal led to a torch-lit chamber, where Chak Tok Ich'aak, flanked by counselors and minions, reclined on an ornate bench. On that bench is, quite possibly, where he met his fate.*23 Like most Maya rulers, Chak Tok Ich'aak spent a lot of his time luxuriating in his court while dwarf servants attended to his whims and musicians played conch shells and wooden trumpets in the background. But he also excelled at such regal duties as performing ritual public dances, sending out trade expeditions in search of luxury goods, and fighting wars-a celebratory stela has Chak Tok Ich'aak personally stomping a manacled POW. In another portrait, a bas-relief, the king is depicted as an alert man with a long breechclout and a jeweled mass of necklaces, bracelets, anklets, and pendants clicking and clattering about his person. Towering a foot over his skull was an elaborate headdress in the shape of a bird of prey, complete with swirling plumage. Like most Maya art, the portrait is too stylized to regard as a naturalistic rendering. Nonetheless, it effectively makes its point: Chak Tok Ich'aak was a major historical figure.

Mutal (modern Tikal) and the huge city-empire of Teotihuacan had trade relations-peaceful, so far as is known-that dated back to 200 A.D. Matters abruptly changed in January 378, when a force led by the Teotihuacan general Siyaj K'ak' arrived in the court of the Mutal king Chak Tok Ich'aak. As depicted on a painting wrapped around a Mutal vase, the foreign soldiers, shown with bundles of spears and atlatls, marched away from a Teotihuacan-style building (above) and confronted the lightly clad Mutalking on the steps of his palace (near left). The outcome of the meeting-Chak Tok Ich'aak's death-may be hinted at in the final image (far left), in which longhaired Maya pay their respects to an empty pyramid.

By combining scraps of data on several inscriptions, archaeologists have calculated that Chak Tok Ich'aak probably acceded to the throne in 360 A.D. At the time, the Maya realm consisted of sixty or so small, jostling statelets scattered across what is now northern Belize and Guatemala and the Yucatan Peninsula. Mutal was older and wealthier than most, but otherwise not strikingly different. Chak Tok Ich'aak changed that. During the eighteen years of his reign, the city acquired diplomatic stature and commercial clout; its population grew to perhaps ten thousand and it established trade contacts throughout Mesoamerica. As it prospered, Mutal attracted considerable attention-which, in the end, may have been the king's undoing.

Marching toward him that January day was an armed force from Teotihuacan, 630 miles to the west. Already in control of most of central Mexico, Teotihuacan was looking for new lands to dominate. Leading the expedition was one Siyaj K'ak', apparently a trusted general or counselor to the ruler of Teotihuacan. Four Maya cities along Siyaj K'ak''s path recorded his progress in murals, panel paintings, and stelae. Texts and images depict the Teotihuacanos as gaudily martial figures with circular mirrors strapped to their backs and squared-off helmets sweeping protectively in front of the jaw. They were bare-chested but wore fringed leggings and heavy shell necklaces and high-strapped sandals. In their hands were atlatls and obsidian darts to throw with them. Painted panels in one city show Maya soldiers in jaguar uniforms rushing to attack the visitors, but in fact it seems unlikely that any of the small settlements between Teotihuacan and Mutal would have dared to harass them.

No detailed description of the encounter between Siyaj K'ak' and Chak Tok Ich'aak exists, but it is known that discussion did not go on for long. They two men met on January 14, 378 A.D. On that same day Chak Tok Ich'aak "entered the water," according to an account carved on a later stela. The Maya saw the afterworld as a kind of endless, foggy sea. "Entering the water" was thus a euphemism on the order of "passed on to a better place." Readers of the stela would understand that Chak Tok Ich'aak's old heart had quietly stopped beating after Siyaj K'ak' or one of his troops slipped a blade into it. Likely the rest of his family perished, as well as anyone else who objected. In any case no one seems to have complained when Siyaj K'ak' established a new dynasty at Mutal by installing the son of his Teotihuacan master on the vacant throne.

Chak Tok Ich'aak's death began a tumultuous period in Mesoamerican history. The new, Teotihuacan-backed dynasty at Mutal drove the city to further heights of power and prestige. Inevitably, its expansion was resented. A northern city-state, Kaan (now known as Calakmul), conscripted an army from its client states and launched a series of attacks. The ensuing strife lasted 150 years, spread across the Maya heartland, and resulted in the pillage of a dozen city-states, among them both Mutal and Kaan. After suffering repeated losses, Mutal unexpectedly defeated the superior forces of Kaan, possibly killing its king to boot. The beaten, humiliated Kaan lost the support of its vassals and was reduced to penury.

Mutal once again reclaimed its heritage from imperial Teotihuacan. But its triumph, though long sought, was short-lived. In one of archaeology's most enduring mysteries, Maya civilization crumbled around it within a century. After a final flash of imperial splendor, the city joined Kaan and most central Maya cities in obscurity and ruin. By about 900 A.D., both Mutal and Kaan stood almost empty, along with dozens of other Maya cities. And soon even the few people who still lived there had forgotten their imperial glories.

"GETTING ALONG WITH NATURE"

Why did the Maya abandon all their cities?

"No words are more calculated to strike dismay in the hearts of Maya archaeologists," the Maya archaeologist David Webster confessed in 2002. Webster, a researcher at Pennsylvania State University, admitted that during his "incautious younger years" he often told fellow airplane passengers that he was flying to work "at some ancient Maya center. Then, with utter predictability, [would come] the dreaded question. Nowadays, older and wiser, I usually mutter something vague about 'business' and then bury my nose in the airline magazine."

One reason Webster avoided the question is its scope. Asking what happened to the ancient Maya is like asking what happened in the Cold War-the subject is so big that one hardly knows where to begin. At the same time, that very sweep is why the Maya collapse has fascinated archaeologists since the 1840s, when the outside world first learned of the abandoned cities in Yucatan. Today we know that the fall was not quite as rapid, dramatic, and widespread as earlier scholars believed. Nevertheless, according to Billie Lee Turner, a geographer at Clark University, in Worcester, Massachusetts, it was unique in world history. Cultures rise and fall, but there is no other known time when a large-scale society disintegrated-and was replaced by nothing. "When the Roman Empire fell apart," he said, "Italy didn't empty out-no cities, no major societies-for more than a thousand years. But the Maya heartland did just that." What happened?

In the 1930s, Sylvanus G. Morley of Harvard, probably the most celebrated Mayanist of his day, espoused what is still the best-known theory: The Maya collapsed because they overshot the carrying capacity of their environment. They exhausted their resource base, began to die of starvation and thirst, and fled their cities en masse, leaving them as silent warnings of the perils of ecological hubris.

When Morley proposed his theory, it was little more than a hunch. Since then, though, scientific measurements, mainly of pollen in lake sediments, have shown that the Maya did cut down much of the region's forest, using the wood for fuel and the land for agriculture. The loss of tree cover would have caused large-scale erosion and floods. With their fields disappearing beneath their feet and a growing population to feed, Maya farmers were forced to exploit ever more marginal terrain with ever more intensity. The tottering system was vulnerable to the first good push, which came in the form of a century-long dry spell that hit Yucatan between about 800 and 900 A.D. Social disintegration followed soon thereafter.

Recounted in numberless articles and books, the Maya collapse has become an ecological parable for green activists; along with Pleistocene overkill, it is a favorite cautionary tale about surpassing the limits of Nature. The Maya "were able to build a complex society capable of great cultural and intellectual achievements, but they ended up destroying what they created," Clive Ponting wrote in his influential Green History of the World (1991). Following the implications of the Maya fall, he asked, "Are contemporary societies any better at controlling the drive toward ever greater use of resources and heavier pressure on the environment? Is humanity too confident about its ability to avoid ecological disaster?" The history of these Indians, Ponting and others have suggested, has much to teach us today.

Curiously, though, environmentalists also describe Native American history as embodying precisely the opposite lesson: how to live in a spiritual balance with Nature. Bookstore shelves groan beneath the weight of titles like Sacred Ecology, Guardians of the Earth, Mother Earth Spirituality, and Indigenous Traditions and Ecology: The Interbeing of Cosmology and Community. So strongly endorsed is this view of Native Americans that checklists exist to judge whether books correctly depict their environmental values. The Native Cultures Authenticity Guideline, for instance, assesses the portrayal of the "Five Great Values" shared by all "the major Native cultures" (including, one assumes, the Maya), one of which is "Getting Along with Nature"-"respecting the sacred natural harmony of and with Nature." To be historically accurate, according to the guidelines, major native cultures must be shown displaying "a proper reverence for the gift of life."

Indians as poster children for eco-catastrophe, Indians as green role models: the two images contradict each other less than they seem. Both are variants of Holmberg's Mistake, the idea that Indians were suspended in time, touching nothing and untouched themselves, like ghostly presences on the landscape. The first two sections of this book were devoted to two different ways that researchers have recently repudiated this perspective. I showed that they have raised their estimates of indigenous populations in 1492, and their reasons for it; and then why most researchers now believe that Indian societies have been here longer than had been imagined, and grew more complex and technologically accomplished than previously thought. In this section I treat another facet of Holmberg's Mistake: the idea that native cultures did not or could not control their environment. The view that Indians left no footprint on the land is an obvious example. That they marched heedlessly to tragedy is a subtler one. Both depict indigenous people as passively accepting whatever is meted out to them, whether it is the fruits of undisturbed ecosystems or the punishment for altering them.

Native Americans' interactions with their environments were as diverse as Native Americans themselves, but they were always the product of a specific historical process. Occasionally researchers can detail that process with some precision, as in the case of the Maya. More often one can see only the outlines of history, as in the reconfiguration of the eastern half of the United States. These two paradigmatic examples are the subjects I turn to now. In both, Indians worked on a very large scale, transforming huge swathes of the landscape for their own ends. Sifting through the evidence, it is apparent that many though not all Indians were superbly active land managers-they did not live lightly on the land. And they do have lessons to teach us, but they are not what are commonly supposed.

FIRE PLACE.

Adriaen van der Donck was a lawyer who in 1641 transplanted himself to the Hudson River Valley, then part of the Dutch colony of Nieuw Nederland. He became a kind of prosecutor and bill collector for the Dutch West India Company, which owned and operated the colony as a private fiefdom. Whenever possible, van der Donck ignored his duties and tramped around the forests and valleys upstate. He spent a lot of time with the Haudenosaunee, whose insistence on personal liberty fascinated him. They were, he wrote, "all free by nature, and will not bear any domineering or lording over them."

When a committee of settlers decided to complain to the government about the Dutch West India Company's dictatorial behavior, it asked van der Donck, the only lawyer in New Amsterdam, to compose a protest letter and travel with it to The Hague. His letter set down the basic rights that in his view belonged to everyone on American soil-the first formal call for liberty in the colonies. It is tempting to speculate that van der Donck drew inspiration from the attitudes of the Haudenosaunee.

The Dutch government responded to the letter by taking control of New Amsterdam from the Dutch West India Company and establishing an independent governing body in Manhattan, thereby setting into motion the creation of New York City. Angered by their loss of power, the company directors effectively prevented van der Donck's return for five years. While languishing in Europe, he wrote a nostalgic pamphlet extolling the land he had come to love.

Every fall, he remembered, the Haudenosaunee set fire to "the woods, plains, and meadows," to "thin out and clear the woods of all dead substances and grass, which grow better the ensuing spring." At first the wildfire had scared him, but over time van der Donck had come to relish the spectacle of the yearly burning. "Such a fire is a splendid sight when one sails on the [Hudson and Mohawk] rivers at night while the forest is ablaze on both banks," he recalled. With the forest burning to the right and the left, the colonists' boats passed through a channel of fire, their passengers as goggle-eyed at the blaze as children at a video arcade. "Fire and flames are seen everywhere and on all sides...a delightful scene to look on from afar."

Van der Donck believed that North America was only "several hundred miles" across, and apparently assumed that all its inhabitants were exactly like the Haudenosaunee. He was wrong about the first belief, but in a sense correct about the second: from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Hudson's Bay to the Rio Grande, the Haudenosaunee and almost every other Indian group shaped their environment, at least in part, by fire.

Early in the last century, ecologists discovered the phenomenon of "succession," the more or less well-defined sequence by which ecosystems fill in open land. A textbook example occurred after the eruption in 1980 of Mount St. Helens, in southern Washington State, which inundated more than two hundred square miles with magma, volcanic ash, and mud. Surviving plants sprang quickly to life, sometimes resprouting within weeks. Then colonizing species like lupine appeared, preparing the ground for the return of the grasses. Fifteen years after the eruption, the ravaged slopes were dotted with trees and woody shrubs: red alder, lodgepole pine, willow bush. Here and there gleamed the waxy red boles of madrone. Forest giants like hemlock, Douglas fir, and Sitka spruce waited in the wings. In the classic successional course, each suite of plants replaces its predecessor, until the arrival of the final, "climax" ecosystem, usually tall forest.

If ecological succession were unstoppable, the continents would be covered by climax-stage vegetation: a world of great trees, dark and silent. Early-succession species would have vanished. Luckily for these species, succession is often interrupted-Nature does not move in lockstep. Windstorms, lightning fires, landslides, volcanic eruptions, and other natural calamities knock down trees and open up the forest, or prevent open country from turning into forestland. A few years or decades of tranquility may see grasses replaced by shrubs and trees which are in turn flattened by a violent thunderstorm, permitting the grass to thrive again. After a while, the shrubs and trees return, only to be wiped out by a flood. And so on. Different types of disturbance shape different ecosystems: floods in the Nile, landslides on the steep pitches of the Andes, hurricanes in the Yucatan Peninsula. For more than ten thousand years, most North American ecosystems have been dominated by fire.

In the Greek myth of Prometheus the gift of fire forever severs humankind from the natural world-the burning torch is the icon of the constructed and artificial. On the mundane, factual level, though, this resonant tale is wrong: Nature has always used fire as a mallet to beat landscapes into other forms. Prometheus only helped human beings to pick up the handle. "The earth," wrote the pioneering fire ecologist Edward V. Komarek, "born in fire, baptized by lightning, since before life's beginning has been and is, a fire planet." Set off by lightning, wildfires reset the ecological clock, dialing the array of plants and animals back a few successional stages. Fire benefits plants that need sunlight, while inhibiting those that love the cool gloaming of the forest floor; it encourages the animals that need those plants even as it discourages others; in turn, predator populations rise and fall. In this way fire regulates ecological character.

Fire is a dominating factor in many if not most terrestrial landscapes. It has two main sources: lightning and Homo sapiens. In North America, lightning fire is most common in the western mountains. Elsewhere, though, Indians controlled it-at least until contact, and in many places long after. In the Northeast, Indians always carried a deerskin pouch full of flints, Thomas Morton reported in 1637, which they used "to set fire of the country in all places where they come." The flints ignited torches, which were as important to the hunt as bows and arrows. Deer in the Northeast; alligators in the Everglades; buffalo in the prairies; grasshoppers in the Great Basin; rabbits in California; moose in Alaska: all were pursued by fire. Native Americans made big rings of flame, Thomas Jefferson wrote, "by firing the leaves fallen on the ground, which, gradually forcing animals to the center, they there slaughter them with arrows, darts, and other missiles." Not that Indians always used fire for strictly utilitarian purposes. At nightfall tribes in the Rocky Mountains entertained the explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark by applying torches to sap-dripping fir trees, which then exploded like Roman candles.

Rather than domesticate animals for meat, Indians retooled ecosystems to encourage elk, deer, and bear. Constant burning of undergrowth increased the numbers of herbivores, the predators that fed on them, and the people who ate them both. Rather than the thick, unbroken, monumental snarl of trees imagined by Thoreau, the great eastern forest was an ecological kaleidoscope of garden plots, blackberry rambles, pine barrens, and spacious groves of chestnut, hickory, and oak. The first white settlers in Ohio found woodlands that resembled English parks-they could drive carriages through the trees. Fifteen miles from shore in Rhode Island, Giovanni da Verrazzano found trees so widely spaced that the forest "could be penetrated even by a large army." John Smith claimed to have ridden through the Virginia forest at a gallop.

Incredible to imagine today, bison roamed from New York to Georgia. A creature of the prairie, Bison bison was imported to the East by Native Americans along a path of indigenous fire, as they changed enough forest into fallows for it to survive far outside its original range. When the Haudenosaunee hunted these animals, the historian William Cronon observed, they were harvesting a foodstuff which they had consciously been instrumental in creating. Few English observers could have realized this. People accustomed to keeping domesticated animals lacked the conceptual tools to recognize that the Indians were practicing a more distant kind of husbandry of their own.

Indian fire had its greatest impact in the middle of the continent, which Native Americans transformed into a prodigious game farm. Native Americans burned the Great Plains and Midwest prairies so much and so often that they increased their extent; in all probability, a substantial portion of the giant grassland celebrated by cowboys was established and maintained by the people who arrived there first. "When Lewis and Clark headed west from [St. Louis]," wrote ethologist Dale Lott, "they were exploring not a wilderness but a vast pasture managed by and for Native Americans."

In 1792 the surveyor Peter Fidler examined the plains of southern Alberta systematically, the first European to do so. Riding with several groups of Indians in high fire season, he spent days on end in a scorched land. "Grass all burnt this day," he reported on November 12. "Not a single pine to be seen three days past." A day later: "All burnt ground this Day." A day later: "The grass nearly burnt all along this Day except near the Lake." A month later: "The Grass is now burning [with] very great fury."