Native ingenuity
Scholars have known for decades that Native American societies were in many
ways more technologically sophisticated than their European counterparts. So
why do we still find this fact so surprising?
By Charles C. Mann
LIKE EVERY AMERICAN schoolchild, I learned the story of the Pilgrims in
school--how half of the Plymouth colonists died of starvation in the first
winter, the remainder surviving only by squatting on an abandoned Indian
village and ransacking Indian homes and graves for caches of food. But it
was only as an adult, visiting the splendid reconstruction of the colony in
Plymouth, that it occurred to me to wonder why the local Wampanoag Indians
had let them stay.
The Wampanoag confederation, which occupied coastal Massachusetts, was
bigger and more numerous than the Plymouth colony, and jealous of its
territory. Why would it let these foreigners, whom the Indians must have
regarded as thieves and interlopers, occupy a valuable piece of coastal real
estate? For that matter, why did Indians permit any of the first European
colonies--all of which were poor, fractious, and ill-prepared--in North
America?
When I asked one of the authentically costumed, ''living history" workers at
the reconstructed village why the Indians hadn't driven away the Pilgrims,
she told me that the Wampanoag wanted European goods, especially metal items
like cook pots, hatchets, and guns. Her explanation precisely reflected the
Pilgrims' view. After the Wampanoag signed an alliance with the colony,
Edward Winslow, a future Plymouth governor, wrote that the Indians were
lured by superior European technology--especially European guns, ''for our
peeces [guns] are terrible unto them."
In my American history classes such stories recurred time and time again.
Although European colonies were feeble at the outset, the teachers
explained, they eventually triumphed over the natives because of their
better technology. This explanation is still common today. ''The fires of
modernization and industrialization...never took light over most of the
non-European world," explains historian Eric L. Jones in ''The European
Miracle," a widely cited text. ''Europe was a mutant civilization in its
uninterrupted amassing of knowledge about technology." Native Americans,
poor laggards, didn't have a chance.
Contemporary research suggests, though, that this picture is too simple.
Indeed, the conventional view of Indians' technological backwardness says
less about the relative sophistication of the two societies than our own
abiding misconceptions about the nature of technology. As the University of
Texas historian Alfred W. Crosby has noted, in Columbus's day Europe ''had a
greater proportion of individuals who understood wheels, levers, and gears
than any other society on earth." Perhaps naturally, European elites ranked
other societies by the number and complexity of their mechanical devices, a
practice still commonly followed by their descendants. Living in the bubble
of our own computers and automobiles, we tend to think of technology in
terms of electricity, plastic and metal, motors and wheels.
In fact, the term ''technology" refers to any application of a systematic
technique, method, or approach for practical purposes. Colonial accounts
suggest that Europeans then viewed technology in these broad terms--and that
they were impressed by what they saw in Native American hands. Specialists
have argued this for a couple of decades, but this view of history has made
few inroads outside academic journals and conference reports. To the first
European visitors, the encounter with Indians was much more like a meeting
of equals than is commonly taught today.
. . .
Consider a single, small example: Indian moccasins. Much more comfortable
and waterproof than stiff, moldering English boots, moccasins were often
given by Indians to colonists when the latter had to walk for long
distances.
Indian birch-bark canoes, to take another example, were faster and more
maneuverable than any small European boat. In 1605 three laughing Indians in
a canoe literally paddled circles around the lumbering dory paddled by
traveler George Weymouth and seven other men. Despite official disapproval,
the stunned British eagerly exchanged knives and guns for Indian canoes.
Bigger European ships with sails were obviously better for long-distance
travel along the shore. Indians got hold of them through trade and
shipwreck, and trained themselves to be excellent sailors. By the time of
the Pilgrims, a rising proportion of the shipping traffic along the New
England coast was of indigenous origin and the English were fearful, Harvard
historian Joyce E. Chaplin has argued, ''that Indians might get the upper
hand."
Most important, the foreigners, coming from lands plagued by recurrent
famine, were awed by Indian agriculture. Based on maize, which yields more
grain per acre than any other cereal, it used sophisticated techniques that
kept the land fertile in ways that Europeans had not seen. A 2003 commentary
in the journal Science described the creation of maize as ''arguably man's
first, and perhaps his greatest, feat of genetic engineering."
Even the Europeans' purported superiority in military technology was
evanescent. The ''peeces" that Winslow thought the Wampanoag wanted, for
example, were less than they seemed. To be sure, Indians were disconcerted
by their first experiences with European guns: the explosion and smoke, the
lack of a visible projectile. But the natives quickly learned that
16th-century matchlocks were fired by shoving a flaming fuse into an open
pan of gunpowder, a process that took two or three minutes for every shot.
In any case, most of the colonists were such dreadful shots, from lack of
practice, that their muskets were little more than noisemakers.
By contrast, Indian longbows were fearsomely fast and precise--''far better
than the average musket of the Plymouth colonists in rapidity and accuracy
of fire," according to the noted arms scholar Harold L. Peterson. Wielded by
people who had practiced archery since childhood, they could shoot 10 arrows
a minute and were accurate up to 200 yards. To the dismay of colonists at
Jamestown in 1607, a Powhatan Indian sank an arrow a foot deep into a target
the Europeans thought impervious to an arrow shot--''which was strange,"
Jamestown council president George Percy observed, ''being that a Pistoll
could not pierce it."
Similar stories played out across the hemisphere. Schoolchildren still learn
that superior European technology let Francisco Pizarro and a force of 168
Spaniards conquer the Inca in 1532. Pizarro, textbooks say, had two
advantages: steel (swords and armor, rifles and cannons) and horses.
(Geographer Jared Diamond, in his 1994 bestseller ''Guns, Germs, and Steel,"
echoes this point.) The Indians had no steel weapons and no animals to ride
(llamas are too small). They also lacked the wheel and the arch. With such
inferior technology, the Inca had no chance. ''What could [the Inca] offer
against this armory?" asked John Hemming, author of a fine history of the
conquest. ''They were still fighting in the bronze age."
Yet just as guns did not determine the outcome of conflict in New England,
steel was not the decisive factor in Peru. True, anthropologists have long
marveled that Andean societies did not make steel. Iron is plentiful in the
mountains, yet the Inca used metal for almost nothing useful. But according
to Heather Lechtman, an archaeologist at the MIT Center for Materials
Research in Archaeology and Ethnology, Inca metallurgy was as refined as
European metallurgy, but it had such different goals that until recently
scientists had not even recognized it as a technology.
Europeans, Lechtman argues in scholarly articles, sought to optimize metals'
''hardness, strength, toughness, and sharpness." The Inca, by contrast,
valued ''plasticity, malleability, and toughness." Europeans used metal for
tools; Andean societies primarily used it as a token of wealth, power, and
community affiliation. European metalworkers tended to create metal objects
by pouring molten alloys into shaped molds. Such foundries were not unknown
to the Inca, but Andean societies vastly preferred to hammer metal into thin
sheets, form the sheets around molds, and solder the results. The results
were remarkable by any standard--one delicate bust that Lechtman analyzed
was less than an inch tall but made of 22 separate gold plates painstakingly
joined.
Andean cultures did make tools, of course. But in the technosphere of the
Andes, Lechtman explains, ''people solved basic engineering problems through
the manipulation of fibers," not by creating and joining hard wooden or
metal objects. To make boats, Andean cultures wove together reeds rather
than cutting up trees into planks and nailing them together. Although
smaller than big European ships, these vessels were not puddle-muddlers;
Europeans first encountered the Inca in the form of an Inca ship sailing
near the equator, 300 miles from its home port, under a load of fine cotton
sails. It had a crew of 20 and was easily the size of a Spanish caravel.
Andean textiles were woven with great precision--elites' garments could have
a thread count of 500 per inch--and structured in elaborate layers.
Soldierly armor was made from sculpted, quilted cloth that was almost as
effective at shielding the body as European armor and much lighter. After
trying it, the conquistadors ditched their steel breastplates and helmets
wholesale and dressed like Inca infantry.
Pedro Pizarro, Francisco's nephew and page, survived enough bloody battles
with the Inca to be under no illusions about indigenous technology. In his
memoirs, he attributed the Spanish victory not to overwhelming European
technology but to overwhelming European diseases. A few years before Pizarro
arrived, smallpox--introduced from Europe via Mexico--swept the Inca realm,
killing the emperor, his chosen heir, much of the court and the military
leadership, and as many as one out of three inhabitants of the empire. The
vacancy at the top led to a ruinous, multi-year civil war that killed
thousands more. ''[Had the emperor] been alive when we Spaniards entered
this land," Pedro remarked, ''it would have been impossible for us to win
it.... And likewise, had the land not been divided by the [smallpox-induced
civil] wars, we would not have been able to enter or win the land." Germs,
not guns or steel, conquered the Inca.
The same held true in the Northeast--the region wasn't conquered so much as
infected. By the time of the Pilgrims, Europeans had been visiting New
England for a century. Thickly populated and heavily armed, Indian villages
had welcomed the trade but fended off permanent settlement. In 1616 a French
ship wrecked off Cape Cod. Indians captured the few survivors and
distributed them into different villages. At least one sailor had a disease,
perhaps viral hepatitis, which he bequeathed to his captors. The results
were devastating. Indians ''died on heapes, as they lay in their houses,"
the English trader Thomas Morton wrote. Death rates in coastal New England
reached 95 percent. Among the victims were the great majority of Wampanoag.
Although statements like Morton's are scattered throughout colonial
accounts, most historians did not take note of them until 30 years ago, and
they still have not percolated into high-school lesson plans. Part of the
reason for the holdup, no doubt, is due to the disciplinary boundaries that
long kept historians of politics and historians of science apart. But
another part, one assumes, is simple ethnocentrism, an intellectual vice in
every society. Europeans and their descendants have long assumed that
cultures were behind the intellectual eight ball if they didn't do things
Europeans were good at. But this view may only be the luxury of those whose
triumphs were ensured by microorganisms that they neither understood nor
controlled.
source:
www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2005/09/04/native_ingenuity/
?page=full