Читать книгу A Companion to Latin American Literature and Culture - Группа авторов - Страница 20

Gustavo Verdesio

The power of the first chronicles that told the stories of exploration and colonization of the Americas is still intact. They represent a land that appears to these authors as pristine and untouched by what the West has called civilization. If one were to believe this corpus of texts about lands that were at that time unknown to European subjects, those lands showed no evidence of significant traces of human labor. The predominance of this early perception of the Americas occurs in spite of both the existence of later chronicles and documents that describe, to a European audience, the wonders of human settlements as complex and sophisticated as Mexico-Tenochtitlán and Cuzco – just to mention the two most spectacular concentrations of people in the first half of the sixteenth century – and the constant presence of Indigenous peoples in the daily social lives of most American nations.

Why is it, then, that the myth that represents the Americas as a blank page where European settlers are free to leave their imprint still survives in the collective unconscious of Western culture? Why this inertia of collective memory that privileges only one of the different images of the past?¹ Why are stereotypes about Indigenous peoples – Charles C. Mann (2005, 4) asks – still reproduced by the textbooks used in the framework of the educational system?² There are, in my view, no simple answers to these questions. Maybe if we try to view this state of affairs as the result of a combination of factors we could understand it a little better. I will later address, briefly, said factors, but first I will go back in time and try to deal with the issue of how scholars and Indigenous peoples believe the Americas were populated, and since when.

This is not a conflict-free matter. On the contrary, there are several contending versions from different camps. The main disagreement can be identified as the one that confronts, on the one hand, several Amerindian nations and, on the other, scholars who believe that Western disciplines can reveal the secrets of the distant past. In general, the latter can be found in the ranks of archaeologists and biological anthropologists. Many an Indigenous group claims to know where they come from and when they came to the Americas. In their oral traditions, we learn about stories of origins that present us with peoples who believe that they have occupied the territory of the Americas since time immemorial – in some cases, since the beginning of time (Zimmerman 2002, 16). These versions of the origins of the different Indigenous groups are contested by Western scholars who have a completely different perspective on this issue. In their opinion, and in spite of the differences among them that we will discuss later, Amerindians arrived in the Americas as immigrants from Asia.

It should be pointed out that although Western scholars tend to view Indigenous oral histories as non-scientific, the stories passed from generation to generation by Amerindians are a useful tool to reconstruct the past – even the very distant past. As Roger Echo-Hawk has shown, it is possible to use traditional tales together with geological, archaeological, and historical evidence to have a richer picture of the distant past, as long as “the historical content of the oral or written information should be compatible with the general context of human history derived from other types of evidence” (2000, 271). In other words, “the oral information must present a perspective on historical events that would be accepted by a reasonable observer” (271). He makes a very convincing case about the time depth of some Indigenous stories about their origins. He even goes as far as to say that some Arikara origin accounts can go as far back as describing the Arctic Circle and Beringia as the place where everything started for them (275–276).

The idea that Indigenous peoples came from Asia, which now passes as the uncontested truth among Western scholars, despite many Amerindian groups’ rejection of it, was (probably) first advanced in 1590 by a Jesuit priest, Father Joseph de Acosta, in a passage about the origins of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. In it, Acosta makes a huge intellectual effort to reconcile the teachings of the Bible about the origins of humankind (a part of which narrative is the Noah’s Ark story), and the undeniable evidence of long and continued human occupation of the lands then known as the Indies (2002, 51, 63). The hypothesis that postulates a migration from Asia has taken, with time, the form of a story: the crossing of what after 1728 was to be known as the Bering Strait. The template of said hypothesis goes like this: in the Wisconsin period (the latest glacier advance of the Ice Age period) glaciers retained so much water that the level of the sea descended dramatically, transforming the Bering Strait into dry land that connected Siberia and Alaska. This land, called Beringia by scholars, allowed the passage of human beings from Asia (there is no agreement, however, about the exact region or regions of the continent they came from) to North America, from where they later moved south, thereby occupying the rest of the continent. This hypothesis has it that the migratory groups of human beings entered the continent through the ice-free corridors that opened during the short periods of deicing. And of course, some elaborate conjectures have been advanced about the different possible routes that those human travelers followed.³

In a more recent development of the crossing of the Bering Strait hypothesis, several scholars (among them Thomas Dillehay, one of the major voices on the issues pertaining to the peopling of the Americas) have advanced the idea that the migration may have taken place, among other ways, by sea, thus contradicting some of Acosta’s conjectures. The new version of the story is based on recent geological investigations that point to different climate changes, on disagreement about dates of deglaciation, on newly discovered patterns of settlement in South America, and many other factors. In South America, for example, the archaeological record is clear about the survival of the megafauna of the Pleistocene well into the early Holocene – something than cannot be said about North America, where most of the megafauna had already disappeared by that time.⁴ For this reason and many others – among them the once controversial site known as Monte Verde, located in present-day Chile – a narrative considered as the true one in North American academic circles is much more difficult to defend for the South American case. I am referring to the “Clovis first” hypothesis that in its most traditional (and I dare say reactionary) versions includes the variation known as “overkill.”

The first hypothesis maintains that the culture that produced the fluted point known in academic circles as Clovis was one organized as bands of hunter-gatherers who moved from one place to another in search of food. The food, so the story goes, was mostly taken from big animals such as Mammoths and other giants known as part of the megafauna of the Pleistocene. In the “overkill” version of it, these bands were so greedy and so environmentally irresponsible that they ended up depleting their hunting grounds. Therefore, the big animals that fed them for millennia vanished from the face of the earth. This culture would have been the one that populated the rest of the Americas.

There are many problems with the application of this narrative to the vast territory south of what today is the US. One of them is, as we said, that those big beasts survived into the Holocene in South America. Another element to take into account is that the Ice Age did not end between 11,000 and 10,000 BP in South America, but sometime between 14,000 and 12,000 BP.⁵ But another set of problems is raised by the study of the evidence found in Monte Verde, Chile. That site – like several others in the southern hemisphere – shows very clearly that not only were its inhabitants not hunting big mammals, but also that their way of life differed dramatically from the one described not only by the “overkill” version but also by the more comprehensive one: “Clovis first.” Many a society in South America developed, at an early stage of human occupation of the Americas, complex and diverse cultural habits – those of foragers – that differ dramatically from the model that presents Amerindians of the ancient past as predators. This evidence put into question the simplicity and most of all the appeal of the Clovis theory that, in its basic form, stated that the hunters of megafauna were the first society in the Americas and that later they populated different parts of the continent in a relatively long period of time. As a consequence, the population of South America, according to this theory, must have been a much later development. Unfortunately for its proponents, archaeological evidence shows that some radiocarbon dates of South American archaeological sites are much older (12,500 BP, in the most conservative estimates) than the ones identified as Clovis, which are only 11,200 years old – and short-lived, to judge from the most recent dates for Clovis places, which date the end of that culture at around 10,800 BP.⁶

Of course, there is more than science behind this dispute about dates, ancestry, and genealogy. There is also politics: the “Clovis first” narrative is mostly supported, not surprisingly, by North America-based scholars. Some have even said that the Clovis fluted point is the first manifestation of American (understood as pertaining to the US) ingenuity, which also gave us Coca-Cola and baseball caps.⁷ This situation, besides being a blatant case of academic imperialism – it took Dillehay years (many more than the usual period for any investigation) to be able to get his radiocarbon dates and stratigraphic analyses broadly accepted by the archaeological community – is also a dispute that may help us rethink the way in which we represent the past. That is, it may help us realize how important are the narratives we produce in the present to create a past that suits our community’s (whatever community one belongs to) needs in the present, and how those pasts one invents are going to determine the futures that will actually happen or take place in real life.

The way in which one represents the very different Indigenous pasts is no small part of the reconstruction of the past Western society has been producing for several centuries now. In this sense, the Clovis case is a very pedagogical introduction to the contradictions present-day scholars incur when trying to write a past that favors the cause of their own culture. For example, it is clear that the image of the first Amerindians as predators who exterminated the megafauna, and as nomads who had no abode, are not the ones preferred in the West to represent civilization. On the contrary, the less complex the society, the more “savage” or “primitive” it appears to Western eyes. On the other hand, Clovis defenders seem to be interested in presenting a scenario where the inventors of the fluted point appear as the pioneers who led the migration from Asia. Therefore, one could even speculate further and say that they could be seen as leaders of a prehistoric expansion that foretells the conquest of the West, undertook thousands of years later by (North) American pioneers. It was they who populated all there is to populate in the Western hemisphere. In this way, US-based scholars make a nationalist claim in the name of science – or if you prefer, disguised as science – in order to appropriate, once again, the territories located south of the Rio Bravo (or Rio Grande, depending on your perspective and geopolitical situation of enunciation).

The diversity of Indigenous peoples in what today is Latin America only grew with time. In addition to the already complex and diverse ancient times panorama, we are starting to get glimpses of the wide array of peoples and cultures that flourished south of the territory of what today is the United States. The most sobering thing for those who yearn for evolutionist narratives⁸ is that there is no visible line that shows any “progress” or “development” in the life and history of Indigenous societies throughout the Americas. If an ideal observer could travel through time and space at will, she would see hunter-gatherers coexisting with settlements of early agriculturalists, or fishers and hunters living side by side with state-like organized societies. There is, then, no single line of “progress” that societies followed. That is to say, there is nothing in the archaeological and ethnographic evidence available to us today that points in the direction of the existence of a rule or set of rules that determine the “evolution” of societies.⁹ Let us now take a look at just a handful of societies that existed in the past, and some that exist in the present, to get an idea of the enormous diversity and the wealth of human variety existent in the Americas.

Let us start by ancient hunter-gatherers, the ones who get the worst press: they are represented as simple, primitive, and not very careful with the environment. The representation has it that those nomads of the past were constantly struggling against the elements, defending themselves from a hostile environment that did not offer them enough resources in the way of food and shelter to have a decent, less difficult life. It follows from this model that these peoples, who were always at the brink of sheer starvation, spent most of their time trying to get food and shelter, which is tantamount to saying that they were too busy to dedicate time and energy to undertake activities unrelated to the production and reproduction of life – that is, activities without relation to subsistence patterns. From this academic perspective, it is with the practice of agriculture that certain activities not related to subsistence get better chances to take place.

However, scholars like Marshall Sahlins proposed, in an article from the mid-1960s (Sahlins 1968) that he later developed in his influential 1972 book Stone Age Economics, a hypothesis that presented hunter-gatherers under a different light: as the original affluent society (Sahlins 1972, 166). In his view, high-mobility people whose subsistence pattern is based on hunting, fishing, and collecting know their environment very well and take advantage of all its resources, thus being able to provide for themselves in ways that minimize the amount of time dedicated to the procurement of food, to the point that “half the time the people seem not know what to do with themselves” (Sahlins 1972, 11). Of course, this hypothesis has been criticized and, over the years, it has become more nuanced – among other reasons, because it is not advisable to incur into generalizations when human groups are so different from each other: there is no such thing as a universal template for hunter-gatherers – but it was important, in its heyday, for the refutation of the predominant view that represented them as fragile people at the mercy of the elements.

Let us now discuss a number of studies that helped view hunter-gatherers in a different light, leading to the discussion of some of the assumptions about their relation to monumentality. Several years ago, archaeologists like Jon Gibson and Joe Saunders, working on the archaic mounds of the US Southeast, reached the conclusion that the earthworks known as Indian mounds (human-made earthen elevations) located in the US Southeast (Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, Florida, and other locations) were the work of peoples without agriculture. These mounds were built, in some cases, 5,400 years ago (Watson Brake, extensively studied by Saunders, is a case in point), and they were the product of societies without agriculture. This was something unexpected, to say the least, because archaeologists had trouble picturing nonagricultural societies staying at a place for long periods of time and with free time to construct massive works that required, without a doubt, a significant organization of the community as a whole – the construction of the mounds requires great quantities of earth and, therefore, a high number of human labor hours.

Thus, a new model started to emerge: it was possible to view these societies (the mound builders of the archaic period) as capable of producing monumental collective works without having developed agriculture first. It is societies like the one known as Poverty Point that prompted some scholars to review the old evolutionary model. This complex is a very big site located in northeastern Louisiana, which contains a number of mounds and embankments. The historical period and culture that bear its name cover the years 3,730 to 3,350 BP and it extends over a large area of the Lower Mississippi Valley from a point near the conjunction of the Mississippi and Arkansas rivers to the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. The artifacts that characterize this culture are made of rocks not available locally, which means their makers must have had to import them. Trade, then, must have been very important for the people who built the earthworks.

The series of questions that places like Poverty Point posed were very difficult to understand for people working on the old paradigm. Those questions include, according to Jon Gibson:

How did the conditions for large-scale construction appear at Poverty Point while everyone else in America north of Mexico was still following a simpler way of life? Was Poverty Point one of the first communities to rise above its contemporaries to start the long journey toward becoming a truly complex society? If Poverty Point did represent the awakening of complex society in the United States, how and why did it develop? Was it created by immigrants bearing maize and a new religion from somewhere in Mexico? Was it developed by local peoples who had been stimulated by ideas from Mexico? Did it arise by itself without any foreign influences? Did it come about without agriculture? Could hunting and gathering have sustained the society and its impressive works?(1999: 1–2)

The responses to those questions, implicit or explicit, show us an academic community that believed, 40–50 years ago, that such a large site like Poverty Point must have been the abode of a large, permanently settled, and therefore complex society. As I mentioned earlier, the prevailing idea at that time was that complex societies developed thanks to agriculture. However, no plant remains have ever been found at the site. The prejudice in favor of agriculture as a trigger of social complexity is such that even Gibson is very cautious when he talks about the food production and consumption at the site:

It was impossible to tell if Poverty Point people had farmed, or if they had made a living some other way, such as by intensively gathering native wild plants or by hunting and gathering along the especially bountiful narrow environmental seams where uplands joined the Mississippi floodplain. We still do not have much information about foods eaten by Poverty Point peoples, but we have enough to be sure about one thing. Poverty Point peoples were not corn farmers. They were hunter-gatherers. We are only beginning to find out what they ate. We have more information about meat than plants, because bones are more resistant to decay through time and are more easily recovered by standard excavation methods.(1999: 12–13)

This attitude is understandable for at least two reasons: first, because Gibson himself had the same prejudices archaeologists had, in general, vis-à-vis so-called “primitive” societies and cultural complexity, and second, because it is always extremely difficult to go against commonly accepted knowledge – that is, it was hard to go against the dominant paradigm in the discipline. If we look at the questions posed by Gibson himself, we will see, between the lines, some of the anxieties that haunt archaeologists even today. One of them is the relationship of agriculture to social complexity, as we have already seen. Yet an even more important one is present throughout the whole series of questions: the one that has complexity itself, as a concept, at its center. That is, I believe, one of the more serious problems faced today by those of us concerned with the past of Indigenous peoples.

If one looks at the questions carefully, there is a constant tension between the pair of concepts “simple/complex,” which is always resolved, at least value-wise, in favor of the latter. In this context (that of the disciplines produced by Western knowledge apparatuses and institutions) complex is better or more desirable than simple. Complex, according to the above-mentioned questions, are those communities that “rise above” (to quote Gibson literally) their contemporaries. Now we see another dichotomy enter the scene: above/below. “Complex” and “above” go together, while their opposites are “simple” and “below.” The axiology these oppositions propose is based on a series of Western concepts and prejudices that philosopher Jacques Derrida called logocentrism: the division of the world in conceptual pairs, one of which is considered to be better than, or above the other. In this context, some scholars who try to vindicate Indigenous cultures from the past or the present are caught in the trap of trying to prove that Amerindians are not as simple as portrayed by Western scholarship and popular beliefs while at the same time are reaffirming the very same structures that postulate the inferiority of Indigenous peoples in comparison to Western culture.

For example, if one wants to study aboriginal societies in a place that is at the other end of the world from Poverty Point, say, in Uruguay, it is important to attack the popularly held prejudices that present Amerindians as backward, simple people. For this reason, one of the first things that a young team of archaeologists did in 1986, was to show the academic community, first, and the Uruguayan general public, later, that there was a culture or a series of cultures never mentioned by history textbooks that were much more socially complex than they ever imagined. The excavations conducted mostly by José López Mazz and Roberto Bracco and the papers and ideas written by Leonel Cabrera began the careful construction of a new way of understanding Indigenous peoples from the distant past in Uruguay. That new way included ideas similar to those advanced by Gibson, due to a series of factors, of which I will only mention two: first, the fact that the cultures studied occupied the Uruguayan territory during, among other epochs, the archaic period (some are said to go as far back as 5,000 BP); second, because the archaeological evidence they encountered presented characteristics similar to those of hunter-gatherer societies that built mounds. Their work, then, presented the Uruguayan public opinion with a picture that was completely different from the predominant one. And yet, this was done within the framework provided by the logocentric pairs that tell us that complex is better than simple.¹⁰ Worse yet, this growing research corpus has had very little impact on the Uruguayan imaginary with regard to the Indigenous history of the territory: Uruguayan citizens continue to view themselves as inhabitants of a country “without Indians.”¹¹

However, where this defense of complexity gets even worse is in the work produced about regions populated by the most prestigious Amerindian societies: those located in the Andes and Mesoamerica. And beyond academic production, the masses, whether they know it or not, are also under the spell of a cluster of notions associated to complexity. It is not a secret to anyone that sites such as Machu Picchu, Tikal, and others constitute not only a source of revenue for the states of Mexico, Perú and Guatemala, but also destinations for peregrination for believers and new-agers of all kinds.¹² The people who comprise this public are almost exclusively interested in the societies that constructed the structures that are now, for the most part, in ruins. These structures are, more often than not, monumental in nature, so monumental that they do not cease to astonish visitors who look at them in amazement for long periods of time, sometimes for many hours or even days. Anybody who has visited any of those sites knows that the image of astounded tourists is part of the landscape. Western amazement before monumentality from the past is twofold. On the one hand, there is a genuine wonder caused by the sheer spectacularity of some of the buildings constructed by Indigenous peoples of the past. On the other, there is an assumption that the cultures that built those structures must have been very complex and, therefore, very civilized.

A word about the concept “civilization” when applied to an Indigenous culture: it is another form of saying that said culture resembles Western civilization in some way or another. That is, it refers to cultures that are, in the Occidental eyes of the observer, comparable to ours. To our eyes, then, those societies who were civilized were capable, like ours, of building monumental structures and vice-versa: they were able to build those structures because they were civilized. Monumentality, then, is a standard against which Western subjects measure the degree of civilization of the culture that produced it.¹³ And monuments built 500 years ago or earlier are, in general and very likely, in ruins. This leads me to another related issue: the fascination of our culture with ruins. Some prefer them clean and tidy, others (like Christopher Woodward) like them invaded by nature – that is, covered by vegetation – but both segments of the public love ruins, period. What does this penchant for decaying structures tell us about our culture and our relationship to Indigenous societies of the past?

To begin with, it tells us that we prefer to see Amerindians as people from the past whose buildings are there as a testament to their past greatness. This means that they are not here, with us, anymore, which would explain why there is nobody to take care of, or to use the ruins in the ways they were intended to be used at the time of their construction. It also means that we can take care of those ruins without much of a feeling of guilt: if the original dwellers are not here anymore, why not honor their memory by taking care of them? The problem is that the average Western present-day observer does not ask herself why the builders of the ruins they are seeing are not there to take care of them any more. Again, like in the case of the Clovis theory, this is a way people from the present appropriate the work and objects produced by Indigenous peoples from the past.

This appropriation has several negative consequences for the way we envision Amerindian pasts. One of them is that in the regions where the Inca, the Mexica, or the Maya cultures flourished, other cultures from the past do not get the same kind of attention. Although for academics who specialize in the Americas’ past, the existence of other cultures that preceded, and coexisted with, those major cultures is a well-known fact, this is not so clear to public opinion. For most people in the world, the Amerindians who thrived in the Andes are the Incas, the ones who dominated Mesoamerica are the Maya and the Mexica (or Aztecs, the most popular name applied to them). And even if one looks at the body of scholarly work, one will see that the enormous majority of research produced about those areas has been devoted, until very recently, to the aforementioned cultures. It is only in the last few decades that work like that produced by Steve Stern on Huamanga, or Karen Spalding on the Huarochirí (for the Andes), and that produced by James Lockhart (for Mesoamerica), just to offer some of the most prominent examples of this kind of scholarship, started to become a well-established trend. Thanks to people like them and others, the cultures under Inca or Mexica rule started to get more attention. Those peoples were sometimes very different from and sometimes very similar to their rulers. A book like Michael Malpass’s (1993), that shows the different ways in which the Incas dealt with those under their aegis, suggests that the differences between those subjected peoples were big enough to warrant a differential treatment from Cuzco, the Inca center from which power irradiated.

And yet, even now, after the production of a wonderful growing corpus of scholarship about peoples subjected to, or in conflict with the Incas or the Mexicas, we still need to see more work on cultures that preceded the ones encountered by the European explorers at the time of contact. Although it is true that ancient cultures that preceded the Inca, such as the Moche, Chavin, and Chimu (in the Andean region) have been getting much more attention in the last decades, it is also true that the amount of research produced about those cultures pales in comparison to that devoted to the Inca. And this is even truer of the cultures of the preceramic horizon: only when it comes to the early horizon, to which Chavín de Huántar belongs, one begins to see a significant corpus of scholarship coming from different disciplines.¹⁴ But early hunters from the Puna (8,000 BP) and early coastal populations do not get the attention of many scholars. This means that the great diversity of cultures that thrived, in ancient times, in what is called the Andean region, who adapted in very different ways to a series of very diverse and complex environments, gets very little attention and, therefore, little justice is given to the almost miraculous ways in which different groups of humans dealt with some of the toughest environmental conditions imaginable.¹⁵ The Inca civilization and all those that preceded it developed a mastery over extreme environmental conditions. In Moseley’s words: “If thriving civilizations had matured atop the Himalayas while simultaneously accommodating a Sahara Desert, a coastal fishery richer than the Bering Sea, and a jungle larger than the Congo, then Tahuantinsuyu [the name given by the Inca to their world] might seem less alien” (2001, 25). This amazing adaptability took, with time, the form of a simultaneous adaptation to all those ecological niches by a single population, a phenomenon that had no precedents in the history of humankind until it happened in the Andean region.

A similar scholarly situation presents itself to the observer in the case of Mesoamerica as well: there are thousands of articles on the Maya Classic and Post-Classic periods, but very little, in comparison, about the early hunters who populated the area of Los Tapiales 10,700 years ago. Even serious books for college survey courses written by major scholars like Michael D. Coe dedicate an insignificant number of pages (15 in a total of 256) to those he calls the “earliest Maya” in his book The Maya (2001). The situation is a little better in the case of Mexico, where significant research is available about the Early Pre-Classic and Archaic periods. However, it is also the case that the majority of the research produced about Mexico covers a period that begins, roughly, with the Middle Pre-Classic, of which the most representative culture is the one known as Olmec, and that ends with the arrival of the Spaniards to the region.¹⁶

As I suggested above, the lack of monumentality among those early peoples from different parts of the Americas might as well be one of the reasons we do not pay much attention to them. But there are also other important factors that come into play. One of them is their social organization. This is why hunter-gatherers or early agriculturalists are not very interesting to the masses and even to scholars: their social organization differs too much from that which constitutes our ideal. It is the states or the societies that showed more complexity (at least understood as we understand it in our culture) that get most of the attention from both the general public and the experts. It seems that those peoples who did not have a state or a similar institution for social and political organization do not deserve much of our interest.

This is part of a general tendency in Western societies, which consists of perceiving Indigenous cultures from our culture-specific perspective. As a consequence, Occidental subjects compare the aboriginal peoples and their cultural and social institutions and habits against the background of the known, therefore failing to assess or understand Amerindians in their own terms, as Alvin M. Josephy, among others, pointed out many years ago (1969, 4). For this reason, a high number of sites and cultures are not as present in our social imaginary as are, say, Machu Picchu or Chichén Itzá. Places like Cahokia (located in Collinsville, Illinois), for example, which seem to exhibit all the traits that characterize a highly “civilized” Indigenous group according to Occidental standards, are relatively little known today – after having attracted, not surprisingly, the attention of the colonizers for many years, until the nineteenth century, when the general public and the academic community began to lose interest in mounds in general – even in the United States.

Although there is a growing number of studies focusing on different subjects, such as the housing areas and the everyday practices of the commoners (Pauketat and Emerson 2000), the nature of the chiefdoms related to the mounds (Pauketat 2004), the ways in which the elites imposed their ideology on the commoners (Emerson 1997; Pauketat 2004), the mechanisms through which a geography (sacred, in the opinion of Sally A. Kitt Chappel) made of mounds could have reflected a system of beliefs, and many others (Chappel 2002), the mounds that still exist (surviving centuries of Western agricultural practices that made thousands of structures disappear) do not have much visibility in the American social imaginary of the present. This is true even in the case of Saint Louis (a city located seven kilometers from Cahokia, that can be seen from the central platform of Monks mound, the biggest and tallest structure of the complex), as I was able to confirm in the summer of 2005, when only one person, among 40 or so, I asked about the Amerindian place knew what I was talking about.

As a matter of fact, the number of visitors to Cahokia is no higher than 200,000 per year. This might sound as a significant number, making one think that the site may enjoy great importance and visibility among present-day Americans. However, it should be taken into account that most of the visitors to the site are simply forced to visit it, for they are primary and secondary school students guided by their teachers. It is also convenient to offer some perspective about that number, for it pales in comparison to the number of visitors to other Indigenous sites such as Machu Picchu, which received 1,411,279 during 2017 (La República 2018) while Chichén Itzá and Teotihuacán received 1,032,029 and 1,753,275 respectively during the same year (Milenio Novedades 2018). That lack of popularity is also reflected on the almost nil references to mound builder societies in the Museum of the American Indian, at least until my last visit in the first semester of 2015. It seems as if these structures and their builders had never existed.

Cahokia is a huge site, with several mound complexes, and with a central mound (Monks Mound) that was the second tallest construction in the Americas before the arrival of the European explorers – it is even taller than the monuments of Tikal – and which is aligned with other mounds and the cardinal points, which reflects a significant astronomical knowledge as well as a sophisticated landscape layout. And yet, people are not interested in it or do not even know that it exists. The reasons for the current situation are many, for sure, but I would like to focus on at least one: the materials used for the construction of the large, monumental structures at the site. Clay is not as prestigious as stone, apparently, in spite of the durability proved by the longevity of the many mounds that comprise the Cahokia complex. Maybe this is why for a while the predominant view on this site has been that it was not a state but a chiefdom. That is, scholars maintained (and still maintain) that the social complexity and the power exerted by the society that built and inhabited Cahokia was not enough to reach the status of a state.¹⁷ They also refuse to call the platform mounds pyramids and the concentration of mound complexes known as Cahokia a city, but as Timothy Pauketat states in a more recent book: “if Cahokia, Cahokians, and Cahokia’s mounds had been in ancient Mesopotamia, China, or Africa, archaeologists might not hesitate to identify pyramids in a city at the center of an early state” (2004, 3).¹⁸ This is probably why Pauketat, a long-time proponent of the chiefdom hypothesis, has admitted that the limits between certain concepts and categories such as state and chiefdom are not very clear in some cases: “we have to admit that no two archaeologists in any part of the world completely agree on how to identify a city, a chiefdom, or an early state” (4). For this reason, he is now more open than before to the possibility that Cahokia could have been a state or something that resembled it very closely.

The picture of how Western knowledge deals with Indigenous pasts would not be complete without at least a brief reference to an increasing number of investigations that try to account for said pasts from a perspective that acknowledges Indigenous agency throughout human history. There is a series of studies that presents Indigenous peoples as subjects with significant agency that I would like to briefly discuss. One of them is Clark Erickson’s work on fisheries, that shows how Amerindians found ways to change the course of some Amazonian water streams so that they could exert a higher level of control over the production and reproduction of the fish that inhabited them (Erickson 2000). There are also important contributions on pre-Columbian human activities in the Amazon basin that are of interest, among other reasons, because their conclusions are controversial to social actors such as conservation activists and some social anthropologists. What the scholars in this line of work are proposing is a new picture of not only the environment but also the dichotomy that distinguishes between nature and culture. These research projects are conducted, according to Erickson, mostly by archaeologists of landscape and historical ecologists (2006, 236, 2008, 158). Their main thesis is that the Amazon we know is not a pristine environment but a landscape domesticated by humans before the arrival of European invaders (Erickson 2006, 2008).¹⁹ His main hypothesis is that Amazonian Indigenous peoples of the past “invested more energy in domesticating entire landscapes than in domesticating individual plant and animal species” (Erickson 2006, 236).

Some of the aforementioned studies have found that plant management and domestication was significant: by the time Columbus arrived in the Americas, Indigenous peoples from the Amazon had already domesticated 83 native species, among which are potato, manioc, cacao, tobacco, and many others (Clement et al. 2015). The picture they present is one in which foragers substantially altered forests during the Early and Mid-Holocene, thereby effecting changes on the land in two ways: intensively, through horticulture in the areas located close to the villages, and in a less intensive fashion, in the more distant areas of the forest (Clement et al. 2015). Other studies focus on the different kinds of constructions that constitute the built environment of the Amazon: earthworks, ditches, forest islands, causeways, fisheries, and others (Clement et al. 2015; Erickson 2006, 2008; Heckenberger et al. 2003). For example, in the studies on the Kuikuro region, 19 major settlements were found, containing earthworks that include ditches that surround settlements, linear mounds²⁰ located at the margins of roads and plazas, bridges, and canals (Heckenberger et al. 2003, 1711).

This image of the human impact on the environment is confirmed by studies that present tropical rainforests as the product of human activity – that is to say, as the consequence of silviculture. Charles Peters, overcoming the limitations that our way of viewing that ecological niche entails, found evidence of human activity and manipulation of the land that took the shape of home gardens and managed forests (Peters 2000, 205–214). Another difficulty for present-day observers at the time of detecting signs of human activity in rainforests is that we are used to seeing how little impact contemporary Indigenous peoples have on it (Peters 2000, 214). Studies like these offer a picture of the relationship between Amerindians and nature that departs from the traditional one, for they appear as less passive (Raffles and Winkler Prins 2003, 166, 168), but the difficulty in recognizing the human labor involved in the construction of certain landscapes persists, for it is a consequence of our ideological bias: for Western subjects, Indigenous peoples are not capable of producing significant modifications in the land (Verdesio 2001, 348).

Another study of the domestication of the land by Indigenous peoples in pre-Columbian times was conducted by Erickson, in the first half of the 1990s, on raised fields (both in the Lake Titicaca basin and in the Llanos de Moxos, in the Beni department) found in Bolivia. This is a type of agriculture that was practiced between 500 and 1,000 years before the emergence of the great States of the region (Erickson 1993, 411). It consisted in the construction of cultivable platforms, elevated through the accumulation of soil taken from adjacent canals in order to allow, in floodable zones, the water flow through the canals without flooding the cultivable parcel (Erickson 2006, 251). They also had the function of securing the irrigation of that cultivable parcel during the dry season, thus creating an ecosystem that is three times richer than the prairie’s (Erickson 1992).

However, in spite of its advantages, the system was abandoned before the arrival of the Spaniards to those lands. Inspired by the principles of experimental archaeology, a group of archaeologists, together with a number of locals, put into practice that type of agriculture, to see what results could be obtained. The productivity rates were excellent even for capitalist standards (Erickson 1992, 291, 2006, 253), which contradicts the general public’s belief that traditional forms of agriculture are not as productive as modern ones. The reason behind that widespread belief lies in the tradition that associates intensive agriculture with state organized labor; supposedly, densely populated societies require a highly organized system of land exploitation. In this way, Erickson’s work allows us to view Indigenous cultures previous to the great Andean states in a different light. It reminds us that Indigenous peoples from the past were in possession of knowledges and technologies that allowed them not only to subsist but also to prosper. This he does through the reconstruction of the uses of space, which help him to recover what he calls “the memory of landscape” (Erickson 1993, 381).

This kind of research has been criticized by conservationists and activists who defend the rights of Indigenous peoples, for a couple of reasons. First, it departs from the image of a pristine nature, clearly distinguishable from human creations – from what the general public understands as culture. The dichotomy of nature/culture is thus called into question by a nature that is not different from the cultural landscape created by human beings; in other words, by the following realization: what we understand as nature is, in reality, the result of the work of humans.²¹ This realization will help us, according to Erickson, elucidate the origin of the relationship between humans and the environment (Erickson 2006, 262). Second, because these investigations present an image of natives as not so ecological agents; that is to say, as subjects who exert a pressure on the environment that changes it dramatically. This kind of portrayal of Indigenous actions can be used to justify the predatory operations by capitalist actors (Erickson 2006, 264). Erickson, for his part, defends this corpus of research by arguing that, in his opinion, it is even worse to deny Indigenous peoples any agency in their dealings with the environment, for they are “responsible for what we now call nature in the Neotropics” (Erickson 2006, 264). At this point, it is not clear what image of the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the environment is the most beneficial (or detrimental) for them: the passive actor who is not capable of making a great impact on the land, or the active one, whose agency is such that their manipulations of the land cause dramatic changes in it. Maybe scholars should ask present-day natives what they think about the conclusions reached by the research done on their pasts.

Although there is, as we have seen, a growing number of research projects that try to avoid the traps of ethnocentrism and cultural bias, it will take the work of generations of scholars and educators to create the ground from where a more respectful image of the diversity and cultural wealth of Indigenous peoples of the Americas could emerge. But most of all, it will take a change of attitude vis-à-vis Indigenous subjects, their traditions, and their knowledge; scholars should be more receptive to, and respectful of, Indigenous peoples’ versions of their own societies’ pasts. Better yet, Western scholars should consider the possibility of incorporating Indigenous peoples into their investigations. This is by no means a novelty, especially in the fields of archaeology and anthropology, but it is still very far from being a widespread or hegemonic practice.²² Moreover, it is necessary that, at some point, as the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group suggested many years ago, scholars build a new kind of relationship with those who, until recently, were considered an object of study (1994, 10). What I am trying to say is that it is about time indigeneity and things Indigenous are defined not only by Western specialists but also by Indigenous peoples themselves.