Finding North America’s lost medieval city
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
It's kind of crazy that most people I know believe that Europeans showed up to an almost entirely empty content, and were like "Oh hey, free land." I learned about Squanto at some point, but I never learned the reason why he spoke English is because he was kidnapped by an English explorer and brought back to Europe. Or that he managed to work his way back to North America and found his tribe had been wiped out by a plague, and that this plague was a huge part of why North America was so sparsely populated.
It's pretty frustrating, because teaching the land was just empty and unused is so far from the truth that it is basically propaganda.
Additionally, we tend to forget who the natives actually were. The Mississippian culture was forgotten, but so are the Comanches - a tribe that in the 1700s and 1800s had an uncontested empire and were described as the best light cavalry in the world. They had a massive striking range and were infamous for raids on European settlements. In these raids they had no compunction about rape and torture (infants included). It wasn't seen as wrong to them - their enemies the Utes would have done the same to them.
History is often much more nuanced than people want to admit.
Note, it's also crazy how empty America really was compared to Europe, China, or India at the time. If you look at maps of world population, you've got tens of dozens of cities larger than 1 million in population throughout Eurasia and virtually none in the Americas prior to 1800.
Based on what I've read, most of North America was indeed relatively sparsely populated relative to, say, early modern Japan or China, but Mesoamerica and the Andes were comparable to early modern Europe in terms of population density and urbanization. For example, by the time of first contact with Cortes in 1519, Tenochtitlan had a population of 200k to 300k, which was roughly three times larger than the estimated population of London at the same time, as well as bigger than any city in Spain or any of the other Hapsburg lands (which is something that the Spanish themselves noted).
Charles Mann's 1491 is a really good read on this general topic by the way, for anyone interested in reading more.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities_through...
It's apparently not cities with 1 million people, it's population centers of 1 million.
Simply teaching, by default, that there was an apocalyptic plague among Native Americans unknowingly caused by Europeans would go a long way towards balancing the narrative.
1. We just don't have access to pre-contact North America. We weren't there to write about it, they didn't write about it, and we don't have a lore lineage because we're not part of the culture.
2. Considering what happened, it's more convenient to think that we didn't really destroy anything much and we "brought culture to the savages" and made things better.
Afaik much of Africa suffers from the same sort of problem.
With Native American history though it is the history of where I live. I have spent my whole life living in areas that were previously controlled by the Anishinaabe people but never learned anything about them in class. To me that would be like a German student knowing as little as me about the 30 years war or a Chinese student who can't tell you the basics of the Taiping rebellion.
History unfortunately does that to nations and peoples. The average European is as ignorant about the Sami as the average American is about the Tonkawa.
Cultural relativism can also be seen as abuse. Let's leave those stone age islanders alone, who are we to say that our culture is better than theirs? Of course it's better. It's abusive to deny them the hundreds of years of scientific and technical progress. We would see it as abuse if someone had a child and didn't send them to school, instead forcing them to learn how to hunt and fend for themselves...
Well, that got off-topic quickly. Sorry!
His books "Descriptions of ancient works in Ohio" and "Ancient mining on the shores of lake superior" are available for free on google play books. He has others as well.
There is some fascinating history that most dont know about. You can find mounds on google maps as well if you know what to look for and line up the maps etc.
I wish the article laid out more empirical evidence for this rather than resorting to "well the Europeans were doing it, so this must have been what they were also doing!"
> He and Alt were both very opposed to the idea that Cahokia might have been a trade center and called it a mistake to view the city as an economic entity.
Cities are inherently economic entities... Kind of gives the impression that these archaeologists are imposing a bit of their own belief systems. It might be more reflective of the informal writing style than anything else.