1491_ New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus - Charles C. Mann [227]
Three other pre-Clovis sites: Meadowcroft Rockshelter, in Pennsylvania, excavated mainly by James Adovasio; Cactus Hill, in Virginia, excavated by Joseph McAvoy; and Topper, in South Carolina, excavated by Allan Goodyear. See Adovasio and Page 2003.
Kennewick Man: Chatters 2001; Thomas 2001. The European connection links to Smithsonian archaeologist Dennis Stanford’s idea that the Clovis culture descended from the Solutrean culture in Pleistocene Era France and Spain. Because Solutrean spear points resemble Clovis points, Stanford has speculated that they wandered across a northern arch of ice from Ireland to Greenland to northeast Canada, in an Atlantic version of the passage through Beringia. Stanford’s Solutrean proposal was never published in scholarly journals, though it was adumbrated in Newsweek and the New Yorker. Specialists in Solutrean culture have not greeted these ideas with equal warmth (Stanford and Bradley 2002; Straus 2000; see also, Preston 1997; Begley and Murr 1999).
Baja skulls: González-José et al. 2003; Dillehay 2003.
Australians into Brazil: Mattos 1939:105–07.
Fladmark and coastal route: Fladmark 1979 (see references therein to earlier papers); Mason 1894 (early proposal); Easton 1992; Koppel 2003:68–74; Powledge 1999; Hall 1999.
“Even primitive”: Quoted in Chandler 2002.
(Re)settlement of Europe: Tolan-Smith 1998; Rozoy 1998. Before the Ice Age, northern Europe was populated, but there was no cultural continuity between the earlier and later inhabitants.
6 / Cotton (or Anchovies) and Maize
“weft-twining”: My thanks to Nobuko Kajitani and Masa Kinoshita for helping me with textile terminology.
Huaricanga dig: Author’s interviews, Haas, Creamer, Ruiz, Gerbert Asencios, Dan Corkill, Luis Huaman, Kit Nelson.
Discovery of Norte Chico: The ruins were first written up by Max Uhle (1856–1944), a German researcher who is often called the “father of South American archaeology” (Uhle 1925). For Uhle’s life and work, see Menzel 1977; Rowe 1954.
Among the world’s biggest buildings: Huaricanga was built before the Egyptian pyramids, at a time when the only other structures that could be called monumental were in the city-states of Sumer. But at the time even these were smaller than the Huaricanga pyramid, so far as archaeologists can tell. The other main Eurasian culture centers—the Indus Valley, the Nile Delta, and the Shang homeland in China—did not even have cities then. Later the ziggurats of Mesopotamia and the pyramids of Egypt surpassed the Peruvian temples in size.
McNeill book: McNeill 1967.
High-school textbook: Stearns 1987 (“four initial centers,” 16; Indian history, 203–12). It was better than some other histories. A World History, by Mazour and People, gave the Americas just five pages (281–86). R. J. Unstead’s History of the World devoted three and a half pages to Indians: one and a half in the chapter “Other Cultures,” and two pages in the chapter “Europeans in America” (Unstead 1983:58–59, 200–02).
Maize as most important crop: The 2001 maize harvest was 609 million metric tons, whereas rice and wheat were 592 million mT and 582 million mT respectively. Statistics from the FAO agricultural database are online at http://apps.fao.org/default.htm.
Three-fifths of the crops: Weatherford 1988:204.
Olmec as founder of Peruvian societies: This idea was common in the 1920s and 1930s (Wells 1920 [vol. 2]:189–90). Later it fell out of favor, though it continued to be mooted until at least the 1960s (Coe 1962).
Sumer as world’s oldest city: Some densely populated settlements were older, notably Çatalhöyük, in central Turkey, and ’Ain Ghazal, in Jordan. But archaeologists believe that these were not true cities, because they show little evidence of public architecture, strong social hierarchy, and division of labor (Balter 1998; Simmons et al. 1988).
Eurasian trade