1491_ New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus - Charles C. Mann [289]
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*19 Given the choice between their own scratchy wool and the Indians’ smooth cotton, the conquistadors threw away their clothes and donned native clothing. Later this preference was mirrored in Europe. When cotton became readily available there in the eighteenth century, it grabbed so much of the textile market that French woolmakers persuaded the government to ban the new fiber. The law failed to stem the cotton tide. As the historian Fernand Braudel noted, some woolmakers then thought outside the box: they proposed sending prostitutes in cotton clothing to wander Paris streets, where police would publicly strip them naked. In theory, bourgeois women would then avoid cotton for fear of being mistaken for prostitutes and forcibly disrobed. This novel form of protectionism was never put into place.
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*20 The statues’ broad lips and flat noses have led “Africanist” historians like Clyde Winters and Ivan Van Sertima to claim that the Olmecs either were visited by Africans or had actually migrated from Africa. The African knowledge gained thereby explains the Olmec’s rapid rise. These views are not widely endorsed. Surprisingly, several noted archaeologists, including Betty Meggers and Gordon Ekholm, have suggested the geographical opposite: that Olmec society was inspired by China. Visitors from the Shang Dynasty are said to have crossed the Pacific to teach the ancient Olmec how to write, build monuments, and worship a feline god. This hypothesis, too, has failed to stir enthusiasm.
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*21 Here, as elsewhere in this book, I am being chronologically inexact. The oldest Zapotec palisade Flannery and Marcus excavated yielded calibrated radiocarbon dates in the range between 1680 and 1410 B.C., which for brevity’s sake I render as “about 1550 B.C.”
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*22 Actually, it didn’t. Inexplicably, the biggest unit, the 144,000-day “millennium,” began with 13, rather than 0. The first day in the calendar was thus 13.0.0.0.0. When I remarked on the peculiarity of this exception to a mathematician, he pointed out societies whose timekeeping systems are so irregular that children have to learn rhymes to remember the number of days in the months (“Thirty days hath September…”) are in no position to scoff at the calendrical eccentricities of other cultures. At least all the “months” in the Mesoamerican calendar had the same number of days, he said.
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*23 Chak Tok Ich’aak’s name, like most Maya names, is easier to pronounce than it looks. In most transliterations, all letters are pronounced much as they are in English, except that x is “sh.” Thus the small ruin of Xpuhil is “Shpoo-heel.” The only difficulty is the glottal stop, the constriction of the throat that occurs when someone with a classic Brooklyn accent pronounces “bottle.” In Maya, the glottal stop is indicated by an apostrophe, as in Ich’aak. Chak Tok Ich’aak, incidentally, meant something like “Great True Jaguar Claw.”
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*24 The river’s main channel is in this area called the Solimões. English-language maps usually put Manaus at the meeting of the Negro and the Solimões, with the latter changing its name back to Amazon upstream. Brazilian maps say that the Amazon begins at the conjunction of the Negro and Solimões.
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*25 Terra preta exists in two forms: terra preta itself, a black soil thick with pottery, and terra mulata, a lighter dark brown soil with much less pottery. A number of researchers believe that although Indians made both, they deliberately created only the terra mulata. Terra preta was the soil created directly around homes by charcoal kitchen fires and organic refuse of various types. I use terra preta loosely to cover both.
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