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By Root 1826 0

puzzle.*15 Countless amateur thinkers took a crack at the problem, as did anthropologists and archaeologists when those disciplines were invented. The professionals made no secret of their disdain for the amateurs, whom they regarded as annoyances, cranks, or frauds. Unfortunately for the experts, in the 1920s and 1930s their initial theories about the timing of Indians’ entrance into the Americas were proven wrong, and in a way that allowed the crackpots to claim vindication. Thirty years later a new generation of researchers put together a different theory of Native American origins that gained general agreement. But in the 1980s and 1990s a gush of new information about the first Americans came in from archaeological digs, anthropological laboratories, molecular biology research units, and linguists’ computer models. The discoveries once again fractured the consensus about the early American history, miring it in dispute. “It really does seem sometimes that scientific principles are going out the window,” the archaeologist C. Vance Haynes said to me, unhappily. “If you listen to [the dissenting researchers], they want to throw away everything we’ve established.”

Haynes was waxing rhetorical—the critics don’t want to jettison everything from the past. But I could understand the reason for his dour tone. Again the experts were said to have been proved wrong, opening a door that until recently was bolted against the crackpots. A field that had seemed unified was split into warring camps. And projects like Pena’s, which not long ago would have seemed marginal, even nutty, now might have to be taken seriously.

In another sense, though, Haynes’s unhappy view seemed off the mark. The rekindled dispute over Indian origins has tended to mask a greater archaeological accomplishment: the enormous recent accumulation of knowledge about the American past. In almost every case, Indian societies have been revealed to be older, grander, and more complex than was thought possible even twenty years ago. Archaeologists not only have pushed back the date for humanity’s entrance into the Americas, they have learned that the first large-scale societies grew up earlier than had been believed—almost two thousand years earlier, and in a different part of the hemisphere. And even those societies that had seemed best understood, like the Maya, have been placed in new contexts on the basis of new information.

At one point I asked Pena what he thought the reaction would be if he discovered that ancient Indians were, in fact, not genetically related to modern Indians. He was standing by a computer printer that was spewing out graphs and charts, the results of another DNA comparison. “It will seem impossible to believe at first,” he said, flipping through the printout. “But if it is true—and I am not saying that it is—people will ultimately accept it, just like all the other impossible ideas they’ve had to accept.”

LOST TRIBES

So various were the peoples of the Americas that continent-wide generalizations are risky to the point of folly. Nonetheless, one can say that for the most part the initial Indian-European encounter was less of an intellectual shock to Indians than to Europeans. Indians were surprised when strange-looking people appeared on their shores, but unlike Europeans they were not surprised that such strange people existed.

Many natives, seeking to categorize the newcomers, were open to the possibility that they might belong to the realm of the supernatural. They often approached visitors as if they might be deities, possibly calculating, in the spirit of Pascal’s wager, that the downside of an erroneous attribution of celestial power was minimal. The Taino Indians, Columbus reported after his first voyage, “firmly believed that I, with my ships and men, came from the heavens…. Wherever I went, [they] ran from house to house, and to the towns around, crying out, ‘Come! come! and see the men from the heavens!’” On Columbus’s later voyages, his crew happily accepted godhood—until the Taino began empirically testing their divinity