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By Root 1723 0

oysters, and clams. With plenty of time for leisure, the Northwest Indians were making exquisite crafts and living in impressive lodges. Farther north, the Haida, similarly well fed, had ample time and energy to commit cruel depredations on fellow tribes in magnificent war canoes carved from whole trees. When we think of a great civilization, however, we think of great cities, of sublime architecture and monuments, of intricate governmental and social structures, of engineering ability which startles even the jaded modern observer. By that standard, neither the Chinook nor any of the other cultures in North America—except the Hohokam—was great. Individually, the Indians could be incredibly skillful—as horsemen, warriors, hunters, artisans—but their high achievement was just that: individual. Even where Indians shared a common language, they broke up into small, separate tribes that, for the most part, went their own way. In contrast to the collectivism of the great Mediterranean, Indus Valley, or Mayan city-states, North American Indian culture was fragmented, atomized, ephemeral.

Most of the great Mediterranean civilizations arose in a region notable for its benign weather. But the climate in California is very similar to that of southern Italy and Greece, and California was a gastronomical paradise on earth, with salmon in the rivers, acorns for the taking, whales grounding themselves on beaches, and enormous herds and flocks of game. But the Hurok and Miwok and Paiute tribes were living in caves and under trees when the Greeks and Romans were building aqueducts and the Parthenon.

An answer to this riddle begins to emerge when one considers that nearly all the great early civilizations were irrigated ones. That single act—irrigation—seems inextricably linked to their ascendance, as well as to their demise. Any people who, for the first time, managed to divert a river and seduce a crop out of wasted land had tweaked the majestic indifference of the universe. To bring off the feat demanded tremendous collective will: discipline, planning, a sense of shared goals. To sustain it required order, which led to the creation of powerful priesthoods, of bureaucracies. Irrigation invited large concentrations of people because of all the food; it probably demanded such concentrations because of all the work. Out of this, cities grew. Work became specialized. There had to be engineers, builders, architects, farmers—probably even lawyers, for the disputes over water rights among upstream and downstream irrigators could not have been much different from today’s. The ample supply of food may have helped in the keeping of slaves; in California, during the mission days, some of the Indians signed themselves into absolute servitude with the padres in exchange for the certitude of being fed.

Once established, irrigated civilizations in the desert were incredibly well off. Before modern weapons, sheer numbers meant power, so they were formidable in war. Oases in hostile deserts, they would have been difficult to approach and attack. The desert was also a healthy place to live. There was no tsetse fly, no malarial swamp, no raging cold and chilling wind. Because everyone was out of doors much of the time, the spread of disease was much less of a risk than in colder climates. Famine was an almost forgotten nemesis. Food was also a wonderful commodity for trade. Mesopotamia had virtually no metals, but it produced enough food to trade not only for iron and bronze but for a phenomenal wealth of gold. Trade was also a way of exchanging ideas; it was through contact with the Assyrians and Greeks that the Romans learned to build aqueducts.

There were, of course, problems. Canals could silt up or wash out in floods. A rigid bureaucratic order could spawn revolution. Any disruption of the water supply—by an earthquake, a drought—would be catastrophic. But those were not the kinds of problems likely to crush civilizations as ingenious as these. They might take their toll, along with wars and plagues, but it seems unlikely they would have sent them