Don't Know Much About Mythology - Kenneth C. Davis [208]
1526 Dominican monks arrive in Mexico.
1530 Portuguese begin to colonize Brazil.
1533 Francisco Pizarro captures Inca chief Atahualpa; orders his execution.
1541 Jacques Cartier founds a French colony at Quebec in Canada.
Pizarro is assassinated by rival Spaniards.
1545 Discovery of vast silver mine in Potosí (Peru); by the 1590s, Spain is exporting 10 million ounces of silver per year from the New World.
1550 First Jesuits reach Brazil.
1552 Bartolomé de Las Casas’s scathing account of treatment of natives, History of the Indies, is published.
1570 Iroquois in northern North America form a league of tribes known as the Iroquois Confederacy.
1607 Foundation of first permanent English colony at Jamestown, Virginia. First African slaves arrive in 1619.
1620 Pilgrims arrive at Plymouth, Massachusetts.
BREAKING NEWS FROM THE NEW WORLD…
In the Central American rain forests of Guatemala, in 2004, archaeologists uncover a royal palace beneath the thick tropical canopy. Inside a tomb within the palace ruins, resting on a stone platform, they find the body of a Mayan queen who reigned more than twelve hundred years ago. Her remains are surrounded by pearls and crown jewels, along with masterpieces of carved jade and artifacts that throw new light on an ancient people about whom there are still mysteries. The researchers who make this remarkable find say it may unlock many secrets of a magnificent civilization. (New York Times, May 11, 2004.)
A tomb near Mexico’s 2,000-year-old Pyramid of the Moon in Teotihuacán is uncovered in 2004, yielding the remains of ten headless human bodies, most likely sacrificial victims. This extraordinary, if grisly, discovery comes after some 200 years of excavations at the site of the first major city in the Americas. Located about 35 miles northeast of Mexico City, and home to an estimated 200,000 people in 500 CE, Teotihuacán mysteriously collapsed about 200 years later. With its massive Pyramids of the Moon and the Sun, it was called “the place where men became gods” by the Aztecs when they rose to power in Mexico in about 1400 CE. (Reuters, December 2, 2004.)
In a case pitting scientists against Native Americans, a federal court rules in 2004 that the skeletal remains of “Kennewick man,” discovered in Washington state in 1996 and the oldest human remains yet found in North America, can be studied for scientific purposes. Tribes from three states in the American Northwest had sued to prevent any further investigation of the 9,200-year-old skeleton under a law that requires the reburial of any Native American ancestral remains. The researchers hope that more extensive testing and study of “Kennewick man”—who was shown to be unrelated by DNA to any of the tribes—will shed more light on long-standing mysteries over who came to the Americas and when they arrived (New York Times, July 20, 2004).
T
hese headline-making stories all point to the long, rich, yet still grossly misunderstood history and mythic traditions of the ancient Americas. Each new scientific advance and archaeological find makes it increasingly clear that our image of Native America has been tainted by the antiquated, “cowboys and Indians,” Hollywood version. Or that we romanticize Native Americans as “noble savages” living in Eden-like spiritual and ecological harmony. Or, more recently, they have been depicted mostly as wealthy casino operators running gambling meccas on tribal lands. Needless to say, none of these views is accurate or complete, in part because there were—and are—so many different Native Americans. Just as the people of Africa were a diverse group, the Native Americans were also a multicolored, many-voiced lot. Set apart by the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and living on two large continents that span the Western Hemisphere, the native peoples of the Americas ranged from the Aztecs of Mexico, the Mayas of Central America, and the Incas of South America, to the vastly