Well Pinguin. It has been 24 hours since you said that you would provide a quote within hours. I still see nothing.
Having some trouble are you?
Why do you care so much about the size of the pre-Columbian population? You’ve already made a dedicated thread about it, and derailed this one.
BTW, this hypothetical makes it possible for the Classical Greek and Punic civilizations, in something like their familiar forms, to survive the rise and fall of Rome – since they are established in independent coastal colonies all around the globe. They might even resist the pull of Christianity.
I had thought of an alternative or additional hypothetical where Greek westward colonization pressure is greater because the Greeks lose the First or the Second Persian War, and there is a diaspora of Greeks fleeing Persian rule. But then we would have to revise the whole history of the Classical and Hellenistic and Roman periods and Christianity and everything; and it’s questionable whether anything like the brilliant apex of Athenian civilization, with its philosophy and art and everything, could have arisen in Persian-occupied Greece, or in a diaspora culture preoccupied with finding new lands and breaking them to the plow.
Well Pinguin, it has now been 2 days. And you said that you would provide this quote within hours. You are still regularly posting in this thread.
Well I guess this proves to all that you can not provide the evidence and that you have only pretended to have read the works of Cabeza de Vaca. Quite clearly you have never even seen his works. All you have done is read extracts in some partisan work and swallowed whatever nonsense the author of that work was selling you.
I answered you already in the other thread about Population at contact. I will post one by one my quotations. I will continue until you recognize you are wrong. I hope you read Spanish, because I have the sources. I don’t depend on translators.
It never ceases to amaze me how people convinced that all Indians in North America were hunter-gatherers, when everyone in the US is taught the story of the Pilgrims in Kindergarten.
How the Pilgrims were starving until they found a cache of buried maize, which they took. How they found a perfect spot for a settlement, because it was the site of an abandoned Indian village. How the village was abandoned because the entire village except one person (Squanto) had died in an epidemic. How they almost starved until the neighboring Indians taught them how to grow maize. How Squanto helped them out because his entire people were dead, and these new settlers arrived and moved into the site of his old home. How Squanto had been captured as a slave and taken to Europe, only to escape and make it back to America. How the Pilgrims were so grateful that the Indians taught them their methods of agriculture that they held a feast of Thanksgiving to thank them.
The story of the Pilgrims is an incredible story because it contains so much of the history of colonization in microcosm.
And yet so many people can’t seem to shake the idea that a typical Indian was a buffalo-hunting horse-riding plains Indian from 1880. They know the story of the Pilgrims and the conquest of the Aztecs, but they can’t integrate that information into their ideas about how Indians lived.
Of course the reality is that the movie-indian milieu was very short lived, and many of those plains dwellers were new migrants to the plains who had just recently been driven off their ancestral farms and adopted this new way of life by necessity.
In 1492, the vast, vast majority of people living in North America were farmers, not hunters. Even if you exclude Mexico. Yes, there are large parts of North America that were unsuitable for farming, like almost all of Canada. And so Canada had very low population density compared to the Mississippi Valley and Eastern Forest. That low population density means very few people lived in Canada, while high populations in farming areas meant lots and lots of people, which means most people were farmers by percentage of population. Note that this doesn’t mean that the vast majority of territory was farming territory, it wasn’t. Just that if you have 9 farmers per square mile in agricultural areas, and 1 hunter per square mile in non-agricultural areas, and the two territories are equal in area, that means 90% of the people in the combined area are farmers.
People also have the strange notion that if people hunt, that means they can’t be farmers. Except just about every modern subsistence farmer in the modern world of 2011 will also hunt and fish and gather to supplement their diet. You have a staple crop and you tend that, but at times when the crops don’t need work you head out and collect wild food. Take a look at the classic “Little House” books. Pa grows wheat and tends the horses and cows on their little farms, but as soon as the harvest is in and winter starts, he takes his gun and goes hunting and doesn’t stop until planting time in the spring.
The other thing is that what we think of as the Plains Indians weren’t really hunter/gatherers in the traditional sense. They were technologically advanced h/gs, at worst, once they had horses and guns. That technology allowed them to sustain a population density well beyond what leg power and bows and arrows would allow. Not to mention the access to trade goods they had. Usually we think of h/gs with essentially a stone age tool kit.
Hunting and gathering does not necessarily mean low population density, primitive and poor in material resources. The natives of the coast of British Columbia, for example, were able to sustain a very high relative population density, level of material affluence and relative civilization by hunting and gathering - admittedly, the riches of the salmon run made this possible.
In all the Americas, fishing was a great source of food. So, populations at the coast were usually larger than in the interior.
The pacific northwest was different by orders of magnitude, in that they were able to support quite wealthy chiefdomships, elaborate wooden towns, and reasonably large-scale warfare off of the somewhat unique bounty of the salmon run.
Also, a famous tradition of carving and the decorative arts.
In fact, they were so wealthy that they invented an entire ceremonial system designed to show status by deliberately destroying or giving away objects of wealth (the “potlatch”).
And they had a superb art as well. That’s a people I admire, actually.
Well, to be fair about the technology was borrowed, or traded-for anyway. They couldn’t sustain that form of technology on their own.
Actually, there was some influx of technology from Mexico and perhaps in an indirect way from Florida. Cahokia, for instance, had metalworking, which originated in Mexico. Maize also came from there in some earlier time.
This corroborates the Lenape legend that their ancestors had had to fight their way to the East Coast. Especially crossing the Mississippi River, where their way was barred by a giant people called Talligewi* who built stone fortresses. Brownsville, Pennsylvania was one such site, at a strategic crossing on the Monongahela River. The Lenape people called the place Red Stone because the ancient building was made of red sandstone.
To people who don’t build in stone, the presence of large stone constructions leads them to posit giants as the builders. Witness the Giants’ Dance (Stonehenge), Ġgantija (Neolithic megalith temples; literally ‘of the giants’) in Malta, and the so-called Cyclopean stonework in Mycenaean fortifications. “The term comes from the belief by classical Greeks that only the mythical Cyclopes had the strength to move the enormous boulders that made up the walls of Mycenae and Tiryns. Pliny’s Natural History reported the tradition attributed to Aristotle, that the Cyclopes were the inventors of masonry towers, giving rise to the designation Cyclopean.”
Archeologically, the eastward migration of ancient Algonquian and Iroquoian peoples, referenced in the above-mentioned Lenape legends, fits with the Adena culture. These legends first became known to white people as a text called the Walam Olum, which purported to be an ancient Lenape document. It has since been proven that the published recension is a forgery by a white guy. However, Lenape people who have read it says it contains authentic Lenape legendary material and language, as though a substrate of original material had been subjected to editorial errors, additions, and omissions.[sup]cite[/sup]
My conclusion is: Lenape legend has preserved a folk memory of the migrations of ancient Algonquian peoples meeting giants, so-called, who built the series of forts along the Mississippi. The white guy who published his recension of the legends without acknowledging his own rewriting of them created a work similar to Lönnrot’s processing of folk material to make the Kalevala, and Longfellow’s reworking of Ojibwe legends via Schoolcraft. Except that Rafinesque is now discredited because he misrepresented the text he came up with.
*As an ancient legendary people lost to history, the Talligewi have been seized on by any number of unfounded theories of who they were. I don’t believe that anyone really knows who they were, so I’m skeptical of all Talligewi identifications. But where the legends seem to place them corresponds with the line of fortifications you mentioned. The legends aren’t always clear to me as to whether they’re talking about the Mississippi or the Ohio. The Red Stone fort at Brownsville is in the upper Ohio river system.
What’s that? Your mother writes on the head of a cow with her tongue?
Just imagine if the Lenape had encountered Classical-Greek walled cities . . .
Cite? AFAIK, Mississipian metalworking was confined to native copper and had fuck-all to do with Mexican techniques.
Show your evidence. I am interested.
Ignoring pinguin’s heartfelt but implausible hijack about disease, I agree with smiling bandit – and I submit that the reason the later diseases appear more terrible to BrainGlutton is the increased population (and increased population density) at the point the later epidemics occurred.
No, really. Please imagine if the Lenape had encountered Classical-Greek walled cities. That’s the kinda thing this thread is about, dammit! :mad: Can we please take all of pinguin’s revisionist historical theories as stated, under advisement, and not worthy of further discussion from this point?