Why aren't Native American historical indicators everywhere?

Great Debates
1

I love history, but unfortunately I live in Wisconsin so the only historical sites of note are a few mounds we can look at. There are historical markers all over but they are for a 150 year old Saw Mill or perhaps a graveyard that was founded in…1804!

I realize I am transposing western ideas of civilization on a pastoral hunter gather people. But come on, humans have been in Wisconsin for 12,000 years. And sure graffiti wears off, but in seeing that is does the natural reaction is to make a mark in the world that lasts longer than the other marks people have made in the past. We do this now with spray paint high on water towers. I would imagine a young dumb and full of cum Native American doing this 5,000 years ago on a cliff for the same reasons, counting coup.

So they didn’t have a written language, but why aren’t there pictographs of ‘Little Turtle’ or ‘Stands With A Fist’ all over carved in stone cliffs? Why don’t ancient important sites have a few large stacked boulders? The place is sacred, but surely human’s desire to adapt his environment would include a place of worship. They had no issue making fish gathering river works, towns, even cities. It’s 500 miles to the Cahokia mounds to the south which had around 15,000 people, the region I live certainly was known to them. I’m not digging up 10,000 year old pottery in my backyard, as far as I understand it no one is despite great clay deposits all over.

Not only can I not comprehend the idea a people wouldn’t want to leave some lasting signs, even silly or stupid people have been leaving lasting marks throughout history.

2

A lot of what the Natives did leave, especially the Mississippian culture has been dug up, turned over or bulldozed. Some of the related groups did stretch up to what is today Wisconsin.

The mounds and constructions they did leave became farmlands and towns as the pioneers headed west from the original colonies.

For whatever reason before the Europeans followed Columbus over, these groups were already in heavy decline. I believe the leading theories for the decline is drought and colder weather that reduced maize production and increased warfare. Soto and others arriving was probably the final nail in the coffin as new diseases swept across North America.

The pioneers and farmers of the old west were of course not worried about those that came before and as another Jim put it, “You’ve got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know… morons.”

3

They did leave behind many artifacts and signs. It’s just less than you’d expect, since time tends to degrade artifacts, and since there were so few of these people, at least relative to numbers of modern humanity. Also it must be noted that they mainly existed in pre-history, meaning they weren’t primitive but they weren’t really creating texts or any kind of historical narratives, so the importance of everything was mainly bound to the time and place of its existence.

Time is very unkind to physical artifacts. Humans neglect many things you’d consider of utmost importance. Have you ever seen any Quaker graffiti? Did you know Richard III, the actual King of England, was found buried in a Leicester parking lot just a few years ago? We’re not great about keeping up with our stuff.

4

When you don’t have the power tools we take for granted, everything is hard; very hard.

Which means the act of ancients altering things in lasting ways for any reason, but especially for what they thought of as frivolous reasons was simply mostly more damned work than it was worth.

As applied to European settlers, any native-made mound was merely a source of easier to move dirt; nothing more. Any stone wall orcedifice was simy a handy pile of preselected stones ready for a better use.

Bottom line:
“They” left little and “we” scavenged almost all of what little there was.

The only real reason there are mounds at Cahokia today is that the European settler population wasn’t there long enough in sufficient number to dig up and reuse all the dirt. Only most of it.

5

FWIW, they keep finding canoes in Lake Mendota that date back thousands of years. At least in that specific area, researches think the boats started out on a shore or in shallow water and the lake hid them over time.

6

Not sure if they count, but what about “rock art” sites around the country like petroglyphs, geoglyphs and places with grinding rocks?

Scavenge is a good term, I think. A coworker of mine used to go “arrowhead hunting” and had a museum-worthy collection. He was part of a sizeable community of artifact hunters. I’ve seen room-sized displays of personal collections of hundreds arrowheads and artifacts in places like the Deming Luna Mimbres Museum and the Antelope Valley Indian Museum.

7

That article was what inspired this post.

But still, that’s the extraordinary lengths archeologists have to go to find anything predating white people. And that’s what inspired my question as I look around at all these ugly strip malls that will last thousands of years if everyone walks away now.

8

Because colonialism and racism.

9

I’m not so sure about that. Have you watched “Urban Exploration” videos on, e.g., YT? If left to decay, with the power out, buildings don’t last very long. Water intrudes through the roof or other damage, then everything rots / gets moldy / decays. If left for, say, 50 years, most such buildings would become an unstable mound in a forest of dense, small trees.

I’ve spent a lot of time hunting through ghost towns and the like, and the buildings go really quickly. What remains are things like rusty water pipes, concrete structures like sidewalk curbs, and decorative trees planted in front of those buildings. These trees differ from the rest of the forest and are very noticeable.

10

I think part of it is because the North American tribes didn’t have writing systems at the time of European contact.

Without actual writing, petroglyphs and the like are somewhat limited into being what are essentially pictograms, and it’s harder to convey information that way (“Is that petroglyph Wiggling Snake from the next village with five bends starting to the right, or is that Wiggling Snake from three villages over with five bends starting to the left?”)

There are a fair number of petroglyphs and artifacts still around in areas that are conducive to their creation and preservation. But there are a lot of areas where neither is the case. Where I live for example, is mostly a mixture of plains, scrubby woods and low, rolling hills. Not a lot of rock anywhere, and where there is naturally exposed rock, it’s almost always part of where a river or stream cut into the hillside or something like that. Which means two things- that rock is pretty soft (the rocks that underlay us are mostly chalk, shale, and sandstone), and that it’s probably not very permanent in the grand scheme of things. So I wouldn’t be surprised if some Native Americans did carve some petroglyphs into river cuts, but then those were subsequently eroded away, being soft and part of a river. Being covered with sediment is another possible outcome as well.

All in all, the geology around here isn’t really conducive to permanent historical indicators. And if there was a temporary encampment where there was a midden or just stuff left, that’s probably still there, but no one knows where to look- it could be under my backyard for all I know.

11

One common explanation for the decrease in the native population of the Americas is that people arriving from Europe brought diseases that killed within a century 85% of the native populations of the Americas. These diseases were ones which had killed a very large percentage of people in Europe, Asia, and Africa during the Middle Ages and before. The people there had acquired immunities over the centuries to those diseases by the time they reached the Americas.

The reaction of the colonists from Europe to the natives of the Americas was that what the natives had didn’t count as real culture. Those funny noises they made weren’t really languages. They should be glad if we (European colonists) allow them to speak European languages. They should be glad if we allow them to interbreed with the colonists. Any structures they had built weren’t important and could be destroyed.

It wasn’t until the twentieth century that European and European-descended universities began studying the cultures of the Americas.

12

This may not be much, but in Northern California, the indigenous tribes left holes they had ground into rocks.

13

If confine ourselves to the present day Lower 48 just for simplicity …

The current US population is ~340M. The majority of our land area is sparsely populated or completely unpopulated. A fact that’s easy to overlook if you don’t spend a lot of time flying over “flyover country”.

Estimates for Native American populations pre-1492 (= pre White predation and White-borne disease) vary a lot, but for what’s now the Lower 48 numbers vary from ~1M to ~10M. So there are between ~30 and ~350 current Americans for each individual old-time Native.

The amount of durable infrastructure and durable goods per person today is probably 1,000 to 10,000 times as much stuff too. Might even be 100K times as much stuff. Whether we choose to measure it by piece count or by the ton.

From the per capita share of capital goods like high rises, strip centers, roads, underground utilities, canals, railroads, garbage dumps, ore mines, factories, etc., to individual durable consumer and capital goods like discarded pots and pans, cars, factory machines, old clothes, broken toys, obsolete computers, etc., and then all the way unto the truly disposable items like the paper wrapper and waxed-paper cup from my burger at lunch today. Plus of course the other plastic cup for my water that won’t appreciably decay for millennia, despite being termed “disposable”.

Multiplying those two (admittedly crude) factors together we see collectively the USA now has between 350K to maybe 3.5million times as much man-made stuff in it today as it did then. And yet there are still large areas of the country where you could wander on foot for a week and, other than airplanes overhead, see no evidence of any past or present human existence whatsoever.

Hardly surprising to me that we can’t find much of their needle in / around / under our haystack. And that’s before considering the attritive effects of both Nature over time and the “scavenging” by prior settlers I referred to in my earlier post.

14

Around here, Native American mounds are so common that most folks never even notice them, and of the ones that are still intact and haven’t been built or paved over, the purpose of most of them have yet to be investigated. There’s one near the school where I work that I suspect might have been a fortification, as the site would have been a very strategic and defensible spot… if the builders had bows. But it would have been almost worthless if the best they had were atlatls. And the uncertainty in the dates of when it was built and when the bow was invented overlap.

15

There are a lot of geographical features with Native American names. Many rivers use Native American names and some states as well. Granted the common pronunciation and spellings are a bit off, sometimes way off, but they are still historical indicators.

16

All over California. There’s one in Santa Barbara that you would never know about because it’s on private property but it’s only a yard or so off the sidewalk behind a hedge in front of a Victorian. I lived in a little cottage on the property in the 1990s.

17

Growing up in Southern California, our road vacations mostly consisted of visiting Indian ruins…because it was free. They are everywhere in the Southwest as well as pictographs, some that can only be seen by rafting through narrow canyons.

18

AIUI, the Native American concept of land “ownership” did not really exist - the people were part of the land like the rocks and rivers and plants and animals. So perhaps they did not feel any need to leave markers or monuments indicating their territory, or modify their environment, or that they were there at all. Anything we find of theirs, such as the grinding rocks mentioned above and arrowheads, are just happy coincidence that they used a durable material, but are unintentional relics of their presence.

19

Great point. Thank you.

Given that this is what the e.g. Cherokee written language looks like, I certainly hope we’d use a more accessible (to us) spelling. :slight_smile:

20

Not even in farming cultures? Historically speaking, land ownership - either private or communal - goes hand-in-hand with farming. One you start planting food, it becomes very important to determine who gets to harvest it. The Aztecs had land ownership. Didn’t other indigenous American peoples?