There are a lot of first hand accounts from the first Spaniards in the New World. I've read them and they are fascinating. They also provide a direct look at the peoples they encountered.<p>Cabeza de Vaca provided a very interesting account. Marooned, he wandered the New World alone for many years. He often found groups of people living in incredible squalor and constant warfare-- barely able to feed themselves. He ended up surviving, in part, because he acted as a middle-man between tribes who needed to trade with each other but were constantly at war.<p>Cortes found fairly advanced civilizations with amazing infrastructure that also suffered from warfare, slavery and ridiculous amounts of human sacrifices.<p>There is also a lot of evidence in the DNA of Native Americans that tell how and when they migrated here.<p>The point I am making is that Native Americans were and are Native Americans. They had good things and bad things going for them. This article (and book) seems pre-occupied with trying to tell you that everything we've learned up to this point is entirely wrong and that the New World was a utopia before the filthy Europeans arrived. It wasn't, and there is a ton of evidence to support that. It just was what it was. To be honest, I feel like this is trying to re-focus history with a politically correct slant-- which is what bothers me.
An article so good it was expanded into a book. In contrast with most books which never have been more than articles. :)<p>The book was reviewed thousands of times but here's mine <a href="http://gondwanaland.com/mlog/2005/12/28/1491/" rel="nofollow">http://gondwanaland.com/mlog/2005/12/28/1491/</a><p>Or there's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1491:_New_Revelations_of_the_Americas_Before_Columbus" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1491:_New_Revelations_of_the_A...</a> and about the followup <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1493:_Uncovering_the_New_World_Columbus_Created" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1493:_Uncovering_the_New_World...</a>
PBS has a good documentary called "Cracking the Maya Code", <a href="https://youtube.com/watch?v=H5ppfC6y-5s" rel="nofollow">https://youtube.com/watch?v=H5ppfC6y-5s</a>, about deciphering of Mayan glyphs, centuries after most books were burnt. Much credit goes to Linda Schele, an art teacher who made breakthroughs in decoding the glyphs, <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linda_Schele" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linda_Schele</a><p>There's a longer version of the documentary called "Breaking the Maya Code", including interview clips with Schele, <a href="http://www.nightfirefilms.org/breakingthemayacode/interviews/ScheleTRANSCRIPT.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.nightfirefilms.org/breakingthemayacode/interviews...</a><p>"<i>The Maya use story.. The advantage to me of stories, like what the Maya used, and the painting onto the patterns of the stars and the Milky Way of images of these great narratives, is you don’t have to be a Ph.D. to understand it. You could be a child and understand it and learn it through stories. In our world, to access that, you either have to be one of the scientists who creates the legend of the Big Bang, or you have to be one of the scientific writers who act as translators for the people in our world.</i>"
Fascinating excerpt from the book by Tyler Cowen:<p>> the modern species [of maize] had to have been consciously developed by a small group of breeders who hunted through teosinte strands for plants with desired traits…"To get corn out of teosinte is so — you couldn't get a grant to do that now, because it would sound so crazy…Somebody who did that today would get a Nobel Prize!"<p><a href="http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2005/08/1491.html#sthash.wNlmQJ0Z.dpuf" rel="nofollow">http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2005/08/149...</a>
One of the best articles I have read on the state of NA civilization pre colonization. <a href="http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/native-intelligence-109314481/" rel="nofollow">http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/native-intelligence-10...</a><p>The short version is that Europeans really did not have any idea about the civilization they were replacing, and by the time they really arrived European diseases had killed most of the population, leading to the myth that the continent was empty. Can't really do justice with a summary.
There are fascinating parallels between this debate and the debate on the size, economic development and political cohesion of the Palestinian population before the establishment of modern day Israel.