1491 (64 page)

My “simple” rule of thumb to call people by the name they prefer is more complex than it may seem. The far north, for example, is home to a constellation of related societies generally known as “Eskimo,” but in the 1980s this term was replaced by “Inuit” in Canada, where most of these groups live, after complaints that “Eskimo” came from a pejorative term in Algonquian language that meant “eater of raw flesh.” Why this would be bothersome seems unclear, because raw meat is a preferred part of northerners’ diet, much as sushi is favored by the Japanese. In any case, linguists believe that “Eskimo” actually stems from the Algonquian terms for “snowshoe netter” or “people who speak a different language,” neither of which seems especially derogatory. Worse for contemporary purposes, “Inuit” is also the name of a specific subgroup of Arctic societies, to which such northern indigenous peoples as the Aleutiiq in the Aleutian Islands and Innu in Labrador do not belong. If that weren’t enough, the Inupiat in Alaska, who belong to the Inuit subgroup but speak a different language than their cousins in Canada, have generally resisted the term “Inuit” in favor of “Alaska Native” or, sometimes, “Eskimo.”

An additional source of confusion occurs when indigenous languages have different romanization schemes. Runa Simi (Quechua), the group of languages spoken in the former Inka empire, has several; I have tried to follow the one promulgated by the Peruvian Academia Mayor de la Lengua Quechua in 1995, which seems to be slowly gaining popularity. The choice is more difficult for the three dozen languages grouped as “Maya.” As an example, the name of the ruler slain at the beginning of Chapter 8 has been rendered as, among other things, Toh-Chak-Ich’ak, Chak Toh Ich’ak, and Chak Tok Ich’aak; his title, “lord,” has been romanized as
ahau, ahaw, ajau, ajaw,
and even
axaw.
In 1989 the Ministry of Culture and Sports in Guatemala published a standardized orthography for Maya. Unfortunately, Mexico has a different one. Indeed, it has
several.
Various Mexican agencies have issued putatively official orthographies, most based on Alfredo Barrera Vásquez’s classic
Diccionario Maya Cordemex,
all intended to “help save these languages from extinction.” In this book, I throw up my hands and spell Maya names as they appear in the most authoritative recent source I have come across:
Chronicle of the Maya Kings and Queens,
by the epigraphers Simon Martin and Nikolai Grube. (None of this is to say that I have not made mistakes or sometimes failed to follow my own rules. I’m sure I have done exactly that, though I tried not to.)

The second type of problem, that of categorization, is equally knotty. Take the word “civilization”—“a saltpeter of a word, often triggering explosive arguments,” Alfred Crosby has written. The arguments occur when cultures are deemed not to be civilizations; are they therefore “uncivilized”? Archaeologists and anthropologists have proposed dozens of definitions and argue about whether the existence of a written language is essential. If it is, there may have been no Indian civilizations outside Mesoamerica. Yet other parts of the Americas are filled with ruins (Tiwanaku, Marajó, Cahokia) that would be described as the product of a civilization if they were anywhere else in the world. The distinction seems to me unhelpful. Like Crosby, I use the word “not in moral comment, but simply in reference to peoples settled in cities, villages, hamlets, and to the kinds of political, economic, social, and military structures associated with such populations.”

Sometimes researchers attempt to avoid the whole debate by substituting the term “complex society.” Not much is gained thereby, because it implies that hunters and gatherers have simple lives. A century ago, anthropologist Franz Boas demonstrated the contrary as he struggled to fathom the mind-bogglingly elaborate patterns of Northwest Coast Indian life. Still, the term has some resonance. As societies grow larger, their members become more encrusted by manufactured goods, both standardized for the mass consumer and custom-made for the elite. Along with this growth comes a growth in the size and variety of the technological infrastructure. It is in this material sense that I use the words “complex” and “sophisticated.”

In this book I tend to marshal terms like “king” and “nation” rather than “chief” and “tribe.” Supposedly the latter refer mainly to kin-based societies whereas the former are for bigger societies based on a shared group identity. In practice, though, “chief” and “tribe” have historically been used to refer disparagingly to frontier cultures conquered by larger societies. In textbooks the Roman emperors, heroic custodians of Greco-Roman civilization, are always fighting off the “barbarian chiefs” of the “Germanic tribes.” But these “tribes” had rulers who lived in big palaces, held sway over sizable domains, and had to abide by written codes of law. The Burgundian “tribe” even conquered Rome and set up its own puppet Roman emperor in the fifth century. (He was killed by another “tribe,” which installed its own emperor.)

Maps of fifth- and sixth-century Europe usually depict the “Celtic kingdoms,” “Kingdom of the Lombards,” and so on, their borders marked by the solid lines we associate with national frontiers. But entities of equal or greater size and technological sophistication in the Western Hemisphere are routinely called “chiefdoms” and “tribes,” implying they are somehow different and of smaller scale. And fuzzy lines mark their borders, as if to indicate the looseness with which they were organized and defined. “‘Tribe’ and ‘chiefdom’ are not neutral scientific terms,” archaeologist Alice Beck Kehoe has declared. “They are politically loaded.” I have mostly avoided them.

In general, I have tried to use the terms that historians of Europe or Asia would use to describe social and political entities of similar size and complexity. This approach risks obliterating the real differences between, to cite one example, the court in Qosqo and the court in Madrid. But it supports one of the larger aims of this book: to explain in lay terms researchers’ increasing recognition that the Western Hemisphere played a role in the human story just as interesting and important as that of the Eastern Hemisphere.

A final note: throughout the text, I use the European terminology of
B.C.
and
A.D.
Many researchers object to them as ethnically bound. In truth, it is a little odd to be talking about “years before Christ” in reference to people whose cultural traditions have nothing to do with Christianity. But no plausible substitutes are available. Some historians use
B.C.E.
to mean “before the Common era,” but because the Common Era calendar is just a renamed Christian calendar that still places past events in reference to Christianity, the main objection. One could switch to a neutral calendar, like the Julian calendar used by astronomers (the latter at least doesn’t get tripped up by zero—it is the first European calendar as sophisticated as the Mesoamerican Long Count). This doesn’t seem useful; to discharge their informational content, readers will have to translate Julian dates back into what they know, the familiar
A.D.
and
B.C.
It seems only kind to save them the bother.

APPENDIX B

 

Talking Knots

All known written accounts of the Inka were set down after the conquest, most by Spaniards who had, of course, never experienced the empire in its heyday. Because many of the chroniclers tried to do their job conscientiously, most scholars use their reports, despite their deficiencies, as I do in this book. For obvious reasons historians of the Inka have never liked being forced to rely exclusively on post-conquest, non-native written sources, but there seemed to be no avoiding it.

Recently, though, some researchers have come to believe that the Inka did have a written language—indeed, that Inka texts are displayed in museums around the world, but that they have generally not been recognized as such. Here I am referring to the bunches of knotted strings known as
khipu
(or
quipu,
as the term is often spelled). Among the most fascinating artifacts of Tawantinsuyu, they consist of a primary cord, usually a third to a half an inch in diameter, from which dangle thinner “pendant” strings—typically more than a hundred, but on occasion as many as 1,500. The pendant strings, which sometimes have subsidiary strings attached, bear clusters of knots, each tied in one of three ways. The result, in the dry summary of George Gheverghese Joseph, a University of Manchester mathematics historian, “resembles a mop that has seen better days.”

According to colonial accounts,
khipukamayuq—
“knot keepers,” in Ruma Suni—parsed the knots both by inspecting them visually and by running their fingers along them, Braille-style, sometimes accompanying this by manipulating black and white stones. For example, to assemble a history of the Inka empire the Spanish governor Cristóbal Vaca de Castro summoned
khipukamayuq
to “read” the strings in 1542. Spanish scribes recorded their testimony but did not preserve the
khipu;
indeed, they may have destroyed them. Later the Spanish became so infuriated when
khipu
records contradicted their version of events that in 1583 they ordered that all the knotted strings in Peru be burned as idolatrous objects. Only about six hundred escaped the flames.

All known writing systems employ instruments to paint or inscribe on flat surfaces.
Khipu,
by contrast, are three-dimensional arrays of knots. Although Spanish chronicles repeatedly describe
khipukamayuq
consulting their
khipu,
most researchers could not imagine that such strange-looking devices could actually be written records. Instead they speculated that
khipu
must be mnemonic devices—personalized memorization aids, like rosaries—or, at most, textile abacuses. The latter view gained support in 1923, when science historian L. Leland Locke proved that the pattern of knots in most
khipu
recorded the results of numerical calculations—the knotted strings were accounting devices.
Khipu
were hierarchical, decimal arrays, Locke said, with the knots used to record 1s on the lowest level of each string, those for the 10s on the next, and so on. “The mystery has been dispelled,” archaeologist Charles W. Mead exulted, “and we now know the quipu for just what it was in prehistoric times…simply an instrument for recording numbers.”

Based on such evaluations, most Andeanists viewed the Inka as the only major civilization ever to come into existence without a written language. “The Inka had no writing,” Brian Fagan, an archaeologist at the University of California in Santa Barbara, wrote in
Kingdoms of Gold, Kingdoms of Jade,
his 1991 survey of Native American cultures. “The quipu was purely a way of storing precise information, a pre-Columbian computer memory, if you will.”

But even as Fagan was writing, researchers were coming to doubt this conclusion. The problem was that Locke’s rules only decoded about 80 percent of
khipu—
the remainder were incomprehensible. According to Cornell archaeologist Robert Ascher, those
khipu
are “clearly non-numerical.” In 1981, Ascher and his mathematician wife, Marcia, published a book that jolted the field by intimating that these “anomalous”
khipu
may have been an early form of writing—one that Ascher told me was “rapidly developing into something extremely interesting” just at the time when Inka culture was demolished.

The Aschers slowly gained converts. “Most serious scholars of khipu today believe that they were more than mnemonic devices, and probably much more,” Galen Brokaw, an expert in ancient Andean texts at the State University of New York in Buffalo, said to me. This view of
khipu
can seem absurd, Brokaw admitted, because the scientists who propose that Tawantinsuyu was a literate empire also freely admit that no one can read its documents. “Not a single narrative khipu has been convincingly deciphered,” the Harvard anthropologist Gary Urton conceded, a situation he described as “more than frustrating.”