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madwriterFor many years I've adamantly believed that our prehistoric ancestors were, put simply, not stupid.
One smaller but equally adamant belief descending from this was that that the native residents of ancient North America were more sophisticated and far-seeing than they're usually given credit for--a lack of credit originally born out of the need to turn them and their ancestors into savages and wiping out their ancient works, like the remains of great cities in the Mississippi River Valley and the enormous burial mounds everywhere, so that we could destroy them and their culture to take their land. From bits and pieces I read over the years, it seemed to me that there were great networks of trade and knowledge that spanned not only this continent but down to South America as well.
So when it came time to plot Arizona, this was the prehistoric North America I wanted to portray in the first part of the book: A series of not monolithic but intertwined cultures enjoying at least marginal contact with and/or knowledge of each other ranging from the Mississippi River down to the Aztec and Mayan lands. Now it turns out that archaeologists are slowly coming 'round to it as well.
The springboard of this discovery was work by Dr. Stephen H. Lekson, currently an archaeologist, curator, and professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, whose specialty is prehistoric Southwest studies and who has held this view of an extensive prehistoric cultural network for years. His arguments are laid out both elegantly and in splendid detail in his 2009 book A History of the Ancient Southwest, which I'm re-reading now, a combination of not just archaeology, but--heresy!--a study of the native peoples' own histories.
(A good example of this "heresy" is how tribes like the Navajo and Hopi recounted stories of ancient tyrannical kings they overthrew and moved away from, while 19th and 20th century archaeologists ferociously argued that the idea of such "primitives" living under a system as sophisticated as a monarchy was so ridiculous as to not even be worth consideration. Another more notorious one--though I don't remember if I read this in Lekson's book or elsewhere--was believing that the Native Americans could never have built Arizona's massive irrigation canal systems, that they must've been Spanish-built, even though the Spanish themselves reported only finding them already in place and restoring and dredging them out.)
Not only does his research feel right to me, it--even more importantly--makes sense. Even if you left aside the Native Americans' accounting of their own past, the archaeological record itself bolsters his arguments in ways that are almost undeniable unless you've totally bought into the now-crumbling orthodoxy.
Personally I think this notion will become orthodoxy in only a few more years.
At any rate, I've spread out now across the other sources that Lekson used for his work, and they're all building the foundation for the pre-Spanish Conquest chapters of Arizona. I ought to send Dr. Lekson a fan letter.
One smaller but equally adamant belief descending from this was that that the native residents of ancient North America were more sophisticated and far-seeing than they're usually given credit for--a lack of credit originally born out of the need to turn them and their ancestors into savages and wiping out their ancient works, like the remains of great cities in the Mississippi River Valley and the enormous burial mounds everywhere, so that we could destroy them and their culture to take their land. From bits and pieces I read over the years, it seemed to me that there were great networks of trade and knowledge that spanned not only this continent but down to South America as well.
So when it came time to plot Arizona, this was the prehistoric North America I wanted to portray in the first part of the book: A series of not monolithic but intertwined cultures enjoying at least marginal contact with and/or knowledge of each other ranging from the Mississippi River down to the Aztec and Mayan lands. Now it turns out that archaeologists are slowly coming 'round to it as well.
The springboard of this discovery was work by Dr. Stephen H. Lekson, currently an archaeologist, curator, and professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, whose specialty is prehistoric Southwest studies and who has held this view of an extensive prehistoric cultural network for years. His arguments are laid out both elegantly and in splendid detail in his 2009 book A History of the Ancient Southwest, which I'm re-reading now, a combination of not just archaeology, but--heresy!--a study of the native peoples' own histories.
(A good example of this "heresy" is how tribes like the Navajo and Hopi recounted stories of ancient tyrannical kings they overthrew and moved away from, while 19th and 20th century archaeologists ferociously argued that the idea of such "primitives" living under a system as sophisticated as a monarchy was so ridiculous as to not even be worth consideration. Another more notorious one--though I don't remember if I read this in Lekson's book or elsewhere--was believing that the Native Americans could never have built Arizona's massive irrigation canal systems, that they must've been Spanish-built, even though the Spanish themselves reported only finding them already in place and restoring and dredging them out.)
Not only does his research feel right to me, it--even more importantly--makes sense. Even if you left aside the Native Americans' accounting of their own past, the archaeological record itself bolsters his arguments in ways that are almost undeniable unless you've totally bought into the now-crumbling orthodoxy.
Personally I think this notion will become orthodoxy in only a few more years.
At any rate, I've spread out now across the other sources that Lekson used for his work, and they're all building the foundation for the pre-Spanish Conquest chapters of Arizona. I ought to send Dr. Lekson a fan letter.
12:34 P.M. Update: I did indeed send Dr. Lekson a fan letter, and found out from the man himself that not only was the above book the first in a proposed trilogy, but also that he has a blog: The Southwest in the World.
