A Companion to Latin American Literature and Culture. Группа авторов

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СКАЧАТЬ to people like them and others, the cultures under Inca or Mexica rule started to get more attention. Those peoples were sometimes very different from and sometimes very similar to their rulers. A book like Michael Malpass’s (1993), that shows the different ways in which the Incas dealt with those under their aegis, suggests that the differences between those subjected peoples were big enough to warrant a differential treatment from Cuzco, the Inca center from which power irradiated.

      And yet, even now, after the production of a wonderful growing corpus of scholarship about peoples subjected to, or in conflict with the Incas or the Mexicas, we still need to see more work on cultures that preceded the ones encountered by the European explorers at the time of contact. Although it is true that ancient cultures that preceded the Inca, such as the Moche, Chavin, and Chimu (in the Andean region) have been getting much more attention in the last decades, it is also true that the amount of research produced about those cultures pales in comparison to that devoted to the Inca. And this is even truer of the cultures of the preceramic horizon: only when it comes to the early horizon, to which Chavín de Huántar belongs, one begins to see a significant corpus of scholarship coming from different disciplines.¹⁴ But early hunters from the Puna (8,000 BP) and early coastal populations do not get the attention of many scholars. This means that the great diversity of cultures that thrived, in ancient times, in what is called the Andean region, who adapted in very different ways to a series of very diverse and complex environments, gets very little attention and, therefore, little justice is given to the almost miraculous ways in which different groups of humans dealt with some of the toughest environmental conditions imaginable.¹⁵ The Inca civilization and all those that preceded it developed a mastery over extreme environmental conditions. In Moseley’s words: “If thriving civilizations had matured atop the Himalayas while simultaneously accommodating a Sahara Desert, a coastal fishery richer than the Bering Sea, and a jungle larger than the Congo, then Tahuantinsuyu [the name given by the Inca to their world] might seem less alien” (2001, 25). This amazing adaptability took, with time, the form of a simultaneous adaptation to all those ecological niches by a single population, a phenomenon that had no precedents in the history of humankind until it happened in the Andean region.

A similar scholarly situation presents itself to the observer in the case of Mesoamerica as well: there are thousands of articles on the Maya Classic and Post-Classic periods, but very little, in comparison, about the early hunters who populated the area of Los Tapiales 10,700 years ago. Even serious books for college survey courses written by major scholars like Michael D. Coe dedicate an insignificant number of pages (15 in a total of 256) to those he calls the “earliest Maya” in his book The Maya (2001). The situation is a little better in the case of Mexico, where significant research is available about the Early Pre-Classic and Archaic periods. However, it is also the case that the majority of the research produced about Mexico covers a period that begins, roughly, with the Middle Pre-Classic, of which the most representative culture is the one known as Olmec, and that ends with the arrival of the Spaniards to the region.¹⁶

      As I suggested above, the lack of monumentality among those early peoples from different parts of the Americas might as well be one of the reasons we do not pay much attention to them. But there are also other important factors that come into play. One of them is their social organization. This is why hunter-gatherers or early agriculturalists are not very interesting to the masses and even to scholars: their social organization differs too much from that which constitutes our ideal. It is the states or the societies that showed more complexity (at least understood as we understand it in our culture) that get most of the attention from both the general public and the experts. It seems that those peoples who did not have a state or a similar institution for social and political organization do not deserve much of our interest.

      This is part of a general tendency in Western societies, which consists of perceiving Indigenous cultures from our culture-specific perspective. As a consequence, Occidental subjects compare the aboriginal peoples and their cultural and social institutions and habits against the background of the known, therefore failing to assess or understand Amerindians in their own terms, as Alvin M. Josephy, among others, pointed out many years ago (1969, 4). For this reason, a high number of sites and cultures are not as present in our social imaginary as are, say, Machu Picchu or Chichén Itzá. Places like Cahokia (located in Collinsville, Illinois), for example, which seem to exhibit all the traits that characterize a highly “civilized” Indigenous group according to Occidental standards, are relatively little known today – after having attracted, not surprisingly, the attention of the colonizers for many years, until the nineteenth century, when the general public and the academic community began to lose interest in mounds in general – even in the United States.

      Although there is a growing number of studies focusing on different subjects, such as the housing areas and the everyday practices of the commoners (Pauketat and Emerson 2000), the nature of the chiefdoms related to the mounds (Pauketat 2004), the ways in which the elites imposed their ideology on the commoners (Emerson 1997; Pauketat 2004), the mechanisms through which a geography (sacred, in the opinion of Sally A. Kitt Chappel) made of mounds could have reflected a system of beliefs, and many others (Chappel 2002), the mounds that still exist (surviving centuries of Western agricultural practices that made thousands of structures disappear) do not have much visibility in the American social imaginary of the present. This is true even in the case of Saint Louis (a city located seven kilometers from Cahokia, that can be seen from the central platform of Monks mound, the biggest and tallest structure of the complex), as I was able to confirm in the summer of 2005, when only one person, among 40 or so, I asked about the Amerindian place knew what I was talking about.

As a matter of fact, the number of visitors to Cahokia is no higher than 200,000 per year. This might sound as a significant number, making one think that the site may enjoy great importance and visibility among present-day Americans. However, it should be taken into account that most of the visitors to the site are simply forced to visit it, for they are primary and secondary school students guided by their teachers. It is also convenient to offer some perspective about that number, for it pales in comparison to the number of visitors to other Indigenous sites such as Machu Picchu, which received 1,411,279 during 2017 (La República 2018) while Chichén Itzá and Teotihuacán received 1,032,029 and 1,753,275 respectively during the same year (Milenio Novedades 2018). That lack of popularity is also reflected on the almost nil references to mound builder societies in the Museum of the American Indian, at least until my last visit in the first semester of 2015. It seems as if these structures and their builders had never existed.

      Cahokia is a huge site, with several mound complexes, and with a central mound (Monks Mound) that was the second tallest construction in the Americas before the arrival of the European explorers – it is even taller than the monuments of Tikal – and which is aligned with other mounds and the cardinal points, which reflects a significant astronomical knowledge as well as a sophisticated landscape layout. And yet, people are not interested in it or do not even know that it exists. The reasons for the current situation are many, for sure, but I would like to focus on at least one: the materials used for the construction of the large, monumental structures at the site. Clay is not as prestigious as stone, apparently, in spite of the durability proved by the longevity of the many mounds that comprise the Cahokia complex. Maybe this is why for a while the predominant view on this site has been that it was not a state but a chiefdom. That is, scholars maintained (and still maintain) that the social complexity and the power exerted by the society that built and inhabited Cahokia was not enough to reach the status of a state.¹⁷ They also refuse to call the platform mounds pyramids and the concentration of mound complexes known as Cahokia a city, but as Timothy Pauketat states in a more recent book: “if Cahokia, Cahokians, and Cahokia’s mounds had been in ancient Mesopotamia, China, or Africa, archaeologists might not hesitate to identify pyramids in a city at the center of an early state” (2004, 3).¹⁸ This is probably why Pauketat, a long-time proponent of the chiefdom hypothesis, has admitted that the limits between certain concepts and categories such as state and chiefdom are not very clear in some cases: “we have to admit that no two archaeologists in any part of the world completely agree on how to identify a city, a chiefdom, or an early state” СКАЧАТЬ