LITMIR.BIZ

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of the world in conceptual pairs, one of which is considered to be better than, or above the other. In this context, some scholars who try to vindicate Indigenous cultures from the past or the present are caught in the trap of trying to prove that Amerindians are not as simple as portrayed by Western scholarship and popular beliefs while at the same time are reaffirming the very same structures that postulate the inferiority of Indigenous peoples in comparison to Western culture.

For example, if one wants to study aboriginal societies in a place that is at the other end of the world from Poverty Point, say, in Uruguay, it is important to attack the popularly held prejudices that present Amerindians as backward, simple people. For this reason, one of the first things that a young team of archaeologists did in 1986, was to show the academic community, first, and the Uruguayan general public, later, that there was a culture or a series of cultures never mentioned by history textbooks that were much more socially complex than they ever imagined. The excavations conducted mostly by José López Mazz and Roberto Bracco and the papers and ideas written by Leonel Cabrera began the careful construction of a new way of understanding Indigenous peoples from the distant past in Uruguay. That new way included ideas similar to those advanced by Gibson, due to a series of factors, of which I will only mention two: first, the fact that the cultures studied occupied the Uruguayan territory during, among other epochs, the archaic period (some are said to go as far back as 5,000 BP); second, because the archaeological evidence they encountered presented characteristics similar to those of hunter-gatherer societies that built mounds. Their work, then, presented the Uruguayan public opinion with a picture that was completely different from the predominant one. And yet, this was done within the framework provided by the logocentric pairs that tell us that complex is better than simple.¹⁰ Worse yet, this growing research corpus has had very little impact on the Uruguayan imaginary with regard to the Indigenous history of the territory: Uruguayan citizens continue to view themselves as inhabitants of a country “without Indians.”¹¹

      However, where this defense of complexity gets even worse is in the work produced about regions populated by the most prestigious Amerindian societies: those located in the Andes and Mesoamerica. And beyond academic production, the masses, whether they know it or not, are also under the spell of a cluster of notions associated to complexity. It is not a secret to anyone that sites such as Machu Picchu, Tikal, and others constitute not only a source of revenue for the states of Mexico, Perú and Guatemala, but also destinations for peregrination for believers and new-agers of all kinds.¹² The people who comprise this public are almost exclusively interested in the societies that constructed the structures that are now, for the most part, in ruins. These structures are, more often than not, monumental in nature, so monumental that they do not cease to astonish visitors who look at them in amazement for long periods of time, sometimes for many hours or even days. Anybody who has visited any of those sites knows that the image of astounded tourists is part of the landscape. Western amazement before monumentality from the past is twofold. On the one hand, there is a genuine wonder caused by the sheer spectacularity of some of the buildings constructed by Indigenous peoples of the past. On the other, there is an assumption that the cultures that built those structures must have been very complex and, therefore, very civilized.

      A word about the concept “civilization” when applied to an Indigenous culture: it is another form of saying that said culture resembles Western civilization in some way or another. That is, it refers to cultures that are, in the Occidental eyes of the observer, comparable to ours. To our eyes, then, those societies who were civilized were capable, like ours, of building monumental structures and vice-versa: they were able to build those structures because they were civilized. Monumentality, then, is a standard against which Western subjects measure the degree of civilization of the culture that produced it.¹³ And monuments built 500 years ago or earlier are, in general and very likely, in ruins. This leads me to another related issue: the fascination of our culture with ruins. Some prefer them clean and tidy, others (like Christopher Woodward) like them invaded by nature – that is, covered by vegetation – but both segments of the public love ruins, period. What does this penchant for decaying structures tell us about our culture and our relationship to Indigenous societies of the past?

To begin with, it tells us that we prefer to see Amerindians as people from the past whose buildings are there as a testament to their past greatness. This means that they are not here, with us, anymore, which would explain why there is nobody to take care of, or to use the ruins in the ways they were intended to be used at the time of their construction. It also means that we can take care of those ruins without much of a feeling of guilt: if the original dwellers are not here anymore, why not honor their memory by taking care of them? The problem is that the average Western present-day observer does not ask herself why the builders of the ruins they are seeing are not there to take care of them any more. Again, like in the case of the Clovis theory, this is a way people from the present appropriate the work and objects produced by Indigenous peoples from the past.

      This appropriation has several negative consequences for the way we envision Amerindian pasts. One of them is that in the regions where the Inca, the Mexica, or the Maya cultures flourished, other cultures from the past do not get the same kind of attention. Although for academics who specialize in the Americas’ past, the existence of other cultures that preceded, and coexisted with, those major cultures is a well-known fact, this is not so clear to public opinion. For most people in the world, the Amerindians who thrived in the Andes are the Incas, the ones who dominated Mesoamerica are the Maya and the Mexica (or Aztecs, the most popular name applied to them). And even if one looks at the body of scholarly work, one will see that the enormous majority of research produced about those areas has been devoted, until very recently, to the aforementioned cultures. It is only in the last few decades that work like that produced by Steve Stern on Huamanga, or Karen Spalding on the Huarochirí (for the Andes), and that produced by James Lockhart (for Mesoamerica), just to offer some of the most prominent examples of this kind of scholarship, started to become a well-established trend. Thanks 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

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