A Companion to Latin American Literature and Culture - Группа авторов

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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.

      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” (4). For this reason, he is now more open than before to the possibility that Cahokia could have been a state or something that resembled it very closely.

      The picture of how Western knowledge deals with Indigenous pasts would not be complete without at least a brief reference to an increasing number of investigations that try to account for said pasts from a perspective that acknowledges Indigenous agency throughout human history. There is a series of studies that presents Indigenous peoples as subjects with significant agency that I would like to briefly discuss. One of them is Clark Erickson’s work on fisheries, that shows how Amerindians found ways to change the course of some Amazonian water streams so that they could exert a higher level of control over the production and reproduction of the fish that inhabited them (Erickson 2000). There are also important contributions on pre-Columbian human activities in the Amazon basin that are of interest, among other reasons, because their conclusions are controversial to social actors such as conservation activists and some social anthropologists. What the scholars in this line of work are proposing is a new picture of not only the environment but also the dichotomy that distinguishes between nature and culture. These research projects are conducted, according to Erickson, mostly by archaeologists of landscape and historical ecologists (2006, 236, 2008, 158). Their main thesis is that the Amazon we know is not a pristine environment but a landscape domesticated by humans before the arrival of European invaders (Erickson 2006, 2008).19 His main hypothesis is that Amazonian Indigenous peoples of the past “invested more energy in domesticating entire landscapes than in domesticating individual plant and animal species” (Erickson 2006, 236).

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