Название: A Big History of North America: From Montezuma to Monroe
Автор: Kevin Jon Fernlund
Издательство: University of Missouri Press
Год: 2022
Страниц: 388
Язык: английский
Формат: pdf (true)
Размер: 10.1 MB

The special relationship between the United Kingdom, an established and secure power, and the United States, a rising one, began after the War of 1812, as the former enemies sought accommodation with, rather than the annihilation of, one another. At the same time, Mexico, also a rising power, was not so fortunate. Its relationship with Spain, an established but declining power, turned hostile with Spain’s final exit from North America after Mexico’s War of Independence, leaving its former colony isolated, internally unstable, and vulnerable to external attack. Significantly, Mexico posed little threat to its northern neighbor. By the third decade of the eighteenth century, then, the fate of North America was largely discernable.

Nevertheless, the three-century journey to get to this point had been anything but predictable. The United States’ rise as a regional power was very much conditioned by constantly shifting transcontinental, transpacific, and above all transatlantic factors, all of which influenced North America’s three interactive cultural spheres: the Indigenous, the Hispano, and the Anglo. And while the United States profoundly shaped the history of Canada and Mexico, so, too, did these two transcontinental countries likewise shape the course of U.S. history.

The question of when humans first arrived in the Americas is as old as the founding of the American anthropology profession in the late nineteenth century. The question was initially dominated by the Smithsonian Institution’s foremost expert on American antiquity, a cultural evolutionist named William Henry Holmes, and his close associate, the Czech-born Ales Hrdlicka. In 1902 Holmes succeeded John Wesley Powell— the one-armed explorer of the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River— as chief of the Bureau of American Ethnology, and as such Holmes was the US government’s leading authority on the American Indian. To answer the antiquity question, he insisted that his fellow archaeologists— and by this, he meant professionals as opposed to amateurs and enthusiasts— use multiple lines of evidence and adhere to the strictest evidentiary standards.

At Monte Verde, Dillehay and his team of eighty scientists dated evidence unearthed beside Chinchihuapi Creek, a small tributary of the Maullín River, and found that humans had occupied the area around 12,500 years ago. The Chilean site, which was not a butchery but an encampment of people who hunted and gathered, had been buried under a layer of wet peat. As a consequence the artifacts excavated there— stone and wooden tools, the bones and even hides of extinct animals, plant foodstuffs, fire pits, and residential structures— were remarkably well preserved. Monte Verde was older than Clovis by almost one thousand years, and thus Dillehay’s findings broke the Clovis time barrier and complicated the Clovis- first narrative. Monte Verde and other archaeological sites in South America suggest an earlier coastal migration or series of migrations— maybe by foot, maybe by boat— along the nutritionally rich “kelp highway” that runs along the Pacific Rim from the Asian to the Andean coasts, except for a break in the tropics, where mangrove forests and coral reefs would have provided other suites of abundant marine foods. Migrating peoples could thus have tapped into marine as well as terrestrial sources of nutrition. Of the two possible routes— the ice- free corridor and the kelp highway— the latter has the virtue of being the simplest, applying the principle of Occam’s razor.

In this ground-breaking work, Kevin Fernlund shows us that any society’s social development is directly related to its own social power and, just as crucially, to the protective extension or destructive intrusion of the social power of other societies.