american-holocaust

AMERICAN HOLOCAUSTvariety of cultural organization, a great diversity of social design. But inall these communities, regardless of size or organizational complexity, humanbeings lived out the joys and sorrows, the mischief, the humor, thehigh seriousness and tragedy, the loves, fears, hatreds, jealousies, kindnesses,and possessed all the other passions and concerns, weaknesses andstrengths, that human flesh throughout the world is heir to.Over time (again as in the histories of the other continents), culturesand empires in North America rose and fell, only to be replaced by otherpeoples whose material and political successes also waxed and waned whilethe long centuries and millennia inexorably unfolded. Not all the culturessurveyed in the preceding pages were contemporaneous with one another;certain of them ascended or declined centuries apart. Some of the societiesthat we have mentioned here, and some that went unmentioned, have longsince disappeared almost without a trace. Others continue on. Some havehad their remains so badly plundered that virtually nothing of them anylonger exists-such as the once-massive Spiro Mound, a monument of aneastern Oklahoma people, that was looted of its treasures in the 1930s bythe farmer who owned the land on which it stood. Literally tons of shell,pearl, and other precious objects were hauled out in wheelbarrows andsold by the side of the road. And then, for good measure, once the moundwas emptied, the farmer had it dynamited into rubble. 44In contrast, other large communities have left immense and permanentreminders of their past glories-such as the huge earthen mound at Cahokia,Illinois. At the center of a large community that sprawled down thebanks of the Illinois River for a distance as great as that from one end ofSan Francisco to the other today, with houses spread out over more than2000 acres of land, stood a gigantic man-made structure extending tenstories into the air and containing 22,000,000 cubic feet of earth. At itsbase this monument, which was larger than the Great Pyramid of Egypt,covered 16 acres of land. About 120 other temple and burial mounds roseup in and around Cahokia which acted as the urban core for more thanfifty surrounding towns and villages in the Mississippi Valley, and whichby itself probably had a population of well over 40,000 people. In size andsocial complexity Cahokia has been compared favorably with some of themore advanced Maya city-states of ancient Mesoamerica. 45 And it wasfully flourishing almost 2000 years ago.These, then, are just some examples of the great multitudes of permanentlysettled societies that constituted what commonly and incorrectly arethought of today as the small and wandering bands of nomads who inhabitedNorth America's "virgin land" before it was discovered by Europeans.In fact, quite to the contrary of that popular image, as the eminent geographerCarl 0. Sauer once pointed out:For the most part, the geographic limits of agriculture have not been greatlyadvanced by the coming of the white man. In many places we have not