american-holocaust

BEFORE COLUMBUS 47impressed into rock alongside various river banks. Apparently his preachingwas successful, since the natives of this region were so generous andkind, the Jesuit missionary Father Manuel Nobrega reported, that "thereare no people in all the world more disposed to receive the holy faith andthe sweet yoke of the evangel than these," adding that "you can paint onthe heart of this people at your pleasure as on a clean sheet of paper." 82Others thought they found evidence of somewhat stranger things. Asone historian summarizes some of the first European reports:There were men with eight toes; the Mutayus whose feet pointed backwardsso that pur~uers tracked them in the wrong direction; men born with whitehair that turned black in old age; others with dogs' heads, or one cyclopeaneye, or heads between their shoulders, or one leg on which they ran veryfast. . . . Then there was Upupiara, half man and half fish, the product offish impregnated by the sperm of drowned men. . . . Brazil was also thoughtto contain giants and pygmies. 83And, of course, there were said to be Amazons, from which the great riverderived its name. In fact, however, apart from the sheer mystery of thisfabulous and seemingly primeval world, perhaps the thing that most amazedand unnerved the Europeans had nothing to do with fairy tales. It had todo with the fact that this land was covered with innumerable independenttribes and nations of people who seemed inordinately happy and content,and who lived lives of apparent total liberty: "They have neither kings norprinces," wrote the Calvinist missionary Jean de Lery in 1550, "and consequentlyeach is more or less as much a great lord as the other." 84Many of the people of this vast region-including such linguisticallydistinct cultures as the Tupian, the Cariban, the Jivaroan, the Nambiquaran,the Arawakan, the Tucanoan, the Makuan, the Tupi-Guarani, andothers-lived in cedar planked houses, slept in hammocks or on large palmleaf mats, wore feather cloaks and painted cotton clothing, and played avariety of musical instruments. Very recent and continuing archaeologicalwork in the Amazon lowlands indicates that the people living there havebeen making pottery for at least 7000 to 8000 years-that is, from aboutthe same time that pottery also was first being made in ancient Iraq andIran, and around 3000 years earlier than current evidence suggests it wasbeing made in the Andes or in Mesoamerica. Some ancient Amazonianpeoples hunted and fished and gathered, others farmed. But there is nodoubt that organized communities lived in this locale at least 12,000 yearsago, evolving into large agricultural chiefdoms and-more than 1000 yearsago-into very populous and sophisticated proto-urban communities, suchas Santarem, which, in the words of one recent study, "was a center forcomplex societies with large, nucleated settlements" in which "people madeelaborate pottery vessels and statues, groundstone tools and ornaments ofnephrite jade." 85