american-holocaust

48 AMERICAN HOLOCAUSTBecause the Amazon climate and land is not conducive to the preservationof the materials of village life, archaeological work is very difficult,and thus retrospective estimates of pre-Columbia.t.t population levels arequite controversial here. No one doubts, however, that the population waslarge-probably at least 5,000,000 to 7,000,000 people in just the Amazonbasin within Brazil, which is only one part of tropical South America,although arguments have been made for individual tribes (such as PierreClastres's estimate of 1,500,000 for the Guarani) that, if correct, wouldgreatly enlarge that regional figure. 86One of the things that has most intrigued some modern anthropologists-Clastresin particular-about the people of the Amazon was theirability to sustain such large populations without resorting to steeply hierarchicalpolitical systems, something conventional political theory claimsis impossible. In most respects, in fact, these people who appointed chiefsfrom among their ranks, but made sure that their leaders remained essentiallypowerless, were the classic exemplars of anthropologist MarshallSahlins's "original affluent society," where people had relatively few materialpossessions, but also few material desires, and where there was nopoverty, no hunger, no privation-where each person's fullest material wantswere satisfied with the expenditure of about fifteen to twenty hours ofwork each week. 87Life was far more difficult for the natives of Tierra del Fuego, the coldand blustery islands off the southern tip of South America, between theStrait of Magellan and Cape Horn, and as close to the Antarctic Circle asKetchikan, Alaska, is to the Arctic. Population densities had to be muchthinner in this rugged environment, where the people lived largely off huntedmarine mammals, fish, and shellfish that they pried loose from rocky headlands.Unlike the inhabitants of the Amazon, the residents of Tierra delFuego--the Yahgan, the Alacaluf, the Ona, and the Haush-had to struggleconstantly to sustain life. Indeed, so important were their sturdy, migratorycanoes to them as they made their way through the icy waters,that they maintained permanent fires in beds of clay on board while theysearched for the animal life on which they fed their families.Harsh as life was for these peoples, the land and the water were theirhome. And, though we know little about them as they lived in pre­Columbian times, it is not difficult to imagine that they revered theirhomeland much as their relatives all over the hemisphere did, includingthose in the even more icy world of the far north. The people of Tierra delFuego, after all, had lived in this region for at least 10,000 years beforethey were first visited by the wandering Europeans. 88Tierra del Fuego,' along with Patagonia, its immediate mainland neighborto the north, was the geographic end of the line for the great hemisphericmigrations that had begun so many tens of thousands of yearsearlier. No one in. human history has ever lived in permanent settlements