America Past; Do1; America Before

(count down to broadcast) (count down to broadcast) final count to broadcast (Music) The culture of the people living today in South America, Central America, Mexico, Southwestern part the United States to a large degree is a mixture of the Native

American culture. The people who are living here 20, 30, 40, maybe 50000 years before the coming of Columbus. And the Spanish, the Spanish who occupied that area in the 16th century. Now, you can get into arguments as to whether the Spanish really deserve credit for discovering the new world. We know they didn't discover it. We know people were living here before them, but were the first non-Americans to be here? There's been a book written called "They All Discovered America" in which the author looks at the various claims for having discovered America. They, of course, looked to Columbus and the Spanish. They look at the Vikings. There's a claim that the early Phoenicians, who were great sailors, were here first. That the Egyptians, building a boat out of papyrus, caught the right ocean currents and that they came to America first. In recent times, a man made that voyage. Showed that could have been done. Could have been. That doesn't prove it

was. The Japanese have a claim on discovering America, the Russians. Some maintain that the first settlers came across from Africa in boats and that there's strong similarities between South American and African culture, for that reason. Aside from Columbus you probably hear the most talk about the Vikings. I think most historians now believe that Vikings did land on the coast of North America maybe 400 years before Columbus. The point is that nothing happened after that. They just didn't give a hoot about a bunch of vines? in Massachusetts they wanted to go back to Europe and be pirates and later merchants. No colonization followed. But many people spent their lives proving that the Vikings were here. In 1966 there was a map discovered at Yale called the Vinland Map which purports to show the continent of North America in the upper left hand corner. If this map is genuine, then that probably does represent North America which

would indicate the Vikings probably were here and one of those inlets, probably being the St. Lawrence River. One of the famous fakes in American history concerns the Vikings. It's called the Kensington Rune Stone. Kensington is a town in Minnesota. Rune is a form of ancient writing. So this is a stone found in Minnesota with some ancient writing on it, Norwegian writing, Viking writing, and the Stone tells the story of a group of Vikings who would travel to that spot from the sea in 14 days and sat down and chiseled out this rock telling about their journey. Well, that was accepted for a while as proof. Then people began to question it. Minnesota's about 2000 miles from the sea. Could they have made it through the jungles and across the lakes and through the swamps in the rivers in 14 days? They must have been pretty good explorers, those vikings to do that. The writing on the stone is

much lighter than the rest of the stone. What does that tell you? Sure, that it was carved more recently. If the stone is really 2000 years old it probably all ought to be about the same color by now. The writing is definitely lighter. The stone uses Arabic numerals 1, 2, 3, 4 like you do. But the Vikings of the year 1000 were still using Roman numerals. Arabic numerals didn't come into Europe until after the Crusades. So if it was a forgery, whoever did the forging was unaware of that. So they decided that for these reasons the Kensington Rune Stone is apparently a fake. Well how about Columbus? We'll just take the traditional view of Columbus discovering America. If you do so, then you're going to start on August the 2nd, 1492. Four fifteen in the morning, the tide went out in the Spanish Harbor. And it carried with it the three most famous ships in American history: the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria.

Weighed only 100 tons. Passenger ships today might weigh 60, 70000 tons. It was 80 feet long. About twice the length of the average classroom. The other ships were smaller, 50 feet long. Yet Columbus would cross the ocean in those ships. Sailed down to the Canary Islands, spent a month there supposedly, according to him, repairing a ship. Some maintain that he was more interested in the woman governor of the islands and that took his mind off of exploration of new lands for a while. At any rate, on September the 6th, they got underway again. Sailing west. Nothing to the south, nothing to the north, but west, straight west, according to his journal. After 30 days, his crew became mutinous, they were scared. "We're not seeing any land. We're too far from

land." They actually were further than they thought, because he'd been lying to them about how far they really had gone. They demanded that he turn back. He talked them into giving him three more days. The morning of the third day, October the12th 1492, about 2:00 AM, the lookout on the Nina sighted land and the European discovery of America had been made. People will say "Well, Columbus wasn't that great - if he hadn't done it, somebody else would have. It was just a matter of time." Yeah, that's probably true, but he did it. The historians of Morison and Commager say he was the greatest navigator in history. With a mutinous crew, he set out, he crossed that ocean and he made that landing. And he got back to Spain in one piece. You can't take that away from him; and the colonization, the development of the New World, or the exploitation of it by Europe followed Columbus. It did not follow the

Vikings or any of the other groups. Now what was here when Columbus got here? The next program we'll look at Europe before Columbus. But what was America like? Who was here? Well apparently there had been people living in the new world for between 15 and 50 thousand years, that each week they seem to come up with a new discovery on that, arguments about it. How'd they gotten here? Some maintain they'd come over in boats from Africa or Asia. One theory says that South America and Africa were once joined. Look at a map. Haven't you ever sat while you were bored in class and looked at a map and figured how that hump fits in there, and the world could all fit into one piece? And the two drifted apart and some people sailed over to the new world standing on South America while their relatives waved goodbye from the African coast. That could have happened, I mean the world could have been joined but it certainly was a long time before people were living on it. Maybe people were created here, maybe the first men were here. So far by

way and away, the oldest people that have been found were in Africa. Maybe we just haven't found the bones in the new world. But the most commonly accepted theory is that the Native Americans came here from Asia (music). (music) They were living in the eastern part of Asia and they began slowly migrating north as a they out grew their food supply. They would move on. And if they crossed the Bering Strait. The Bering Strait where Asia joins North America is only about 50 miles wide. At one time it was a land bridge, if they'd wondered across there, down into North America, down into South America, scattering out over the continent. That is the most widely held theory but it cannot be proven absolutely at this time. At the time of Columbus, what were these people like? Who was living here? And how advanced were they? What were these people like? (music background ends)

Well, anyone who's traveled in Central America, Mexico, Peru, has some idea about that. They see the great pyramids, they see their temples. In some cases the jungles have moved in around them. Others have been cleared out and you can see what they built. You only have to visit there to know they were great builders. That's one thing about them. But you can't really say what they were like without saying, well, what time are you talking about? We're looking at several thousand years here. They changed. They didn't remain the same, anymore than the United States remains the same over even a 200 year period. And what was who like? There were numerous groups. We really want to talk about the three groups that were prominent shortly before the time of Columbus. In Central America, The Mayans spelled May-an pronounced Mayan. They had reached a fairly high level of development by 300 B.C., that's the time of Alexander the Great in Greece. In Peru, modern day Peru, there were the Incas, who were great builders.

And in the area of modern day Mexico, particularly in Mexico City, you found the Aztecs. So the Mayans, the Incas, and the Aztecs. We will not look at those individually but rather collectively of what they've achieved. Were they advanced? Well, now that involves a judgment, naturally and some people object to that. You look at this group of people and say well they're not advanced, and you look at this group and you say, well they're more highly advanced. Why do you say that? Well, probably because they're more like we are, the closer you are to being like us the more advanced you are, in our opinion. Now realizing that might be wrong that we're wrong in thinking that way. Nevertheless, when anthropologists and archaeologists look at certain civilizations, there are certain things they look for, and they say well, if they can do these they've reached a fairly high level of advancement. Well using that criteria, how do you look at the Mayans, the Aztecs, and the Incas? Well one of the criteria is large scale building not little grass huts,

not just individual homes, but large scale. This sort of thing. This is a model of the Pyramid of the Magicians. They were builders of large scale architecture, there's no doubt about that. They would level off whole mountain tops and build a temple or a pyramid on the top it. The Pyramid of the Sun north of Mexico City, actually built just before the time of the Aztecs. While in area, that's the largest pyramid in the world. It was only about 200 feet high, it wasn't as high as the pyramids of Egypt if you want to compare it to that but it was much bigger around. And obviously it's still there. You do not destroy pyramids of that magnitude. It's there for people to study to this day. Some time their architecture served a double purpose, the Pyramid of the niches the four sides represented the four seasons. There were 365 niches each representing, obviously, one of the days of the year. They developed the arch. The Egyptians were great builders, but they did not have an arch. The Greeks did not use the arch. Everything was a right angle, with the Greeks.

The Romans had, so did the builders in the Americas. Some of the Mayans' government buildings, they really are superior to what was going on in Europe at the time. Those drafty medieval castles certainly were no better than the buildings of the Mayans. They compare favorably with the Romans who consider themselves the greatest builders of all time. Maybe they were. Not just large scale things now like our architecture though. What's another area that you could use as a means of comparison? Well, the use of metal. Particularly in jewelry. They had copper, they had silver, they had gold. They like to look nice. Man has always seemed to want to look better than just looking plain. They used ornamentation. Spain later will come get this gold and silver. It will lay the basis of their great empire. But gold jewelry, in the new world, certainly is a sign of their advancement. (flute music) Writing? That's a sign of advancement. The Aztecs had a form of writing.

Much of it has not been deciphered and the project is waiting for somebody yet. But obviously the fact that they had learned to take symbols and have them represent sounds would be a sign of advancement. What else? Well, there was their sculpture. These stone carvings are done by the Aztecs. And at almost every Aztec site you're going to find carvings. Whether it's a governmental site, religious site, a burial site. Oddly enough, the best sculpture seems to come from the very earliest period, the Olmecs, when you had some colossal sculpture, this is an eight foot head, for example. Makes you wonder just what the size of the entire statue would have been. Comes either from the early period, or the later period, or a most recent period of the Aztecs. Now the sculpture was often related to religion. As true in most societies, medieval Europe their art was related to religion,

painted religious subjects. That's true here. Here you have the Aztec goddess of maize, the water goddess, or the fire goddess, or fire god. It was very common that the sculpture would represent religious topics. What other advancements had they come up with? Take the religion, since we're talking that. An organized religion with a the priesthood, a complicated religious system, is a sign of a developed society or developing society. It was polytheistic. Just as the early civilizations in Africa, the Near East had been. They had many gods. Gods for every purpose. Some, as in the case of the Aztecs, involved human sacrifice, laying the victim on the altar cutting out the heart while it was still beating. But it was an advanced religious organization. They developed pottery, huge pottery. That is not a pot that you

fill and lug around with you. That's one you're going to fill and leave it sitting there, for grain or for water or something. They had learned to weave cloth, that is no small achievement, to take, say wool and turn it into thread and then turn that into cloth. The calendar. They had two types of calendars what you might call a regular calendar, and a ceremonial calendar, at least the Aztecs did. When you go to Mexico City and go to their museum, you see the great calendar stone there. There's a ceremonial type calendar. They've had a year of 360 days and they knew that was wrong. There were five extra days there. They were called Dead Time. And they could manipulate that for leap years, or other times it could be shortened to four days or three or whatever they needed to do but the end of the year you had this five day long New Year's Eve period, in which they worshiped the gods, thanking them for the past year, performing ceremonies that would ensure that the next year took place. Which of course it always did.

Now, certainly one of their major developments was in agriculture. Once a people begins to a farm. Then you get all sorts of other changes. They begin to stay in one place. They have to store up grain and water to farm. They can't wander around. They have to have more complicated governmental systems. They change their gods. They're interested in Mother Earth and gods that produce crops. They develop irrigation, in this case of underground wells. If you can imagine running up and down that ladder with water on your head. When the Spanish came they were surprised that the agricultural products they saw that were unknown in Europe: corn, pineapple, potato. The potato did not develop in Ireland, as many people think. Tomato, which Europeans thought was poisonous. Later they thought it increased your passion and called it a "love apple." The avocado, chocolate, they used chocolate beans for money at one stage. Tobacco, which isn't really a food, but it's certainly an

agricultural product. So you take these things together, agriculture, writing, the calendar, sculpture, weaving, gold jewelry, the highly developed religious organization, and you can look at a society like this, and you say it was a highly developed society. These were not backward people. The Spanish were amazed. They came here expecting to find other savages. One Spaniard wrote this in 1520: "Then I saw things which were brought to the king out of the new land of gold An entire Golden Sun a full fathom wide and likewise a silver moon. All kinds of wondrous things of their armor and weapons and all sorts of marvelous objects for human use which are more beautiful to behold than the things spoken of in fairy tales. In all the days of my life I have never seen anything which so filled my heart with joy

as these things." Or as another one put it, "Savages never carved these stones." In general these are some of the achievements of the pre-columbian Indians in Mexico, Middle America, South America. But what was the nature of the Native American in what is now the United States? When you think of the Indians, of what is now the United States, what comes to your mind? Well, I don't know, but I can tell you what comes to most people's minds. Somebody in a colorful headdress, riding a horse, someone who is an expert marksman, hunting buffalo on the great plains. That is a stereotype, Hollywood version of the 19th century Indian. Of course, the Indian before Columbus, he was not an expert marksman. Guns hadn't been introduced. He was not an expert horseman. The Spanish hadn't brought horses over here yet. Or he hunted buffalo, but he went out there and did it on foot.

So what do you think of? Well the key word that ought to come to your mind is variety. Europeans are not all alike. Africans are not all alike. The Native American was not all alike. There were at least eight major cultural areas, hundreds of subdivisions, hundreds of languages. Sometimes Indians that lived within a few miles of each other could not communicate except in sign language. What are some examples of the variety? Well, one is housing. Everyone's seen the basic Indian tepee, a group of poles with skin strung over them. They can be easily moved and it was used by Indians that moved around a lot. The great hunters. It was very common on the Great Plains. In the eastern woodlands. You have other materials. The Indian adapted to his environment. He built wigwams, covered them with bark. Built round houses,

covered them with swamp grass. The Iroquois had the Long House. Several families would live in one of them together. In Virginia, the Powhatan Indians used the Long House for members of an extended family. In southwestern Colorado, in New Mexico, the Indian adapted to his environment by building the famous cliff dwellings. Dwellings with maybe 200 rooms. A unique feature of the cliff dwellings was the kiva, a kiva was an underground ceremonial chamber, where the male members of the tribe would meet for religious purposes. "They lived along the face of the cliff. for several purposes. The sun hidden against the cliff kept the rooms

warm for periods of the day or the night. And also, they built along the face of the cliff for protection from enemies, other Indians. Also in the Southwest, you find the famous Pueblos. Adobe homes in which many Indians still live. Such as this one in Santa Clara, New Mexico. So you really can't say this is what an Indian house was like. What Indians? Where? When? How about their class structure? Well, in some cases it was very informal. It's hard to tell that there were upper and lower classes. Although almost certainly there were, it's just hard to discern them. Others it was very structured. The Natchez Indians had a group at the top called the Suns and a group at the bottom called the Stinkers. Some were matriarchal, that means the woman was powerful. Property was inherited through the woman. When you

got married you moved in with the woman's family. A matriarchal society. The Iroquois, the women elected the Governing Council and they could remove the members. The members were men but they were elected by women. They could decide after a war what prisoners lived, who had to die. Private property, the European always said "Oh, we can take the Indians land. The Indian has no concept of property," well they all did of personal property. They all own their personal belongings. Some did not have the concept of owning land but others did. You had your house and the land around it and they farmed up in the north west and had that concept. Others didn't. How about government? Some very simple, in time of war, we elect a leader. Probably the strongest or the best fighter. Sometimes the oldest, age is associated with wisdom. Others, the government was

structured. The Iroquois, you had tribes who elected representatives to a larger council. It was sort of what we would call a confederation, they would call it chiefdoms, rather than confederations, but it was a structured government. Most of the Indians were very good farmers. The fact that they knew how to raise corn may have saved the early colonists. An early French explorer talked about Indian farmers on the East Coast. "They till the soil very diligently, using a kind of hoe made from fish bone. After the ground has been broken up and leveled. The planting is done by the women. Some making holes with sticks, into which others drop seeds of beans and maze." At the time of Columbus, there were about a million and a half Indians in the United States. If they're going to lose the battle to a handful of Europeans,

they probably could have united and driven those first settlers out but they didn't. In some cases they thought the light-skinned settlers were gods, they had legends that told them that. That was true here, of the Powhatan Indians. And in every case of course there was a technological disadvantage. The bow and arrows a good accurate weapon. Probably more accurate than those guns at that time but it isn't effective against an iron shield. And guns improved, the bow and arrow did not. So there was this technological disadvantage. But there was always inter-tribal disunity. There were certain Indian groups that had a long standing hatred against other Indian tribes and the European was able to exploit that. Time and time, again he's able to hire one Indian group to help him fight another Indian group. Occasionally the Indians unite. The Powhatan did on several occasions. Pontiac managed it just before the revolution. Later on the great chief Tecumseh.

But generally, the European could get one tribe to fight another or to help the European against an Indian tribe. It was just a suicidal lack of inter-tribal political unity combined with a technological disadvantage, that made it very difficult for the Indian to withstand the influx of the Europeans. Despite their deficiencies and intertribal unity. Probably the historians Morison and Commager had as going to statement of any about the Native American. "The American Indians were a great and noble race. Which we of European or African origin are proud to claim as predecessors and ashamed to have treated as barbarians, which they were not.