THE AMERICAS THAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN by Julian Granberry, Bahamas Archaeological Team The Setting Americans and their European confreres are preparing to celebrate the 500th anniversary of what they call THE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA. A visitor from another world would be led to assume, on the basis of our jubilation and interminable (and often unresolvable) scholarly arguments, that these "Americas", wherever they may have been, were new to the eyes of man 500 years ago, a virgin land open to the happy settler. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Americas had a population then in the many millions. The world's largest civilized nation was located there. The larger urban centers were ten times the size and population of the largest of European cities. The metropolitan heartland of the Aztec Empire alone, for example, was in excess of eleven million souls. Native American scholars were investigating and debating topics as abstract and complex as any ever discussed in European universities. The New World was hardly a land of vacant fields and forests populated by a few ignorant savages eagerly awaiting the largesse of Christian Europe. While we must, of course, not give short shrift to the momentous occasion of 12 October 1492, which did indeed alter world history, it must, in other words, be remembered that the Americas were NOT "discovered" in 1492. Discovery and settlement had come between forty and twenty-six and a half thousand years earlier, and, for better or worse, credit goes not to Europeans nor Africans, but, rather, to Asians. The year 1492 marks only an accidental European finding of the New World--a very late one, and the second such European finding at that. Why, then, the inordinate amount of attention to Mr. Columbus and his venture? Because, whether one views 1492 as an event to celebrate or an event to be saddened by, its impact was destined to be far more devastating than anything that had happened to the New World before or that has happened to it since. There is much still to unravel in the events of that fateful year and what came after. Our calendar, however, has no "Discovery Day", only a "Columbus Day", as though the Men Out Of Asia had never arrived, had never created their own lifestyles, viable enough to last some 265 centuries and more. The common view inculcated into us all from childhood ignores the fact of Asian discovery. These men and women have been viewed in our particular mythology of history as at best the "Nobel Savage", with emphasis on the latter word. Little, if anything, is seen as lost in their physical and cultural demise. It's as if the past really began just yesterday, and began, at that, from a clean slate. To continue this gloomy mood a moment more, it should be well-noted and remembered in this context that New Explorers, anywhere and at any time, tend to frown on what they consider the "inferior" and "alien" lifestyles of the "natives" they encounter. History makes it clear that such Adventurers always attempt to recreate in some detail their own home-turf, no matter how offensive, bizarre, or unsuitable to the new cultural and physical locale. The delightful gabled Dutch buildings of downtown Djakarta and Surabaja, lolling in Indonesia's humid clime, attractive leaded windows carefully sealing the interiors from the frigid winters of Holland which never arrive, provide one incredible example. The northeastern pill-box homes of South Florida or the Virgin Islands, marching row after narrow row, climate-sealed with artificial frozen air and set amidst uniformly manicured mid-western lawns, offer a mind-bending exercise closer to home. And these are just the "benign" examples. The more insidious, directly life-threatening ones-- the Roman conquests, the Crusades, the Mongol Invasions, the Nazi expansions, the Palestines, the Viet Nams and Cambodias--these genocidal blood-baths need not even be invoked. One could, of course, go on forever, offending every settler in all the earth's "new" lands, past and present, bloody or "benign". But this is not the point. The point is that the Newcomer tends to feel that his "new world" did not exist, or at least not properly so, until his own momentous arrival. In the Americas this meant the conscious obliteration of all that came before. Just as modern native Floridians and Bahamians have seen their centuries-long lifestyles vanish entirely, along with the landscape, in less than 30 years, so the Europeans of 1492 devoured the Welcome Wagon that met them. Less than 50 years later the Juggernaut had completed its rounds in the Caribbean basin, and after another two centuries little remained anywhere even to remind the Europeans that the Americas had not always been European. A few feeble attempts were made, in retrospect, to halt such genocidal excesses--the New Laws of the Indies of 1542 or the meetings in Valladolid of 1550, for example--but they came too late. The damage had long been done and institutionalized, as the encomienda and repartimiento in Spanish lands, as the native reserve in English lands. A few pockets here and there were inadvertently left, increasingly to become curious time-warped enclaves of the "noble" past. In latter days these have been "protected" by the insipid and ineffectual "help" of those whom the Pueblo Indians of our Southwest refer to with disdain as "The Yearners"--those governmental and private groups, who create in their own mind's-eye an Indian past and personality that never existed and project it onto their charges. A peculiar brand of neo-colonialism still as much in vogue in Washington, Ottawa, Brasilia, Lima or Guayaquil as it was in La Isabela in 1493--the world's worst and surely most obscene example being Amazonia in the late 1980's. With rare exceptions these relict societies had, however, already been culturally and physically traumatized beyond recovery in an America no longer American. Though it may sound so to the listener, none of this is said to resurrect the ghost of Las Casas' BLACK LEGEND, to dwell inordinately on the evils of Spanish, Portuguese, English, Dutch, French, Danish, Swedish, Russian or Euro- and Afro-American settlement. The attempt is not to raise the banner of militant Pan-Indianism, though there is much to justify its raising. The points are made to clarify the fact that permanent cultural contact is rarely "good" and always destructive. By its very nature it puts in gear the mechanisms of change, and the old rarely survives in the face of the new. Judgmental concepts of "good" and "bad", "right" and "wrong", while easy to invoke, however, have no honest place in viewing the panorama of human history. While we can quake and be appalled at human nature, we can only not patterns, and the most salient pattern of New World history since 1492 has been the purposeful, wholesale destruction of native America, reaching the end of its rampant and inexorable path just today. No other continent, at any time in known human history, has seen the total destruction of almost ALL its native life-ways. The Europeanization of the Americas stands as a unique and astounding fact of human action. The only comparable event might be the conquest of earth by Martians and the purposeful obliteration of many of its people, specifically including all its educated classes, and all of its cultures. It would be interesting to know, in any case--whether one views the Conquest of the Americas to be praise-worthy or scurrilous--how the hemisphere would have fared had the Europeans and Africans not arrived, to see what those Asian-American societies might be like today, their destinies formed and followed without the intervention of alien lifeways. The Asian discovery, we must in all fairness say, was nor more a premeditated, "Eureka!" kind of event than the European rediscovery thousands of years later. It was an accident, as so many "great events" seem to be. The Asian presence in the Americas was the result of the gradual migration of small groups of people, moving on to greener pastures, little aware that a new world almost the size of the old lay ahead of them. It began from Siberia, sometime in the dim and uncertain period between 40,000 and 25,000 B.C. and accomplished itself during the early centuries before the birth of Christ. After the migrations ceased, the Americas developed alone, uniquely Asian-American, and a bewildering number of native American societies developed. They showed more language and cultural variation than existed then or now in all of Europe, Africa, and Asia combined. The concept of THE Indian, a single entity all the same from Arctic to Antarctic, is as bizarre a caricature as the concept of the "Inscrutable Oriental". It was a simplistic figment of European and later Euro-American imagination. It has never been so. We know the route these first migrants took--across the Bering Land Bridge between Siberia and Alaska during the glacial ages--but the full details remain a mystery yet to be elucidated by archaeology. What we can say for sure is that these migrants came from North Asia, bringing with them the tools, social norms, and world-outlooks of their Asian cultures. These, not European nor African life-ways, were to form the woof and warp of New World personality and the complex societies Columbus and the Europeans confronted in the years after 1492. Between the early years A.D. and 1492 the Americas had few additional visitors from the Asiatic world, so far as we can tell. All the expansionist urges of the medieval Orient led not eastward but westward, toward Europe. They culminated in the near-conquest of Vienna by the Mongols early in 1241. Had not, in fact, the Great Khan Ogadai died suddenly in faraway Karakorum on 11 December 1241, causing a retreat of the Mongol occupying armies to join the kuriltai, the election-council, Europe might well have become part of that mighty Asiatic empire and world history vastly changed. What eastward Asiatic expansion there was led no further east than the island of Cipangu, where the Mongols suffered one of their few crushing defeats, thanks largely to Mother Nature and a devastating typhoon. Medieval Asia did not participate in the re-discovery of the New World, Its interests lay elsewhere. Nor did Africa participate in either the original or ongoing settlement of the New World until the time of forced population movement through slavery in the years after first European settlement. Various ingenious archaeological and ethnological theories have been put forth over the years to prove a pre- European African presence in the New World, but none have, for better or worse, held up under close scrutiny. From about 25,000 B.C. until 1492 the New World was part of the Asian realm, both physically and culturally. Internal development over this 26,500 year period produced new and unique cultural patterns alien even to the original Asian homeland, but there is no inkling of anything European or African in that fabric until after 1492. Late medieval and renaissance Europe, on the other hand, was quite another thing, with urges and concepts very unlike those of either medieval Asia or Africa. Europe in the late 1400's was READY to move outward--politically and psychologically. The Age of Exploration was the natural culmination of a 500-year struggle toward national and cultural identity and economic success. Largely encapsulated in the tenets of European Christianity, which had become a strongly proselytizing agent of acquisitive change through the centuries-long period of the Crusades, the European Zeit Geist was looking for new worlds to conquer, worlds of concrete goods as well as of the mind, human flesh and human products as well as human souls. Contact had long ago been made between the Roman Church and the court of the Great Khan, and the Polos had demonstrated almost two centuries earlier that overland contact with China and the Far East was possible and profitable. The journey, however, was long and fraught with difficulties and danger. The sea-route around Africa had been found in 1488 and was to lead on to India in 1497. Columbus, in fact, was present when Dias returned to the Portuguese Court in December 1488 and recounted what he had found on rounding the Cape of Good Hope. the tribulations of this route, too, though, seemed to outweigh its advantages, and the consequent urge to go west to get east became suddenly stronger. Educated tradition implied it should work, the route was probably short, and there was only the sea to contend with. A foresightful Columbus had, in fact, already sought funding for this route in 1484 from the Portuguese Maritime Advisory Committee, only to be turned down. All of this, of course, eventually conspired, in Columbus' person, to fulfill Seneca's prophetic words in his MEDEA: "An age will come after many years when the Ocean will loose the chains of things, and a huge land lie revealed; when Tethys will disclose new worlds and Thule no more be the ultimate," A quotation to which his son Ferdinand later added the handwritten note - "This prophecy was fulfilled by my father the Admiral, in the year 1492" in Columbus' own copy of Seneca's work. But Thule was indeed to remain the Ultimate westward land to Europeans for many years after the first centuries A.D., and Iceland and Greenland were the furthest afoot Europeans went in that direction until the year 986. In that year Norsemen from Iceland quite unknowingly penetrated the eastern shores of northernmost North America. Had all things been equal, the Icelanders and Greenlanders would undoubtedly, sooner or later, have pressed onward, southward from Vinland into North America's main landmass. But that would have been another thing. The devastating Black Death of 1349 so decimated Norther Europe-- killing one out of every three--that the European ties of Iceland and Greenland were temporarily severed and the island Norsemen were forced to fend for themselves. There was neither energy nor man-power left for westward exploration. By the end of the 1400's the three-thousand-strong population of Viking Greenland had vanished entirely--a mystery still largely unsolved--and the Norse of Iceland had been severely reduced in numbers. And so the Americas remained isolated from the European Old World until their epochal rediscovery by Christopher Columbus on the 12th of October 1492. But suppose, for argument's sake, that Columbus HADN'T rediscovered the New World. Suppose NO European had headed out into The Ocean Sea and its unknown perils--that the New World had NEVER been found by Europeans? Let's assume the overland routes charted to the Orient by the Polos had provided all the economic and psychological rewards that Europe needed? If there had been no contact until yesterday, what would we find? What would the Americas be like today? To say "WHAT IF" this centuries-long chain of events had not happened, "WHAT IF" this temperament had not existed, is almost to negate the events of European history from the conversion of Constantine to Christianity in 324 to the final expulsion of the Moors from the Kingdom of Granada, seven months to the day before Columbus' 2 August 1492 departure from Palos. "WHAT IF" ignores the whole fabric of the Western European past and its frenzied, acquisitive, proselytizing and inquisitorial apogee, which came, quietly and unbeknownst to all, at the treaty of surrender signed by Abu 'Abd Allah, Sultan of Granada, and Their Catholic Majesties Ferdinand and Isabela, King and Queen of Aragon and Castille in the Salon of the Ambassadors of the Alhambra palace on January 2, 1492. Nonetheless, this is precisely what we are going to assume-- that somehow, for unfathomable reasons, just as the Asians did not remain in constant touch with the Americas, just as the Africans made no known American contact, just as the Norsemen did not penetrate further south than the Newfoundland coast of North America, so the Western European secular and ecclesiastical elite did not reach that pitch of Outward Urge, of Exploration for the Faith and for Exploitation, that did, in fact, hold it in thrall. Let us imagine a Europe still embroiled in internecine strife, still battling the more civilized and tolerant Moor, still certain that Asian riches could come from overland trade to the east. A Europe perhaps still fraught with missionizing zeal for the soul of men and economic greed for his body and belongings, but one in which these urges were directed inward or overland to the East. If this were so, let us describe the Americas in 1492 and extend that description, inasmuch as we can, to the present time. NATIVE AMERICAN STATES IN 1492 When Columbus landed on the Bahamian island of Guanahani-- another 'wherever-it-may-have-been'--on 12 October 1492, there were, amongst the 3,000-some native Indian groups, seventeen well-organized states of various sizes and kinds actively pursuing their courses in the New World. As in Europe of the time, these were entities striving toward national independence and expression. Of them, four had largely succeeded in the venture and would compare easily to the largest and most cultivated of European, Asiatic, or African states of the 1400's: one in North America, two in Middle America, and one in South America. All of The Big Four were urban--brilliantly so--with large conglomerates of people concentrated in highly stratified settlements. As in the Old World some were literate and some were not. All possessed carefully defined political and economic groups. All had an erudite class and an organized system of schools. All were as concerned with things-religious as Western Europe, though in less demanding universalist, xenophobic ways. All of the attributes we associate with nationhood were abundantly present in all four major American nation-states and, in nascent but rapidly developing manner, in the remaining thirteen as well. One, Tawantinsuyu "Land of the Four Quarters"--the Inca Empire--was the largest political entity in territorial extent the world has ever seen, with the exception of the USSR today. As in the Old World, these states were not static entities but constantly changing, vibrant social organisms, spreading and shrinking through space and time, struggling with their own internal problems and vying with one another for political and economic power. These states, with the BIG FOUR in capitals, were: NORTH AMERICA: 1. Hodenohsoni [The Iriquois League] (Northeast) 2. Creek Confederacy (Southeast) 3. Timucua States (Florida) 4. Calusa State (Florida) 5. Natchez State (Mississippi) 6. Caddoan States (Oklahoma) 7. UNITED PUEBLOS (Arizona/New Mexico) 8. Northwestern City States (British Columbia) MIDDLE AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN: 9. AZTEC EMPIRE (Mexico) 10. Tarascan Empire (Mexico) 11. Mixtec States (Mexico) 12. MAYA STATES (Mexico/Guatemala/Belize/Honduras) 13. Taino States (Dominican Rep/Haiti/Puerto Rico) SOUTH AMERICA: 14. TAWANTINSUYU [The Inca Empire] (Chile/Bolivia/Argentina/Peru/Ecuador) 15. Tairona State (Colombia) 16. Muisca State [The Chibcha Empire] (Colombia) 17. Guarani (Paraguay) The only ones which Columbus himself saw were the Taino States of the islands of the Greater Antilles, urban and well-organized but not of the calibre, from our point of view, of the Big Four. It remained for later explorers and conquistadores to make contact with the larger polities. Between, around, and amongst these states were other tribal groups, less organized and not yet in 1492 on the verge of nascent nationhood. Several were, much later, to embark on the same path, but only in the 1700's, 1800's and 1900's as a direct counter-reaction to European encroachment and subjugation--the Cherokee Nation in the late 1700's, only to be dissolved in 1914 by the United States government; Kalaallit Nunaat [Greenland] in 1953; Dinetah [The Navajo Nation] in 1969; and Nunavut [The Canadian Eskimo Union] in the 1980's. The Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole were also, for a time before the rescinding of treaties and creation of the state of Oklahoma, semi- independent nations. Of all the original seventeen and the later comers to native American nationhood, the only ones to survive as even semi- independent entities into the 20th century have been the Pueblos of the Southwest, the Eskimo in both Canada and Greenland, the Navajo in Arizona, and the Guarani in Paraguay. All except the Guarani and the Greenlanders are dependent upon the largesse of other governments and exist within a peculiar framework allowing neither full independence nor full support from the Euro-American master governments. Thanks to Denmark's enlightened policies, the Greenlanders' future seems assured,and Guarani shows the distinction of being the sole native American language to have official-language status in any American state, its native Paraguay. The Maya in Yucatan and Guatemala as well as the Inca in Peru, through variant effective tactics, have kept the essence of their social norms and may yet redeem parts of their former national independence and ways of life, but it will clearly take a blood-bath of considerable dimensions to accomplish this. This, at least in Peru, I make as a prognostication for the years to come. WHAT WERE THEY LIKE? We have enough archaeological and ethnohistoric detail to describe the workings of most of the seventeen American states at some length and with considerable precision, but to do so here, unless we limited our discussion to a single state, would cause the forest to vanish because of the trees. We would end up with a list of meaningless exotica. For that reason this paper will concentrate on a larger overall view. Such a view can be achieved through description and discussion of the underlying social philosophies of the citizens of each state, philosophies which determined and delimited their behavior in every walk of life. Some concepts were similar to European philosophies, but most were different, often radically so. It is here that one can dramatically see what made things tick, how the people thought, what their goals were and how they reached toward them. It was these underlying philosophies of life which determined the manner in which the American states interacted with each other and with the outside. It can be noted that in all the cultural and linguistic diversity of the pre-Columbian New World there were only three such broadly defined underlying social themes at work, only three different kinds of societies and cultures. We can be so certain about this because of the wealth of ethnohistoric, linguistic, and archaeological information which has survived. The bulk of what we know--a surprise to most-- stems directly from the surviving literatures of these early peoples, which is voluminous in the extreme. The surviving repertoire, for example, of Aztec literature, written in Nahuatl during the years immediately following the Spanish Conquest, is greater in volume and more varied in topic than the total surviving repertoire of Classical Greek, of which we think so much. It fast equals in bulk all the writings of the Romans throughout their history. This literature includes philosophical works as profound and great as any Socrates, plato, or Aristotle ever spoke or penned. We have lesser but similar works for the Iroquois, the peoples of the Pueblos, the Navajos, the Kwakiutl, the Maya, and many other peoples. From such centuries-old works, in conjunction with the details of everyday life provided by archaeology and historical reports, a surprisingly vivid picture of native American social philosophies emerges. The first such theme can be called the UNITARY theme (referred to as HAWAIIAN by the anthropologist). Of our seventeen native American states the AZTEC EMPIRE of Mexico and TAWANTINSUYU (the Inca Empire) in South America are the only examples. Most Far Eastern cultures, with the exception of Japan, also have this kind of social system, but it is almost non-existent in Europe. Unitary systems come as close to literal communism as one can get. They are UNITARY in that all members of the society are seen as of equal importance. Men and women are seen as essentially different-but-equal partners in society and life at large. There is usually only a single primary social class--the People--though specific individuals or groups are, in the larger Unitary societies, "elevated" by election or similar means to greater levels of social responsibility, explicitly to serve The People, never to become a permanent or privileged ruling class. There is, consequently, no such thing as a "social ladder" to success. Slavery does occur, almost exclusively as punishment for crimes of "individualism". The social group--the family, the town, the nation--is infinitely more important than the individual. Competition and individual expression, consequently, are seen as THE most anti-social behavior possible and are ruthlessly punished. Economic goods, including land, buildings, food, manufactured items, and even what we think of as "personal goods", belong to the group, not to the individual. Interestingly, time and boundaries are of no importance in this kind of society. Warfare and the urge toward territorial expansion are frequent. The conquered are obliterated, literally, or absorbed into the social whole. We see this system perhaps best at work in China throughout its long history, and the recent events in Tienanmen Square bear out the analysis abundantly. Any tipping of the boat toward individual expression is considered dangerously anti-social. All are expected to think and act and look the same--witness the lack of differentiation between men's and women's clothing in China today as a simple example. The job of political leaders is to insure the survival of the system, NOT to rule as individuals-- the Cult of Personality, as the Chinese call it, is punished severely, as Madame Mao Dze Dung found to her dismay. In Europe, Yugoslavia provides a fine example. Both countries are ruled by committee, not by individuals. Both countries are communist, BUT have broken with Russian fascism, which, with its rigid Party class structure, is quite alien to genuine communism. In Unitary systems all humanity is seen as essentially one, and all are liable to governance and consideration by the same set of rules. The Chinese subjugation and Sinicization of Tibet provides a fine example. "Good" and "bad", "right" and "wrong", even "yes" and "no" do not exist as polar quantities--what is "good" today may be "bad" tomorrow, a "yes" answer today may have to be a "no" answer tomorrow. The Mandarin Chinese word hao, for instance--a response to the question "How are you?"--may mean "fine", "terrible", "so-so", or whatever one wishes, depending on the context. It means, that is, "For the shape the world is in today I am, as you can see, still here, thank you". The keynote of Unitary systems is "Everything is Equal and Everything is Relative". Good and Bad are inherently found, simultaneously, in everything. The YIN-YAN symbolism, which we erroneously view as a dualism, an "either/or", is a national expression of this concept of oneness. There is never any need for compromise, since good and bad, right and wrong, correct and incorrect are all inherently present in everything at all times. It is interesting to note, in this context, that some of the best practitioners of modern physics and its relativistic world have been ethnic Chinese. In the Americas Tawantinsuyu best exemplifies the Unitary state. The State was governed by an elite group, the Incas, the individual members of which were subject to replacement if they did not rule for the people at large. Within the ruling class the young were trained in special schools, and only those who showed the aptitude were ever likely to become more than just another idle "prince". Such training emphasized not the rights and power of monarchy, but the responsibilities of the rulers to The People at large. It was a benign Machiavellianism which out- Machiavellied Machiavelli. The citizens of the State had the responsibility to supply labor, agricultural goods, and manufactured goods to the central government in lieu of monetary taxes. That government had the responsibility to collect those goods and to see to it that they were equitably redistributed to ALL. Poverty was unknown, except to those who, through crimes of individualism, had refused to pay their dues to the State. Poverty was, in effect, a punishment, not a natural economic state. Cuzco, the amazing capital city of Tawantinsuyu, from which literally all roads to the rest of the empire radiated, served as the organizational center for this massive gathering/ redistribution effort. It was a city of great beauty as well as efficiency, filled with administrative buildings, which the Spanish erroneously called "royal palaces", solid storehouses, the State schools and temples, and other public buildings. At least the lower walls of many of these survive still today. The system worked well, and Tawantinsuyu was a literal communist welfare state. The State built and maintained a 10,000-mile highway system, which surpassed the similar but more famous Roman highway system, for the collection and redistribution of goods. The State maintained an educational system open to all who could demonstrate the desire to learn and who showed their abilities through continued good performance. From its graduates came new legions of efficient administrators, merchants, engineers, and priests. It is hard to find anything to criticize adversely in the Inca system. Inca religion, which believed like Shinto that all was holy, allowed human sacrifice, which is to us barbaric, but even here the chosen were drugged with coca into insensitivity before the event and left in such a comatose state to freeze to death on an open mountain peak. Inca warfare was frequent and brutal in the extreme, but the conquered who were allowed to live were taken in as part of the fold. Because Tawantinsuyu governed lands where over 80 languages were spoken, Quechua, the Inca tongue, became the official language of the realm. The overall democratic concern of the system, as administered by the chosen rulers, for the welfare of all without distinction--conquered as well as native son--has an undeniable appeal in this age of dog- eat-dog. The sacrifice which we could not endure would be the sacrifice of the competitive urge, the sacrifice of individual expression. Inca Unitary life still survives in the Andean highlands of Peru, where the Group transcends the individual and village and family welfare comes first. They still call themselves Runa, The People, and look forward to a time when their time-honored values will once again govern their land. They refer to Quechua as Runa Simi, Human Speech, and to Spanish as Alqo Simi, Animal Language. Though Tawantinsuyu is gone, the Unitary Inca Survive, numbering yet in excess of 7,000,000. The Aztec Empire was also governed by this kind of Golden Rule, and in much the same manner. The ruling class of Mexico was as well-trained as the Inca elite, and only the apt within that class were elected to rule. Goods were gathered in lieu of taxes, though cacao beans were used as currency, and agricultural and manufactured products were redistributed through a market system of staggering proportions. The Spanish estimated that the market place of Tlatilolco in the capital of Tenochtitlan alone saw 30,000 souls a day and 60,000 on every regular market day. Given the modern archaeological estimate of an urban population of 400,000 for the city at large and 11,000,000 for the Valley of Mexico heartland, the usual accusation of Spanish exaggeration is in this case likely not justified. Bernal Diaz del Castillo, who accompanied Cortez when he first entered Tenochtitlan, tells us that the city as seen from the banks of the Great Lake at Ixtapalapa and Xochimilco seemed to float on the water, a vision of unbelievable beauty unsurpassed by any other city he had seen. They were dumbfounded at its vast extent. They marvelled at its careful plan, its aqueducts of roaring fresh water, its system of waste disposal, its immaculately clean streets and buildings. The pyramidal towers of the temples gleamed against the intense blue of the sky, and the many massive causeways leading several miles across the lake to the city were crowded with people coming and going. Spanish description of the city, once inside, is even more lavish, telling us of the endless networks of canals linking every section of the city, the plantings of road-side trees and flowering hedges, the city's metropolitan zoo and botanical gardens. Society at large was divided into smaller geographical and social segments, called wards or calpulli, each a self-sufficient cog in the overall economic and political machine of the State. Education was provided on the local level, and the State itself maintained scholarly institutions considerably more advanced in both knowledge and instructional technique than any of Europe's medieval universities. Literary efforts, many in hieroglyphic written form--a king of prompt-book rather than the full-fledged writing of the neighboring Maya--flourished, and philosophical tracts concerning the nature of man and the world are complex and profound. The surviving works of the philosophers Tlacaelel and Nexahualcoyotl, for example, rival those of any thinker of any time. Unlike Inca religion, which was essentially simple and direct, Aztec religion was extremely complex. It had the same negativism and concept of sin and inherent human evil so typical of all Semitic religions, notably Judeo-Christianity and Islam. The Spanish clergy was pleasantly surprised at this aspect of native belief. Atonement, however, came not only through confession and ceremony, but, to the horror of the Spanish priests, through the annual sacrifice of human beings, numbering in the thousands each year, at more than a dozen public Holy Days. It was this which colored and still colors the European view of Aztec Mexico, though it must be remembered that in a Unitary society to sacrifice one's life for the welfare of the whole is the greatest of honors, not an unspeakable and tortured horror. The literary educational instructions to the young which have survived, particularly those to the budding rulers, reflect a highly humane view of life, one in which the avoidance of excess in any form is of paramount social value. Death for the Sate was seen as a necessary part of life, something to be valued. Aztec life came to a sudden and violent end in 1521, and, unlike Inca life to the south, has been largely absorbed into the Hispanic mainstream of modern Mexico, which prides itself on being an Hispanic-Indian nation. The Unitary way of life is gone, however, and there are no signs of a significant revival. The second social theme may be called the DUALISTIC theme (referred to by anthropologists as the ESKIMO system). The only native American states with this type of social system were the MAYA CITY STATES. Most Western European cultures, including Spain, Portugal, England, the Netherlands, and France, also have this kind of social system, as does Japan in the Far East. Such systems are DUALISTIC in that society and the people within it are viewed as fitting into either/or categories. Men and women are seen as different and unequal in such societies. In by far the preponderance of Eskimo systems, men are dominant. There are no inbetweens--or, when they occur, they are lumped with the negative side of the fence. There are always two social classes--the "haves" or INs and the "have-nots" or OUTs, with widely varying privileges. It is usually possible to "climb the social ladder" in such societies, so that "have-nots" may, with effort, become "haves". Slavery is a frequent practice, the slave usually being one of the "have-nots" and often someone from another society. In practice, the rights of the individual are far more important than the overall rights of the group. Competition and individual expression, in all walks of life, are the most highly valued and rewarded forms of behavior--the exact reverse of Unitary systems. Government is by an individual, be it monarch, president, or whatever. Economic goods belong to individuals. One's individual rights, though we don't like to admit it, come before the family, the town, the nation, or membership in any group. Warfare and territorial expansion is frequent, with conquered peoples and cultures cast in the role of OUTs and, therefore, "bad", "wrong" and "inferior". Conquered peoples are often enslaved, either literally or, more frequently, through long-term political and economic subjugation. Like the Unitary societies, these are colonialist cultures. Time and space are absolutely "of the essence". Our social system is a fine example. To us things are "positive" or "negative", "right" or "wrong", people are "good" or "bad", questions can be answered with "yes" or "no", criminals are either "innocent" or "guilty". The world is seen, literally, as either black or white--greys are thought of as black. Everything comes in twos. It was not a miracle of modern technology that the binary number system of the computer age was invented in our dualistic system; it was a foregone conclusion. The keynote to such systems is that things are either absolutely and irrevocably "good" or absolutely and irrevocably "bad". It is a world of Absolutes. Such systems view compromise not as a virtue but as a weakness. Of more than passing interest should be the fact that the Japanese social system, in spite of its borrowings from China and its seeming foreignness to us, is more Dualistic at base than even the Western European systems. It should, consequently, come as no surprise to anyone that the Japanese are succeeding tremendously in out-competing all the rest of us together these days. That, too, was a foregone conclusion. In the pre-Columbian New World there was only one native polity created by a Dualistic culture--the Maya city states of Yucatan, Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras. For many years the Maya have been portrayed as a highly docile, peaceful people, obsessed with time. Only the latter turns out to be true--as salient a feature of Maya life as it is for us today. Every brilliant hieroglyphic monument is covered with series after series of finely-honed dates in a calendrical system next to which ours pales as mere child's-play. It had been thought, however, that the beautifully designed urban complexes of the Maya were strictly market centers, occupied only by the priestly ruling class on a regular basis, used like the Aztec markets as a method of redistribution of goods to The People. We now know that this was not so. At first our data seemed to indicate that the individual was of little worth. When, however, we succeeded in unravelling the intricacies of Maya hieroglyphic writing--only in the past fifteen to twenty years--we discovered a world of highly competitive individualism, quite in keeping with the other Dualistic attributes of Maya life. Now that we can read the bulk of what the inscriptions say, we know that they are celebrating the rule of hereditary dynasties, of individual families, and glorifying the exploits of single rulers. A number of spectacular royal tombs have been found and opened, revealing the glory and panoply of a King Tut's tomb and clearly letting us know the extreme importance the individual played in Maya society. These were city states governed by a noble class, cities which struggled against one another over the centuries for control of agricultural lands and economic goods. Warfare was frequent, and the conquered were enslaved. The Maya realm divided itself into Commoner vs. Ruler, the OUTs and the INs. Other cities, other peoples, and other cultures were OUTs by definition, fair game for political and economic exploitation. Maya cities were all that cities are today, with public functions housed in artistic and well-engineered buildings of considerable architectural merit, with temples and schools, markets and military barracks, recreational ballparks and cultural centers. Maya science was well-developed, and the Maya alone amongst native Americans developed a writing system capable of recording the spoken word in all its intricate beauty, a system which, like the Chinese, could be equally applied to all the mutually unintelligible Maya tongues. Gorgeously painted manuscripts of considerable length recorded history, mathematical tables, scientific knowledge, as well as religious and literary works. Spanish zeal and Bishop Landa succeeded, in true Nazi fashion, in consigning this truly invaluable fountain of information to the flames in holocausts of burning books which put the Inquisition back home to shame. Only parts of four of these books have survived. When the Spanish finally came, in 1528, the Maya were ready to deal with them, and though, one after one, the Maya cities fell and became the source of plundered stone for Spanish towns, the Maya people and the Maya way of life survived. Guerilla warfare made it impossible for the conquerors to physically conquer the defeated. The urban way of life was gone, but the Maya simply retreated to less accessible lands. As late as 1860 the Maya rose against their oppressors, coming very close to taking all of Yucatan. In the 1900's there have been sporadic but concerted efforts again to reinstate the Maya Way, which may yet win out, both in lowland Yucatan and highland Guatemala. Unlike the Aztec, whose culture is largely gone, or the Inca, who survived by retreat into the mountains, the Maya survive largely because they understand their conquerors. Though Hispanic dualism is not the same as Maya dualism, the Maya are individualists, and they have learned how to compete against their rulers by fighting fire with fire. The third theme is called TRIALISTIC THEME (coming in three varieties, called IROQUOIS, OMAHA, and CROW by the anthropologists). Of the seventeen native American states listed earlier eleven fall in this category, most of them the Crow sub- type. In the rest of the world this type of social system is typical of Africa, the Middle East (particularly the Arab World), and Central Asia (the Turks and Mongols)--what Western European patronizingly call The Third World. In the TRIALISTIC world-view men and women are seen as different and unequal. One sex is always considered much more dominant than the other--in the Omaha sub-type it is the male (Islamic societies, for example), in the Iroquois and Crow sub- types it is the female (many of the societies of India, for example). There are always three primary social classes--the elite, the average man (usually, and importantly in most Trialistic societies, the merchant and the warrior), and the common man. Slavery, however, rarely occurs. One is born into one's social class; there is no "social ladder" to climb. For every "yes" and "no" there is a "maybe", for every "good" and "bad" there is a "so-so", for every "innocent" or "guilty" there is a "part-guilty/part-innocent"--notice that English does not even have words for such middle-grounds. Warfare occurs, but territorial expansion exists solely for economic reasons and is rarely permanent. The conquered are neither obliterated, absorbed into the social mainstream, nor treated as to-be- enslaved OUTs. They form a third, OTHER, class, with its own rights and privileges. Peoples with this kind of social system are the world's compromisers. For every problem they see a possible inbetween solution which will partially satisfy all and completely satisfy none. This, in these societies, is the way of the world, or at least mankind. The keynote might be: "You can please some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but you can never please all of the people all of the time (so why try!)". The most impressive of the native American Trialistic societies, and the only ones which had achieved true nation status, were the western Pueblo city states of Arizona and New Mexico. In 1539, when the Spanish first arrived, these were but a remnant of the once more spectacular glory of Chaco Canyon days, but twenty-four pueblos had nonetheless maintained both their integrity as societies and an overriding political organization to link them into a loose-jointed confederacy. True urban conglomerates ranging in size from 2,000 to 10,000 people, the Pueblos represented four totally distinct language groups--the Hopi, the Zuni, the Tanoan peoples, and the Keresan peoples. Differing, too, in outward culture, they nonetheless shared the same underlying social norms (the anthropologists call it the Crow social system). Desire to protect this common norm and way of life is what brought the Pueblo peoples together. In common with Trialistic peoples the world-round, Pueblo societies were divided into three social classes: the political and religious elite, the warrior/merchant class, and the common man. An intricate system of social obligations and duties linked the three together into a cohesive unit, expressed through a yearly round of colorful and spectacular ceremonies still performed today. The Pueblos have been erroneously called theocratic states, inasmuch as religious myth and ceremony provides the rationale for the social system, but one can not so nearly compartmentalize the life of these people, in which every facet of behavior is linked into a succinct whole much more so than in dualistic European societies. The pervasiveness of what seem to us religious norms is comparable to the pervasiveness of Islamic norms in everyday life in the Arabic world. All Trialistic societies arrange their lives in this manner. The Pueblo cities were multi-storied urban centers strategically located on impressive buttes when the Spanish first arrived. Most survive today in their original locations, those at Taos and Acoma remaining the most unchanged. The Pueblo societies, like the Taino of the Caribbean, welcomed the Spanish with open arms as representatives of yet another way of life. It was only when they realized that their new-found "friends" insisted on REPLACING native philosophies with their own that reaction set in. These were live-and-let- live societies. Little did they realize that their conquerors' philosophies left no such room for compromise. They would quickly find out the price of their tolerance. Pueblo leaders tolerated the attempts to destroy what to the Spanish seemed religious institutions for 140 years, practicing the Spanish rites in public and their own native social ceremonies under the secrecy of night. Then, in 1680, they rebelled. In a matter of hours the well-coordinated plot exterminated the Spanish clerical and secular presence in New Mexico and Arizona. In true form, the survivors were allowed to leave unharmed, and the Pueblos returned to their own non- forceful way of life. This lasted until 1692, when the Spanish returned again in force. Though Spanish reconquest was, this time, successful, the Pueblo people steadfastly refused both Spanish culture and Christianity. To this day the Pueblos maintain a Pueblo-wide organization and preserve their age-old customs little touched by alien culture. The external norms have partly become Hispanic and Anglo-, but the inner structure of society survives intact. Survival has been insured by steadfast refusal since 1680 to allow outsiders to live in their towns or join their ranks. These are closed societies in which the lessons of the past have made the outsider no longer welcome. Toleration and moderation are still the norms, but they now extend only so far. Internal flexibility over the centuries has served the Pueblos well. WHAT WOULD THE AMERICAS HAVE BECOME? Amongst other things, the presence of these three primary social philosophies in the pre-Columbian New World meant that unlike Dualistic or Unitary European and Asian states, the predominantly Tertiary American states had no territorial or missionizing ambitions. If and when they expanded, it was for temporary economic reasons alone. There was no urge to exploit or convert the "heathen". The only exceptions were the Unitary Aztecs and Incas and the Dualistic Maya States. Except amongst those three cultures the attempt to force peoples of other languages and cultural groups into artificial colonial alliance was alien in the extreme. Conquest by Trialistic peoples leaves the decision to join the conquerors a voluntary one. No stigma is attached to retention of one's native cultural system. Perhaps the best example of the territorial spread of a Trialistic people is the spread of the Arabs and Islam. Islam during the Middle Ages was, and remained until the last 40 years, extremely tolerant of the beliefs and social structures of conquered cultures. Other grounds of belief were neither harmed nor converted. During the European Middle Ages, for example, Islam served as the SOLE refuge for Judaism, rabid anti- Jewishness rearing its head only as Islamic lands fell into hands of Western European Christendom and its to-be-expected concepts of absolute rights and absolute wrongs. At the fall of Moorish Spain, the Jewish population fled en masse to the protection of Moslem Morocco, a protection still honored by that Trialistic state today. It is of equal interest to note that inasmuch as the social systems of the Incas and the Aztecs were essentially the same as the Chinese system, it should come as no surprise that they were dominating and expansionist peoples, insisting on cultural absorption or enslavement of conquered peoples. It is, however, the Trialistic model, so totally alien to both Europe and the Far East, which was and is still today characteristic of most New World societies. Most such societies did not resist the invader for the simple reason that there was always tolerance in their philosophy of life for "yet another view". The first American societies contacted by Columbus and the Europeans were Trialistic--the Taino States of the Greater Antilles and their island outliers. The Taino accepted the newcomers with open arms. Rebellion began only when it became clear that the Spanish would tolerate no philosophical aberrations from absolutist, Dualistic Hispano-Christian norms. It is customary, as an unconscious apologia, to lay the greatest blame for the skyrocketing native death rates of the early decades of the 1500's on inadvertently introduced Old World diseases. This certainly played a role, sometimes a major one. The staggering mortality rate throughout Tawantinsuyu between 1500 and 1550 was, for example, certainly more the result of European measles than of Spanish depredation, and the 1519 11,000,000 population of the Valley of Mexico was reduced to 325,000 by 1570 at least in part as the result of disease. Yet such epidemics have been overused as blanket causal rationales throughout the New World, even where we have no positive or even suspicious data to point to such medical catastrophes. There is, for instance, no data to substantiate such a rationale for the vanishing Taino population of the 1493-1520 period. In some instances we know that wholesale population deportation became the rule of the day, decimating entire Taino states. This is what reduced the 100,000-plus population of the Bahamas and Turks and Caicos Islands to a handful of no more than several hundred individuals by the year 1521. The deportees were used as agricultural or industrial slaves (in the mines and the pearl fisheries). When the Spanish spread their rule to the mainland regions, especially Yucatan, Central Mexico, and the west coast of South America, they met their real foes. Both Aztecs and Incas presented a picture so alien that it was unintelligible to the European conquerors. Spanish eyes saw in Tenochtitlan and Cuzco urban centers of such sophistication and institutionalized organization that they assumed they were governed in the same manner as the cities of Spain, that they represented a European social system. Just, however, as modern China remains an enigma to the Western World, so the overpowering group orientation of Aztec and Inca society was impossible for the Spanish to fathom. Aztecs and Incas fought to protect their lands, but when the center of the system, the chosen ruling elite, had been obliterated, the system simply collapsed, something the Spanish never expected. The long drawnout battles province by province never came. Aztec Mexico and Inca Peru, without a symbol of Unity to hang on to, simply substituted the Spanish Lords for their own. Used to following orders for the general good, they readily acquiesced to the new Spanish order, little knowing that in so doing they were destroying their own inner being. Though Mexico remains to this day Indian in blood, the Unitary social theme is gone, replaced almost totally by Hispanic, individualistic norms. The inca have been more fortunate, for they retreated inasmuch as possible into the mountain fastness of the Andes and have, by isolation alone, retained at least the core of their ancient norms. If the Europeans had never come, it is likely that we would see today a mosaic such as we have described. There would, without doubt, still be an American Big Four--the United Pueblos, the Aztec Empire, the Maya City States, and Tawantinsuyu. It is doubtful that the Trialistic Pueblo would have spread their domain from its homeland in the American Southwest, for such expansion is not a permanent Trialistic norm. Both the Aztec Empire and Tawantinsuyu, however, still expanding rapidly in 1492, would undoubtedly have continued to spread. It is likely that all of modern Mexico and much of Central America would today be part of the Aztec realm, and all of Andean South America part of an expanded Tawantinsuyu, the Tairona and Muisca (Chibcha) states absorbed in the Inca state. The Maya States would certainly still control Yucatan, Guatemala, and Honduras. The southeastern part of South America might be part of Guarani lands. Eastern North America, which I have neglected in this survey, predominately Trialistic in culture, would likely show the same political configuration it did in 1492, with, perhaps, a somewhat expanded Hodenohsoni (The Iriquois League). The national newcomers would be the Navajo in the North American Southwest, the Cherokee in the Middle South, and the two Eskimo nations in the far north. It seems unlikely that such nations would attempt to consolidate their power through subjugation and conquest, for this is not a Trialistic trait. The perpetual "troublemakers" would still be the Aztec Empire in the north and Tawantinsuyu in the south. Internal relations of the Trialistic states, as well as relations with the states of modern Europe, Africa, and Asia would be routine and non-combative. Foreign relations of the Aztecs and Tawantinsuyu with the rest of the world would likely be much the same as those of modern China with its European and Asian neighbors--cordial but strained, with considerable misunderstanding of motives and goals on both sides of the Atlantic and Pacific. If we drew up a list of international political and economic allies, it seems unquestioned that both the Aztec Empire and Tawantinsuyu would face east across the Pacific to join hands with their distant Chinese and Southeast Asian kin, for philosophical compatibilities would be great. The Trialistic American majority, however, would more likely today be joined in alliance with the Third World nations of the Arab Middle East and the nations of Africa, where Old World Trialistic societies are dominant. The most difficult to place would be the Maya od today. It is not beyond possibility that they would join hands with Western European allies. Certainly the two new Dualistic Eskimo nations, Nunavut and Kallaalit Nunaat would be so-aligned. That is, patterns of international alliance today indicate clearly that like-stands-with-like. Dualistic nations tend to seek other dualistic nations--the Western European/Euro-American Alliance, and Japan; Unitary nations tend to seek other unitary nations--China, Southeast Asia, and, in Europe, Yugoslavia; Trialistic nations tend to seek other trialistic nations--the Arab Middle East, many African states, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Turkey, with strong ties to Soviet Central Asia. Within the Dualistic nations there is at present, not surprisingly, a two-way split--the Western Dualistic Alliance and the Eastern Dualistic Alliance of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, though this is predictably breaking up today. There is no reason to think the pattern would be changed by the introduction of the native American states. Water tends to seek its own level, it might be said. It is only natural, as part of the human condition, that like seeks like. Ultimately survival of the American states would have produced, in the 20th century, an overall balance of power quite at variance, however, with what we see today. The Dualists dominate today--Western Europe, Euro-America, Japan, and the Soviet Union. Unitary states--China at present the only powerful one on earth--are tugged one way or the other by the courting Dualistic competitors. The Trialistic states are lumped together as The Third World, with more than a touch of disdain from the Dualistic dominators. With the addition of the American states, the Trialists and Unitarians would dominate. Western Europe, probably in full alliance with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, would be The Third World. It MIGHT, with Trialistic dominance, be a more tolerant world. With certainty the ultimate battle lines, if they ever came, would be drawn between Unitary America and Asia on the one hand--China, Southeast Asia, Tawantinsuyu, and the Aztec Empire--and Dualistic Europe on the other. In that event Europe would clearly lose, for more tolerant Trialistic America, Africa, and the Near East would throw its weight behind the Unitary states. The Americas That Might Have Been would have led to a 20th century we would not recognize, to a more pluralistic world in which colonialism, among other things, would have been minor thorn rather than the determiner of world fate it in fact became. If Columbus had never set forth from Palos, if those Outward Urges had never taken Europe in thrall... But, in fact, the dream is over, for the Americas ARE a European land. SUGGESTED READINGS GENERAL: Washburn, Wilcomb, ed. "History of Indian-White Relations." Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 1. Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, 1989. THE AZTECS: Brundage, Burr Cartwright. "The Fifth Sun: Aztec Gods, Aztec World." University of Texas Press, Austin, 1979. Leon-Portilla, Miguel. "The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico." Beacon Press, Boston, 1962. THE INCA (TAWANTINSUYU): Brundage, Burr C. "Empire of the Incas." University of Oklahoma Press, Norman. Brundage, Burr C. "Lords of Cuzco." University of Oklahoma Press, Norman. THE IROQUOIS LEAGUE (HODENOHSONI): Wallace, Anthony F.C. "The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca." Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1970. THE MAYA: Coe, Michael D. "The Maya." 3rd ed. Thames and Hudson, London, 1984. Leon-Portilla, Miguel. "Time and Reality in the Thought of the Maya." Beacon Press, Boston, 1968. THE PUEBLOS: Ortiz, Alfonso. "The Tewa World: Space, Time, Being and Becoming in a Pueblo Society." University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1969. Walters, Frank. "Book of the Hopi." Ballantine Books, New York, 1963. Reprint permission granted by author. Copyright by Julian Granberry, 1989.