Columbus and Western Culture
Berliner has not done his homework--or studied anthropology. In 1492, the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan, now buried under Mexico City, was home to more than 220,000 people. According to Cortes and his conquistadors, Tenochtitlan’s market rivaled that of Seville and Constantinople. Aztec religious beliefs were, if anything, more sophisticated than those of the Catholic friars who followed Cortes. In 1492, the rulers of the Inca Empire presided over domains that stretched from highland Bolivia to Ecuador. They controlled the destinies of more than 5 million people.
By 1492, Native Americans had flourished in North America for more than 15,000 years. Some of them, like people living in the high Arctic or in the Great Basin, were indeed simple hunter-gatherers--but their environmental and botanical knowledge was vastly superior to ours. Along the Northwest and California coasts dwelt some of the most sophisticated hunter-gatherer societies on Earth. Some Chumash villages housed more than 1,000 people when the Spaniards arrived.
To claim that the Native Americans were “primarily hunter-gatherers, living hand-to-mouth and day-to-day” is to make a mockery of history. In 1492, American Indian farmers were probably the most skilled in the world. Maya script ranks among the most sophisticated and difficult to decipher of all ancient writing. No one has yet unraveled the full complexities of the Inca quipu, the knotted string, the Andean substitute for writing.
This is a fascinating time to be an anthropologist or historian, faced with the challenge of teaching a balanced, multicultural view of the past that does, indeed, treat all cultures as equal partners. It is not a matter of political agendas or glorifying one society at the expense of another. It is a simple matter of respecting diversity and different cultural values.
Berliner’s view of history highlights the greatest problem our ethnically diverse society faces--ignorance of others.
BRIAN M. FAGAN
Professor of Anthropology
UC Santa Barbara
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