neuralgraffiti

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1. jennifer fox bennett wrote:

   i realize that i was fortunate enough to have pursued a minor in american indian studies in school when i came across charles c. mann’s 1491 recently. it’s a collaboration of a lot of research that my history professor had followed written in a very nonacademic way. one contention that mann raises that i often find myself mentioning in debates over the immigration hoopla is that people often want to argue numbers pre-1491 or maybe “the land-bridge made indians immigrants here, too.” the latter has obvious logical pitfalls in comparisons that i don’t have the time to go into here. the former overshadows the importance of recognizing the long-standing establishment of a culture or society.

   one thing that i learned via this book was that everyone knows about the neolithic invention of agriculture in mesopotamia about 12,000 years ago or so which then lent itself to the sumerians about 7K yrs later. it spawned technological advancement in a period about a tenth of how long modern humans had been running around the world already. the americas had two completely separate neolithic ages of their own: one in mesoamerica and one in the andes highlands. both occurred slightly after the mesopotamian, but had just as equally enormous impacts on the advancement of society (for better or for worse in some places).

   anyway, thus far, it’s a good read for the uninitiated. in zinn’s people’s history, he only focuses on numbers and how disgusted the north am indigenous people were with how dirty the english/french europeans were. mann focuses on how vast, complex, and advanced the people here actually were.

   Thursday, June 8, 2006 at 12:36 pm | Permalink
2. Phil Haack wrote:

   That sounds like an interesting read, I’ll add it to my (ever-growing) list. Thanks Jen!

   Thursday, June 8, 2006 at 1:07 pm | Permalink

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