determination of the direction and timing of their migration. Archaeological
finds do not grow older as we move northwest through the Yukon and across
Alaska.^18 Moreover, even if the first Americans did arrive on foot, they were
just as surely explorers as Columbus.
Garraty drones on, continuing to imply that the first settlers were rather dim:
“None of the groups made much progress in developing simple machines or
substituting mechanical or even animal power for their own muscle power.”
But this was not the Americans’ “fault.” No “animal power” was available.
For that matter, in Europe and Asia before 1769, most “simple machines”
depended on horses, oxen, water buffalo, mules, or cattle—beasts unknown in
the Americas. In Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond suggests that the
availability of at least some of these animals for domestication was a critical
factor in developing not only machines but also the division of labor we call
“civilization.”^19
All of the textbooks are locked into the old savage-to-barbaric-to-civilized
school of anthropology dating back to L. H. Morgan and Karl Marx around
- Their authors may well have encountered such thinking in anthropology
courses when they were undergraduates; it is no longer taught today, however.
Garraty exemplifies the evolutionary stereotype: “Those who planted seeds
and cultivated the land instead of merely hunting and gathering food were more
secure and comfortable.” Apparently he has not encountered the “affluent
primitive” theory, which persuaded anthropologists some forty years ago that
gatherer-hunters lived quite comfortably. American History then makes an
even sillier mistake: “These agricultural people were mostly peaceful, though
they could fight fiercely to protect their fields. The hunters and wanderers, on
the other hand, were quite warlike because their need to move about brought
them frequently into conflict with other groups.” Here Garraty conflates civil
and civilization. Decades ago, most anthropologists challenged this outmoded
continuum, determining that hunters and gatherers were relatively peaceful,
compared to agriculturalists, and that modern societies were more warlike
still. We have only to remember the history of the twentieth century to see at
once that violence can increase with civilization.
Most textbooks do confer civilization on some Natives—the Aztecs, Incas,
and Mayans—based on the premise, embraced by the Spanish conquistadors
themselves, that wealth equals civilization. In the words of The American
Adventure : “Unlike the noncivilized peoples of the Caribbean, the Aztec were