windsor.k12.mo.uswindsor.k12.mo.us/.../sites/...1-packet-2016-2017.docx · Web viewTheir word hootchenoo, for homemade liquor, eventually became the slang word ''hootch ... within

Unit 1

The Founding, Invading, Conquering and Settling of the “New World”

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Advanced Honors American History I

Unit 1: When Three Worlds Collide 1450-1700Text Reading: Henretta-- chapters 1-2; pages 5-69

August 22 Intro to class—UMSL credit discussion; “Why Study History?” Reading & Discussion

August 23 “America Before Columbus” video

August 24 Finish video; “America Before Columbus” reading; writing a reaction paper

August 25 North American Civilizations notes and lecture; Reading: “Mighty Cahokia”

August 26 Video -”500 Nations, part 1”__________

August 29 Reaction Papers Due

August 30 Europe notes and lecture

August 31 Reading: “Columbus: Hero or Villain”

September 01 Africa notes and lecture

September 02 __________

September 05 No School

September 06 Identification Assignment due; Exploration notes and lecture

September 07 Video – “Columbus” biography

September 08 Invasion and Settlement notes and lecture

September 09 Video: “Lost Roanoke” http://www.unctv.org/content/birthofacolony__________

September 12 Native Americans and the New Settlers notes and lecture

September 13 Readings: “Mary Rowlandson and Mary Jemison”

September 14 Captivities - discussion & video

September 15 Classwork on essays

September 16 Essays Due

Honors Advance American History IBoehm 2016-2017

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“America Before Columbus” By Lewis Lord and Sarah Burke Pay attention to the following ideas as you read this article from U.S. News and World Report: Had you heard of Cahokia before? What surprised you, if anything? What misconceptions did Europeans have about the North American Continent? How were these misconceptions inaccurate? What details help to show that Native American tribes were part of a civilized culture? In what ways was that civilization misunderstood by the Europeans? How has the land and wildlife changed since the time of Columbus? What was the Columbian Exchange? How did it affect the societies involved?

They lived in temples as well as teepees, dined on succotash and 9-inch oysters, and developed customs, including daily baths, that Europeans abhorred. They were America's first settlers, and the world they inhabited was anything but new. Most vacationers on Interstate 70 speed right by ancient Cahokia and its 15-acre ceremonial mound, the one that's 2 acres bigger than the Great Pyramid of Egypt. Only a curious few pull off to learn how a feather-crowned dictator known as the Great Sun used to kneel atop the earthen temple every morning and howl when the real sun came up. At its peak, the town across the Mississippi from present-day St. Louis boasted a trade network that stretched from the Gulf of Mexico to the Dakotas and probably had as many residents as did London at that time. But modern textbooks barely take notice. Cahokia's problem is that American history, in the minds of many, started just 500 years ago, back when Columbus discovered the New World. By 1492, Cahokia was an Illinois Babylon, a city that had thrived and vanished. Like many 20th-century metropolises, 13th-century Cahokia could not handle growth, even though its developers were sharp enough to grasp geometry and astronomy. Besides building more than 100 neatly proportioned mounds, they constructed a circle of tall poles -- archaeologists call it ''Woodhenge'' -- that aligned with the sun at equinox and solstice. Despite this evidence of advanced thinking, however, no Cahokian appears to have anticipated the consequences of ecological change and environmental degradation. Cornfields that fed 20,000 to 40,000 urbanites gradually lost their fertility. Forests were stripped of trees not only to fuel thousands of daily household fires but also to form a 2 1/2-mile stockade wall. As hard times set in, Cahokians moved or perished. Centuries later, the French arrived and found only grown-over mounds. The Europeans who peopled America in Columbus's wake believed the land had never been settled, much less civilized. ''North America was inhabited only by wandering tribes who had no thought of profiting by the natural riches of the soil,'' wrote Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835. It was, the French observer concluded, ''an empty continent, a desert land awaiting its inhabitants.'' Tocqueville's ''empty continent'' phrase endures today in Fourth of July speeches that hail the building of the nation, but in fact the New World was 2 anything but empty in Columbus's day. Give or take several million, the Western Hemisphere in 1492 had as many people as Europe. It was the teeming and majestic civilizations of Mexico's Aztecs and Peru's Incas that awed the Spanish conquistadors initially -- some gawked like country bumpkins at Montezuma's capital, with its several hundred thousand people -- but ancient societies had also been rising and falling for centuries above the Rio Grande. More than 1,000 tribes -- with upward of 2 million people -- still inhabited the northern forests, prairies and mesas when whites arrived. Newcomers from Europe, though accustomed to people being burned or beheaded, were shocked at what went on in America. Columbus claimed he had to take hundreds of Carib Indians to Spain for their own good and that of their Arawak neighbors, whom they were eating. (He had a harder time explaining why he also enslaved the gentle Arawaks.) While cannibalism and human sacrifice were rare among Indians north of Mexico, people in some tribes killed unwanted infants, had multiple wives and, in the case of the Hurons, wiped their hands on dogs that ambled by. Other traits seemed alien as well: an awed reverence of nature, a desire to share and, for many, societies free of oppression and class stratification. In addition, most took a daily bath, a practice the Europeans abhorred. America was not new, but it was different.


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As whites moved westward across what is now the United States, they encountered a familiar question among tribesmen in their path: ''Why do you call us Indians?'' The answer, of course, was that Columbus was mistaken. He thought he was in the distant Indies, somewhere between Japan and India, and labeled his hosts los Indios. The Indians had no word for their race. They called their own tribes ''people'' or ''real people,'' and other tribes names like ''friend,'' ''enemy'' or ''poisonous snake.'' The diversity that Americans relish today actually existed long before Columbus arrived. Most of the hundreds of languages the Indians spoke were as different from one another as Farsi is from French. Some Indians loved war. Others hated it. After every reluctant fight, Arizona's Pimas subjected their warriors to a 16-day cure for insanity. Some tribes banned women from their councils. Others were ruled by female chiefs, like Georgia's ''Lady of Cofitachequi,'' who greeted Hernando DeSoto with pearls from the Savannah River. (He ungraciously kidnapped her.) Puppies were a gourmet's delight in some huts. Elsewhere, Indians would rather die than eat dog meat. Premarital sex was unthinkable among the Cheyenne. But Mississippi's Natchez tribe encouraged teenagers to have flings while they could. Once a Natchez girl wed, an extramarital affair could cost her her hair or even an ear. Every American Indian, from the Abenakis of Maine to the Zunis of New Mexico, descended from immigrant stock. Asian-Americans were the first Americans, and they came over 12,000 to 20,000 years ago, probably crossing a glacial land bridge between Siberia and Alaska. For some time, they hunted the mastodon and the long-horned bison, perhaps speeding their extinction. As long ago as 5,000 years, people in Mexico may have cultivated maize, better known as corn, and early residents of Arizona were growing it in A.D. 1. Many people in what is now the United States existed the next 10 or 15 centuries as nomads, moving about in search of game, fish and wild plants for food, but some accomplished much more. Pioneers who found thousands of abandoned mounds in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys refused to believe they had been built by Indians. ''The natural indolence of the Indian and this averseness to any kind of manual labor are well known,'' wrote author William Pidgeon in 1858. Other 19th-century writers speculated that the mound builders were stray Vikings, Phoenicians or a lost tribe of Israel -- obviously an intelligent people who were annihilated by Indian savages. Settlers liked that theory, because it seemed to justify the treatment they inflicted on the Indians on the frontier. Not until the 1890s did educated people agree that the mounds in fact were built by the Indians' ancestors. The genius of the mound builders has become even more evident in recent years. Just west of the Mississippi in northeast Louisiana lies Poverty Point, a 3,500-year-old collection of concentric semicircles of earth, the biggest nearly three quarters of a mile long. Visitors can stand atop a mound just west of Poverty Point's rings during the spring and fall equinox and see the sun rise over what was the town's central plaza -- a view like that at England's Stonehenge during similar conjunctions of earth and sun. On Moundbuilders Golf Course in Newark, Ohio, stands an earthen ring that is 15 centuries old. Its diameter is the same, 1,050 feet, as those of two more circles within 50 miles of Newark. Other precisely measured mounds in central Ohio include three 1,200-foot circles and five 27-acre squares. ''Such nice equivalences of shapes and sizes are not the work of savages,'' says Roger Kennedy, director of the Smithsonian's Museum of American History, who is writing a book entitled ''Medieval America.'' ''I doubt that the Harvard freshman class would be capable of similar intellectual achievement.'' Every explorer and early settler seemed to notice the aroma of America. Robert Beverley was awed by ''the pleasantest Smell'' of Virginia's giant magnolias. DeSoto's men admired Georgia's ''very savoury, palatable and fragrant'' strawberries. Henry Hudson paused in New York's harbor to enjoy the ''very sweet smells'' of grass and flowers on the New Jersey shore. But the visitors also smelled smoke. Many soon concluded that Indian women did all the work, while the men idled away their time hunting, fishing and setting the woods on fire. The native men, it turned out, were practicing a form of forest management that put food in their wigwams and longhouses. With torches and stone hatchets, the Nootkas and Haidas of the Pacific Northwest toppled giant redwoods and turned them into whaling canoes. In the eastern forests, Indians slashed and burned to clear the way for cornfields fertilized by the ashes and to create meadows for grazing deer and elk. Every autumn, Indians burned huge chunks of woodland to clear away underbrush. The sprouts that poked each spring through the charred ground boosted populations of game animals, which the Indians could easily spot in the open forests. The trees that survived flourished, too. Sycamores in Ohio grew seven feet in diameter, and the


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white pines of New England towered 200 to 250 feet. Governor's Island, now in the shadow of Manhattan's skyscrapers, had so many big hickory and walnut trees that the Dutch settlers called it Nut Island. Colonists enjoyed describing the country they settled as a ''howling wilderness'' -- a phrase from the Book of Jeremiah -- and in many places it was. Bamboo canebrakes, 20 to 30 feet high and impenetrable, stretched in parts of the Southeast for 100 miles or more, and tangles of brier and grapevines crowded the cottonwoods of the river bottoms. The forests were so boundless, the settlers liked to say, that a squirrel could travel from Maine to the Mississippi and never touch the ground. But wherever Indians hunted, the forest floor was usually clear, reminding one observer of ''our parks in England.'' 4 Early English settlers, accustomed to woods with only a few doves, were startled by the spectacle in America's skies. The colonists especially admired the green-and-gold Carolina parakeet, ''a fowle most swift of wing [and] very beautiful.'' Passenger pigeons passed in flocks ''for three or fourehoures ... so thicke they have shaddowed the skie from us.'' Out west, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark would see huge flocks of pelicans and sandhill cranes along the Missouri and dense clouds of geese over the Columbia River. Animals were bigger then. Pennsylvania trout, nearly 2 feet long, were easy targets for Algonquian arrows. Virginia sturgeon stretched 6 to 9 feet, and Mississippi catfish topped 120 pounds. Off Cape Cod, a few Indians could catch 30 lobsters in a half hour, some weighing 20 pounds, and many Massachusetts oysters had to be sliced into thirds to be swallowed. Bison roamed not only the Great Plains but also the meadows and open forests of Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia. The western bison were infinitely more numerous, thundering along in herds 25 miles long, but the woods buffalo was bigger and blacker with shorter hair and no hump. A few still remained in George Washington's time; he considered crossing them with domestic cattle. The white man's Bible taught that it is better to give than to receive, and the Indians couldn't agree more. Long after the Arawaks showered Columbus with birds, cloth and ''trifles too tedious to describe,'' natives were offering Europeans virtually anything they had, from fish and turkeys to persimmon bread and the companionship of a chief's daughter. Colonists interpreted the Indians' generosity as evidence they were childlike. That they had no desire to accumulate wealth was seen as a symptom of laziness. The Indians, concluded one New Englander, must develop a love of property. ''Wherever this can be established, Indians may be civilized; wherever it cannot, they will still remain Indians.'' The Indians felt quite civilized with what they did own, often things a Puritan wouldn't appreciate. Colorado's Pueblos kept parrots that came from Mexico. The Cayuse of Eastern Oregon swapped buffalo robes for the shells of coastal Indians. The Ottawas, whose name meant ''to trade,'' traveled the Great Lakes exchanging cornmeal, herbs, furs and tobacco. The Chinooks of the Northwest even developed their own trade jargon. Their word hootchenoo, for homemade liquor, eventually became the slang word ''hootch.'' Above all else, Indians were religious. They saw order in nature and obeyed elaborate sets of rules for fear of disturbing it. Land was to be shared, not owned, because it was sacred and belonged to everyone, like the air and sea. Animals also were precious. A hunter risked stirring the spirits if he killed two deer when one was all his tribe needed. Europe's view of nature, though rooted in religion, was much different. Man should subdue the Earth, Genesis dictated, ''and have dominion ... over every living thing.'' Rituals surrounded each important Indian event. To prove their courage, the Arikara of North Dakota danced barefoot on hot coals and, with bare hands, retrieved and devoured hunks of meat from pots of boiling water. Timucuan leaders started council meetings in Florida with a round of emetics brewed from holly leaves. The Hurons of the Great Lakes carried smoldering coals in their mouths to invoke a spirit to cure the sick. But often the rituals were painless. From New York to New Mexico, tradition allowed a woman to end 5 her marriage by putting her husband's belongings outside their door -- a sign for him to live with his mother. Three centuries before the U.S. Constitution took shape, the Iroquois League ran a Congress-like council, exercised the veto, protected freedom of speech and let women choose officeholders. The New Yorkers ran a classless society, as did many tribes across America. But ancient caste systems also endured. The Great Sun of the Natchez, a mound dweller like Cahokia's Great Sun, used his feet to push his leftovers to his noble subordinates. The nobles were not about to complain; below them was a class known as ''Stinkards.'' Besides, the chief's feet were clean. He was carried everywhere, a French guest reported, and his toes never touched ground.


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Columbus's second voyage -- the one in which Europeans came to stay -- began the process that changed nearly everything. Instead of 90 sailors on the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria as in 1492, Columbus set out in '93 with 1,200 men in 17 ships. In addition to starting the world's most significant movement of people, he delivered a Noah's Ark of animals unknown to the New World -- sheep, pigs, chickens, horses and cows -- plus a host of Old World diseases. What the Admiral of the Ocean Sea created was the Columbian Exchange, a global swap of animals, plants, people, ailments and ideas that historian Alfred Crosby calls ''the most important event in human history since the end of the Ice Age.'' For the Old World as well as the New, the event was both salubrious and calamitous. Twenty years after Columbus colonized Hispaniola -- the island now shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic -- diseases and taskmasters reduced its Arawaks from a quarter million down to 14,000. Within two centuries, Old World diseases killed probably two thirds of the New World's natives, and America did indeed seem empty. Africans also were dying by the thousands. They were brought to the New World to grow sugar, another import from the Old World. Yet, thanks to Columbus, Africa's population boomed. Corn, an American staple for thousands of years, augmented African diets, boosting the continent's birth rates and life spans. The same thing happened in Europe with the potato, also from America. The Columbian Exchange thickened Italy's sauces with tomatoes, seeded Kentucky with European bluegrass and covered the gullies of Georgia with Chinese kudzu. China, in return, became the globe's No.1 consumer of the American-born sweet potato. ''The Columbus story is not an Old World, New World story,'' explains Smithsonian historian Herman Viola, who heads the Museum of Natural History's Columbus Quincentenary programs. ''It is two old worlds that linked up, making one new world.'' It is also a story of winning and losing, with many of the losers gone before the winners ever showed up. When whites first penetrated the fertile Ohio Valley, they found many mounds but few Indians. The Southeast also seemed vacant when the French came to stay around 1700. As they moved into lands that abounded in natural food resources, the settlers kept wondering where the Indians had gone. Some scholars believe they were wiped out or chased away by epidemics of European diseases that moved north along Indian trade routes in the century after Columbus. Two years before DeSoto visited Cofitachequi's female chief in the 1540s, pestilence swept her province, decimating her town and emptying others nearby. In one village, the Spaniards found nothing but large houses full of bodies. It was the same medical disaster the conquistadors at that time 6 were discovering in Mexico and Peru and the Pilgrims would notice much later in Massachusetts. Four years before the Mayflower landed, disease killed tens of thousands of Indians on the New England coast, including the inhabitants of a village where Plymouth would stand. John Winthrop, admiring the abandoned cornfields, saw the epidemic as divine providence. ''God,'' he said, ''hath hereby cleared our title to this place.'' Indians in the forests shuddered every time they found honeybees in a hollow tree. The ''English flies'' moved 100 miles ahead of the frontier -- a sign that the white man was on his way. The smart tribes moved west, pushing whatever band was in their way. The Chippewas pushed the Sioux out of the woods of Minnesota into the Dakotas. The Sioux pushed the Cheyenne into Nebraska. The Cheyenne pushed the Kiowas into Oklahoma. Yet not every Indian fled. The Comanches, with horses descended from Columbus's stock, thwarted Spain's colonial designs on Texas with frequent raids on Spanish outposts. Apaches did the same thing in Arizona and New Mexico. Parts of Pennsylvania and New York today might be part of Quebec had the Iroquois rolled over for the French. Many who didn't move perished. A generation after their gifts of corn saved England's toehold settlement at Jamestown, the Powhatan Indians were systematically wiped out, their crops and villages torched by settlers who wanted more land to grow tobacco. Florida's Timucuas -- of whom it was said ''it would be good if among Christians there was as little greed to torment men's minds and hearts'' -- vanished in the early 19th century, victims of epidemics and conflicts with the Spanish, English and Creeks. Natchez's Great Sun wound up with his feet on the ground, enslaved in the West Indies by the French, who eradicated his tribe. California's Chumash shrank from 70,000 to 15,000 toiling for the friars. Soon after the Gold Rush, the tribe, like most in California, ceased to exist. The four-century clash of cultures made 2 of every 3 tribes as extinct as the Carolina parakeet. The land they left is different now. The white pines that towered over New England became masts for the Royal Navy's sailing ships. The redwoods that stretched from the Rockies to the Pacific, like the cypresses that


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crowded the Mississippi Valley, exist in pockets smaller than the Indians' shrunken reservations. The hours-long thunder of bison hooves no longer shakes Kansas or Nebraska, where only a few stretches of grassland remain like the prairie John Muir described a century ago -- ''one sheet of plant gold, hazy and vanishing in the distance.'' The prairie now feeds the nation with Old World food like wheat and pork. Yet at least one ancient American community endures. Shunning electricity, 3,000 Pueblo Indians live today in Acoma atop a mesa in the high New Mexico desert. The town's adobe apartments have been inhabited since the 12th century, through droughts, Apache raids and a brutal occupation in which the enslaving Spaniards chopped off one foot of each adult male. Acomans are reluctant to promote the fact that their settlement is nearly twice as old as St. Augustine, Fla., the Spanish-settled city that is generally considered the nation's oldest community. The people of Acoma figure they have had enough visitors.

Lord, Lewis, and Sarah Burke. "America Before Columbus." U.S. News and World Report 8 July 1991. MAS Ultra - School Edition.EBSCO.Valley High School Lib., West Des Moines, IA. 14 Aug. 2006 <http://search.ebscohost.com/>.


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Mighty CahokiaA major trading center whose influence extended throughout much of NorthAmerica, Cahokia was in its day the greatest settlement north of Mexico.William R. IsemingerWilliam R. Iseminger is an archaeologistand curator at Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site.

It is the time of the annual harvest festival celebrating the fall equinox. Traders from distant territories have brought

precious offerings for the lords of Cahokia.Ramadas have been erected everywhere to shelter the merchants and their goods: beads and other ornaments shaped from native copper; drinkingvessels and gorgets cut from large whelk and conch shells, many engraved with symbolic designs; baskets of tiny marginella shells; bangles cut from sheets of mica; quivers of arrows tipped with gem like points; galena, hematite, and ocher from which to make pigments for pottery, clothing and body paint; and salt from springs and seeps to the south. In exchange the Cahokians offer their own god: feathered capes; freshwater peark; finely woven fabrics; fir garments made from ottel; mink, and beaver; cherthoes and axes; and corn, dried squash, pumpkin, and seeds from many other plants. These will be taken back to distant places, some in polished black ceramic vessels bearing incised designs of interlocking scrolls, forked eyes, and nested hevrons, symbols of power and prestige because of their place of origin-mighty Cahokia.

This fanciful yet fairly accurate description of Cahokia's harvest celebration is drawn from archaeological studies and early historical accounts of remnant Mississippian cultures in the Southeast. Eight miles east of St. Louis, Cahokia was in its day the largest and most influential settlement north of Mexico. Its merchants traded with cultures from the Gulf Coast to the Great Lakes, from the Atlantic coast to Oklahoma, and they helped spread Mississippian culture across much of that vast area. Some 120 earthen mounds supporting civic buildings and the residences of Cahokia's elite were spread over more than five square miles perhaps six times as many earthen platforms as the great Mississippian site of Moundville, south of Tuscaloosa, Alabama. At its core, within a log stockade ten to 12 feet tall, was the 200-acre Sacred Precinct where the ruling elite lived and were buried.

Today Collinsville Road passes in front of Monks Mound, which is 100 feet high,covers 14 acres at its base, and contains 22 million cubic feet of earth.


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Atop a massive earthen mound stood a pole-framed temple more than 100 feet long, its grass roof possibly decorated with carved wooden animal figures festooned with glimmering beads, feathers, and cloth. Here Cahokia's rulers performed the political and religious rituals that united the realm. Estimates of the city's population at its zenith, ca. A.D. 1050-1 150, range from 8,000 to more than 40,000, though most fall between 10,000 and 20,000. Around A.D. 12b0, perhaps having exhausted its natural resources, Cahokia went into a decline that left it virtually empty by 1400.

Reconstruction of Cahokia at its apex shows (1) the 40-acre Grand Plaza, surrounded by temples and elite residences, within(2) a wooden stockade. Bordering the plaza are (3) Monks Mound and (4) the Twin Mounds. Outside the stockade is (5) theWoodhenge, where Cahokia's priests may have observed solstice and equinox sunrises, as well as houses of elite and less well-to-do inhabitants.

In 1810 the lawyer and journalist Henry Marie Brackenridge, while surveying the Mississippi and Missouri valleys, visited the site and marveled at the "stupendous pile of earth" at its center. At the time a colony of Trappist monks was growing wheat and fruit trees on the earthen structure, soon to be known as Monks Mound. Their plans to build a monastery atop it were abandoned when fever and a shortage of money forced them to leave the site in 1813. The first archaeological excavations at Cahokia took place in the 1920s under the direction of Warren K. Moorehead of the R. S. Peabody Museum in Andover, Massachusetts. Moorehead's work confirmed that the mounds were neither natural hills nor the work of a mysterious race of MoundBuilders or Pre-Columbian colonists from Europe—as imagined by nineteenth-century amateur historians but had been built byAmerican Indians. In the 1940s and 1950s archaeologists from the University of Michigan, the Illinois State Museum,The Gilcrease Institute of Tulsa, and elsewhere conducted scattered excavations at the site, but the most intensive work began in the early 1960s when Interstate 55-70 was routed through it. Over the years many of Cahokia's mounds have been lost to the bulldozer and the plow, to subdivisions, highways, and discount stores. Today fewer than 80 remain, 68 of which are preserved within the 2,200-acre Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, managed by the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency.

Cahokia owed its existence to a floodplain 80 miles long at the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. Knownas the American Bottom, the plain was interlaced with creeks, sloughs, lakes, and marshes. With fertile soil, extensive forests,and plentiful fish and game, the region was an ideal place to settle. During the Palaeoindian (ca. 9500-8000 B.C.) and Archaic (ca. 8000400 B.C.) periods transient hunter-gatherers set up temporary camps or seasonal villages here. During the Woodland period (ca. 600 B.C.-A.D. 800) the population grew, cultivation of native crops began, and larger and more settled communities, including Cahokia, were established. Settlements spread slowly and grew in size throughout the Emergent Mississippian period (ca. A.D. 800-1000), then expanded rapidly in the Mississippian (ca. A.D. 1000-1400) as more intense farming, especially


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of corn, made fast population growth possible. Cahokia reached its apex during this period, when it was surroundedby dozens of satellite settlements and scores of smaller villages.

In time, Cahokia's influence spread far beyond the American Bottom. Artifacts made there, including Ramey Incised pottery and hoes of Mill Creek chert from southern Illinois, have been found at sites as far north as Minnesota, as far west as eastern Kansas and Oklahoma, and as far south as the lower Ohio River Valley, Arkansas, and Mississippi. Local imitations of Cahokia's wares, especially pottery, have also been unearthed in these regions. At Cahokia itself we have found copper from thearea of Lake Superior; mica from the southern Appalachian Mountains; shells from the Atlantic and Gulf coasts; and galena, ocher, hematite, chert, fluorite, and quartz from throughout the Midwest. Finely made ceramics from the lower Mississippi Valley, perhaps used to carry exotic commodities such as shells from that area, have also been discovered at Cahokia, along with local copies of many of these forms.

The most visible remains of the ancient city are its mounds. Most are rectangular with flat tops (platform mounds) thatsupported civic buildings and the homes of the elite. Somewhat rarer are conical mounds that may have contained eliteburials, as they did in the earlier Woodland period. During the 1920s Moorehead excavated several such burials, but it isoften difficult to tell from his records whether they were found in the mounds themselves or in earlier layers.

Excavated between 1967 and 1971, Mound 72 contained the burials of about 280 people, including an elite male laid on a bedof some 20,000 shells (1). Nearby six people were interred with hundreds of arrowheads, beads, and other items (2). Four menburied without their heads and hands (3) and four mass graves of women (4-7) suggest human sacrifice. Mound 72 was originallythree separate smaller mounds (8-10) that were later incorporated into a single structure about 140 feet long, 70 feet wide, andsix feet tall.

Rarest of all are rectangular ridgetop mounds that may have marked important locations such as community boundaries or mortuary complexes. The destruction of one such mound by farmers in 1931 revealed mass burials laid upon platforms of shellbeads and cedar bark. Monks Mound stands at the center of the site, on the northern edge of the 40-acre Grand Plaza. Covering 14 acres at the base and rising in four terraces to a height of 100 feet, it is the largest prehistoric earthen structure in the New


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World. Some 19 million man-hours of labor would have been required to excavate, carry, and deposit the estimated 22 million cubic feet of earth needed for this project. Excavations and soil cores indicate that it was built in stages between ca. A.D. 900 and 1200, each possibly related to the accession of a new leader. Probes on the summit have revealed wall trenches for a wooden building 104 feet long and 48 feet wide. Here the leader of Cahokia governed his domain, performed ceremonies, consultedwith the spirit world, and may have resided as well. The bones of deceased chiefs may also have been stored here, as was the custom among some historical tribes in the Southeast.

One of the most fascinating discoveries at Cahokia came during the 1967-1971 excavation of Mound 72, a ridgetop one-halfmile south of Monks Mound. Measuring 140 feet long, 70 feet wide, and barely six feet high, Mound 72 is oriented along a northwest-southeast axis, one end pointing toward the winter solstice sunrise and the other toward the summer solstice sunset. Excavations revealed that it had originally been three separate, smaller mounds, two platforms and one conical. Around and beneath these three mounds were some 280 burials dating to Cahokia's initial development between ca. A.D. 1000 and 1050.Some of the dead had been borne to their graves on litters or wrapped in mats or blankets, while others had simply been tossed into pits, suggesting that people of different statuses were buried at the same place. Soon after the burials the three mounds were fused into a single ridgetop mound with a final mantle of earth.

In one opulent burial a man about 40 years old, perhaps one of Cahokia's early leaders, was laid upon a bird-shaped platformof nearly 20,000 marine-shell beads. Around him were several other bodies, perhaps of retainers or relatives, some interred for the first time and others reburied from elsewhere. Heaped atop six nearby burials were two caches of more than 800 newly ade arrowheads, whose Midwestern cherts and hafting styles suggest possible origins in Wisconsin, Illinois, Missouri, Tennessee,Arkansas, and Oklahoma. One cache included 15 large concave ground-stone discs, sometimes known as "chunkey" stones, after a game played with similar stones by historical tribes in the Southeast. Also found were a large pile of unprocessedmica from the southern Appalachian Mountains, a three-foot-long roll of copper (possibly a ceremonial staff) hammered from Lake Superior nuggets, and more marine-shell beads.

Further excavations under Mound 72 revealed several mass burials, most of females between 15 and 25 years old, suggesting human sacrifice. The largest pit held more than 50 women laid out in two rows and stacked two and three deep; two others contained 22 and 24 women. A fourth pit, with 19 women, had been partially redug, and more than 36,000 marine shell beads, another cache of unused arrowheads (more than 400 of chert and a few hundred more of bone and antler), and several broken ceramic vessels had been deposited there. Another burial, of four males whose heads and hands had been removed, may represent the ritual sacrifice of vassals or-retainers, perhaps to accompany their leader in death. How and why these people weresacrificed remain mysteries, but there may be parallels with rituals performed by the Natchez Indians of seventeenth-andeighteenth-century Mississippi, where individuals often volunteered to be sacrificed upon a leader's death to raise their own or their family's status.

In the early 1960s archaeologists working in the remains of a residential area outside the stockade, to the west of Monks Mound, discovered a number of postholes at regular intervals along the circumferences of at least five circles of different diameters. Four of these constructions are thought to have been complete circles, with 24,36,48, and 60 posts, respectively. The fifth seems only to have had 12 posts standing along a portion of the circle; if complete it would have had 72. Why all five circles were formed of multiples of twelve posts is unknown, though some scholars have speculated that the number may have been related to lunar cycles. Because of their resemblance to the famous English megalithic Monument of Stonehenge, Cahokia's circles of standing wooden posts became known as "woodhenges." One, with a large center post and 48 evenly spacedperimeter posts, was 410 feet in diameter and dates to just after A.D. 1100. It is the most completely excavated of thewoodhenges and has been reconstructed in its original location. From a platform atop the central post a priest might haveobserved sunrises along the eastern horizon aligning with particular perimeter posts at the equinoxes and solstices. Onthe equinoxes the sun would have risen over the front of Monks Mound, perhaps symbolizing the bond between earthly ruler and solar deity. Other posts may have marked other important dates, such as harvest festivals or moon and star alignments.


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Most of the work at Cahokia has dealt with the everyday life of its people, many of whom lived outside the stockade in small, rectangular one-family pole-and-thatch dwellings with walls covered with mats or sometimes daub. Compounds of these dwellings grouped around small courtyards may have housed kinfolk. Each compound also included buildings used for storage, food processing, and cooking. Excavation of refuse pits around the houses has revealed that the Cahokians ate mainly cultivated corn, squash, and pumpkin, as well as the seeds of cultivated sunflower, lambs' quarters, marsh elder, little barley, and may grass. This diet was supplemented by hundreds of different wild plants and mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, and amphibians.Household groups were in turn arranged around larger communal plazas that may have defined neighborhoods. Other structures found in each neighborhood included small circular sweat lodges, where water sprinkled upon heated rocks produced steam for ritual cleansing of the body and spirit; community meeting lodges, granaries, and storage buildings; and possibly huts to which women would have been restricted during menstruation.

Ceremonial structures, special-use buildings, and the dwellings of the elite were generally larger versions of the basic house. Many of the elite must have lived within the stockade, but so far none of their residences has been excavated. Elite areas outside the wall include a plaza mound group to the west; another group to the east; Rattlesnake Mound (named for the snakes in the area) to the south; and the North Plaza and Kunnemann (named after a family that once owned the land) groups to the north. Wedo not know whether the elite living outside the stockade differed from those living inside, although relationship to the leader by lineage or clan affiliation may have been a factor.

Evidence for warfare at Cahokia remains largely circumstantial. A stockade was erected around the Sacred Precinct ca. A.D. 1150 and rebuilt at least three times during the next hundred years. The defensive nature of the wall is suggested by the regular spacing of bastions at 85-foot intervals along its length. From elevated platforms in these projections, warriors could launch arrows at attackers and protect the narrow L-shaped entryways between some bastions. The everyday function of the wall may


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have been more social, to isolate and protect the Sacred Precinct. Free access may have been limited to the elites who lived there, probably members of the ruling lineage, with the general population admitted only for ceremonial occasions or markets, or in times of war.

The stockade was a monumental construction, built at a great cost of time, labor, and materials. Much of my own fieldwork at Cahokia has involved excavations along the lines of the stockade east of Monks Mound. Based on that work I have estimated that builders would have used nearly 20,000 logs each time the wall was built, and conservatively 130,000 man-hours to fell, trim, debark, transport, and place the posts in excavated trenches. Construction of the stockade, itself designed to protect the city center, may have contributed to Cahokia's decline beginning ca. A.D. 1200. The demands for wood would have been staggering, even for such a renewable resource. Wood was also needed for fires and construction, and people from nearby communities would have been competing for the same resources. The forests around Cahokia, and the animals and plants livingthere, would have been affected. Soil eroding from deforested slopes may have clogged streams and lakes with silt, increasing localized flooding of valuable farmland.

Beginning in the thirteenth century, a cooling of the climate and concomitant floods, droughts, and early and late frosts may have led to more crop failures and reduced yields. As food and other natural resources became scarce, economic disruption and social unrest could have become problems, perhaps even leading to wars between Cahokia and its neighbors. Eventually its political and economic power base eroded as nearby groups became more autonomous. Although increases in contagious diseases and nutritional deficiencies caused by a heavily corn-based diet may have affected Cahokia's population, more dataare needed to determine the role of such health problems in Cahokia's decline. Where the people of Cahokia went is one of the site's many mysteries. There is no evidence that the city was destroyed in a single catastrophe. It appears that its people slowly dispersed, breaking up into smaller groups, some establishing new communities and perhaps new ways of life elsewhere. Many small Late Mississippian villages and hamlets have been found in the uplands surrounding the American Bottom and at higher elevations in the bottomlands themselves. Other people may have been absorbed into existing groups elsewhere, possiblywhere kinship ties already existed. In any event Cahokia was abandoned by 1400, and no positive ties have been establishedbetween the great city and any historical tribe.

Because of limited funding and the site's enormous size, only a small percentage of Cahokia has been excavated. Research continues through small field-school programs that include nondestructive remote-sensing projects using electromagnetic conductivity, electrical resistivity, and magnetometry, as well as soil coring. These efforts help locate man-made features underground, providing direction for future small-scale excavations. Detailed mapping projects, combined with soil-core studies, are helping identify the original forms of mounds that have suffered from heavy plowing or erosion. Unpublished data from earlier excavations are being analyzed or reexamined and the results published. In addition, salvage projects at contemporary sites in the American Bottom such as East St. Louis, are providing insight into Cahokia's interactions with these outlying sites.

Though I have worked at Cahokia for 25 years, I still marvel at what I see. It is an awesome site, massive and mysterious,especially in the predawn hours as I drive past the dark shapes of mounds poking through ground-hugging mist on my way to greet modern-day solstice and equinox observers at the reconstructed woodhenge. Cahokia, the largest prehistoric community north of Mexico, was one of the crowning achievements of the American Indians. Here they established a complex social, political, religious, and economic system and influenced a large portion of the midcontinent. Today, as then, the climb tothe top of Monks Mound is breathtaking, literally as well as figuratively, and looking out from the summit one can only imagine what this truly extraordinary place must have been like.


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Columbus - Hero or Villain?By Felipe Armesto | Published in History TodayVolume: 42 Issue: 5 [Felipe Fernandez-Armesto weighs up the case for and against the Genovese explorer, finding a Columbus for all seasons.]This year, his statue in Barcelona exchanged symbolic rings with the Statue of Liberty in New York; meanwhile, the descendants of slaves and peons will burn his effigy. In a dream-painting by Salvador Dali, Columbus takes a great step for mankind, toga-clad and cross-bearing – while a sail in the middle distance drips with blood. The Columbus of tradition shares a single canvas with the Columbus of fashion, the culture-hero of the western world with the bogey who exploited his fellow-man and despoiled his environment. Both versions are false and, if historians had their way, the quincentennial celebrations ought to stimulate enough educational work and research to destroy them, Instead, the polemical atmosphere seems to be reinforcing a partipris positions.It is commonly said that the traditional Columbus myth – which awards him personal credit for anything good that ever came out of America since 1492 – originated in the War of Independence, when the founding fathers, in search of an American hero, pitched on the Genoese weaver as the improbable progenitor of all-American virtues. Joel Barlow's poem, The Vision of Columbus, appeared in 1787, Columbus remained a model for nineteenth-century Americans, engaged in a project for taming their own wilderness. Washington Irving's perniciously influential History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus of 1828 – which spread a lot of nonsense including the ever-popular folly that Columbus was derided for claiming that the world was round – appealed unashamedly to Americans' self-image as promoters of civilisation.Yet aspects of the myth are much older – traceable to Columbus' own times and, to a large extent, to his own efforts. He was a loquacious and indefatigable self-publicist, who bored adversaries into submission and acquired a proverbial reputation for using more paper than Ptolemy. The image he projected was that of a providential agent, the divinely-elected 'messenger of a new heaven', chosen to bear the light of the gospel to unevangelised recesses of the earth – the parts which other explorers could not reach. His plan for an Atlantic crossing 'God revealed to me by His manifest hand'. Playing on his Christian name, he called himself 'Christo ferens' and compiled a book of what he said were biblical prophecies of his own discoveries. Enough contemporaries were convinced by his gigantic self-esteem for him to become literally a legend in his own lifetime. To a leading astrological guru at the court of Spain, he was 'like a new apostle'. To a humanist from Italy who taught the would-be Renaissance men of Castile, he was 'the sort of whom the ancients made gods'.From his last years, his reputation dipped: writers were obliged to belittle him in the service of monarchs who were locked in legal conflict with Columbus' family over the level of reward he had earned. Yet his own self-perception was passed on to posterity by influential early books. Bartolome de Las Casas - Columbus' editor and historian - professed a major role for himself in the apostolate of the New World and heartily endorsed Columbus' self-evaluation as an agent of God's purpose. Almost as important was the Historiedell’Ammiragijo, which claimed to be a work of filial piety and therefore presented Columbus as an unblemished hero, with an imputed pedigree to match his noble soul.Claims to having access to a divine hot-line are by their nature unverifiable. Demonstrably false was the second element in Columbus' self- made myth: his image of tenacity in adversity - a sort of Mein Kampf version of his life, in which he waged a long, lone and unremitting struggle against the ignorance and derision of contemporaries. This theme has echoed through the historical tradition. That 'they all laughed at Christopher Columbus' has been confirmed by modern doggerel. Vast books have been wasted in an attempt to explain his mythical perseverance by ascribing to him 'secret' foreknowledge of the existence of America. Yet almost all the evidence which underlies it comes straight out of Columbus' own propaganda, according to which he was isolated, ignored, victimised and persecuted, usually for the numinous span of 'seven' years; then, after fulfilling his destiny, to the great profit of his detractors he was returned to a wilderness of contumely and neglect, unrewarded by the standard of his deserts, in a renewed trial of faith.

These passages of autobiography cannot be confirmed by the facts. The documented length of his quest for patronage was less than five years. Throughout that time he built up a powerful lobby of moral supporters at the Castilian court and financial backers in the business community of Seville. His own protestations of loneliness are usually qualified by an


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admission that he was unsupported 'save for' one or two individuals. When added together, these form an impressive cohort, which includes at least two archbishops, one court astrologer, two royal confessors, one royal treasurer and the queen herself. In his second supposed period of persecution, he was an honoured figure, loaded with titles, received at court, consulted by the crown and - despite his woebegone protestations of poverty - amply moneyed.

The explanation of the image of Columbus-as-victim must be sought in his character, not in his career. He was what would now be called a whinger, who relished his own misfortunes as good copy and good theatre. When he appeared at court in chains, or in a friar's habit, he was playing the role of victim for all it was worth. His written lamentations - which cover many folios of memoranda, supplications and personal letters - are thick with allusions to Jeremiah and Job. The notions of patience under suffering and of persecution for righteousness' sake fitted the hagiographical model on which much of his self-promotional writing was based: a flash of divine enlightenment; a life transformed; consecration to a cause; unwavering fidelity in adversity.The most successful promotional literature is believed by its own propagators. To judge from his consistency, Columbus believed in his own image of himself. It is not surprising that most readers of his works, from Las Casas onwards, have been equally convinced. Columbus seems to have been predisposed to self-persuasion by saturation in the right literary models: saints, prophets and heroes of romance. Despite his astonishing record of achievement, and his impressive accumulation of earthly rewards, he had an implacable temperament which could never be satisfied, and an unremitting ambition which could never be assuaged. Such men always think themselves hard done by. His extraordinary powers of persuasion - his communicator's skills which won backing for an impossible project in his lifetime - have continued to win followers of his legend ever since his death.Like Columbus-the-hero, Columbus-the-villain is also an old character in a long literary tradition. Most of the denunciations of him written in his day have not survived but we can judge their tenor from surviving scraps. The usual complaints against servants of the Castilian crown in the period are made: he acted arbitrarily in the administration of justice; he exceeded his powers in enforcing his authority; he usurped royal rights by denying appeal to condemned rebels; he alienated crown property without authorisation; he deprived privileged colonists of offices or perquisites; he favoured his own family or friends; he lined his pockets at public expense. In the course of what seems to have been a general campaign against Genoese employees of the crown in the late 1490s, he was 'blamed as a foreigner' and accused of 'plotting to give the island of Hispaniola to the Genoese'.Other allegations attacked his competence rather than his good faith, generally with justice. It was true, for instance, that he had selected an unhealthy and inconvenient site for the settlement of Hispaniola; that he had disastrously misjudged the natives' intentions in supposing them to be peaceful; and that his proceedings had so far alienated so many colonists that by the time of his removal in 1500 it was a missionary's opinion that the colony would never be at peace if he were allowed back. All these complaints reflect the priorities of Spaniards and the interests of the colonists and of the crown. There were, however, some charges against Columbus which anticipated the objections of modern detractors, who scrutinise his record from the natives' point of view, or who look at it from the perspective of fashionably ecological priorities.First, there was the issue of Columbus' activities as a slaver. Coming from a Genoese background, Columbus never understood Spanish scruples about slavery, which had been characterised as an unnatural estate in the most influential medieval Spanish law-code, and which the monarchs distrusted as a form of intermediate lordship that reserved subjects from royal jurisdiction, Castilian practice was, perhaps, the most fastidious in Christendom. The propriety of slavery was acknowledged in the cases of captives of just war and offenders against natural law; but such cases were reviewed with rigour and in the royal courts, at least, decision-making tended to be biased in favour of the alleged slaves.Shortly before the discovery of the New World, large numbers of Canary Islanders, enslaved by a conquistador on the pretext that they were 'rebels against their natural lord' had been pronounced free by a judicial inquiry commissioned by the crown, and liberated, in cases contested by their 'owners', in a series of trials. This does not seem, however, to have alerted Columbus to the risks of slap-happy slaving.Although the ferocious Caribs of the Lesser Antilles were generally deemed to be lawful victims of enslavement (since the cannibalism imputed to them seemed an obvious offence against natural law) Columbus" trade was chiefly in Arawaks, who, by his own account, were rendered exempt by their amenability to evangelisation. By denying that the


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Arawaks were idolatrous, Columbus exonerated them of the one possible charge which might, in the terms of the time, be considered an 'unnatural' offence. Even when the monarchs reproved him and freed the Arawaks he sold, Columbus was astonishingly slow on the uptake. In a colony where the yield of other profitable products was disappointing, he traded slaves to allay the colony's grievous problems of supply. 'And although at present they die on shipment,' he continued, 'this will not always be the case, for the Negroes and Canary Islanders reacted in the same way at first'. In one respect, contemporary criticisms of the traffic differed from those made today. The friars and bureaucrats who denounced Columbus for it did so not because it was immoral, but because it was unlawful.Slavery was only one among many ills which Columbus was said to have inflicted on the natives. The current myth incriminates him with 'genocide'. In the opinion of one soi-disant Native American spokesman, 'he makes Hitler look like a juvenile delinquent'. This sort of hype is doubly unhelpful: demonstrably false, it makes the horrors of the holocaust seem precedented and gives comfort to Nazi apologists making 'genocide' an unshocking commonplace. Though he was often callous and usually incompetent in formulating indigenist policy, the destruction of the natives was as far removed from Columbus' thoughts as from his interests. The Indians, he acknowledged, were 'the wealth of this land'. Their conservation was an inescapable part of any rational policy for their exploitation. Without them the colony would have no labour resources. At a deeper level of Columbus' personal concerns, they were the great glory of his discovery: their evangelisation justified it and demonstrated its place in God's plans for the world, even if the material yield was disappointing to his patrons and backers. And Columbus had enough sense to realise that a large and contented native population was, as the monarchs said, their 'chief desire' for his colony. 'The principal thing which you must do,' he wrote to his first deputy,is to take much care of the Indians, that no ill nor harm may be done them, nor anything taken from them against their will, but rather that they be honoured and feel secure and so should have no cause to rebel.Though no contemporary was so foolish as to accuse Columbus of wilfully exterminating Indians, it was widely realised that his injunctions were often honoured in the breach and that his own administrative regulations sometimes caused the natives harm. The missionaries almost unanimously regarded him as an obstacle to their work, though the only specific crime against the natives to survive among their memoranda – that 'he took their women and all their property' – is otherwise undocumented. The imposition of forced labour and of unrealistic levels of tribute were disastrous policies, which diverted manpower from food-growing and intensified the 'culture-shock' under which indigenous society reeled and tottered, though Columbus claimed they were expedients to which he was driven by economic necessity.

Some contemporaries also condemned the sanguinary excesses of his and his brother's punitive campaigns in the interior of Hispaniola in 1495-96. It should be said in Columbus' defence, however, that he claimed to see his own part as an almost bloodless pacification and that the 50,000 deaths ascribed to these campaigns in the earliest surviving account were caused, according to the same source, chiefly by the Indians' scorched-earth strategy. The outcome was horrible enough, but Columbus' treatment of the Indians inflicted catastrophe on them rather by mistakes than by crimes. In general, he was reluctant to chastise them – refusing, for instance, to take punitive measures over the massacre of the first garrison of Hispaniola; and he tried to take seriously the monarchs' rather impractical command to 'win them by love'.It would be absurd to look for environmental sensitivity of a late twentieth-century kind in Columbus' earliest critics. Yet the accusation of over-exploitation of the New World environment, which is at the heart of the current, ecologically-conscious anti-Columbus mood, was also made before the fifteenth century was quite over. According to the first missionaries, members of Columbus' family were 'robbing and destroying the land' in their greed for gold. Though he declined to accept personal responsibility, Columbus detected a similar problem when he denounced his fellow-colonists' exploitative attitude: unmarried men, with no stake in the success of the colony and no intention of permanent residence, should be excluded, he thought. They merely mulcted the island for what they could get before rushing home to Castile.

The danger of deforestation from the demand for dye-stuffs, building materials and fuel was quickly recognised. The diversion of labour from agriculture to gold-panning aroused friars' moral indignation. The usefulness of many products of the indigenous agronomy was praised by Columbus and documented by the earliest students of the pharmacopoeia and florilegium of the New World. The assumption that there was an ecological 'balance' to be disturbed at hazard was, of course, impossible, On the contrary, everyone who arrived from the Old World assumed that the natural resources had to be supplemented with imported products to provide a balanced diet, a civilised environment and resources for trade. The modifications made by Columbus and his successors were intended, from their point of view, to improve, not to destroy.


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They introduced sources of protein – like livestock; comforts of home – like wheat really disastrous is hard to judge dispassionately. The loss of population in the early colonial period was probably due to other causes. In the long run, colonial Hispaniola proved able to maintain a large population and a spectacular material culture.Since it was first broached in Columbus' day, the debate about the morality of the colonisation of the New World has had three intense periods: in the sixteenth century, when the issues of the justice of the Spanish presence and the iniquity of maltreatment of the natives were raised by religious critics and foreign opportunists; in the late eighteenth century, when Rousseau and Dr Johnson agreed in preferring the uncorrupted wilderness which was thought to have preceded colonisation; and in our own day. Until recently, Columbus managed largely to avoid implication in the sins of his successors. Las Casas revered him, and pitied, rather than censured, the imperfections of his attitude to the natives. Eighteenth-century sentimentalists regretted the colonial experience as a whole, generally without blaming Columbus for it. This was fair enough. Columbus' own model of colonial society seems to have derived from Genoese precedents: the trading factory, merchant quarter and family firm. The idea of a 'total' colony, with a population and environment revolutionised by the impact and image of the metropolis, seems to have been imposed on him by his Castilian masters. In making him personally responsible for everything which followed – post hunc ergo propter hunc – his modern critics have followed a convention inaugurated by admirers, who credited Columbus with much that was nothing to do with him – including, most absurdly of all – the culture of the present United States. Columbus never touched what was to become US territory except in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. The values which define the 'American ideal' – personal liberty, individualism, freedom of conscience, equality of opportunity and representative democracy – would have meant nothing to him.Columbus deserves the credit or blame only for what he actually did: which was to discover a route that permanently linked the shores of the Atlantic and to contribute – more signally, perhaps, than any other individual – to the long process by which once sundered peoples of the world were brought together in a single network of communications, which exposed them to the perils and benefits of mutual contagion and exchange. Whether or not one regards this as meritorious achievement, there was a genuine touch of heroism in it – both in the scale of its effects and in the boldness which inspired it. There had been many attempts to cross the Atlantic in central latitudes, but all – as far as we know – failed because the explorers clung to the zone of westerly winds in an attempt to secure a passage home. Columbus was the first to succeed precisely because he had the courage to sail with the wind at his back.Historians, it is often said, have no business making moral judgements at all. The philosophy of the nursery school assembly, in which role-models and culprits are paraded for praise or reproof, seems nowadays to belong to a hopelessly antiquated sort of history, for which the reality of the past mattered less than the lessons for the present and the future. A great part of the historian's art is now held to consist in what the examiners call 'empathy' – the ability to see the past with the eyes, and to re-construct the feelings, of those who took part in it. If value judgements are made at all, they ought at least to be controlled by certain essential disciplines. First, they must be consistent with the facts: it is unhelpful to accuse of 'genocide', for instance, a colonial administrator who was anxious for the preservation of the native labour force. Secondly, they should be made in the context of the value-system of the society scrutinised, at the time concerned. It would be impertinent to expect Columbus to regard slavery as immoral, or to uphold the equality of all peoples. Conquistadors and colonists are as entitled to be judged from the perspective of moral relativism as are the cannibals and human-sacrificers of the indigenous past. Thirdly, moral judgements should be expressed in language tempered by respect for the proper meanings of words. Loose talk of 'genocide' twists a spiral to verbal hype. Useful distinctions are obliterated; our awareness of the real cases, when they occur, is dulled.

Finally, when we presume to judge someone from a long time ago, we should take into account the practical constraints under which they had to operate, and the limited mental horizons by which they were enclosed. Columbus was in some ways a man of extraordinary vision with a defiant attitude to the art of the possible. Yet he could not anticipate the consequences of his discovery or of the colonial enterprise confided to him. Five hundred years further on, with all our advantages of hindsight, we can only boast a handful of 'successful' colonial experiments – in the United States, Siberia, Australia and New Zealand – in all of which the indigenous populations have been exterminated or swamped. The Spanish empire founded by Columbus was strictly unprecedented and, in crucial respects, has never been paralleled. The problems of regulating such vast dominions, with so many inhabitants, so far away, and with so few resources, were unforeseeable and proved unmanageable. Never had so many people been conquered by culture-shock or their immune-systems invaded by irresistible disease. Never before had such a challenging environment been so suddenly transformed


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in an alien image. In these circumstances, it would be unreasonable to expect Columbus' creation to work well. Like Dr Johnson's dog, it deserves some applause for having performed at all.

So which was Columbus: hero or villain? The answer is that he was neither but has become both. The real Columbus was a mixture of virtues and vices like the rest of us, not conspicuously good or just, but generally well-intentioned, who grappled creditably with intractable problems. Heroism and villainy are not, however, objective qualities. They exist only in the eye of the beholder.

In images of Columbus, they are now firmly impressed on the retinas of the upholders of rival legends and will never be expunged. Myths are versions of the past which people believe in for irrational motives – usually because they feel good or find their prejudices confirmed. To liberal or ecologically conscious intellectuals, for instance, who treasure their feelings of superiority over their predecessors, moral indignation with Columbus is too precious to discard. Kinship with a culture-hero is too profound a part of many Americans' sense of identity to be easily excised.Thus Columbus-the-hero and Columbus-the-villain live on, mutually sustained by the passion which continuing controversy imparts to their supporters. No argument can dispel them, however convincing; no evidence, however compelling. They have eclipsed the real Columbus and, judged by their effects, have outstripped him in importance. For one of the sad lessons historians learn is that history is influenced less by the facts as they happen than by the falsehoods men believe.


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