360• GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL
in Eurasia were largely confined to the Arctic reindeer herders, the Siberian hunter-gatherers, and the hunter-gatherer enclaves in the Indian subcontinent and tropical Southeast Asia.
The Americas had two empires, those of the Aztecs and Incas, which resembled their Eurasian counterparts in size, population, polyglot makeup, official religions, and origins in the conquest of smaller states. In the Americas those were the sole two political units capable of mobilizing resources for public works or war on the scale of many Eurasian states, whereas seven European states (Spain, Portugal, England, France, Holland, Sweden, and Denmark) had the resources to acquire American colonies between 1492 and 1666. The Americas also held many chiefdoms (some of them virtually small states) in tropical South America, Meso-america beyond Aztec rule, and the U.S. Southeast. The rest of the Americas was organized only at the tribal or band level.
The last proximate factor to be discussed is writing. Most Eurasian states had literate bureaucracies, and in some a significant fraction of the populace other than bureaucrats was also literate. Writing empowered European societies by facilitating political administration and economic exchanges, motivating and guiding exploration and conquest, and making available a range of information and human experience extending into remote places and times. In contrast, use of writing in the Americas was confined to the elite in a small area of Mesoamerica. The Inca Empire employed an accounting system and mnemonic device based on knots (termed quipu), but it could not have approached writing as a vehicle for transmitting detailed information.
THUS, eurasian societies in the time of Columbus enjoyed big advantages over Native American societies in food production, germs, technology (including weapons), political organization, and writing. These were the main factors tipping the outcome of the post-Columbian collisions. But those differences as of a.d. 1492 represent just one snapshot of historical trajectories that had extended over at least 13,000 years in the Americas, and over a much longer time in Eurasia. For the Americas, in particular, the 1492 snapshot captures the end of the independent trajectory of Native Americans. Let us now trace out the earlier stages of those trajectories.
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Table 18-1 summarizes approximate dates of the appearance of key developments in the main "homelands" of each hemisphere (the Fertile Crescent and China in Eurasia, the Andes and Amazonia and Mesoamerica the Americas). It also includes the trajectory for the minor New World homeland of the eastern United States, and that for England, which Ot a homeland at all but is listed to illustrate how rapidly developments
spread from the Fertile Crescent.
This table is sure to horrify any knowledgeable scholar, because it reduces exceedingly complex histories to a few seemingly precise dates. In reality, all of those dates are merely attempts to label arbitrary points along a continuum. For example, more significant than the date of the first metal tool found by some archaeologist is the time when a significant fraction of all tools was made of metal, but how common must metal tools be to rate as "widespread"? Dates for the appearance of the same development may differ among different parts of the same homeland. For instance, within the Andean region pottery appears about 1,300 years earlier in coastal Ecuador (3100 b.c.) than in Peru (1800 b.c.). Some dates, such as those for the rise of chiefdoms, are more difficult to infer from the archaeological record than are dates of artifacts like pottery or metal tools. Some of the dates in Table 18.1 are very uncertain, especially those for the onset of American food production. Nevertheless, as long as one understands that the table is a simplification, it is useful for comparing continental histories.
The table suggests that food production began to provide a large fraction of human diets around 5,000 years earlier in the Eurasian homelands than in those of the Americas. A caveat must be mentioned immediately: while there is no doubt about the antiquity of food production in Eurasia, there is controversy about its onset in the Americas. In particular, archaeologists often cite considerably older claimed dates for domesticated plants at Coxcatlan Cave in Mexico, at Guitarrero Cave in Peru, and at some other American sites than the dates given in the table. Those claims are now being reevaluated for several reasons: recent direct radiocarbon dat-mg of crop remains themselves has in some cases been yielding younger ates; the older dates previously reported were based instead on charcoal ought to be contemporaneous with the plant remains, but possibly not so, and the status of some of the older plant remains as crops or just as co lected wild plants is uncertain. Still, even if plant domestication did egm earlier in the Americas than the dates shown in Table 18.1, agricul-
3 6 1 •GUNS,GERMS, AND STEEL
table18.1 Historical Trajectories of Eurasia and the Americas
Approximate Date of Adoption
Eurasia
Fertile Crescent
China
England
Plant domestication
8500 b.c.
by 7500 b.c.
3500 b.c.
Animal domestication
8000 b.c.
by 7500 b.c.
3500 b.c.
Pottery
7000 b.c.
by 7500 b.c.
3500 b.c.
Villages
9000 b.c.