Charles C. Mann, the author of "1491," talks about the thriving and sophisticated Indian landscape of the pre-Columbus Americas
"What is clear from oral history accounts is that Europeans who arrived early on found busy, thriving societies. When John Smith visited Massachusetts in 1614, he wrote that the land was "so planted with Gardens and Corne fields, and so well inhabited with a goodly, strong and well proportioned people ... [that] I would rather live here than any where." But by the time the colonists reached Plymouth in the Mayflower six years later, they found one deserted village after another—the Indians had been felled by European diseases to which they had little resistance. Mann writes,
All through the coastal forest the Indians had "died on heapes, as they lay in their houses," the English trader Thomas Morton noted. "And the bones and skulls upon the severall places of their habitations made such a spectacle" that to Morton the Massachusetts woods seemed to be "a new found Golgotha"—the hill of executions in Roman Jerusalem.
The debate over how many Indians lived in the Americas will perhaps never be settled—there is too little archaeological evidence..."
Perhaps decolonizing the Stone Wall Myth might change that thought about "too little archaeological evidence." Recognizing the Sacred Ceremonial Stone Landscape of the eastern gate of Turtle Island is a first step to understanding that these "stone walls" are the largest pieces of archaeological evidence, long misidentified, but in plain sight, snaking across the scarred landscape, watching...
Perhaps decolonizing the Stone Wall Myth might change that thought about "too little archaeological evidence." Recognizing the Sacred Ceremonial Stone Landscape of the eastern gate of Turtle Island is a first step to understanding that these "stone walls" are the largest pieces of archaeological evidence, long misidentified, but in plain sight, snaking across the scarred landscape, watching...
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