GEOG 3515

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GEOG 3515

• The Geography of South America

Class 9 Native South Americans
2
Some Class Questions

• Llama, Vicuna and Alpaca are separate species
  all of the camel family (see box 7.1).
• There is a fourth Camelidae in the Andes the
  guanaco.
• The llama and the alpaca were domesticated the
  former mostly for transport and the latter for
  its wool.
• The vicuna remained wild, hunted for meat and
  seasonally captured and sheared for wool.
• The guanaco was widely hunted for meat and only a
  few remain in the isolated Tierra del Fuego.
• Brasil The name Brazil is derived from the
  Portuguese and Spanish word brasil, the name of
  an East Indian tree with reddish-brown wood from
  which a red dye was extracted. The Portuguese
  found a New World tree related to the Old World
  brasil tree when they explored what is now called
  Brazil, and as a result they named the New World
  country after the Old World tree (American
  Heritage Dictionary).

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Encounters With Natives

• Writings dating back to the arrival of the
  conquistadores and padres remarked on both the
  size and the sophistication of many of the native
  populations.
• Little direct evidence exists of the numbers of
  indigenous peoples in the New World all
  estimates must be inferred from secondary
  information such as archaeological findings.
• Estimates are inconsistent and are politically
  charged, since they carry different meanings with
  respect to a) the relative level of development
  of the colonizers and colonized b) the magnitude
  of the impact that the colonizers had in
  decimating the native peoples.
• Three of the more widely quoted estimates show
  the extremes 12.4m (Rosenblat 1954), 53.9m
  (Denevan 1992) or 80.2-100.3m (Dobyns 1966)
  note that the population of Iberia in 1500 was
  about 7m (Encyclopedia of World History).

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More than we think?

• While scholars argue about the actual numbers,
  the competency to support large numbers of people
  as a result of agricultural sophistication is not
  disputed.
• Native Americans had domesticated a wide range of
  highland and lowland crops and a number of
  animals for meat and fiber such that they could
  produce food in almost all the major bioregions.
• Farming technology was extensive with both
  irrigation and drainage systems designed to
  exploit both seasonally dry lands and poorly
  drained areas.
• Hillsides were terraced around mountain towns,
  and in many area, there is evidence of continuous
  cultivation of the same fields over thousands of
  years without apparent decline.

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Social Arrangement

• Scholars suggest that at the time of Columbus
  arrival, the New World contained as many as 5,000
  distinct ethnic groups differentiated by dialect,
  social arrangement, customs and other important
  characteristics.
• While distinct, there appears to have been
  extensive interaction in the form of trade and
  cultural diffusion, especially between the four
  principal mountain peoples from the Aztecs in
  Mexico north and south up and down through the
  Mayan, Chibcha and Inca.
• Recognizing that a grouping suggests greater
  similarity and difference, most scholars
  separately characterize the Highland dwellers in
  the Western Alpine system from the Lowland
  dwellers in the Eastern plains and plateaus.

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Geography of Pre-Colombian Indigenous Peoplesat
time of Conquistadores
Carib
Chibcha
Arawak
Tupí
Gê
Inca
Tupí
Guaraní
Charrúa
Araucanian
Puelche
Tehuelche
Chono
Ona
Alacaluf
Yahgan
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Native Highland Peoples

Inca Central/Southern Andes
Maya Central America
Chibcha Northern Andes
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Highland v Lowland

• The Western Highland peoples were characterized
  by relatively dense and highly advanced
  population centers whereas the Eastern Lowland
  and Highland (plateau) peoples were organized in
  low population densities with more modest social
  organization and material achievement.
• The Western Highlands agricultural base was
  different, with a range of different crop types
  domesticated in and suited to the corresponding
  region (see Table 7.2).
• Many of the Eastern Lowland peoples were
  hunter-gatherers whereas the Western Highlands
  were sedentary agriculturalists.

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The Inca

• The largest, and most advanced group in South
  America at the time of the Conquistadores arrival
  were the Inca.
• With a territory that covered 4,000km (2,500 mi)
  of the Andes, the small Inca tribe that had
  settled in Cuzco had expanded since the mid 1200s
  to subdue the Aymarans and other groups and
  establish military and administrative centers
  from Ecuador down through Chile.
• The Inca were governed by a hierarchy based on
  family groupings, with leaders governing
  associations of families from 40,000 down to 10.
  Those leaders from smaller groupings of families
  reported to the leaders of the larger groupings.
• They shared a common language Quechua.

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Incan Empire
Valley of Cuzco today
The temple city of Machu Pichu
Incans possessed advanced masonry and
architectural skills
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South America and the area of the Inca Empire at
the time of the conquest
The Inca population at its peak was thought to be
around 6 million (useful web site at
http//www.crystalinks.com/incan.html)
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The mita

• Leaders were selected by the Inca rulers and
  trained in the language and customs of the ruling
  classes at Cuzco, especially the taxing of mita
  communal labor contributions to the rulers for
  their wealth creating and public works projects.
• Family kinship was key in structuring
  administrative units.
• Each administrative unit, the ayllu,was required
  to self-organize and provide labor to work the
  lands of the higher classes, perform military
  service, work in mines, and construct impressive
  public works projects paved roads (over 20,000
  km), buildings, irrigation canals, and suspension
  bridges.
• The Inca did not develop a high culture (e.g.
  arts, astronomy) like the Aztecs and Maya, nor
  did they develop a written language per se.
• Every person was given a profession and expected
  to pursue this profession for the rest of his
  life.

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Other Native groups

• The Northern Andes in Colombia were home to the
  Chibcha, less organized than the Inca but more
  sedentary and village based than the Lowland
  peoples.
• The Chibcha had started to become more state-like
  by the time of the Spanish arrival and were noted
  for their metal-work, especially in gold.
• They had spread up through Panama into Central
  America sharing a common language root
  Chibchan.
• They filled up many of the areas not dominated by
  the Mayan and Aztec peoples.
• A number of current day tribes like the Misquitos
  of the Honduran and Nicaraguan coast are direct
  descendents.

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Southern Andean Peoples

• South of the Inca empire were the Araucanian
  peoples, the indigenous natives of modern-day
  Chile.
• In Quechua, this literally meant rebel, since
  these warlike peoples were never conquered by the
  domineering Inca.
• They rebeled against the Spanish too, right
  through the 17th and 18th centuries.
• They were further subdivided into different,
  loosely related tribes Picunche, Mapuche,
  Pehuenche, Huilliche.
• Different tribes favored different activities
  llama herding, grain and tuber farming, hunting
  or fishing.
• Property was held communally and settlements were
  small, nucleated extended family groupings.

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Southern Lowlanders

• Nomadic hunters and gatherers occupied the
  prairies of Tierra del Fuego, plateaus of
  Patagonia, the Pampa and the hills of what is now
  Uruguay.
• To the South and West existed a less organized
  and advanced group than the Araucanians,
  consisting of the Chono, Alacaluf, and Yahgan.
• Despite the cold winds and rain, many of these
  tribesmen wore no clothes of footwear and
  subsisted on gathered shellfish and hunting of
  coastal mammals and birds and their eggs.
• To the East existed the Ona, Tehuelche, Puelche
  and Charrúa.
• They mostly hunted guanaco and the flightless
  Rhea (ostrich-like) bird.
• They frequently warred among themselves and were
  attacked by the horseriding (copied from the
  Spanish) Mapuches coming over the Andes.

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Northern and Central Lowlanders

• Throughout the humid Brazilian Plateau, the
  Amazon Basin and the Tropical northern coastlands
  were many thousands of small bands and tribes of
  peoples.
• Many were simple hunters and gatherers like the
  Gê.
• Most also practiced shifting cultivation in
  forest clearings, especially of manioc (a
  starch).
• Knowledge of medicinal and food plants was
  extensive (and still is!) and hunting
  technologies (traps, efficient weapons e.g.
  blowguns) very versatile.
• Most groups lived on the coast or along navigable
  rivers using dugout canoes for transport.
• It is thought that voluntary migrations, female
  infanticide, prolonged sexual abstinence,
  warfare, and cannibalism kept populations in a
  given community in check, maintaining low
  densities.

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Four Major Language Groups

• Almost all the lowland bands spoke a variation of
  one of four languages, from south to north
  Tupinambá (Guaraní and Tupí Paraguay and most
  of Brazil), Gê (Brazilian interior uplands),
  Cariban (Suriname-Guiana area) and Arawak (from
  Venezuela down the interior of the Andes).
• Living arrangements varied from nucleated
  settlements with individual family dwellings to
  very large communal long huts with over 200
  people housed therein.
• Warfare between neighboring bands were common and
  this both kept populations in check and probably
  allowed, through capture of women, to widen
  community gene pools.

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Colonizers and Colonized

• Although heterogenous, native peoples across
  South America, unlike European populations, were
  largely free of endemic diseases that would give
  rise to epidemics and mass fatalities
  populations were gradually healthy, dying of
  causes other than infectious diseases.
• Unlike Europeans, native cultures tended to favor
  communal ownership and the sharing of labor, and
  involved only limited animal husbandry,
  preferring cultivation and gathering/hunting.
• Like Europeans, most were prone to warfare, many
  practiced slavery, and many were social
  stratified, with clear elites in the form of
  noble families, especially in the more advanced
  Andean societies, especially the Inca.

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Impacts of the Colonizers

• Perhaps the most rapid depopulation of any region
  and decline of any peoples in the history of
  humankind.
• Likely 90-95 of all the natives who had come
  into contact with the Europeans had died by 1650,
  i.e. within 150 years, perhaps as many as 50
  million or more.
• Accused by rival Protestant nations of deliberate
  extermination, it is unlikely that this genocide
  was via concerted effort, in the first place
  because the Spanish and Portuguese needed workers
  to fulfill their extractive aims and in the
  second place they generally sought to convert and
  civilize the natives, not eliminate them.
• While battle did undoubtably bring about many
  depths, once subdued, the general population
  declined for non-military reasons.

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Pulling the rug out

• Importing the caballero ethic that the wealthy
  man does not farm his land, but runs cattle to
  graze, took large tracts of land out of food
  production.
• Importation of exotic crops from the Old World
  for the export back to Europe disrupted the flow
  of food within South America.
• An end result was growing severities of food
  shortages with corresponding morbidity and
  mortality from under nutrition.
• This was exacerbated by removing rural farmers
  from the lands and their forced slavery in the
  regions mines among other exploitations.

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Disease Destructs

• In their bodies and on their vermin (especially
  rats), the colonizers introduced many
  communicable, infectious diseases against which
  which the natives had no natural defenses.
• Important European diseases included small pox,
  measles, influenza, diptheria, whooping cough,
  Typhus, chicken pox, tuberculosis, and the
  bubonic plague.
• Later, African tropical diseases were introduced
  through African slaves who transferred them to
  mosquito vectors and the broadser population -
  included malaria and yellow fever.
• Small pox was the biggest killer easy to
  contract, small pox wiped out up to an estimated
  50 of all the population resident in South
  America when Colombus arrived.

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Control of the Survivors

• Surviving indigenous peoples were required to
  serve the colonizers in an increasingly punitive
  manner across much of South America, especially
  the Spanish lands.
• As with the overseeing of land holdings, the
  latifundistas governed the natives on their
  territory through overseers, coopting the
  traditional native ruling classes (e.g. Inca
  curacas) to do the work of collecting tribute
  (taxes) and forced labor.
• Rapidly, this degenerated into increasingly
  exploitative arrangements and the corrupted
  native intermediaries were replaced by non-native
  corregidores.
• Natives, integrated into a market-economy in
  which they had little power, were exploited in
  manners that enriched the colonizers and
  impoverished them, creating a highly
  marginalized, neglected underclass, traits of
  whose treatment persists today and is the cause
  of ongoing tension/conflict.