this corpus of texts about lands that were at that time unknown to European subjects, those lands showed no evidence of significant traces of human labor. The predominance of this early perception of the Americas occurs in spite of both the existence of later chronicles and documents that describe, to a European audience, the wonders of human settlements as complex and sophisticated as Mexico-Tenochtitlán and Cuzco – just to mention the two most spectacular concentrations of people in the first half of the sixteenth century – and the constant presence of Indigenous peoples in the daily social lives of most American nations.
Why is it, then, that the myth that represents the Americas as a blank page where European settlers are free to leave their imprint still survives in the collective unconscious of Western culture? Why this inertia of collective memory that privileges only one of the different images of the past?1 Why are stereotypes about Indigenous peoples – Charles C. Mann (2005, 4) asks – still reproduced by the textbooks used in the framework of the educational system?2 There are, in my view, no simple answers to these questions. Maybe if we try to view this state of affairs as the result of a combination of factors we could understand it a little better. I will later address, briefly, said factors, but first I will go back in time and try to deal with the issue of how scholars and Indigenous peoples believe the Americas were populated, and since when.
This is not a conflict-free matter. On the contrary, there are several contending versions from different camps. The main disagreement can be identified as the one that confronts, on the one hand, several Amerindian nations and, on the other, scholars who believe that Western disciplines can reveal the secrets of the distant past. In general, the latter can be found in the ranks of archaeologists and biological anthropologists. Many an Indigenous group claims to know where they come from and when they came to the Americas. In their oral traditions, we learn about stories of origins that present us with peoples who believe that they have occupied the territory of the Americas since time immemorial – in some cases, since the beginning of time (Zimmerman 2002, 16). These versions of the origins of the different Indigenous groups are contested by Western scholars who have a completely different perspective on this issue. In their opinion, and in spite of the differences among them that we will discuss later, Amerindians arrived in the Americas as immigrants from Asia.
It should be pointed out that although Western scholars tend to view Indigenous oral histories as non-scientific, the stories passed from generation to generation by Amerindians are a useful tool to reconstruct the past – even the very distant past. As Roger Echo-Hawk has shown, it is possible to use traditional tales together with geological, archaeological, and historical evidence to have a richer picture of the distant past, as long as “the historical content of the oral or written information should be compatible with the general context of human history derived from other types of evidence” (2000, 271). In other words, “the oral information must present a perspective on historical events that would be accepted by a reasonable observer” (271). He makes a very convincing case about the time depth of some Indigenous stories about their origins. He even goes as far as to say that some Arikara origin accounts can go as far back as describing the Arctic Circle and Beringia as the place where everything started for them (275–276).
The idea that Indigenous peoples came from Asia, which now passes as the uncontested truth among Western scholars, despite many Amerindian groups’ rejection of it, was (probably) first advanced in 1590 by a Jesuit priest, Father Joseph de Acosta, in a passage about the origins of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. In it, Acosta makes a huge intellectual effort to reconcile the teachings of the Bible about the origins of humankind (a part of which narrative is the Noah’s Ark story), and the undeniable evidence of long and continued human occupation of the lands then known as the Indies (2002, 51, 63). The hypothesis that postulates a migration from Asia has taken, with time, the form of a story: the crossing of what after 1728 was to be known as the Bering Strait. The template of said hypothesis goes like this: in the Wisconsin period (the latest glacier advance of the Ice Age period) glaciers retained so much water that the level of the sea descended dramatically, transforming the Bering Strait into dry land that connected Siberia and Alaska. This land, called Beringia by scholars, allowed the passage of human beings from Asia (there is no agreement, however, about the exact region or regions of the continent they came from) to North America, from where they later moved south, thereby occupying the rest of the continent. This hypothesis has it that the migratory groups of human beings entered the continent through the ice-free corridors that opened during the short periods of deicing. And of course, some elaborate conjectures have been advanced about the different possible routes that those human travelers followed.3
In a more recent development of the crossing of the Bering Strait hypothesis, several scholars (among them Thomas Dillehay, one of the major voices on the issues pertaining to the peopling of the Americas) have advanced the idea that the migration may have taken place, among other ways, by sea, thus contradicting some of Acosta’s conjectures. The new version of the story is based on recent geological investigations that point to different climate changes, on disagreement about dates of deglaciation, on newly discovered patterns of settlement in South America, and many other factors. In South America, for example, the archaeological record is clear about the survival of the megafauna of the Pleistocene well into the early Holocene – something than cannot be said about North America, where most of the megafauna had already disappeared by that time.4 For this reason and many others – among them the once controversial site known as Monte Verde, located in present-day Chile – a narrative considered as the true one in North American academic circles is much more difficult to defend for the South American case. I am referring to the “Clovis first” hypothesis that in its most traditional (and I dare say reactionary) versions includes the variation known as “overkill.”
The first hypothesis maintains that the culture that produced the fluted point known in academic circles as Clovis was one organized as bands of hunter-gatherers who moved from one place to another in search of food. The food, so the story goes, was mostly taken from big animals such as Mammoths and other giants known as part of the megafauna of the Pleistocene. In the “overkill” version of it, these bands were so greedy and so environmentally irresponsible that they ended up depleting their hunting grounds. Therefore, the big animals that fed them for millennia vanished from the face of the earth. This culture would have been the one that populated the rest of the Americas.
There are many problems with the application of this narrative to the vast territory south of what today is the US. One of them is, as we said, that those big beasts survived into the Holocene in South America. Another element to take into account is that the Ice Age did not end between 11,000 and 10,000 BP in South America, but sometime between 14,000 and 12,000 BP.5 But another set of problems is raised by the study of the evidence found in Monte Verde, Chile. That site – like several others in the southern hemisphere – shows very clearly that not only were its inhabitants not hunting big mammals, but also that their way of life differed dramatically from the one described not only by the “overkill” version but also by the more comprehensive one: “Clovis first.” Many a society in South America developed, at an early stage of human occupation of the Americas, complex and diverse cultural habits – those of foragers – that differ dramatically from the model that presents Amerindians of the ancient past as predators. This evidence put into question the simplicity and most of all the appeal of the Clovis theory that, in its basic form, stated that the hunters of megafauna were the first society in the Americas and that later they populated different parts of the continent in a relatively long period of time. As a consequence, the population of South America, according to this theory, must have been a much later development. Unfortunately for its proponents, archaeological evidence shows that some radiocarbon dates of South American archaeological sites are much older (12,500 BP, in the most conservative estimates) than the ones identified as Clovis, which are only 11,200 years old – and short-lived, to judge from the most recent dates for Clovis places, which date the end of that culture at around 10,800 BP.6
Of course, there is more than science behind this dispute about dates, ancestry, and genealogy. There is also politics: the “Clovis first” narrative is mostly supported, not surprisingly,
