said that the Clovis fluted point is the first manifestation of American (understood as pertaining to the US) ingenuity, which also gave us Coca-Cola and baseball caps.7 This situation, besides being a blatant case of academic imperialism – it took Dillehay years (many more than the usual period for any investigation) to be able to get his radiocarbon dates and stratigraphic analyses broadly accepted by the archaeological community – is also a dispute that may help us rethink the way in which we represent the past. That is, it may help us realize how important are the narratives we produce in the present to create a past that suits our community’s (whatever community one belongs to) needs in the present, and how those pasts one invents are going to determine the futures that will actually happen or take place in real life.
The way in which one represents the very different Indigenous pasts is no small part of the reconstruction of the past Western society has been producing for several centuries now. In this sense, the Clovis case is a very pedagogical introduction to the contradictions present-day scholars incur when trying to write a past that favors the cause of their own culture. For example, it is clear that the image of the first Amerindians as predators who exterminated the megafauna, and as nomads who had no abode, are not the ones preferred in the West to represent civilization. On the contrary, the less complex the society, the more “savage” or “primitive” it appears to Western eyes. On the other hand, Clovis defenders seem to be interested in presenting a scenario where the inventors of the fluted point appear as the pioneers who led the migration from Asia. Therefore, one could even speculate further and say that they could be seen as leaders of a prehistoric expansion that foretells the conquest of the West, undertook thousands of years later by (North) American pioneers. It was they who populated all there is to populate in the Western hemisphere. In this way, US-based scholars make a nationalist claim in the name of science – or if you prefer, disguised as science – in order to appropriate, once again, the territories located south of the Rio Bravo (or Rio Grande, depending on your perspective and geopolitical situation of enunciation).
The diversity of Indigenous peoples in what today is Latin America only grew with time. In addition to the already complex and diverse ancient times panorama, we are starting to get glimpses of the wide array of peoples and cultures that flourished south of the territory of what today is the United States. The most sobering thing for those who yearn for evolutionist narratives8 is that there is no visible line that shows any “progress” or “development” in the life and history of Indigenous societies throughout the Americas. If an ideal observer could travel through time and space at will, she would see hunter-gatherers coexisting with settlements of early agriculturalists, or fishers and hunters living side by side with state-like organized societies. There is, then, no single line of “progress” that societies followed. That is to say, there is nothing in the archaeological and ethnographic evidence available to us today that points in the direction of the existence of a rule or set of rules that determine the “evolution” of societies.9 Let us now take a look at just a handful of societies that existed in the past, and some that exist in the present, to get an idea of the enormous diversity and the wealth of human variety existent in the Americas.
Let us start by ancient hunter-gatherers, the ones who get the worst press: they are represented as simple, primitive, and not very careful with the environment. The representation has it that those nomads of the past were constantly struggling against the elements, defending themselves from a hostile environment that did not offer them enough resources in the way of food and shelter to have a decent, less difficult life. It follows from this model that these peoples, who were always at the brink of sheer starvation, spent most of their time trying to get food and shelter, which is tantamount to saying that they were too busy to dedicate time and energy to undertake activities unrelated to the production and reproduction of life – that is, activities without relation to subsistence patterns. From this academic perspective, it is with the practice of agriculture that certain activities not related to subsistence get better chances to take place.
However, scholars like Marshall Sahlins proposed, in an article from the mid-1960s (Sahlins 1968) that he later developed in his influential 1972 book Stone Age Economics, a hypothesis that presented hunter-gatherers under a different light: as the original affluent society (Sahlins 1972, 166). In his view, high-mobility people whose subsistence pattern is based on hunting, fishing, and collecting know their environment very well and take advantage of all its resources, thus being able to provide for themselves in ways that minimize the amount of time dedicated to the procurement of food, to the point that “half the time the people seem not know what to do with themselves” (Sahlins 1972, 11). Of course, this hypothesis has been criticized and, over the years, it has become more nuanced – among other reasons, because it is not advisable to incur into generalizations when human groups are so different from each other: there is no such thing as a universal template for hunter-gatherers – but it was important, in its heyday, for the refutation of the predominant view that represented them as fragile people at the mercy of the elements.
Let us now discuss a number of studies that helped view hunter-gatherers in a different light, leading to the discussion of some of the assumptions about their relation to monumentality. Several years ago, archaeologists like Jon Gibson and Joe Saunders, working on the archaic mounds of the US Southeast, reached the conclusion that the earthworks known as Indian mounds (human-made earthen elevations) located in the US Southeast (Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, Florida, and other locations) were the work of peoples without agriculture. These mounds were built, in some cases, 5,400 years ago (Watson Brake, extensively studied by Saunders, is a case in point), and they were the product of societies without agriculture. This was something unexpected, to say the least, because archaeologists had trouble picturing nonagricultural societies staying at a place for long periods of time and with free time to construct massive works that required, without a doubt, a significant organization of the community as a whole – the construction of the mounds requires great quantities of earth and, therefore, a high number of human labor hours.
Thus, a new model started to emerge: it was possible to view these societies (the mound builders of the archaic period) as capable of producing monumental collective works without having developed agriculture first. It is societies like the one known as Poverty Point that prompted some scholars to review the old evolutionary model. This complex is a very big site located in northeastern Louisiana, which contains a number of mounds and embankments. The historical period and culture that bear its name cover the years 3,730 to 3,350 BP and it extends over a large area of the Lower Mississippi Valley from a point near the conjunction of the Mississippi and Arkansas rivers to the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. The artifacts that characterize this culture are made of rocks not available locally, which means their makers must have had to import them. Trade, then, must have been very important for the people who built the earthworks.
The series of questions that places like Poverty Point posed were very difficult to understand for people working on the old paradigm. Those questions include, according to Jon Gibson:
How did the conditions for large-scale construction appear at Poverty Point while everyone else in America north of Mexico was still following a simpler way of life? Was Poverty Point one of the first communities to rise above its contemporaries to start the long journey toward becoming a truly complex society? If Poverty Point did represent the awakening of complex society in the United States, how and why did it develop? Was it created by immigrants bearing maize and a new religion from somewhere in Mexico? Was it developed by local peoples who had been stimulated by ideas from Mexico? Did it arise by itself without any foreign influences? Did it come about without agriculture? Could hunting and gathering have sustained the society and its impressive works?(1999: 1–2)
The responses to those questions, implicit or explicit, show us an academic community that believed, 40–50 years ago, that such a large site like Poverty Point must have been the abode of a large, permanently settled, and therefore complex society. As I mentioned earlier, the prevailing idea at that time was that complex societies developed thanks to agriculture. However, no plant remains have ever been found at the site. The prejudice in favor of agriculture as a trigger of social complexity is such
