1491: New revelations of the Americas before Columbus (2005)
“Native Americans were as active in shaping their environments as anyone else. They built great and wealthy cities; they lived, for the most part, on farms”<p>“He closes with a provocative thesis: namely, that the present worldwide movement toward democracy owes not to Locke or Newtonian physics, but to Indians, “living, breathing role models of human liberty.””<p>Oh lord. Revisionists begetting revisionists.<p>I had a buddy in college who insisted that Natives were ‘almost as technologically advanced as europeans’ and if not for a few miscalculations in battle, would have effectively flung them off and advanced to a society beyond our wildest dreams.<p>Of course, he failed to respond when I mentioned that there were no modern weapons and the mystical technology he assumed to exist amounted to little more than what Europeans had had for tens of thousands of years.<p>It’s really sad how much hyperbole gets thrown into the revisionism of prehistoric civilizations. It’s not doing the descendants of these people any favors to make up fictitious reinventions of their technological advancements.