haudenosaunee: the first libertarians?

i just finished 1491, an attempt by author charles mann to piece together what indian culture was like before the arrival of columbus. despite spending a quarter of the book pointlessly debating the illness hypothesis (that most of native america was wiped out due to foreign disease long before 1491), mann's retelling is an excellent example of a trend in indian historical analysis to humanize native cultures.

one thesis mann repeatedly drove home was that indians weren't much different than europeans. for example, they had large, structured, complex societies including cities, such as aztec tenochtitlan, which was bigger than london or rome. indigenous societies had astronomy and mathematics, philosophy and war, oppression and freedom. some governments favored authoritarian socialism, yet others had limited representative government and equal rights for all people. mann's concluding argument is laid bare using the example of the haudenosaunee. he goes so far as to call them libertarian, despite their collective land use, and cites highly circumstantial evidence that they may have shifted colonial thought - and even the scottish enlightenment - towards individual liberty and equality.

of equal interest was his commentary on the preservationists movement. he notes that the "wilderness" seen by 1491 visitors was largely designed and full of domesticated plants. indians manipulated their environment to suit their needs, e.g. converting "perhaps one quarter" of what we now consider the south american rain forest into farms and gardens, domesticating many trees and vegetables, and controlling game populations. he argues that what we see as "nature" is really the result of entropy, as sickness wiped out the majority of the indian population who were then incapable of maintaining their large farms and gardens. there is no one "nature," rather sustainable and unsustainable environmental manipulations.

my main question while reading, though, was: if native societies were so similar in intelligence, culture, and government, why were they so "behind" europeans? they couldn't sail ships to colonize spain, after all. going off the book, an answer could come from a combination of factors, the principle one being the lack of beasts of burden which in turn made the meso-american invention of the wheel useless, preventing the flurry of development seen elsewhere. i'm sure that other, perhaps more prominent, factors (such as lack of disease immunity) are involved. ideas?

Labels: misc. science