The first thing that stands out is the prominence of
hunter- gatherers
throughout the pre- Columbian period. In contrast to the Australians,
they did not have either continent to themselves; but relatively
speaking they continued to occupy far more territory than their
counterparts in the Old World.
The northern half of North America offers an obvious
example. At a
latitude at which the peoples of northern Asia were tending
domesticated reindeer, those of North America hunted caribou. Since
caribou and reindeer are close enough to be considered the same
species, the explanation of the difference is probably to be sought on
the human side. Perhaps the Old World development was a case of
stimulus diffusion: the peoples of the Eurasian Arctic were exposed to
pastoralists tending herbivores in the grasslands to their south,
whereas, for a reason we will come to, those of the American Arctic
were not.
Farther to the south, much of what is now the western
United States was
occupied by hunter- gatherers, and many tribes of the plains and
prairies, though practicing some agriculture, lived primarily by
hunting and gathering. Temperate South America presents a similar
picture on a smaller scale. Most of the land was left to hunter-
gatherers; they hunted the guanaco, the wild ancestor of the llama, but
did not domesticate it. Likewise, hunter-gatherers were to be found
here and there in the tropics.
As in Australia, the persistence of the hunter-gatherer
way of life did
not mean an absence of change. In the far north, for example, the
arrival of the Eskimos—or their "Palaeo-Eskimo" predecessors—from
northeast Asia within the last few thousand years marks the appearance
of a culture specially adapted to Arctic hunting. From Alaska they
spread eastward to Greenland, and westward back into the northeast
corner of Asia—thus becoming the only American population to colonize
the Old World. They were likewise the only pre-Columbian people in
whose tool kit iron had a place; they must have obtained it from
meteorites and from trade with northeast Asia or the Vikings of
Greenland. To the south of the Eskimos, we encounter two families of
languages occupying vast territories, Athapascan in the west and
Algonquian in the east; the existence of these incontrovertible
families points to expansions within the last two or three thousand
years, and it does so far more clearly than Pama-Nyungan in Australia.
What powered these expansions we do not know. Turning to South America,
we find pottery dating back to about 6000 B.C. in the eastern part of
the tropical region; this was made by groups exploiting aquatic
resources, but innocent of farming (rather as in Jomon Japan).
Not all hunter-gatherers of the Americas lived in,
or took effective
advantage of, environments that allowed such developments. The American
Antarctic, for example, was no mirror image of the Arctic. Though
neither as poor in resources nor as harsh in climate as the Arctic, the
tip of South America was inhabited by societies as simple as any in the
world; their canoes, for example, were far less seaworthy than those of
the Eskimos. There was an obvious reason for the disparity: in contrast
to the Arctic, this Antarctic world was a very small one, and
completely isolated from similar territories on other continents. Yet
overall, the American hunter-gatherer scene was as changeable as that
of Australia. Why did hunter- gatherers, however simple or complex
their societies, continue to occupy so much of the Americas? The answer
lies not in any distinctive strength of their way of life but rather in
the relative weakness of American farming.
