2.3 America: 5000 to 3000 b.c.  (Page 2/2)

Mexico, central america and the caribbean

Santa Luisa, in the Veracruz area was occupied before 4,000 B.C. and became major trade center with an extensive irrigation system . The people were successful hunters and gatherers as well as early farmers. By 3,500 Mexican cave inhabitants relied heavily on agriculture. One third of their food came from domesticated plants, including maize, beans and others. Maize was destined to play the same role here that wheat and barley did in the Near East. In the Tamaulipas Mountains they had begun to domesticate summer squash and chili pepper, and the bottle gourd (as a water container). Early man also ate grasshoppers, ants and termites.

We speculated at the beginning of this chapter that the time of about 3,100 B.C. might have been a milestone in history when some fantastic upheaval occurred in the Atlantic, with far-reaching secondary effects in the development of early civilizations in Egypt and the Near East. It is amazing then, to find the zero date in the incredibly accurate Maya Calendar, which will be described later, to be "4 Ahau Cumhu", which converts to our calendar as August 12, 3,113 B.C.! No satisfactory explanation of that date has ever been given, but Maya written and oral texts and those of their descendant civilizations claim descent from a civilized people who sailed in from the east! (Ref. 236 , 211 , 95 )

South america

Dating to probably about 5,000 B.C., in those last centuries before real agriculture, is the partially excavated village on a loma at Paloma on the dry Peruvian coast. The village extends over 1,900 feet in length at an altitude of 660 to 825 feet. Engle (Ref. 62 ) excavated only 2 trenches, removing 35,000 cubic feet of ruble, using only trowels and brushes. Some 90 graves and 45 huts were thus exposed and from that he estimated, by extrapolation, that complete uncovering of the entire village areas would involve 7,000,000 cubic feet of debris to be removed to reveal 9,000 graves in and around some 4,000 to 5,000 houses. Obviously this was not done.

Radio-carbon datings indicate that cotton and beans were present in the upper inter-Andean valleys about 6,000 B.C. but in the coastal villages they were not present until 5,000 B.C. or shortly thereafter. At Chilca, about 45 miles south of Lima, portions of another village have been excavated, showing multiple archeological layers, indicating multiple re-occupations. Carbon 14 dating indicates the earliest habitation at 3,500 B.C. Large mollusks were present but are no longer to be found, so the shore line may then have been much farther east and the retreat of the ocean-line and consequently the mollusks, may have led to the abandonment of the site. Only a few sites have been uncovered, since a cubic yard of kitchen midden weighs about 2,600 pounds and so sifting a village of 7 1/2 acres that forms a mound 1 yard thick means the "---sifting some 36,000 tons of debris, the equivalent of a train 1,000 cars long"

Maize was brought down from Mexico, but potatoes and manioc were developed from local plants. The earliest dated pottery in the New World is from Colombia, from 3,090 B.C., sand-tempered with wide-lined incising. Cotton has been used for at least 4,000 to 6,000 years in the Andes, replacing other plants that could be used for spinning and making cloth.

We have written something of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego in the last chapter. The islands of the western archipelago off the tip of South America were still blocked by ice until about 5,000 B.C. and the Alacaluf arrived after that time. They were a little people with the men ranging from 61 to 62.5 inches and the women 56.9 to 57.7 inches, with a truly Asiatic appearance, including thick black hair, Mongoloid spots and very little body hair. They lived entirely from the ocean, diving off boats made of boards sewed together. Later these people were sold as slaves by the Chonos to the north. (Ref. 45 , 62 )

Forward to America: 3000 to 1500 B.C.

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