1491: Part Two

Believing that his discovery was important, he tried over the years to show the bones to local Folsomites. Most spurned his entreaties.

Hrdlička issued his caustic "where are any such things” speech months after learning about Folsom — a disingenuous act. But he never directly challenged the spear points’ antiquity.

Despite overkill’s failure to enjoy full acceptance, it helped set in stone what became the paradigmatic image of the first Americans. Highly mobile, scattered in small bands, carnivorous to a fault, the paleo-Indians conjured by archaeologists were, above all, "stout-hearted, daring, and voracious big-game hunters,” in the skeptical summary of Norman Easton, an anthropologist at Yukon College, in Whitehorse.

As a graduate student in the mid-1970s, Fladmark was so surprised to learn of the paucity of evidence for the ice-free corridor that he wondered if paleo-Indians had instead gone down the Pacific coast by boat.

Future searches will be difficult: thousands of years ago, the melting glaciers raised the seas, inundating coastal settlements, if they existed.

By then the dispute over the origin of maize had filled almost as much paper — and became as acrimonious — as the battle over Clovis.

Wilkes believes that some or all of these difficulties may be resolved by reproducing features of the milpa in a contemporary setting. If this occurs, it will be the second time that the dissemination of Mesoamerican agricultural techniques will have had an enormous cultural impact — the first time being, of course, when they originated.

During the rest of the year, the climate is drier, and farmers plant and tend their milpas on the alluvial soil.

The denizens of San Lorenzo are unlikely to have shared Europeans' dismay at the physical deformity portrayed in these images.

In Mesoamerican cultures, the date of one’s birth was such an important augury of the future that people often acquired that day as their name.

Another difference: primogeniture was not expected. If the queen did not think her eldest son was fit for the crown, she could pass it to another child, or even to a nephew or cousin.

Modern drawings of ancient cities tend to show them at an imagined apogee, the great monuments all splendidly arrayed together, perfect as architectural models.

Chan Chan suffered a palace surfeit because dead rulers were regarded as divine figures.

Thupa Inka descended the Moche River and paralyzed Chimor’s defenses by the simple expedient of threatening to destroy its water supply.

Over and over again, Andean stories tell of spirits embodied in stones and giants transformed into natural features. The landscape has an intricate numinous geography; it is charged with meaning that must be respected and heeded.