this post was submitted on 13 Apr 2025
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Holy shit, TIL. I always kinda of suspected that the North American indigenous population was completely decimated by epidemics, such that what we know of them today is wildly different from what they were in the pre-contact era. De Soto describes agrarian societies in Florida, for example (IIRC). There's also evidence for agrarian societies that collapsed along the Mississippi River valley. Totally wild.
Mound builders.
One huge problem is how negligent the US has been preserving indigenous history - often in ways that seem deliberate. We’ve turned these sites into golf courses.
Big problem in the 1800s and early 1900s archeology of indigenous sites being basically grave robbing for the artifact trade. What happened to the Spiro mounds raises my blood pressure (the photos of the hack job are burned into my mind - just hire random day laborers with shovels I guess), especially because to this day the fake Heavener “Viking runestone” gets more attention.
We know so fucking little about indigenous history, because of systemic ignorance, laziness, and racism on the part of many historians and archeologists. Just imagine the languages that went extinct without being documented, or what actual religious practices would have looked like (so much “Great Spirit” talk just seems indelibly colored by Christianity…)
Imagine being an 1800s “philologist” and sleeping on this.
Just in California's central valley region, we lost hundreds of languages. Again, post-contact, so we're functionally dealing with a post-apocalypse civilization, but oftentimes tribes were fairly small here and controlled fairly small geographic territories. The Spanish document that travelling, even with guides, was frustrating because their guides would go through four or five languages in an excursion, and would often end up in areas where they didn't know the language.
Yeah, 100%, the amount of knowledge that was lost or just outright destroyed is awful. Most of what we know, we know because the Spanish wrote it down, and IIRC it's known that missionaries would often distort what they heard to fit a Christian narrative in order to make later conversion easier.
And if they couldn’t make it fit the narrative:
We get most of what we know of the pre colonial Maya from a man who “burned ninety-nine times as much knowledge of Maya history and sciences as he [gave] us.”
Genocide isn’t just about the physical violence. The Maya were one of a handful of societies to independently invent writing. Imagine what we lost.
Buddha ease my suffering, this hurts worse than the burning of Nalanda University or the Library of Alexandria.