Charles Mann

“They build their monuments as if their intent was never to finish them,” the Spanish academic Polo de Ondegardo marveled in 1571. Exactly right, Isbell and Vranich said. Completion was not the object. The goal was a constant buzz of purposeful activity.

In our day the Soviet Union disintegrated after drought caused a series of bad harvests in the 1970s and 1980s, but nobody argues that climate ended Communist rule. Similarly, one should grant the Maya the dignity of assigning them responsibility for their failures as well as their successes.

Over time, the Meggers-Roosevelt dispute grew bitter and personal; inevitable in a contemporary academic context, it featured charges of colonialism, elitism, and membership in the CIA.

Experiments by Makoto Ogawa of the Kansai Environmental Engineering Center, near Kyoto, Japan, demonstrated that charcoal retains its carbon in the soil for up to fifty thousand years. “Slash-and-char is very clever,” Ogawa told me. “Nobody in Europe or Asia that I know of ever understood the properties of charcoal in soil.”

Doubtless her political anxieties are not without justification, although—as some of her sparring partners observed—it is difficult to imagine greedy plutocrats “perusing the pages of Latin American Antiquity before deciding to rev up the chainsaws.”

Another book, The Great New Wilderness Debate, published in 1998, was edited by two philosophers who earnestly identified themselves as “Euro-American men…whose cultural legacy is patriarchal Western civilization in its current postcolonial, globally hegemonic form.”

“We were enslaved as American Indians,” he wrote, “we were colonized as American Indians, and we will gain our freedom as American Indians, and then we will call ourselves any damn thing we choose.”

Racial categories are inevitably problematic, because they are ostensibly biological—that is, they are supposed to be based on heritable physical characteristics like skin color—but in fact are heavily cultural, as demonstrated by the infamous “one drop” rule in the nineteenth-century southern United States, which proclaimed that men and women were Negroes, even when they could not be distinguished by whites from appearance, if any of their ancestors, no matter how remote, were African.