Comment by altacc
6 months ago
When foreign cultures were discovered by Europeans the default thinking was to assume they were savages without culture, complex society or technology. That has echoed throughout time and still affects our view of history today. The true savages were the Europeans that preferred to subjugate or kill any non-European population they encountered.
It is only recently that TV & films from the US stopped portraying the stereotypical American Indians as only vaguely more than natural fauna. Until recently US history hardly seems to acknowledge the existence of pre-Colombian towns and cities across the southern states, some with tens of thousands of inhabitants. It didn't fit the European settler narrative that they were taming the wild and when native Americans are mentioned it has been incredibly whitewashed and edited.
At the time when the fields in this article were being tilled, the Europeans were building castles, cathedrals, river spanning arched stone bridges, multi-masted sailing ships and trebuchets and massive siege engines using tools of iron and steel. People in middle east were already working with colored glass and people in China were already working with porcelain, gunpowder and early printing presses. A thousand years or more before that, the Greeks were already working with complex geared mechanisms and making things like the Antikythera mechanism and proto steam turbines. The people tilling these fields on the other hand were using relatively simple stone, bone and wooden tools, and hadn't even invented the wheel yet.
While I appreciate the point you're trying to make that native Americans weren't some kind of savages as they were all too frequently portrayed in the past, the notion that their level of technological or societal development was anywhere near that of Europe, the Middle East or China at the time does not reflect actual history. Relatively speaking, outside the empires of Meso-America most pre-contact American societies were substantially less complex that European societies, and from a purely technological perspective every single American society ever documented was vastly less technologically complex than European, Middle Eastern and East Asian societies. So from that lens its not unreasonable for the Europeans of the time to have perceived the native Americans as less socially and technologically advanced as they were, as that was simply the reality of world at the time.
Also, any historian with any knowledge of actual pre-contact North American societies can tell you they too were subjugating and killing any other populations they encountered just as much as the Europeans did when they arrived on the continent. The notion that native societies lived some kind of eco-friendly, conflict free lifestyle is just as egregious of whitewashing as any former settler narratives.
>the true savages were the Europeans...
Look I completely agree with your whole comment, especially the line above, but it has very little to do with the GP.
Their comment is about "big state systems", which are a totally different thing from culture, complex society, technology, or savagery.
The native Americans of the pacific northwest practiced slavery and would murder them during potlatch ceremonies. When Europeans showed up in New Zealand the Maori were busy commenting genocide against the Moriori.
Let be serious here people are shitty.