Ghost cities

It will come as no great surprise to regular readers of Skeptophilia that I have a bit of an obsession with considering what the world was like in the past.  Both the historical past and the prehistoric, extremely distant past -- thus my fascination with both archaeology and paleontology.

It's easy to fall into the error of looking around and not realizing how extensively things have changed.  And not just on geological time scales; after all, by now it's pretty much common knowledge (young-Earth creationists excepted) that if you go back far enough, even the continents have shifted their positions dramatically.  But as I found out from an article sent to me by my friend, the wonderful author Gil Miller, there's a place in Kansas where what is now an expanse of widely-separated small towns interspersed with miles of corn and wheat fields was once a thriving metropolis of the Wichita people.

And not that long ago, either.

The Wichita -- in their own language, the Kitikiti'sh -- are a tribe of the central United States related to the Caddo (who live farther south) and the Pawnee (who live farther north).  The languages they speak belong to a language family called Caddoan that is an isolate group, related to no other known languages (or, more accurately, any relationship it might have is undetermined).  All the languages in the family are critically endangered.  The Wichita language itself is effectively extinct; the last native speaker, Doris Jean Lamar-McLemore, died in 2016.

This makes the recent discovery even more staggering (and sad) -- an earthwork fifty meters across that is called a "council circle" (although its actual function is uncertain), part of a network of six such earthworks along an eight-kilometer stretch of the Little Arkansas and Smoky Hill Rivers in central Kansas.  The archaeologists studying the site, part of a team from Dartmouth College, believe that at its height, only four hundred years ago, it may have been part of a thriving group of settlements housing over twenty thousand people, meaning it rivals Cahokia as the largest settlement of First Peoples in what is now the United States.

The site has been called Etzanoa -- the name for it given by a man captured there by the Spanish in the seventeenth century -- but what that name meant, and its etymology in the languages spoken at the time, are both unknown.  

Site of the Etzanoa earthwork [Image courtesy of Jesse Casana]

Because, of course, the apparent prosperity of the inhabitants was not to last.  They were living on land valuable to White settlers for cattle ranching and growing commercial crops, and the Wichita were forced off their land, relocated more than once, and finally ended up on a reservation in Oklahoma, most of them in or near the town of Anadarko.  Like many other Indigenous people, they also fell prey in huge numbers to infectious disease.  As of the last census, there were just under three thousand people who belong to the Wichita tribe.

The current research made use of drones and remote telemetry to locate the site, which was under ranch land and (amazingly) had sustained little damage.  Excavation there is ongoing, and has turned up not only Native items but ones from the Spanish and other European settlers, including -- of course -- bullets.

It's astonishing how fast things have changed -- and in this case, there's a deep sense of tragedy.  A whole thriving society, with their own language and traditions and culture, erased because of greed, entitlement, racism, and the abuse of power.  All we have is the remnants to study, a ghostly trace of a network of cities that once dominated the Great Plains.  It's a poor trade for all the lives and knowledge lost, but at least it's something.

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Resurrecting a fossil

A year ago I wrote about linguistic isolates -- single languages, or small clusters of related languages, that have no apparent relation to any other language on Earth.  The problem, of course, is that being spoken by only a small number of people, these are some of the most endangered languages.  There are many of them for which the last native speakers are already elderly, and there's a high risk of their going extinct without ever being thoroughly studied.

And as I pointed out in my post, the sad part of that is that each one of those is a lens into a specific culture and a particular way of thinking.  Once lost, they're gone forever, or only exist in scattered remnants, like the fossils of extinct animals.  What you can reconstruct from these relics is perhaps better than nothing, but still, there's always an elegiac sense of what we've lost, and what we're still losing.

This topic comes up because of an article in Smithsonian sent to me by a friend and frequent contributor of topics to Skeptophilia, about some linguists who are trying to reconstruct the extinct indigenous Timucuan language of northern Florida.  Timucuan was a linguistic isolate, and seems to be unrelated to the languages spoken by neighboring groups (such as the Seminole, Muscogee, and Choctaw).  The Timucua people, which at the time of European contact in 1595 comprised an estimated 200,000 people in 35 chiefdoms, each of which spoke a different dialect, was decimated by war and by diseases like smallpox.  By 1700, there were only about a thousand Timucuans left, and the slave trade eradicated those few survivors.  There is currently a genetic study to see if some populations in Cuba might be the descendants of the Timucuans, but so far the results are inconclusive.

This would just be another in the long list of complete and irretrievable cultural loss, if it weren't for the efforts of linguists Alejandra Dubcovsky and Aaron Broadwell.  Working with a handful of letters written in Timucuan (using the Latin alphabet), and a rather amazing bilingual document by Spanish missionary Francisco Pareja called Confessions in the Castilian and Timucua Language, With Some Tips to Encourage the Penitent, they have assembled the first Timucuan dictionary and grammar, and reconstructed how a long-gone people spoke.

A page from the Confessions, with Spanish on the left and Timucuan on the right [Image courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library, Brown University]

Which is incredibly cool, but there's also a wryly amusing side to it, because with Dubcovsky's and Broadwell's knowledge of the Timucuan language, they're able to compare what Pareja wanted the translators to say with what they actually did say.  "Our favorite is the description of marriage," Dubcovsky said.  "The Spanish side asks very clearly, 'Have the man and a woman been joined together in front of a priest?'  And the Timucua version of that sentence is, 'Did you and another person consent to be married?'  The Timucua translation not only takes out any mention of gender, but it also removes any mention of a religious officiant.  A priest did not write this, because a priest does not forget to include himself in the story."

So the Confessions document is not only a Rosetta Stone for Timucuan, it gives us a fascinating window into how the Timucuan translators saw the Spanish Catholic culture that was being imposed upon them.

It's tragic that this language and its people were so thoughtlessly (and ruthlessly) eradicated; worse still that such tragedies are all too common.  So it's all the more important that people like Dubcovsky snd Broadwell work to resurrect these extinct languages from the scant fossils they left behind.  It can't ever repair the damage that was done, but at least allows us to glimpse the minds of an extinct culture -- and to honor their memory in whatever way we can.

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The glass grass

The attitudes and practices of colonialism did incalculable damage, and not least on the list is the fact that (by and large) the colonizers completely disregarded indigenous people's knowledge of their own lands.

The inevitable result was that much of that knowledge was lost.  Not only general, broad-brush information such as how to raise food in climates unfamiliar to the colonial cultures, but specific details like the uses of native plant and animal species.  The colonizers, secure in their own arrogance, instead imported the species they had back home -- thus adding another problem on top of the first.

Because, of course, this is a huge part of why there's such a problem with invasive exotics.  Some jumped accidentally; but a great many were deliberate imports that have proceeded to wreak havoc on native ecosystems.  Consider, for example, the problems caused by the introduction of European rabbits to Australia -- and the millions of dollars that have been spent since trying to control them.

I bring up Australia deliberately, because it's a prime example of colonizers completely ignoring millennia of experience and knowledge by indigenous people, embodying Adam Savage's oft-quoted line "I reject your reality and substitute my own."  You'd think they would have listened, wouldn't you?  Not only does Australia have a tough climate by most anyone's standards, plagued by droughts and floods that seem to alternate on a monthly basis, its native species have adapted by becoming tough and resilient.  The indigenous Australians managed in much the same way; learning how to deal with the climate's vagaries -- and relying on the native plants and animals to provide sustenance.

This meant making use of damn near everything, including species that seem on first glance to be worse than useless.  Take, for example, spinifex grass (Triodia spp.), which grows all over inland Australia.  Not only is it able to survive in broiling hot desert conditions -- it can survive temperatures of 60 C -- it puts down roots as long as thirty meters in an attempt to access what groundwater there is.  In a place where any kind of vegetation is fair game for herbivores, spinifex has developed ways to defend itself; it absorbs silica from the soil and deposits it in the tips of the leaves.  Silica, I probably don't need to point out, is better known as glass.

Walking through a field of spinifex in shorts is a good way to come out with your legs embedded with thousands of glass splinters.

An Australian grassland ecosystem, with two species of spinifex -- the green plants are soft spinifex (Triodia pungens), and the gray-green ones are lobed spinifex (Triodia basedowii). [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Hesperian, Triodia hummock grassland, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Despite its difficulties, the indigenous Australians made full use of this odd plant.  The fibers of the stems were used for weaving and thatching huts; the waxes and oils extracted from it were hardened into a resin that could be used as a glue or a sealant.  And now, spearheaded by the Indjalandji-Dhidhanu people of the upper Georgina River, spinifex is being reintroduced as a 21st-century commodity -- with potential international markets.

Scientists at the University of Queensland, working with Indjalandji-Dhidhanu elder Colin Saltmere (himself an adjunct professor of architecture), have analyzed spinifex's unique properties, and found that not only does the resin (used for thousands of years by indigenous peoples) have properties similar to moldable plastic, the fibers in the stems have high flexibility, exceptional resistance to fatigue cracking -- and eight times the tensile strength of an equal diameter of steel.  The potential applications are already a very long list, including cable manufacture, production of resilient membranes (possibly superseding latex in gloves, for example), and creation of substitutes for wood, plastics, and carbon nanofibres.

"For thousands of years, spinifex was a building block for the Aboriginal societies in the desert; now it will continue to play a role in advancing local Aboriginal communities through business and employment opportunities," Saltmere said.  "The fine fibres at a nanoscale make this plant remarkable – and because it is so fine, we can make a fully renewable gel that is 98% water, and on a scale where we can sustainably generate hundreds of thousands of tonnes of material."

What seems to me to be nothing more than common sense -- "Listen to the people who know the land way better than you do" -- was effectively ignored for hundreds of years.  It's heartening that at least some of those voices are now being heard.  And given what's happening to the climate, we're going to need every advantage we have.  Better late than never, I suppose.  In this case, making use of a strange crop that was considered little more than a weed by the European colonizers, the multiple uses of which are only now becoming wider knowledge outside of the communities of indigenous Australians.

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Tribal mentality

There's a difference between respecting a culture and believing every damn thing it comes up with.

At its extreme, this tendency to take a kid-gloves attitude toward culture is what results in charges of Islamophobia or (worse) racism any time someone criticizes the latest depravity perpetrated by Muslim extremists.  Yes, it is their right to adhere to their religion.  No, that does not make it right for them to behead non-Muslims, hang gays, subjugate women, and sell children into slavery.  And the fact that most of their leaders have refused to take a stand against this horrifying inhumanity makes them, and the ideology they use to justify it, complicit in it.

A more benign manifestation of this same tendency is the glorification of indigenous cultures, as if they didn't have their own bad people and commit their own atrocities.  Current favorites are the Native Americans and the Celts, both of whom earned Historical Pathos Points for being overrun respectively by the European settlers, and by the Romans and (later) the English.  The destruction of their cultures gives them a veneer of tragic nobility.

Celtic knot from the Lindisfarne Gospels, 8th century [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Now, don't mistake me; the destruction of Native American tribes by the Europeans, and the crushing of Celtic society first by Rome and then by England, is an atrocity bordering on genocide.  But just because they had some cool aspects to their beliefs, and were ultimately destroyed, doesn't mean that they were somehow above reproach.  Indigenous people, just like us upstart Westerners, are people -- some good, some bad, some wise, some petty.  Some of their beliefs, just like some of ours, are worthy of emulation, and some are very much better off forgotten.

This blind admiration for All Things Indigenous reaches its pinnacle in the Worldwide Indigenous Science Network, which claims that modern science has gone off the rails -- and what we need is a return to "indigenous science."  Which, according to the site, is defined thusly:

Indigenous science is a way of knowing and a way of life. The power of indigenous science lies in its ability to make connections and perceive patterns across vast cycles of space and time. This "Great Memory" belongs to the entire human species, but it is most fully active in cultural healers who develop heightened levels of consciousness. The Great Memory may also be realized more universally when the interspecies bond is honored.

Which sounds lovely, doesn't it?  You might at this point be asking, "but how do we know that any of this is real?"  You're asking the wrong question, they say:

Indigenous science is holistic, drawing on all the Sense [sic], including the spiritual and psychic...  The end point of an indigenous scientific process is a known and recognized place.  This point of balance, referred to by my own tribe as the Great Peace, is both peaceful and electrifyingly alive.  In the joy of exact balance, creativity occurs, which is why we can think of our way of knowing as a life science.

In other words, another call to abandon the modern scientific insistence on data, controls, and analysis.  Just get to the "point of balance" (whatever the hell that is) and you'll know the answer without all of the messy experimentation.

Now, lest you think that with all of their talk about peace and balance that they are working in harmony with actual scientists, all you have to do is look at their "Research Page" to put that to rest.  Some of it seems to be anthropological research, which is fine and dandy, but then they jump into serious woo-woo land with their project to help "Western man (to) remember who he is."  This, apparently, involves finding out about tribal Anglo-Saxon practices, under the guidance of an "Anglo-Saxon wizard," Brian Bates, and a "Siberian shaman," Dora Kobyakova.  The latter is going to lead tours to museums to "help identify artifacts which science has not been able to."

Worse still is their involvement in HIV/AIDS in Africa, where they are spearheading an effort to incorporate "traditional medicine and alternative therapies" into the "treatment and prevention of AIDS."  My charitable side wants to believe that this is about finding medically efficacious native plants -- research that has turned up useful chemicals for the treatment of many diseases -- but after the involvement of shamans and wizards in their anthropological studies, I'm pretty sure this isn't so.  And this crosses yet another line, which is taking woo-woo beliefs into a realm where they're suggesting that people abandon tested and effective medical treatment in favor of magical thinking.  Thus, for all of their flowery verbiage, they are jeopardizing human lives.

Look, it's not as if I don't think ancient beliefs are fascinating.  I'm an amateur student of anthropology myself, and love learning about other cultures, traditions, and languages.  I celebrate my own ancestry, for all that I keep in mind that some of them were probably not nice people.  I'm glad that I still speak French, given that three-quarters of my ancestors did as well; and I proudly wear a Celtic knot tattoo on my leg in honor of my Scottish forebears (which account for much of the remaining quarter).

But the ancients weren't right about everything.  They did bad things, held counterfactual beliefs, and participated in gruesome rituals.  I'm happy to live in the modern world, for all of its faults; and should I become ill, I still will seek out the assistance of modern medicine, not a shaman.

Simply put: there's a reason we are the healthiest, longest-lived society humanity has ever seen.

There's some truth in the claim that we could learn something from some of the indigenous cultures -- most clearly in their understanding that we are all part of nature.  (Nota bene: yes, I know that not even all of them believed that.  The Yanomami of Brazil, for example, consider themselves so separate that they don't even classify members of other tribes as human.  But many indigenous peoples understand that we are fundamentally connected to nature in a way we westerners have long ago lost.)

We won't learn from other cultures, however, by romanticizing them, by unquestioningly accepting everything they did as praiseworthy (and simultaneously condemning our own culture in toto).  Leaping into "other ways of knowing" just because our distant ancestors didn't have access to modern science and medicine is foolhardy at best.  Ethnocentrism, whether lauding a culture or denigrating it, is never going to be a valid way to understanding.