It certainly would have been informative if the natives
of the Americas had been prolific writers the way the Chinese,
Arabs and ancient Europeans were.
The Aztecs, Incas and the Spiro people did have writing
but they either didn't leave enough behind or there wasn't enough
writing about daily life and business to feel like we knew them.
I suspect that literacy was not wide-spread so huge
numbers of people couldn't have expressed themselves in any other
way than speech or art. without symbolic speech which is what
writing is, we may see the art and not know if it is religious
expression, some sort of protest or what. It could be anything.
Scholars can dig through the Spiro Mounds and look at
tons of objects but not know what was in the minds of the people
in their daily lives.
What made people afraid? What did you have to be careful
about to avoid being punished? Who would have punished you? What
was community life like?
All those things are things we will probably never know.
Some of those ancient societies practiced human
sacrifice. Researchers found a cave in the Andes several years
ago containing the mummified body of a boy of about 6. We don't
know anything about what religion his family practiced, but we
know they made a long trek up a mountain to this cave where the
boy was ceremonially wrapped while still alive and struck on the
head to kill him.
It is horrifying to us, but a great example of how other
societies in the past had lives that would be incomprehensible to
us today. Who made the decision that this little boy must die? It
makes no sense to us.
We are products of our time and our society. The Western
idea of the worth of individuals is fairly new. It could be that
some of these native societies may have treated their people very
well, but we don't know anything except that several societies in
the Americas thrived for hundreds of years and then dissolved in
to ruin and military adventure.
Actually, this is not unique to the Americas. There were
ancient societies in Asia such as in Cambodia which built great
temples and other structures and then appear to have faded away
in to the forest, so to speak.
The "National Geographic" frequently has articles about
ruins and vanished civilizations and I always enjoy learning
about them.
Martin
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