* The failure of historians for a long time to recognize that the native American societies of the 18th and 19th centuries were societies created by the survivors after the population crash caused by the influx of diseases from the old world brought by the Columbian exchange. The social structures created from the remnants of earlier societies and the acquisitions from new contacts with the European societies, under pressure from the invaders and colonists provided little hint of the greatness that had been lost.
* The emergence of better history that is possible combining archaeological and anthropological knowledge with history, delving into the historical records from the Maya now being deciphered for the first time, and retrieving original sources from the archives of those records of the early contacts.
* The failure of U.S. schools and text books to provide an adequate coverage of pre-Columbian history, and the vast ignorance of the U.S. population of the history of this hemispere. Our view of native Americans should be different if we knew more about what their ancestors had achieved. We might be wiser if we understood more about the varieties of human experience, and might gain that breadth of understanding if we could add the richness of history of other continents to our knowledge of European history.
* The huge impact on the environment that the human population had in the thousands and perhaps tens of thousands of years they had occupied the Western Hemisphere. They possessed at least one powerful technology -- fire. Even pulling up plants seen as weedy species, planting and protecting plants that they valued, hunting and controlling competing species, pre-Columbian Americans could and almost surely did greatly modify the the ecology of the North and South American continents.
* While we are coming to understand the impact of European immigrants and technology on the American environment, we probably have underestimated the impact of the crash of the native American population on the environment. Removing 90 or 95 percent of a human population of say 100 million, who had developed extensive technologies and infrastructure must have had a major impact on the environment.
I would suggest that while Western civilization picked up a lot of technology from the native Americans (e.g. corn and potatoes, peppers and tomatoes, turkeys, varieties of beans and cotton), there remains potentially very important technology we have only partially mastered (e.g. quinoa, grain amaranth). Moreover, many native American societies used tree species grown in natural stands. Babassu palms still provide employment for half a million people in Brazil, even though they are not cultivated in plantation systems. Mast, "the nuts of forest trees accumulated on the ground", was an important food source for North American natives before Columbus, and many species of fruit trees were and still are used in South and Central America without being grown in plantation cultivation. I suspect that there would be real economic value in melding these technologies with modern practice for commercial exploitation.
I think there are technologies, such as raised bed agriculture that European colonists did not discover or adopt that fell into disuse, that could be revived and more widely used. I suppose that the Pueblo's rediscovery and revival of pre-Columbian pottery traditions illustrates the potential of such revivals. I suspect we would love to understand the technology that was used by the Incas for fitting huge stone blocks together, and might find its adaptation useful, but will never be able to discover its secret.
One thought out of still further in left field: Archaeologists are interested in the ruins of cities, and perhaps especially interested in those cities that eventually crashed leaving their ruins in places that the archaeologists can now dig without disrupting urban life. I suggest that this tends to focus on the interface as the decline of the previous culture.
Think about 1776 and all that in these terms. The existing political system crashed. There was a population crash (as one-third of the population of the colonies got up and left). The period was marked by war over a wide area. Trade patterns were disrupted for decades. Citizens of the United States tend to think of the period as the birth of American democracy and of a better society and improved form of government. If we did not have the historical records, and depended only on archaeological findings, we might have a totally different view of the period!
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