Inca Indians

Agricultural Contribution: The Gift of Food


The Inca fest of tilling

 

More precious than the silver the Incans were forced to take from the earth is a food root the Incans seeded into the earth.  The potato, given to the world by the Incans, saved more lives than silver ever has.  Moreover, the lowly potato eventually shifted the power centers of Europe.

Before the conquest, Europeans depended on grain crops which needed warm climates and predictable weather conditions to be harvested.  The colder Northern European countries had to import grains and thus remained dependent on the more stable Southern European grain-growing nations.  With the arrival of the Incans’ potato, which could be grown in cold climates, the Northern European countries were able to feed their masses with a cheap, nutritious crop that needed only four months to harvest.

Five hundred years after the conquest, environmentalists are desperately trying to reconstruct a world where appropriate technology will lead to an atmosphere that is not life-threatening.  Our food, water, and atmosphere are so poisoned that scientists predict a possible future of human species extinction unless rapid and radical changes in the use of technology, chemicals, and energy sources are adapted to a simpler and less consumptively driven lifestyle.  Clues to such a life are buried in the history of suppressed cultures.  The remarkable agricultural system of Caribbean farmers was efficient and abundant.

Mayan and Aztec agriculturalists had developed brilliant methods of irrigation, continuous harvesting, and recycling of waste.  In the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan the chinampa system of organic farming fed over one hundred thousand inhabitants by adapting the city to its location on a lake.  The Aztec farming experts created floating plots of land where food crops or gardens of flowers flourished. 

This intricate terraced cultivation had been in use for over fifteen hundred years before Cortes destroyed Tenochititlan, the ancient city whose wealth, in the eyes of the Europeans, lay in gold and slaves, not an urban geography of beauty, abundance, and unparalleled environmental architecture.

 

http://www.sfu.ca/archaeology/museum/laarch/inca/age.html

http://www.foodtimeline.org/foodmaya.html

 

Economic Contribution: The Gift of Silver


Colonial Potosi

 

Nothing from our impossible past has died.

Mirna Martinez, in Zoe Anglesey, ed., Ixoc Amar*go, 249

 

The communal traditions of the Indians shaped the political structure which the Founding Fathers constructed, but Indians were not responsible for the economic system based on accumulation that the Europeans imported from the “old world.”  The Incan Indians of the Andean nations provided the forced labor that impelled a world economic transformation that shaped generations and gave rise to a capitalist world economy.

The silver mined from the Cerro Rico of Bolivia initiated a new currency, which, unlike gold, could be used by the emerging merchant class of bakers, fisherman, candle makers, and cloth weavers.  Never before had this common sector of society been major actors in the economy:

Never before in the history of the world had so much silver money been in the hands of so many people.  Kings, emperors, czars, and pharaohs had always accumulated great wealth in their jewels, their hordes of gold, and their coinage, but the total amount of gold and silver was quite limited by the scarcity of precious metals….This changed with the opening of the Americas…Precious metals from America superseded land as the basis for wealth, power, and prestige.  For the first time there was enough of some commodity other than land to provide a greater and more consistent standard by which wealth might be measured.  This easily transported and easily used means of wealth prepared the way for the new merchant and capitalist class that would soon dominate the whole world.

Even though the Indians made possible the greatest economic boom in the history of the world…they still languish in poverty….Potosi, the city which supplied the silver for the rise of capitalism, is now out of silver….The great mint of Potosi that swallowed eight million Indian miners and turned out billions of coins from the sixteenth century into the twentieth century operates now as a museum for visiting children.

 

Jack Weatherford, Indian Givers, 13, 18-19