Ed Barnhart: belief

Transcript context

…So where and who were the first civilizations in South America, Mesoamerica? Well, I think we’re still piecing that together. Coming back to the first things we talked about, I think we’re still missing a lot of stuff, especially in South America. It just keeps getting older and older. Part of the reason it’s hard to answer that question is, at what point do we consider people a civilization or a culture? We have in the Americas this long period of time that we call the Paleo-Indian time where they were hunting megafauna. And then when those went away, we get into this even longer period of time called The Archaic, where they’re just hunters and gatherers. Sometimes somebody’s coming up with a cool different kind of arrowhead. They go back and forth with different hunting tools, but really nothing changes for thousands of years and then finally they start developing into these larger groups, which for the most part has to do with agriculture. It used to be archeology that was just the end all, be all. Civilization starts with the invention of agriculture. And we can’t have sedentary communities until people learn how to farm. But that’s been discounted. Peru was a big part of that. That area of Caral, it’s connected to another city on the coast called Aspero. Aspero starts about the same time, but they’re all about fishing. They have no farming. And Caral, who’s upriver from them, is farming, but funny enough, they’re not really farming food. They’re farming cotton and they’re making nets and they’re trading the nets with the people on the coast for the fish. So it’s not as simple as, it’s just agriculture anymore. But it is, I think, still rooted in, how can we feed more people than just our family? How can we together create a food abundance so we’re no longer scared about running out of food? So is it possible, which is something you’ve argued, that civilization started in the Amazon, in the jungle versus the coast?…

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