Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

112. Terence Grieder, professor of art history at the University of Texas at Austin, has compared the early art of the Americas with that of Australia, Polynesia, Indonesia and south-east Asia and offers some fascinating observations. He finds in both realms that there are three basic types of civilisation and that the art of these three civilisations varies systematically in both form and symbolic content. He argues that this supports the idea that the Americas were peopled by three separate migrations. Grieder’s main point is that there is a cultural gradient which shows parallels between the Americas and the Australian–south-east Asian landmass. For example, in Australia and the Atlantic coast of South America, furthest from the Eurasian landmass, were found the ‘most primitive peoples’, areas populated by bands of hunter-gatherers without permanent shelter, without agriculture or specialised techniques. Melanesian people, on the other hand, and the inhabitants of the Great Plains of North America, and some areas of South America, lived in settled villages and practised agriculture. Finally, in Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines, and on the Asian mainland, and in Central America, there were large populations who lived in towns, with temples of stone, and specialist occupations. In both locations (Australia to south-east Asia on the one hand, the Americas on the other), similar levels of civilisation had similar symbolic art.

The first wave, as Grieder calls it, was characterised by primitive vulva and phallus signs, cup-marked stones, face and body-painting. The second wave was typified by the holy tree or pole, masks and bark cloth. The third wave showed geometrical symbols (cross, checkerboard, swastika, S-design) and often represented the cosmos (celestial symbolism), which was also reflected in the use of caves and mountains as holy sites, including artificial mountains, or pyramids. Tattooing was introduced in the third wave, and bark paper books. Of course, in many areas the different waves came into contact and affected one another (Iroquois symbolism, in particular, is a mixture of all three waves, a conclusion supported by blood-type analysis). But Grieder finds that the three-wave symbolism is still strong and that it is unlikely to have been invented twice. He therefore concludes that not only were there three waves of migrants into the Americas, but that these three waves were paralleled in the migrations from south-east Asia to Australia, Tasmania and New Zealand. Grieder, Origins of Pre-Columbian Art, Op. cit.

113. Wright, Op. cit., pages 53–54 and 165. See also Moynahan, Op. cit., page 513 for ‘Christian’ forms of killing.

114. Elliott, Op. cit., pages 81 and 86.

115. Ibid., page 87.

116. Bernard Lewis and P. M. Holt, Historians of the Middle East, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962, page 184.

117. The whole process was underlined by an idea that had begun with the Church Fathers – that civilisation, and with it world power, moved steadily from east to west. On this account, civilisation had begun in Mesopotamia and Persia, and been replaced in turn by Egypt, Greece, Italy, France and now Spain. Here, it was said (by the Spanish of course), it would remain, ‘checked by the sea, and so well-guarded that it cannot escape’. Elliott, Op. cit., page 94 and Fernando Pérez de Oliva, Las Obras, Córdoba, 1586, 134f.

118. Elliott, Op. cit., page 95.

119. Ibid., page 96.

120. Earl J. Hamilton, American Treasure and the Price Revolution in Spain, 1501–1650, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1934, page vii.

121. Walter Prescott Webb, The Great Frontier, London: Secker & Warburg, 1953. See pages 239ff for the role of the revolver and two new methods of farming. See also: Wilbur R. Jacobs, Turner, Bolton and Webb: Three Historians of the American Frontier, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1965.

122. Though Michael Coe says that even today the population of, say, the Mayan Indians is unknown. Op. cit., page 47.

123. Elliott, Op. cit., page 65.

124. Royal Commentaries, translated by Livermore, part II, ‘The conquest of Peru’, pages 647–648. Quoted in Elliott, Op. cit., page 64.

125. Elisabeth Armstrong, Ronsard and the Age of Gold, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1968, pages 27–28.

CHAPTER 22: HISTORY HEADS NORTH: THE INTELLECTUAL IMPACT OF PROTESTANTISM

1. Manchester, A World Lit Only by Fire, Op. cit., page 132.

2. Ibid., page 130.

3. Ibid., page 131.