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.The first North American pottery, found it at Stallings Island, Georgia,dates to 3500 B.P.Potters introduced glazes to seal porous clays and decorate pots,jugs, and storage vats.In the Four Corners region of Arizona, Colorado, New Mex-ico, and Utah, craftspeople painted on or pressed patterns into the pottery in theshape of ropelike coils or geometric figures.Pottery vessels surpassed wood, woven, and stone containers in a variety of ways.Unlike the baskets and stoneware they replaced as cooking utensils, clay pots main-tain water temperature, which allows cooks to simmer and boil foods.Archaic cookscould thus leave their cooking unattended while they did other tasks.Slow cookingturned dried grains into porridge.Pottery, properly sealed, preserved foods, cookedor uncooked.Using clay cooking utensils in sedentary camps, cooks began to ex-periment with recipes adding a variety of ingredients at different times in the cook-ing process.In Archaic North American settlements, dogs were the only domesticated work-ing animal, and turkeys the only herd animal.Human hunters must have found wolfpups and adopted the most sociable and docile.Thousands of years of breeding re-sulted in the first North American dogs.They resembled the spitz dog family of morerecent times heavily muscled, short eared, curly tailed, and thick furred.But why domesticate only dogs? Middle Eastern goatherds and shepherds in thetime of the Hebrew Bible were contemporaries of late-Archaic Americans and hadalready domesticated cattle, chickens, sheep, pigs, and goats, and rode horses andcamels.Perhaps the animals of America were not amenable to domestication.Or it28 WORLDS I N MOTI ONmay be that the Americans did not need to domesticate animals why feed and carefor herds when wild animals could be taken in their natural haunts? In addition,North American natives symbiotic relationship with the animals may have pre-cluded domestication.To tame such beasts would have been unnatural and perhapseven unthinkable.One salubrious byproduct of their failure to domesticate a wide variety of animalswas that the Americans escaped the diseases that animals like rats and mice, horses,sheep, pigs, poultry, and cattle carry.Cattle incubate measles, tuberculosis, andsmallpox.Pigs are hosts to influenza and whooping cough, and sheep are notoriousfor the wide array of microbes they bear.Overall, humans share fifty different dis-eases with cattle, forty-six with sheep, forty-two with pigs, thirty-five with horses,thirty-two with rats and house mice, and twenty-six with poultry.Old World herdsmen and farmers literally lived with their animals (and the ani-mal feces) and died from animal-borne plagues.The first Americans suffered fromdietary diseases like rickets, a form of tuberculosis, and perhaps even the ancestorof the Hanta Virus, but the dispersion of native population prevented outbreaks ofdisease from becoming plagues.Unfortunately, when Europeans brought all thesediseases to the Americas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the natives hadno resistance to them, and the resulting  virgin-ground epidemics sometimes car-ried off 80 to 90 percent of the native population who came in contact with the germs.VillagesThe social and cultural life of the Archaic settlement differed from life in the Pa-leolithic hunting camp.Increasing density of population required complex adjust-ments in social and economic arrangements.Sedentary peoples must have surplusesof food, and archaeologists have found Archaic food caches and storage areas.Thelitter of shellfish fragments (mussel and clam shells, for example) on the Atlanticand Pacific coasts prove that Archaic sites were occupied time and again for long pe-riods by substantial numbers of foragers.But forage and storage required more com-plex social organization than hunting and gathering.Some individuals and familieswithin the group emerged as leaders.These men and women probably exercised agood deal of influence, although Archaic native chiefs did not have the kind of ab-solute formal power that European monarchs and princes exercised.Increasing population also spurred more organized religious practices.Fourthousand years ago, the  red ochre Indians of Labrador, Newfoundland, and north-eastern Maine fashioned large cemeteries and conducted elaborate burials.Mourn-ers broke and laid copper, greenstone, and chert objects in the graves.At PovertyPoint, Louisiana, archaeologists have found evidence of a series of Archaic Indianridges in the shape of a circle, each ridge over twenty feet in height.This amphithe-ater of burial mounds was topped by houses or campsites.At ceremonial sites likeTHE FI RST AMERI CANS 29the Adena burial grounds in Newark and Chillicothe, in south-central Ohio, priestsand villagers remade the landscape itself to honor the dead.At either end of a roadstood two enclosures, one round and the other polygonal, lined with logs and bark.The road itself, parts of which are still visible from the air, was raised above groundand pounded smooth.The increasing population density of the sedentary way of life brought with it apolitical crisis.Given that the maximum human carrying load of any ecological re-gion the largest population that it can support depends on what it can produceon a  bad day, the Archaic settlement had to command its surrounding territory ina way that hunter-gatherers did not [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]