Post-Apocalyptic America
Aug. 2nd, 2013 11:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragoness_eImagine, if you will, that pandemic diseases sweep across the Americas--diseases that the Americans have no resistance to. More than 75% die in each successive wave--because it doesn't stop coming. A civilization supporting millions collapses, because there are not enough people left to sustain the arts, the government, organized religion, other fundamental institutions of society, the infrastructure, or even food production. Those who survive the disease often starve. All that are left are small bands of barbarians, eeking out a hard-scrabble, stone-age hunter-gatherer existence, who avoid the decaying ruins filled with unburied bones.
To foreign travelers visiting the Americas, the land appears a pristine wilderness, untouched by human hands save for a few hostile "savages". They never know of the great civilizations that once stood there; the ruins have fallen into unrecognizable mounds. To their eyes, the land is empty, and ripe for the taking.
The year is not 2100 or some far future date; it's 1620 A.D., and the foreigners are English settlers.
I am reading "1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus" by Charles C. Mann and it is an amazing, eye-opening book. Everything I ever learned about Indians as a schoolgirl was wrong, pretty much. Modern archaeology and related studies have completely changed the picture of the pre-Columbian world from the old stereotypes.
I'm only part way through the book; I'm having to sit back and digest the chapters on what happened when Old World diseases got loose in the New World. The diseases raced far ahead of any contact with Europeans, up and down the trade networks; whole peoples died out and civilizations vanished before any white man ever heard of them. Some were never heard of, save as archaeological mysteries centuries later.
Smallpox and other diseases broke the backs of the great civilizations we did know about: the Aztecs, the Incas, etc. Even while they were fighting the Spanish, they were dying in droves from diseases they had no resistance to. That's why the common language of Mesoamerica and South America is Spanish, now.
The settlers who founded Canada and the U.S. did not come to a "pristine wilderness"; they landed in recently-emptied, post-apocalyptic land. The dystopian sci-fi scenario is not from our future; it's from our past.
To foreign travelers visiting the Americas, the land appears a pristine wilderness, untouched by human hands save for a few hostile "savages". They never know of the great civilizations that once stood there; the ruins have fallen into unrecognizable mounds. To their eyes, the land is empty, and ripe for the taking.
The year is not 2100 or some far future date; it's 1620 A.D., and the foreigners are English settlers.
I am reading "1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus" by Charles C. Mann and it is an amazing, eye-opening book. Everything I ever learned about Indians as a schoolgirl was wrong, pretty much. Modern archaeology and related studies have completely changed the picture of the pre-Columbian world from the old stereotypes.
I'm only part way through the book; I'm having to sit back and digest the chapters on what happened when Old World diseases got loose in the New World. The diseases raced far ahead of any contact with Europeans, up and down the trade networks; whole peoples died out and civilizations vanished before any white man ever heard of them. Some were never heard of, save as archaeological mysteries centuries later.
Smallpox and other diseases broke the backs of the great civilizations we did know about: the Aztecs, the Incas, etc. Even while they were fighting the Spanish, they were dying in droves from diseases they had no resistance to. That's why the common language of Mesoamerica and South America is Spanish, now.
The settlers who founded Canada and the U.S. did not come to a "pristine wilderness"; they landed in recently-emptied, post-apocalyptic land. The dystopian sci-fi scenario is not from our future; it's from our past.
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Date: 2013-08-03 04:42 pm (UTC)That makes so much sense, though. For so damned many things.