Why no Pyramids in Ohio?

The Escalante Canyon, where my now-husband took me on a grueling one-week wilderness expedition in order to propose marriage, is one of the most extraordinary places I’ve ever been. A subsidiary of the Grand Canyon, its bizarre hillocks and slot canyons are formed out of fossilized sea-bed and, with a fertile imagination, one can just about imagine man-eating puffer-fish and prehistoric fanged things lurking behind the sandstone outcrops. On day 4, when I’d almost  run out of lipstick and cigarettes, and my husband was still desperately concealing his engagement gift among increasingly smelly socks, our guide took us on a detour to see some petroglyphs, scrawled high on a red rock face, thought to be 1,000 years old. We stood in reverence for some time, and my fellow wilderness explorers expostulated at length about how amazingly old they were and wasn’t it weird to think of people, right here, doing that, all that time ago.

Secretly Unimpressed

But in the privacy of our tent, later, the socks safely parked outside, I confessed I wasn’t all that impressed. The Great Pyramid of Giza, which I first saw when 11, is more than 4,500 years old. A bit of spackle, and it would quite comfortably join the towers of the Manhattan skyline on an equal footing.

A thousand years ago, Song dynasty Chinese engineers were successfully tinkering with clock mechanisms. A few pictures of buffalo scratched on a wall when the Romans had already figured out under-floor heating frankly didn’t seem all that impressive to me. By the same token, I felt positively cheated when, as a teenager, I was taken to Mesa Verde in Colorado and, having struggled up the rickety wooden ladders to examine what I assumed were ancient habitations, discovered this community was at its peak when Chaucer was writing the Canterbury Tales. In other words, I suffered from the Northern European’s snobbery about ancient North America.

That snobbery morphed into curiosity when I started to visit the stand-out sites of MesoAmerica and South America. I got leg cramps from climbing just one pyramid at Teotihuacan, showing the Nahuatl-speaking ancients close by what is now Mexico City suffered from no lack of grandeur 2,000 years ago. Then there’s the Mayans, the Olmecs, and the Zapotecs. They were no slouches when it came to leaving imposing structures for the ages. In the big picture of American ancient civilizations, it seems that only a few hundred miles to the south, literate men were lining up theodolites and paving roads when the North Americans were still picking lunch out of each other’s hair.

Was Anybody There?

When you think about it, it’s a good question: Why are there no pyramids in Ohio? At first, I got ridiculous answers. Several people tried to convince me that there were no people in North America in ancient times, so they can hardly have been expected to build anything dramatic. Wrong. Flat wrong. North America has been teeming with humans for tens of thousands of years. Well, okay, not teeming like Fifth Avenue on the Saturday before Christmas, but quite respectably populated. Besides, everyone in ancient Meso- and South America originates from a great migration from Eurasia across the Bering Straits and down the continents of America.

North America, in other words, was populated before South America. So how come no-one stopped in North America long enough to build something truly, you know, awe-inspiring? Was it a sort of continental fashion statement? Those Mayans! So gauche!

Big-Ticket Bling Bling

“We’re blinded by bling,” argues Jonathan Haas, McArthur Curator of Anthropology at the Field Museum in Chicago, which has a permanent exhibition on Ancient Americas (North, South and Meso-). He says the big-ticket items from the ancient world are incredibly isolated incidents. The Inca civilization, for example, occurs only in the Andes, in a relatively small area of Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia. Same with the Mayans in MesoAmerica – you have an area in Southern Mexico that reaches slightly into Guatemala. “And that’s it,” he points out. They’re not even contemporaneous, and therefore even more isolated if you add the dimension of time (Incas aren't strictly ancient, but they built Machu Picchu, which is pretty cool.). “Larger surrounding areas didn’t develop grand civilizations.”

It turns out that the plain fact of the matter is no-one wants to build a pyramid. I mean actually build one, stone block by grueling stone block. It’s quite a different matter to survey the glorious result silhouetted against the sunset from your high golden throne, wafted by oiled Nubians wielding peacock-feather fans. There have been plenty of ego-addicted rulers, throughout time, who are just dying for a ziggurat. The trick is finding someone who’s prepared to die to build one for you.  “People who want pyramids don’t build pyramids,” says Haas. “It’s that simple.”

Persuading someone who doesn’t want to build a pyramid to change his mind takes a great deal more than personal charisma and a look of destiny. It requires the power to be able to force them to do it. And that’s the key. “You have a plethora of rich cultural heritage in ancient North America,” says Haas. “What you don’t have is the kind of power hierarchy that leads to the big civilizations.”

Geography is Political

The question, of course, is: why not? Haas has the answer. “What distinguishes South and Meso-America is that someone gained power over resources and production, and that didn’t happen in North America,” Haas says. “The reason is that in what’s now the United States, there’s a lack of centralized riverine water and fertile land.”

In the Andes, it’s easy to block off a river source or a hanging, fertile, valley, and start demanding that people pay you in labor or goods for those resources. But try cordoning off access to the broad Hudson or the mighty Mississippi; or fencing off the Great Plains of the American West and charging rent. That didn’t happen until a few hundred years ago, and it required all the greed and ingenuity of people who’d already figured out indoor plumbing. In other words, in the ancient world, geography was politics. Take control of the source of a River Delta, and you can sit on lama hide popping chocolate-covered chilis in your mouth while slaves toil to build you a nice tomb. Labor alongside your fellow men who are harvesting their own little piece of an expanse of wild spelt that stretches out to the horizon, and things tend to stay a lot more egalitarian.

“For example, Peru is all arid desert, and people gained control of the irrigation systems to buy and coerce the cooperation of other civilizations,” continues Haas. “In MesoAmerica, there was control over fertile land. This is what provoked different paths. Once that happens, it develops through warfare, and then it’s hard to stop because everyone’s on the same path.” That path can go on a long way. The Mayans, after all, did their thing for nearly 3,000 years, and produced astonishing numbers of huge structures and treasures for us to wonder at later.

“But in ancient North America, no-one gains control over that production,” continues Haas. “The area has very productive land that’s easy to farm. It’s an agricultural continent. So the North Americans solved their stresses in different ways than centralized production, and that prevented leaders from becoming rulers.”

Not that life in ancient North America was an idyll of socialist cooperation. “In third century BC Louisiana, you have precocious leaders popping up and having mounds built, but then they fall down again,” Haas says. “You get little hiccups of power, but those people never gain enough control to put them on the other path.”

It’s true that little hiccups of power don’t produce as awe-inspiring results as the great belches of megalomania that emanated from King Cheops or Qin Shi Huang, what with one thing and another. But Haas questions our dewy-eyed admiration for Sphinxes and Great Walls and vast necropoli in the jungle. “We love the tombs, the fancy ceramics, the gold treasures, but that doesn’t look at what life was like for the people. Who’s building the pyramids? Who’s making the ceramics? Who’s supporting the army? Who’s in the army? Life was very hard for the peasants.”

By the way, quite aside from solving the mystery of why we’ve got the Mall of America rather than Angkor Wat, Haas has cured me of my snobbish ideas about North America’s lack of ancient sites. Apparently, the country is thick with fascinating pre-500 CE stuff, including the Hopewell culture, Cahokia, and Blackwater. He’s got me feeling quite different about mounds, too, of which there are many ancient examples in the United States.

But if a few collapsed mounds don't rock your boat, you can always subscribe to some of the more controversial theories, of which there are many. One rumour has the Smithsonian engaged in a deliberate, decades-long cover-up of definite proof that Ancient Egyptians built caves in the Grand Canyon.

Ancient American Magazine believes they are “writing a New History of our nation by convincingly offering research that, in the coming century, will amount to virtually a total revision of American antiquity.” Its editorial position stands firmly on behalf of evidence for the arrival of overseas visitors to the Americas hundreds and even thousands of years before Columbus.

Of course, if you're unimpressed by the ancient works of Ohio, please send us your own theories.


 

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About The Author

Helen Atkinson

Last three pieces by this author:

My Favourite Ancient Spot in London - the Female Gladiator | Reserve King Tut Tickets Now! Advance Booking Now Open for Denver Tutankhamun Exhibition | Was Göbekli Tepe a Temple... or a Playpit?

Heritage Key's NYC Correspondent, Helen Atkinson, has 20 years of journalism experience in subjects ranging from the reinsurance industry to canoeing down the Bronx River. Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, Helen studied English Literature at Oxford, before embarking on a writing career. She moved to New York in 1994 and intends to stay there.