Turns out, not only is it from a poorly researched alternate history fiction, it's from an unfinished, unpublished, as yet unwritten, poorly researched alternate history fiction.
At this point I'm starting to wonder how the 2015 mark got past the person who shared it and then started to wonder how many other people had shared it with remarks about how #NativeLivesMatter and how the white historians are keeping this map out of academia ; so I went to twitter, searched for #BeforeAmerica and found that since about twelve hours ago, this little image and it's right on message, has been slowly spidering its way across the twitterverse. Each share, more shocked that they hadn't been "taught this at school" than the last, each one more supportive of the Native peoples, who's map colonialism destroyed, than the last.
Me being me, I've gone and told every last one of them that if they genuinely cared about the native peoples of the Americas that they'd have recognized the obvious fiction far quicker than me.
If they really supported the native Americans they'd have known that the Apache as people didn't exist until horses were imported from Europe, they'd have know that the Maya, Olmec, and Aztec weren't contemporary with each other, they'd have known that the Anasazi culture died out by the 1300s.
Basically I caught some idiots in the wild, uncritically sharing something because it fits their narrative, and I textually stamped on them. Hopefully this'll be an end to the travels of this image.
Update: It wasn't an end to it :(
UPDATE: 09/03/16
In the last week or so, this shit has reappeared, only in black and white this time, because that totally makes it more legitimate. *sighs*
It looks like this now
Thanks for tackling this map. I've been trying to counter it on Facebook since it came to my attention, but with little luck. At least I kept my own friends from sharing it.
ReplyDeleteI wanted to point at an error or two that you have here though. First, the Apache were around before the Spanish and horses showed up, though they weren't as prominent as they would later be. There had been some debate on exactly when they arrived in the Southwest from further north, but some archaeological sites discovered in 2013 (such as the Whitlock Mountain site) points to an Apache presence in the area as early as the mid-1400s.
Also, in a weird quirk of history and archaeology, the Olmecs actually are contemporaries of the Aztecs. Just not in the way people think. The name "Olmec" is now almost always associated with the archaeological culture that was dominant in the Gulf lowlands between 1500-400 BCE. But the name originated as the term for the Nahuatl-speakers of Olmecan, the Land of Rubber (People), a peripheral tributary of the Aztecs in the Gulf lowlands - although the region seems to be more commonly referred to as Tochtepec after its largest community. So there actually were Olmecs living at the same time of the Aztecs (and sending some 16,000 balls of rubber annually to Tenochtitlan as tribute, along with other goods).
Of course, this wasn't what the original creator of the map was aiming for. He describes the Olmec on his map as a people adopting an ancient name to emphasize their legitimacy, like European powers claiming to be the heirs of Rome. This is problematic, since they people living there wouldn't have called the ancient culture "Olmec" like modern archaeology does.
Yup, the exonyms were a dead giveaway.
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