Kingdoms Of Gold, Kingdoms Of Jade: The Americas Before Columbus - Hardcover

Mostly about the prehistoric societies of Mexico and Peru, this book catalogs new finds in pre-Columbian archaeology. While Fagan tackles the complex questions surrounding the collapse of the Aztec, Inca, and other native American cultures, his otherwise informative narrative is marred by an overabundance of simplifications, speculations, unfounded generalizations, and premature conclusions. Part of the problem is that Fagan uses long-discarded anthropological concepts to explain the patterns he sees. For example, compressing recent and 14,000-year-old Indian societies into one, he attributes continent-wide similarities to psychic unity. As for the collapse, he suggests that native Americans simply did not have the 'right stuff' to repel the ruthless invaders. A better book to satisfy the demand for a comprehensive summary of the archaeology of the Western Hemisphere spurred by the upcoming Columbus quincentenary is Stuart J. Fiedel's Prehistory of the Americas (Cambridge Univ. Pr., 1987). Later discoveries can be gleaned easily from popular magazines such as National Geographic and Archaeology. For a roundup of books related to the quincentary, see "Rediscovering Columbus," p. 120-122-- William S. Dancey, Ohio State Univ., Columbus
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