When I began to write The Oregon Testament, it came about largely because of the questions that interested me about Eastern Honduras' native history.  I began to see the Isthmus as the historical center of the Americas; where civilization brimmed.  What did it mean to have a history that was mostly buried?  And I always sensed that the fact that we knew so little about the history of the Americas had a role in so many of the cultural problems of the Americas.  Even in my own country, for example, in the paranoid years after 9/11, so many people pulled European heritage and Judeo-Christian heritage into their political vocabulary as an aggressive subcontext to their own political motivations.

Something about this never smelled right to me, because while no doubt the old world plays a considerable role in the culture of the Americas, in the increasingly diverse cultural landscapes of the new world, countries would be well served to embrace their only unifying history – the one under their feet.

But, what is the history of the American countries?  And is it important that nations filled with people from different places put a value in the deep history of the place they live? 

That question has always been blurred, I think, by the fact that the Americas were populated by a monoculture.  The Bering Land Bridge was a literal genetic bottleneck, all Native Americans were born from a very narrow set of genes.  When they came in contact with Europeans, as we all know, two continents of people and history nearly vanished.

In the last ten years, archaeologists have begun to rewrite the Americas' history with new evidence.  And authors like Charles Mann (1491: Revelations of the Americas before Columbus) have popularized these shifting views on the Americas.  Native America, we are learning, was much more organized, made much more significant advances in the sciences, and had much more an affect on our societies today than we ever imagined.

The thrill of having questioned these mysteries while traveling was doubled by the thrill of seeing some of their answers slowly get pieced together.  But if, as some scientists now believe, the Americas contained at their Pre-Columbian height 1/5th of the world's population, the history of their demise has a genetic, if not, evolutionary, explanation.