>It seems to me that the tribes were, on the whole, more "civilized" than
>their European counterparts, and only now are we beginning to see that fact.
 
This smacks of a sort of neo-Rousseau sentimentality: The Noble Savage Redux.
How do you measure civilization? Sure, the Amerindians had no Hitler,
Stalin, Vlad the Impaler -- but where's the Amerindian Einstein, Beethoven,
Shakespeare? Europe may have gone to extremes of high and low, but we all seem
to average out about the same.
 
kjf-