User reviews

I'm a huge fan of PBS documentaries about history and past civilizations, and I was so looking forward to a long-overdue in-depth look at the earliest civilizations in North and South America. I'm still looking forward to it, because this series isn't it. You won't learn much about the history of the first civilizations the way you do if you watch other PBS shows - there's little information about how First People lived once upon a time (diet, housing, building techniques, daily life, local animals and plants that were vital to them, theories about why civilizations dissolved, how the dead were buried, etc.), the role of women in the various civilizations that came and went, relations between tribes, different ways groups governed themselves, etc. This series is more of a celebration of how people NOW, descended from the First Peoples of in North America, feel about their past, how they view their history from an emotional point of view, their perceptions of the past - and that's absolutely fine, and interesting if you don't know about their feelings, emotions and perceptions, which many people don't. Everyone presents a very romanticized view that make the past sound like all was perfect and in harmony, with no wars, no conflict, no problems at all - and I don't think any civilization, past or present, can claim that.