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Title: 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
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| 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Vintage Terrific | | The other reviewers have more than admirably summarized this book. It is a wonderful compilation of current thinking on the history of the Americas. Mr. Mann's writing takes you effortlessly into what could have been a very dry subject. I couldn't put this book down. Bravo and thank you Mr. Mann. | | 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Vintage What a complex, diverse, populous world was lost! | Most of what the public is taught in schools about Indians (or Native Americans) is wrong. In _1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus_ author Charles C. Mann sought to dispel many of the myths, cherished and otherwise, about what the inhabitants and their civilizations were like before the Europeans arrived. Though some of these revelations he admits aren't "new" (some of the older findings date back to the 1940s), nevertheless public perception, media portrayal, and public education has not caught up with the latest research. Even some academic positions suffer from a lack of balance and are at their heart flawed, as they view Indians only as either "poster children for eco-catastrophe" or as "green role models."
If I had to sum up this wonderful book in a sentence or two, it would be that the Indians of the Americas were immensely more diverse and populous than is generally thought. As the author put it, time and again "Indian societies have been revealed to be older, grander, and more complex than thought possible even twenty years ago."
The author roughly divided the book into three sections to tackle what he called Holmberg's Mistake (deriving from anthropologist Allan R. Holmberg and his studies of the Siriono of South America), the "idea that Indians were suspended in time, touching nothing and untouched themselves, like ghostly presences on the landscape." Geographer William Denevan called this "the pristine myth," the notion the Americas were somehow largely an Eden, untouched by human hands.
The first section dealt with why and how estimates of pre-1492 indigenous populations have been radically revised upwards. Many researchers now believe that there were more people living in the Americas than in Europe in 1491 and that one area, Central Mexico, was at the time the most densely populated place on Earth, with a population of 25.2 million - many scientists once thought the entire Americas boasted a population of under 9 million - and with twice as many people per square mile as either India or China (Spain and Portugal only boasted about 10 million inhabitants).
The second section tackled the peopling of the Americas and the advent of complex Indian societies, Mann showing why scientists now feel that not only were the Americas settled considerably earlier than once thought but that they achieved urban civilizations quite a bit earlier than had been previously imagined. Indeed, one civilization, that of the people of Norte Chico on the Peruvian coast, were building cities when only one other urban complex on Earth existed; Sumer. The on-going research into Norte Chico has caused considerable waves in archaeological circles due to what has been called the MFAC hypothesis, the maritime foundations of Andean civilization. All later Andean cultures, be they the Wari, the Tiwanaku, or the Inka, owe their origins to ancient coastal cities that drew their sustenance from the sea, not originally from agriculture. While the other Old World "wellsprings of human civilization" (such as Mesopotamia or China) were all based on growing crops, the people of Norte Chico grew to prominence thanks to the great fishery of the Humboldt Current.
The complexity of Indian culture was fascinating, whether it was the engineering of mound construction, Maya mathematics, or the khipu (or quipu) of the Inka, knotted strings that researchers now believe may in fact be a kind of three-dimensional binary code, a form of writing unlike anything on Earth.
The third section dealt with the fallacy that Indian cultures did not or could not control their environment, that most were simple hunter-gatherers. Mann provided examples throughout the book of how thoroughly and completely native cultures altered the landscape. Examples included the extensive terracing of mountainsides and building of canals for agriculture by Andean cultures, the rerouting of an entire river by Cahokia (a mound-building culture near modern St. Louis that at five square miles and 15,000+ people was the largest city north of the Rio Grande until the 18th century), the open, park-like woodlands relatively free of undergrowth found in eastern North America that amazed Europeans (the result of careful use of fire by the Indians, who also used fire to keep prairie and savanna from returning to forest in places like Illinois, Nebraska, and the Texas hill country, areas that started to revert to woodland after the decline of native culture), and the still amazing feat of actually improving the impoverished soil of sections of the Amazon rain forest by ancient cultures just now being discovered and studied, a people who were able to create a dark soil known as terra preta that was immensely fertile for centuries and even to the present by a process of expertly creating charcoal in cool, slow-burning fires and mixing it in with the soil.
Even when the Indians largely vanished before the settlers arrived, felled by waves of disease that preceded colonization, what the settlers encountered was also a cultural artifact. The vast herds of bison and the sky-blackening flocks of passenger pigeons that so amazed Europeans were the direct result of the decline of natives; they were examples of "outbreak populations" resulting from a severely disrupted ecosystem, namely, the removal of a keystone species, the Indian, who had previously kept such species in check through land and game management. The Yanomamo of the Orinoco river basin rain forest, who captured European imagination as a Stone Age people who lived lightly on the land as hunter-gatherers deep in the jungle, are a cultural artifact because disease and slave trading in the 17th and 18th centuries drove them from their farm villages to live in the forest, a forest that they in large part originally had created due to the careful planting of such valuable food-bearing trees as the peach palm; what many had classified as natural, pristine, climax forest were in essence vast orchards, remnants of a still little understood form of Amazonian agro-forestry, inhabited by the descendents of refugees, their "idyllic" and "natural" existence "in fact a life in poor exile."
| | 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Vintage Exchanges one set of biases for another | Some good and some bad in this book. There is a lot of information here, but most of it I had seen before in other sources. If you're new to the subject, this provides a broad overview, but please read additional material. The book presents the pre-Columbian Americas as a very complex mix of societies who modified their environment to perhaps a heretofore uninmagined degree. That's worth further investigation and I certainly hope we can learn from both their triumphs and their failures.
I found it problematic that the author told about professional archeaologists who excavated Indian burial grounds with bulldozers, and then, within a few pages, lumps all amateur archeologists into one group and call them a bunch of "Altantis hunting quacks". This is extremely disrespectful towards the many amateurs who have done amazing work in this area and who have spearheaded the efforts to decipher evidence that has long been ignored by main stream archeologists.
Secondly, the broad claim that there was no meaningful contact between the Americas and the other continents is likely not accurate. Epigraphers are now finding more and more links between ancient scripts in the Americas and abroad. Also, there is significant evidence of an ancient trans-Atlantic copper trade. Please see Michigan Copper: The Untold Story by Fred Rydholm and Contact with Ancient America by Ida Jane Gallagher for additional information.
Third, the author touts that the "three sisters" cutivation method used in the Andes is the only horticultural method that had been used for centuries without wearing out the soil. Obviously he hasn't spent much time researching Chinese history. The Chinese have kept many areas in continuous cultivation for centuries by utilizing every scrap of available biomatter to enrich the soil. They've cut terraces and dug irrigation ditches and provided an amazing amount of food for their people in an often inhospitable climate and terrain. Personally, as an organic gardener and a histroy buff, I've tried the three sisters combo with less than stellar results in my location. I've also used the Chinese method of enriching the soil with anything that can be composted and have had excellent results.
Worth a read, but don't stop with this book.
| | 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Vintage A Must Read | | 1491 is a must read for anyone interested in American history and culture. It begins with "Native Americans", and continues to influence us, and the world, today. Even if it did not, the record should be set straight about life here prior to the Old World invasion. | | 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Vintage Fascinating revisionist history. Well documented balanced account. | "1491" is a well researched book. Mann has extensively traveled to South America with the leading social scientists at the cutting edge of pre-Columbian history revisionism. Additionally, Mann has solicited these same scientists' editorial input. Thus, the quality of the book content is excellent.
Mann does a good job in presenting as objectively as possible the polemical debates on various controversial issues. In summary, here are the main revisionist themes he shares:
a) The Americas population was far larger than previously thought. Some estimates are as high as 110 million. Those estimates vary widely based on what extermination rates scientists use. If they use 95%, a post-Columbian population gets multiplied by 20 or divided by (1 - 95%). If they use 90%, the multiple is now half that or 10. In any case, they come up with estimates that are high multiples of what we learned in our high school textbooks.
b) Some of their cities in the 15th century were larger than Paris or London at the time. Agriculture, irrigation, urbanization, and waste management were often more advanced than in Europe.
c) The apparent natural wilderness of the Amazon rain forest is a mirage. It was often more of a managed landscape serving the resource and agricultural needs of the natives at the time.
d) The Americas were populated much earlier than 13,000 years ago and through different avenues than just the migration from Russia to Alaska through the Bering Strait. Estimates now range between 20,000 to 40,000 years ago of when settlers first populated the Americas. This was way before many Western European countries were inhabited.
One of the most interesting polemics relates to the firsthand description of the Amazon area written by Gaspar de Carvajal, a Spaniard in the Dominican order who went on a military expedition down the Amazon river. He wrote his document at the time of his travel around 1500 AD. His document was so controversial that it was not published until three centuries later. He describes the area as abundantly populated with many villages and very large cities with abundant fruitful gardens. But, the main source of skepticism is due to his describing Spaniards being attacked by topless warrior women (Amazons) who lived without men. They reproduced by occasionally kidnapping men. Carvajal warned that any kidnapped man "would go a boy and return an old man" once the Amazons would be done procreating with him. One leading archaeologist, Betty Meggers in Amazonia: Man and Culture in Counterfeit Paradise argues that the accounts of Carvajal are delusional. She discredits his narratives of the Amazons and everything else as sheer fantasy. She advances a case that no civilization could have generated an agricultural surplus in the Amazon area whose ground is unfit for agriculture. But, Anna Roosevelt, another leading archaeologist takes the opposite view that Carvajal firsthand accounts, besides the mythical Amazons, was probably for real. Today, the consensus on this heated debate has progressively sided with Roosevelt.
Chapter 10, `The Artificial Wilderness' is also intriguing. It suggests that nature really went wild so to speak after the conquistadors and their Western diseases disseminated the native Indians. The Indians managed thoroughly the natural landscape and had a profound impact on all aspects of the ecological equilibrium. Once the Indians were removed, the ecological equilibrium completely changed. Quoting the author: "... the newly created wilderness was indeed beautiful. But, it was built on Indian graves and every bit as much a ruin as the temples of the Maya."
The book contains also much information that is well established and not controversial. This includes how Pizarro with a really small army took over the Incas. It was not so much because of superior military technology. Instead it was because of the devastating impact of the small pox, Incas' factionalism and civil wars, and Incas lack of succession plans. When political and military leaders were killed they were not readily replaced. They were viewed as quasi deities whose dead bodies were still empowered by leadership. Obviously, this was a recipe for leadership vacuum. The documentation of the 97% drop in Aztec population upon the Spanish conquest within a single century is staggering. As shown on the graph on page 130, it is almost entirely due to a succession of diseases brought accidentally by the Spaniards and their pigs. Similarly, information in the Appendix regarding the three Mayan calendars is intriguing. This is because their combined precision entailed they had a surprising understanding of mathematics and astronomy.
The author also covers many topics that remain unresolved. The Appendix on 'Talking Knots' is interesting. The Incas used knot patterns on ropes and textile in a way that baffles researchers. Some believe it was a form of accounting. Others think it is a full fledge language; but, they have not decoded it yet. The Olmecs invented the wheel over two thousand years ago but never made use of it besides manufacturing small toys with wheels. The Incas masonry including the moving of enormous stones and building huge fortresses without mortar or draft animals remains a mystery. The Mayas invented the number zero early on. But, besides their sophisticated calendar they left no mathematical legacy. Meso-American Indians were able to turn teosinte into corn through impressive genetic engineering feat we'd be hard pressed to duplicate today. The Nazca Indians drew on the ground huge figures of animals and plants several miles long. Erich von Daniken (not a scientist, but mentioned in the book) advanced a theory that the Nazca Indians were too primitive to have made drawings on such a large scale visible only from the air. Instead, he mentioned in his book The Return of the Gods: Evidence of Extraterrestrial Visitations that those drawings were the vestige of visiting extra terrestrial beings. Yet, how the Nazca Indians actually drew those drawings and why remains unexplained. Andean societies built a formidable 40 mile long Great Wall of Peru for no apparent reason. Why did the Maya abandon their cities? The standard answer that it was solely because of self-induced resource devastation is now questioned. The over 100 year war between Kaan and Mutal played a large role in the Mayan's ultimate collapse. Why did North American Indians build gigantic earth mounds 6,000 years ago way before the advent of agriculture is also puzzling? Social scientists will ponder upon those mysteries for a long time.
I really enjoyed this book as it opened my mind to a new world (that's surprisingly old). If you found my review interesting, you'll find the book fascinating. | | 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Vintage Product Description | In this groundbreaking work of science, history, and archaeology, Charles C. Mann radically alters our understanding of the Americas before the arrival of Columbus in 1492.
Contrary to what so many Americans learn in school, the pre-Columbian Indians were not sparsely settled in a pristine wilderness; rather, there were huge numbers of Indians who actively molded and influenced the land around them. From the astonishing Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán, which had running water, immaculately clean streets, and was larger than any contemporary European city, to the Mexican corn that was so carefully created in a specialized breeding process that it has been called man’s first feat of genetic engineering, Indians were not living lightly on the land but were landscaping and manipulating their world in ways that we are only now beginning to understand. Challenging and surprising, this a transformative new look at a rich and fascinating world we only thought we knew. | | 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Vintage Amazon.com | | 1491 is not so much the story of a year, as of what that year stands for: the long-debated (and often-dismissed) question of what human civilization in the Americas was like before the Europeans crashed the party. The history books most Americans were (and still are) raised on describe the continents before Columbus as a vast, underused territory, sparsely populated by primitives whose cultures would inevitably bow before the advanced technologies of the Europeans. For decades, though, among the archaeologists, anthropologists, paleolinguists, and others whose discoveries Charles C. Mann brings together in 1491, different stories have been emerging. Among the revelations: the first Americans may not have come over the Bering land bridge around 12,000 B.C. but by boat along the Pacific coast 10 or even 20 thousand years earlier; the Americas were a far more urban, more populated, and more technologically advanced region than generally assumed; and the Indians, rather than living in static harmony with nature, radically engineered the landscape across the continents, to the point that even "timeless" natural features like the Amazon rainforest can be seen as products of human intervention. Mann is well aware that much of the history he relates is necessarily speculative, the product of pot-shard interpretation and precise scientific measurements that often end up being radically revised in later decades. But the most compelling of his eye-opening revisionist stories are among the best-founded: the stories of early American-European contact. To many of those who were there, the earliest encounters felt more like a meeting of equals than one of natural domination. And those who came later and found an emptied landscape that seemed ripe for the taking, Mann argues convincingly, encountered not the natural and unchanging state of the native American, but the evidence of a sudden calamity: the ravages of what was likely the greatest epidemic in human history, the smallpox and other diseases introduced inadvertently by Europeans to a population without immunity, which swept through the Americas faster than the explorers who brought it, and left behind for their discovery a land that held only a shadow of the thriving cultures that it had sustained for centuries before. --Tom Nissley A 1491 Timeline | Europe and Asia | Dates | The Americas | | 25000-35000 B.C. | Time of paleo-Indian migration to Americas from Siberia, according to genetic evidence. Groups likely traveled across the Pacific in boats. | | Wheat and barley grown from wild ancestors in Sumer. | 6000 | | | 5000 | In what many scientists regard as humankind's first and greatest feat of genetic engineering, Indians in southern Mexico systematically breed maize (corn) from dissimilar ancestor species. | | First cities established in Sumer. | 4000 | | | 3000 | The Americas' first urban complex, in coastal Peru, of at least 30 closely packed cities, each centered around large pyramid-like structures | | Great Pyramid at Giza | 2650 | | | 32 | First clear evidence of Olmec use of zero--an invention, widely described as the most important mathematical discovery ever made, which did not occur in Eurasia until about 600 A.D., in India (zero was not introduced to Europe until the 1200s and not widely used until the 1700s) | | 800-840 A.D. | Sudden collapse of most central Maya cities in the face of severe drought and lengthy war | | Vikings briefly establish first European settlements in North America. | 1000 |  | | Reconstruction of Cahokia, c. 1250 A.D.* | Abrupt rise of Cahokia, near modern St. Louis, the largest city north of the Rio Grande. Population estimates vary from at least 15,000 to 100,000. | | Black Death devastates Europe. | 1347-1351 | | | 1398 | Birth of Tlacaélel, the brilliant Mexican strategist behind the Triple Alliance (also known as the Aztec empire), which within decades controls central Mexico, then the most densely settled place on Earth. | | The Encounter: Columbus sails from Europe to the Caribbean. | 1492 | The Encounter: Columbus sails from Europe to the Caribbean. | | Syphilis apparently brought to Europe by Columbus's returning crew. | 1493 | | | Ferdinand Magellan departs from Spain on around-the-world voyage. | 1519 |  | | Sixteenth-century Mexica drawing of the effects of smallpox** | Cortes driven from Tenochtitlán, capital of the Triple Alliance, and then gains victory as smallpox, a European disease never before seen in the Americas, kills at least one of three in the empire. | | 1525-1533 | The smallpox epidemic sweeps into Peru, killing as much as half the population of the Inka empire and opening the door to conquest by Spanish forces led by Pizarro. | | 1617 | Huge areas of New England nearly depopulated by epidemic brought by shipwrecked French sailors. | | English Pilgrims arrive at Patuxet, an Indian village emptied by disease, and survive on stored Indian food, renaming the village Plymouth. | 1620 | | | *Courtesy Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, Collinsville, Ill., painting by Michael Hampshire. **Courtesy Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, Santa Fe, N.M. (Bernardino de Sahagún, Historia General de las Cosas de Nueva España, 1547-77). | |
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