1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus | 
 enlarge | Author: Charles C. Mann
Publisher: Vintage
Category: Book
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Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 541
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.2 x 1.2
ISBN: 1400032059
Dewey Decimal Number: 970.01
EAN: 9781400032051
ASIN: 1400032059
Publication Date: October 10, 2006
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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 Tlacaelel, 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 Tenochtitlan, 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 Sahagun, Historia General de las Cosas de Nueva Espana, 1547-77). |
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 Tenochtitlan, 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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 185 more reviews...
 Only a few steps away from Chariots of the Gods... June 26, 2008
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
I wanted to like this book and believe in the arguments that the author was making, but in the end I simply could not do it.
There was too much anecdote and speculation used to support the author's ideas about the size and sophistication of pre-Columbus populations in the Americas. A bounty of documented evidence and facts are critical when attempting to revise such a major part of the historical record.
I found too many instances where the author was glib presenting an analogy or drawing a conclusion. I repeatedly found myself thinking, "No, Y does not follow from X in this case!"
Like other readers, I also found this book extremely disorganized in its presentation. One chapter we're following the Inca Empire in Peru, the next it's off to Plymouth, Massachussetts, then a quick stop at Clovis, and then we doddle off to the Yucatan to hang out with the Maya.
There also seems to be a larger agenda behind Mann's arguments in this book. This is especially apparent when he is discussing the potential pre-1492 human impact on the Amazon basin. He consistently pursues a line of argument best paraphrased as, "Hey, the Indians were constantly slashing and burning parts of the forest to create arable land, so what's the big deal if we do it nowadays?"
Great, except that the ability of small tribes with stone axes to clear rainforest isn't within ten orders of magnitude of what modern man and a few diesel bulldozers can achieve.
Fascinating speculation, recommended only if you have a lot of spare time to go on a summer flight of fancy.
 EYE-OPENING BOOK! June 24, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I began reading 1491 having absolutely no idea of what to expect, but I was pleasantly surprised to learn tons of information of which I was totally unaware and which is hardly ever discussed in traditional history books. The author (Mann) does a superb job of keeping the language simple enough for anyone to understand while delivering information which may difficult for some to accept and obviously remains controversial to many. Of course, many of these ideas are certainly "theories" which cannot really be proved, but even if you believe half of what's contained in this book, you will probably never view history in the same way again. The author offers alternative views from many experts regarding life before Columbus, such as the incredible length of time the americas had been inhabited, the true way of living of the "Indians", the possible number of Indians that inhabited the americas and the Carribean Islands, along with how the cultures were decimated, perhaps losing up to 90% of the population due to slaughter and disease. This book will make you rethink what you thought you knew! Enjoy!
Truly Mind-Altering Revelations about America Before Columbus June 9, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I can't say enough about this book! I spend hours telling friends about it and emailing them on the Internet. The author writes beautifully, no doubt about that. His description of the effects of North American Indians on the world's perception of human dignity and the freedom of the individual are extraordinary.
Terrific March 22, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
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.
What a complex, diverse, populous world was lost! March 8, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
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."
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