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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2071 in Books
• Published on: 2006-10-10
• Released on: 2006-10-10
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 541 pages

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

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. In a riveting and fast-paced history, massing archeological, anthropological, scientific and literary evidence, Mann debunks much of what we thought we knew about pre-Columbian America. Reviewing the latest, not widely reported research in Indian demography, origins and ecology, Mann zestfully demonstrates that long before any European explorers set foot in the New World, Native American cultures were flourishing with a high degree of sophistication. The new researchers have turned received wisdom on its head. For example, it has long been believed the Inca fell to Pizarro because they had no metallurgy to produce steel for weapons. In fact, scholars say, the Inca had a highly refined metallurgy, but valued plasticity over strength. What defeated the Inca was not steel but smallpox and resulting internecine warfare. Mann also shows that the Maya constructed huge cities and governed them with a cohesive set of political ideals. Most notably, according to Mann, the Haudenosaunee, in what is now the Northeast U.S., constructed a loose confederation of tribes governed by the principles of individual liberty and social equality. The author also weighs the evidence that Native populations were far larger than previously calculated. Mann, a contributor to the Atlantic Monthly and Science, masterfully assembles a diverse body of scholarship into a first-rate history of Native America and its inhabitants. 56 b&w photos, 15 maps.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
As a schoolboy, Charles C. Mann learned that the original American Indians migrated from Asia during an Ice Age about 13,000 years ago. Living in small bands of big-game hunters, they barely affected a wilderness that endured until 1492, when Christopher Columbus initiated a period of European colonization that transformed the Americas, introducing historic change to timeless, primeval continents. "When my son entered school, [he] was taught the same things I had been taught," Mann discovered. That persistent story troubled Mann, who, as a correspondent for Science and the Atlantic Monthly, had encountered dramatic new evidence for a radically different history of pre-Columbian America.

In 1491, Mann introduces readers to the controversies provoked by the latest scholarship on native America before European exploration and colonization. Many scholars now insist that native settlement began at least 20,000 years ago, when fishing peoples arrived in small, open boats from coastal Siberia. Their descendants developed especially productive modes of horticulture that sustained a population explosion. By 1492, Indians in the two American continents numbered about 100 million -- 10 times previous estimates.

Far from the indolent, ineffective savages of colonial stereotypes, the Indians cleverly transformed their environments. They set annual fires to diminish underbrush, to encourage large, nut-bearing trees and to open the land to berry bushes that sustained sizable herds of deer. In the Andes, they built massive stone terraces for farming. In the Amazon River basin, they improved vast tracts of soil by adding charcoal and a fish fertilizer.

Sometimes they overcrowded the land, straining local supplies of water, wood and game animals. More often, however, the natives ably managed their local nature, sustaining large populations in plenty for centuries. Amazonia, for example, probably supported more people in 1491 than it does today.

Their environmental management came to a crashing end after 1492. Colonizers swarmed over the land, determined to subdue, to exploit and to convert the natives. The newcomers carried destructive new weapons of gunpowder and steel. They also introduced voracious livestock -- cattle, pigs and horses -- which invaded and consumed native crops. Worst of all, they conveyed diseases previously unknown to the natives. Lacking immunity, the Indians died by the millions, reducing their numbers to a tenth of their previous population by 1800, in the greatest demographic catastrophe in global history.

As Indian populations collapsed, the land lost their management. Underbrush and some species of wildlife surged after the initial epidemics but, significantly, before the arrival of large numbers of colonists. Seeing a wilderness, the colonizers misunderstood it as primeval evidence that the surviving Indians were lazy savages who did not deserve to keep so much promising land. During the 20th century, anthropologists and environmentalists developed a more positive spin, but one still based on misunderstanding: They recast the Indians as simple conservationists who trod lightly on their beautiful land for centuries, setting examples of passivity that we should emulate.

By dispelling these myths to recover the intensive and ingenious native presence in the ancient Americas, Mann seeks an environmental ethos for our own future. Instead of restoring a mythical Eden, we should emulate the Indian management of a more productive and enduring garden. In sum, Mann tells a powerful, provocative and important story -- especially in the chapters on the Andes and Amazonia.

Mann's style is journalistic, employing the vivid (and sometimes mixed) metaphors of popular science writing: "Peru is the cow-catcher on the train of continental drift. . . . its coastline hits the ocean floor and crumples up like a carpet shoved into a chairleg." Similarly, the book is not a comprehensive history, but a series of reporter's tales: He describes personal encounters with scientists in their labs, archaeologists at their digs, historians in their studies and Indian activists in their frustrations. Readers vicariously share Mann's exposure to fire ants and the tension as his guide's plane runs low on fuel over Mayan ruins. These episodes introduce readers to the debates between older and newer scholars. Initially fresh, the journalistic approach eventually falters as his disorganized narrative rambles forward and backward through the centuries and across vast continents and back again, producing repetition and contradiction. The resulting blur unwittingly conveys a new sort of the old timelessness that Mann so wisely wishes to defeat.

He is also less than discriminating in evaluating the array of new theories, some far weaker than others. For example, he concludes with naive speculations directly linking American democracy to Indian precedents that supposedly dissolved European hierarchies of command and control. In the process, he minimizes the cultural divide separating consensual natives from coercive colonists: "Colonial societies could not become too oppressive, because their members -- surrounded by direct examples of free life -- always had the option to vote with their feet. . . . Historians have been puzzlingly reluctant to acknowledge this [Indian] contribution to the end of tyranny worldwide." Mann would be less puzzled if he knew that Indians would not have welcomed thousands of colonial refugees; that colonial societies sustained a slave system more oppressive than anything practiced in Europe; and that the slaveowners relied on Indians to catch runaways.

Despite these missteps, Mann's 1491 vividly compels us to re-examine how we teach the ancient history of the Americas and how we live with the environmental consequences of colonization.

Reviewed by Alan Taylor
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

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.

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."

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.