Product Description

A groundbreaking study that radically alters our understanding of the Americas before the arrival of the Europeans in 1492.

Traditionally, Americans learned in school that the ancestors of the people who inhabited the Western Hemisphere at the time of Columbus’s landing had crossed the Bering Strait twelve thousand years ago; existed mainly in small, nomadic bands; and lived so lightly on the land that the Americas was, for all practical purposes, still a vast wilderness. But as Charles C. Mann now makes clear, archaeologists and anthropologists have spent the last thirty years proving these and many other long-held assumptions wrong.

In a book that startles and persuades, Mann reveals how a new generation of researchers equipped with novel scientific techniques came to previously unheard-of conclusions. Among them:

• In 1491 there were probably more people living in the Americas than in Europe.
• Certain cities–such as Tenochtitlán, the Aztec capital–were far greater in population than any contemporary European city. Furthermore, Tenochtitlán, unlike any capital in Europe at that time, had running water, beautiful botanical gardens, and immaculately clean streets.
• The earliest cities in the Western Hemisphere were thriving before the Egyptians built the great pyramids.
• Pre-Columbian Indians in Mexico developed corn by a breeding process so sophisticated that the journal Science recently described it as “man’s first, and perhaps the greatest, feat of genetic engineering.”
• Amazonian Indians learned how to farm the rain forest without destroying it–a process scientists are studying today in the hope of regaining this lost knowledge.
• Native Americans transformed their land so completely that Europeans arrived in a hemisphere already massively “landscaped” by human beings.

Mann sheds clarifying light on the methods used to arrive at these new visions of the pre-Columbian Americas and how they have affected our understanding of our history and our thinking about the environment. His book is an exciting and learned account of scientific inquiry and revelation.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #18734 in Books
• Published on: 2005-08-09
• Released on: 2005-08-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 480 pages

Amazon.com Review
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
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

It's about time
It's about time we shed our Euro-centric views and gave more credit to the indigenous people that were here first. This book is well written and makes use of the research of others. It is nicely organized and collected together in one place. None is original research and not too surprising if you are familar with the field. However if this is new to you then you might be in for a surprise, history is not quite the way you might have been taught. A good quick read, lively, engaging and thought provoking. I enjoyed this book very much and look forward to more from the same author.

rmw

Book Review
In this beautifully written book Charles C. Mann recollects his journey to old tribal communties in what is now America. This book holds many facts that are amazing and your idea of what the US was like before Columbus will change drastically. Charles Mann tells lost stories of lies and betrayal between the Indians and the early explorers who landed on the coast of America. Many assumptions about what the Indians were like are completely contradicted in this book, although bold at time all of the facts are true and seem to line up perfectly. Although lacking cities of gold the Americas did have sophisticated technology in some tribes, even more ahead than their un familiar rivals in Europe. Early interactions between the first people to land on the United States are extordanary and just imagine how complicated it was with almost no communication possible. These early trades were great but also left some American Indian tribes in ruins. 1491 Changed everything, and it will change you.

Probably one of my favorite non fiction reads of all time
I will keep this brief and to the point. I read a lot of non-fiction. In fact, one of the reasons I cannot bring myself to read another novel is THIS BOOK. I have gotten more from Mann's 1491 than any other I have read over the last five years--maybe more. I recommend that prospective college/high school students read this and learn.