1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

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1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

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 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

1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus Accessories

1421: The Year China Discovered America (P.S.)
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
Marco Polo: From Venice to Xanadu (Vintage)
Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War
1434: The Year a Magnificent Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance
The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey
America in 1492: The World of the Indian Peoples Before the Arrival of Columbus
The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal (P.S.)
Over the Edge of the World: Magellan's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe (P.S.)

1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus Reviews

Mann argues that with an anywhere from five to fifteen thousand year (and perhaps even more) head-start, the peoples of the Americas developed and cultivated cities, monuments and complete ways of life that rivaled, and at times bested, anything their contemporary European (and Asian) counterparts had to offer. Where Mann lacked in this book was in detail. Mann's 1491 successfully argues that there was much more to the societies of the pre-Columbian Americas than has been traditionally thought as well as taught. Throughout the course of the book Mann lays down wide-ranging evidence that the people and societies that occupied the Americas before Europeans arrived were much more complex than historians and the general population have traditionally given them credit for. However, because this book is so clearly well-researched, I would suggest it to anyone interested in the societies of the pre-Columbian Americas. I believe his primary argument would have been better served that pre-Columbian cultures were much more sophisticated and complex than generally believed if he had reduced his number of examples and expounded further on selected cases. 1491 sets out with the thesis that there is a lot more to "American History" than what is covered in high school textbooks. The research that Mann put into this book through the course of many years is clear and apparent.

He offers no hard facts to promote his patronizing image of Native American civilizations prior to Europeanization. Mann's book, while entertaining, is nothing more than speculative revisionism. Mann's intentions may have been good, but it doesn't excuse the fact that you can't rewrite history simply to promote an idealistic view of native cultures based on circumstantial evidence. The book does not read very easily because it jumps around from one topic to the next without warning frequently. Nonetheless I enjoyed the book because it does offer some new or "fresh" perspectives into Native American cultures prior to (but mainly after) 1492, but I treated it more as fictional entertainment rather than an authentic historical account.

This book really teaches you some things you may not have learned while you where in high school, or maybe even in college especially if you are older than the age of 25-30. If you enjoy history you will enjoy this book, if you are not into history this book is probably not for you. Some of the lessons taught are of finding information that some of the ancient Mesoamerican civilizations wher actually quite large and elaborate. Some had flowing water and others where the size of if not larger than Paris, France at the same time.

I liked the author's story but I can't believe all the things that he assumes for what was happening in the Americas before 1492.

Whatever the reason, there is a school of thought devoted toward minimizing estimates of the Native American population prior to the arrival of Columbus, and minimizing their level of cultural advancement. All in all, Mann presents a compelling argument that America was a far different place in 1491 than most of us realize. If they were that knowledgeable about farming, doesn't that imply that they had settled into agricultural communities. We all know how the Indians taught the Pilgrims how to farm - how to grow corn and squash and beans and how to fertilize and tend these crops - we've all heard the story of "Squanto." So if the Indians were a bunch of Stone Age savages living in tepees in the woods - how is that they knew more about farming than the Pilgrims. A fascinating account, and definitely a must-read for anyone interested in history.

And this would make sense, because the material IS controversial. I was impressed by the scholarship and came away convinced that the Native Americans were far more advanced than we have been led to believe in the typical American History book. And these are descriptions of the Indians living far from the major population centers and urbanized areas in central America. The idea that the white man is responsible for the deaths of millions of people does not sit well politically with some folks, who perhaps believe it is somehow an indictment of them, or the United States, or maybe democracy. It is also clear that the idea that Native Americans consisted of small bands of stone age savages frolicking in the woods cannot possibly be true. In my opinion, and to his credit, Mann provides a balanced view of this debate, citing both sides, and then weighs in with his assessment (which is more in line with the "high" side). To put this in perspective, imagine a scenario where the New World inhabitants had progressed faster than the Old World, and that huge invasion fleets from Central America began appearing off the European coast and the Mediterranean at the time of the Roman Empire. Perhaps it is more palatable to think that there were only a few pesky savages around and we brought them order and civilization, versus contemplating the possibility that we may have erased an entire hemisphere's worth of civilization.

Back in the 1980s I picked up a book off my father's shelf that caught my eye and read it through: "Indian New England Before the Mayflower" by Howard Russell. What do we make of the reports from early European explorers of large villages and even small cities surrounded by square miles of farms. Kind of like Iowa, only without satellite TV or football teams. Imagine if these "Indians" arrived with a suite of diseases lethal to the native Europeans, and possessing technology several centuries ahead of the Romans. Regarding the population of pre-Columbian America, for every researcher who claims a low, less dense population, Mann shows that there are other researchers who estimate the population to be ten times higher. Charles Mann has researched his book nearly as extensively as Russell - in fact it comes as no surprise that Russell's book is cited as a source for "1491." As an aside I am puzzled by some of the one star reviews that imply "1491" has not been adequately researched - there is a 50 page note section at the back, followed by a 58 page bibliography citing, and I am not making this up, well over 1000 scholarly sources. Again, I tend to think he presents a pretty convincing argument.

We all know this intuitively just from the "Pilgrim" story. The Pilgrims basically occupied the abandoned Indian town that was situated at Plymouth (it was abandoned because the inhabitants had been decimated by disease), and the early accounts describe it as a full-scale village with streets and large wooden buildings. Such comments make me question whether the writers of such reviews even have copies of the book in their possession, or are they simply launching negative reviews for some ulterior motive. This book was massively researched the way David McCullough would research a book: every account left by early explorers and observers was read; every reference in regional or local histories or archaeological writings was examined; every New England museum or known archaeological site was visited and informed people interviewed.

Imagine Europe enduring the Black Death five times over, and then waves of "Indians" coming to inhabit the now collapsed and abandoned Roman Empire and slightly less civilized areas surrounding it in Germany or Eastern Europe. We will probably never know. Mann presents a good case that this kind of scenario is far more likely to have occurred in the New World when the Europeans arrived than the one we have all been told in American History books.

Who knows. Thus I was not surprised by the content of "1491," which takes the same thesis and expands upon it to cover the entire New World.