1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
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1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus description
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 territor ... review details
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What a complex, diverse, populous world was lost!
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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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