1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

This is an interesting book in which the author collates a lot of scholarly data and presents it in a "popular" presentation for general readers. One thing that struck me was that these Indian societies followed a general trend in which they flourished and then collapsed over a period of 500 - 1000 years. After collapse, the man-made structures remained but the people disappeared. Finally, the structures became overgrown and essentially hidden. This cycle occurred repeatedly; all before Christopher Columbus came on the scene.The author is sympathetic to the Indians but perhaps over-states their cause. While he makes appeals to authority concerning the existence of some 125 million Indians living in North and South America at the time Christopher Columbus discovered Hispaniola, there really isn't any evidence presented beyond calculations based upon the assumption that small pox killed 95% of the Indian population. That many dead bodies or skeletal remains would have made an impression on the Europeans, but they generally comment on the emptiness of the Americas while exploring the land after the initial waves of small pox in the 1500s.While the introduction of small pox in the Americas was a tragedy, it was unintentional. This book is thankfully free of polemics castigating Christopher Columbus. The behavior the Spanish Conquistadors was generally reprehensible, but that was beyond Columbus' control.The ways in which the Indians manipulated the environment is fascinating. While limited in technology, the Indians weren't stupid. However, the assertions of voluntary cooperatives has absolutely no evidence to support that view, and just seems revisionist. While the Indians were in the Americas for thousands of years, they didn't advance beyond being able to work soft metals such as copper, silver and gold; also, the absence of draft animals seems to have hindered the Indians.A very curious omission was almost no discussion of the pre-Columbian Indian religions. Except for a mention, in passing, concerning human sacrifice, and couple of mentions of befanged gods, the reader learns nothing about their religious practices. I suspect that the author is not particularly religious himself, and doesn't grasp how horrified the Europeans were by encountering peoples whose gods had to be propitiated with human blood. The author tries to argue that the Europeans executed more people in Europe than the Indians in South America but I didn't find it convincing. If the human sacrifices weren't THAT big a deal, why did the Conquistadors find Indian allies?Overall an interesting book. There is a huge bibliography.

This book challenges the notion that the Americas were a barely inhabited pristine wilderness before the arrival of Europeans. It presents multiple examples of environment-altering societies that both rose and fell centuries before the ultimate tragedy: the encounter with European diseases that wiped out millions of people who had never seen a European.Rather than damning Europeans for this tragedy (which was not intentional on the part of those who accidentally introduced those microbes), this book delves into the reasons the population was so susceptible: a narrower range of DNA immune responses and the lack of domestic animals (which would have served as a disease-producing reservoir to familiarize the people's immune systems with a wider range of diseases). In other words, any contact between hemispheres was inevitably going to be fatal to the people of the Americas.While I was reading this book, I spied a news headline about yet another culture, similar to the ones in the far-western Amazon region, discovered in Ecuador. The amount still to learn is vast.This book serves as a useful reminder that we cannot assume that humans of different times and places thought the same way we do, or even the way we assume they did, as we filter what we learn about them through our own expectations. Archeologists and anthropologists seem to be as prone to arrogance and ideological bias as anyone else.

I came upon this book by accident, and it turned out to be one of the greats.First, this is packed with interesting history about events on the American continent prior to the arrival of Columbus (with some attention to the years soon after). I thought I had done pretty well keeping up with history, but who knew? A lot more civilizations rose and fell than I had ever heard of, and for those who like to think about the "normal" arc of a civilization, there's a lot here to think about.Second, while being enlightening as to human history, there's also a lot of insight about nature -- some of it extremely interesting to me. Put succinctly, the untapped wilderness that preceded European interference... turns out to be a misleading half truth. Very interesting information about both North and South America in this regard.Third, I found the book interesting in the light it shed on the way the commonly accepted history has been warped both by those with a conservative and those with liberal agendas.Finally, I admire the realistic account of the academic wars that occurred along the way to figuring out the facts, to the extent to which they are now known. I suppose that pro and anti science ideologues will read this differently and emphasize opposite aspects of the story, but a fair reader will come away with a three dimensional picture of how scientific disputes play out.Not really a light read, but not terribly difficult, either. It does not read as a continuous narrative though, it discusses different areas and topics separately rather than making for one long "story of what happened on the continent."

Charles C. Mann’s book, 1491, provides us with an eye opener about the pre-Columbus populations of the North and South America. It is not an easy read: it is very detailed and well researched with references to critical scientific studies. It is not a chronological or systematic account, and this makes the book somewhat disjointed. Mann’s main intents were to examine Indian demography, Indian origins and Indian ecology.In my opinion, he is not successful in the first objective of describing Indian demography. However, I doubt there are enough research available to tackle this objective. They may never be enough research as there were multiple occupations of land by unknown populations throughout the period from the first arrivals of the peoples loosely described as Indians to the present day. Also, the populations were dynamic, growing and shrinking depending on the social and natural environments of various groups of Indians. The task may just be too difficult to build a record of Indian populations prior to the arrival of Christopher Columbus. Mann has tried to report the research faithfully but the Indian populations of Western United States and that of Argentina in my opinion, not well researched, and thus understated in this book. It is also possible that populations reported are also understated.Mann has been more successful in the second two objectives and particularly the third. I think the overriding theme of this book is that pre-Columbian inhabitants of the Americas shaped their environment to fit their needs, no more than we do today and certainly, no less. Where we think that that current forests are wild and untouched by man, in fact, they are the results of previous inhabitation of the lands. There is no more a representation of this than the forests in the vicinity of the Amazon River. However, after the demise of the inhabiting culture, what remains is an overgrowth of plant and animal life. And this is true in North and Central America as well! It can be said definitively based on research that the Indian populations did not live lightly on the land.I found the book at the first reading contradictory of what I had been taught of American Indians after growing up in Montana and having lived with Yupik Eskimos (technically, Eskimos are not Indians,) in Western Alaska. In the first Chapter, Mann indicates that I would have this experience. But I find the research he quotes valid and confirmatory of his arguments. In addition, he often provides alternative arguments. Mann is not the author of this research, but the reporter of the research.Before reading and finishing the book, I did not read reviews of it. Thus, as I read it, I was amazed at the information and oftentimes, skeptical. However, I read several of the research reports referenced. Then, on finishing the book, I read several reviews both positive and critical. The book is widely acclaimed. The critical reviews stem mainly from people who found the book too detailed for their tastes and too difficult to read. One of the critical reviews was from an interpreter of the Cahokia site in Illinois who questions Mann’s statements which originated from Professor Woods. However, this same interpreter does not provide alternative research to support his claims.There probably is nothing more understood in the United States, and perhaps the World, than the pre-Columbus North and South American cultures. There are many reasons for this.First and foremost, Columbus in his search for Asia did not know the Americas nor had he ever been to the coastlines of Asia. Therefore, on reaching America, he thought he had reached Asia and thought the peoples he witnessed where of India. Thus, he named them “Indians” and the name, despite the confusion, has remained to this day and is a global term for all of the pre-Columbus inhabitants even though there are major distinctions in their cultures and genetics. While a number of the various tribes and nations object to the use of the word “Indian,” no better term has emerged that all will accept. For a discussion of this, see Appendix A of 1491.Second, most of the pre-Columbus inhabitants of the Americas either did not have writing or not a form of writing recognized by the European explorers and invaders. The result was that much of the written information of the pre-Columbus inhabitants had been lost either through decay of whatever records there were or through the willful destruction of the records by the invaders. Where there were no known records, Europeans interested in pre-Columbus cultures had to rely on the inhabitants themselves who were often recent transplants to the regions.Third, the pre-Columbus population of the Americas has been estimated from the finds of various archeological sites to be as high as 125 million people. Yet when early European scholars arrived to study and record Indian cultures, they found only remnants of the populations. It is accepted that European diseases such as sma...

Do not misunderstand, this is not a conclusive effort and it was not meant to be one... But, what this book did was to bring number of opposing views to light about the Americas before 1492, during the year when the world changed forever, in a neat 480 page package! Being a writer, Mann did not hide the fact that when he first thought of this project, even years after, he did not know too much on the subject and was only frustrated by the fact that there was a lack of information on it to start with. And, what information there was, was scattered among lots of different detached publications with opposing views. So, he made it his duty to bring it all together and, in doing so, he did something more than even I expected possible...I was always interested in the history of the Americas before Columbus because, for anything after that, we have many relatively well documented accounts and such was the side effect of this burden of knowledge that, to an untrained eye, this seemed when Americas' history really began! Layered up thick, this information covered the knowledge of the people who were separated from us for thousands of years and who developed into an interesting self-defined subset of humanity... Many still walk among us or are very much a part of us, playing the next big time gaming system or are very interested in what Batman will do next, and the scars they left on this planet serve as a constant reminder of a know-how they had that, to this day, seem to stun a brilliant of scientists as impossible!Going far and wide and over many years, Mann asked lots of questions of many smart people in their fields of expertise and, what is even more important, gave this scattered effort a face! A popular face that was heavy enough on a textbook like facts but still read with ease. If you ever thought of yourself getting into the subject, START HERE. And, if you are still hungry for more after you are done, this book has an extensive (almost 50 page) Bibliography that you can really sink your curiosity shovel in deep!