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1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus | 
 enlarge | Author: Charles C. Mann
Publisher: Vintage
Category: Book
List Price: $15.95
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Rating:  204 reviews
Sales Rank: 1397
Media: Paperback
Pages: 541
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.2 x 1.2
ISBN: 1400032059
Dewey Decimal Number: 970.01
EAN: 9781400032051
ASIN: 1400032059
Publication Date: October 10, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: paperback, 541 pages, HISTORY-1, will ship immediately
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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 Tlacaelel, 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 Tenochtitlan, 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 | | | *Courtesy Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, Collinsville, Ill., painting by Michael Hampshire. **Courtesy Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, Santa Fe, N.M. (Bernardino de Sahagun, Historia General de las Cosas de Nueva Espana, 1547-77). |
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 Tenochtitlan, 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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 199 more reviews...
 An excellent update on the current academic understanding of pre-Columbian America November 16, 2005
Ursiform (Torrance, CA USA)
278 out of 301 found this review helpful
Although recent years have yielded significant progress in understanding how "Indians" lived throughout the Americas before 1492 and Columbus, only isolated bits of the story have reached the popular press. Far too many people still hold to one of two myths of the Indians, or have little conception at all of pre-Columbian America.
The first popular myth is that the Indians were a bunch of primitive savages just keeping the land warm until superior Europeans showed up. It's sad to read reviews here that assert that because Indians used stone tools they were therefore "stone age", with the implication that their culture was no further advanced than that early period.
The second myth makes the Indians into proto-flower-children, naively and simply in tune with their environment.
Both myths are based on stereotyping and are condescending to the pre-Colombians. How could people spread over two continents and many millennia be briefly summarized? They can't be! The Americas saw the development of a broad range of cultures, just like every other inhabited area of the world. Some cultures overstressed their environment and soon collapsed. Others created stable conditions under which they could survive for generations. (Which is not the same as saying they didn't impact nature.) But even the latter could be brought down by climate change, political instability, disease (especially European), or contact with outsiders (Indian or European).
Great cities arose in mesoamerica and the Andes, and also in other areas when the right conditions prevailed. And sophisticated cultures existed even where city building wasn't favored.
This book takes the reader through a vibrant overview of centuries of Indian culture both before and shortly after Columbus landed. Much of the narrative is based on work-in-progress by archaeologists and historians, and will certainly become dated with time, but it is an important update to the common, current understanding of the subject.
For those not enthralled by one of the myths I mention above, most Americans recall our history along the lines of Scene 1: The Pilgrims land and encounter Indians who teach them how to grow corn; they then have a big Thanksgiving party together. Scene 2: Americans moving inland encounter savage Indians who need to be exterminated or moved to reservations to make the continent safe for manifest destiny. Scene 3: The few remaining Indians are victims of brutal European suppression, and we need to buy jewelry and pottery from them to make ourselves feel better about the situation.
This book is a welcome update to our thinking about the Americas before Columbus. It's also one of the best books I've read in long time, and I highly recommend it.
 The Pre-Columbian Americas August 21, 2005
Robert W. Kellemen (Crown Point, IN United States)
189 out of 240 found this review helpful
"1491" is destined to become a much-debated history of pre-Columbian America. Already being called "revisionist" by some and "revolutionary" by others, it certainly is not "your father's history of Native Americans" (who were called "Indians" by your father's generation, anyway).
Those who complain of scant primary support don't understand historiography of pre-historic history. By it's very nature and name, the historian of such societies much rely on more ancillary research and documentation. Mann does so by culling the results from diverse fields such as archaeology, anthropology, sociology, and paleolinguistics.
His most fascinating and likely most provable hypothesis results from first-hand accounts from the first Europeans of their first encounters--encounters with people they considered their equals. From this information and copious additional research, Mann hypothesizes that the "American" continents were richly populated with culturally enriched societies that were killed off by diseases before later Europeans could document their existence.
Reviewer: Robert W. Kellemen, Ph.D., is the author of "Soul Physicians" and "Spiritual Friends," and of the forthcoming "Beyond the Suffering: The Story of African American Soul Care and Spiritual Direction."
 1491 or 2005? October 24, 2005
Richard L. Leed (Ithaca, NY USA)
93 out of 154 found this review helpful
There are indeed a few new things (at least to me) in this book, like the artifacts of the Beni in the upper Amazon and the criticism of my colleague the late Allan Holmberg (a bit unfair, I'm sure). But the book is so annoying in its presentism and propagandizing that I quit reading and skimmed the remainder. Mann is an antinomian child of the modern age who wants to believe the Indians lived in complete personal liberty, as if an Iroquois male adolescent had the choice of being a brave brave or cowardly math nerd. He is a neo-Rousseauvian: he doesn't believe in the savage part of the noble savage myth (indeed, he thinks the advanced societies of Indians remade the environment, for the good), but he keeps the noble part with a vengeance. Even after a century of contact with debilitating European diseases, the Indians the Pilgrims met were well-formed and healthy while the Europeans were pock-marked and stunted-somehow it doesn't make sense, except that Europeans in this book are invariably destined to come out on the short end in more ways than one.
Although post-Columbian North America was settled primarily by people from England, they are usually referred to in this book as Europeans, as if their distinctive Englishness was unimportant. In fact, he goes out of his way to criticize, quite unfairly, one of the finest scholars on the subject of the English origins of the early colonists, Bernard Bailyn. Mann simply doesn't understand the vast difference between insular and continental Europe in the history of the Western Hemisphere.
My suspicions of Mann's judgment were confirmed when I found him citing that academic fraud Ward Churchill in all seriousness (e.g. p. 131).
Mann's style is as annoying as his gullibility. "Taken literally" the recent assertions that "The Great Law of Peace inspired the U. S. Constitution" seem "implausible" to Mann. As soon as you read his "taken literally" you know that there is a better way to take it: "The framers of the Constitution... were pervaded by Indian ideals and images of liberty." It's not just the absurdity of any of these assertions that annoy, it is the effect of his romantic enthusiasm on his choice of loaded words and his grammatical carelessness: the "framers" were "pervaded"?
This book is more about the author's views on modern society than it is about ancient Indian societies.
An incorrect argument September 1, 2005
Quentin R. Bass II (USDA Forest Service)
92 out of 183 found this review helpful
Often when developing a certain argument, some authors become so enamored by the argument that they get carried away by the beauty of their argument to the exclusion of the facts. Such is the case here. The fact is, what we have found out about the human occupation of the Western Hemisphere, both in the archaeological record for the extended period prior to Euro-American settlement (pre-1492), and in the early historic archaeological and ethnographic record since that time (post-1492), actually clearly illustrates exactly what it documents: Indians, regardless of their local manifestations were, at first, big game hunters, then hunter-gatherers, and only very late in the record (and in many places not at all), practicing horticulturalists or agriculturalists. And, in a handful of places, in the entire Western Hemisphere, from Tierra del Fuego to the Arctic Circle, this agricultural life way was superceded by early state-level societies (i.e., the Maya, Inca, Aztec and their immediate predecessors in their areas of occurrence.). Each of these life ways are paralleled, without exception, by a specific level of sociopolitical complexity and a concomitant population density. And each brought with it a certain impact to and relationship with the prevailing environment. There are no exceptions to this - worldwide. In all their manifestations in the Western Hemisphere prior to A.D 1492, we are dealing essentially with stone age peoples. The fact is, as a member of one of these stone age societies, there is only so much you can do to the environment with a stone axe. Moreover, all societies with stone axes are limited in size both by their technology (stone tool technology, you know) and economy (subsistence agriculture, at its most developed). So, there are just so many people to alter the environment. And, added to this, and probably most important, the people of these societies, people who carry around stone axes, only want to, and only have a need to, do so much to the environment. The fact is that which is overwhelmingly documented not only by the archaeological, historic, and ethnographic record, but also by the ecological record, illustrates precisely what occurred in the Western Hemisphere - That is, with the exception of the immediate areas occupied by the early state level societies, Indians did not significantly alter the ecosystems of the Western Hemisphere; Euro-American societies did - and are still doing so. One example makes this point: Every plant and animal species ever recovered in all of the tens of thousands of prehistoric Holocene archaeological sites (from 8,000 B.C. to A.D. 1492) that have been excavated in the entire Western Hemisphere to date have also been recovered from excavated early historic (post A.D. 1492) archaeological sites. However, it is also in the archaeological sites of this period (post A.D. 1492) that plant and animal species recorded prior to A.D. 1492 start to disappear from the archaeological record. The reason for the disappearance, extirpation and extinction of these species is heavily documented for this period in the ethnographic and historic record. The perpetrators of these alterations were not Indians.
The entire prehistoric and historic record, in all the disciplines that yield this record, illustrates that Euro-American societies, with their fundamentally different land use patterns, huge numbers and totally different world view from that of the Indians, altered, and in many cases removed, the ecosystems of the Western Hemisphere. Yet, the author, ignores this entire record and comes to the opposite conclusion - that the Indians significantly altered the ecosystems of the Western Hemisphere. Really?
An Intriguing New Look September 13, 2005
John D. Cofield
77 out of 89 found this review helpful
Charles C. Mann has taken much of what we thought we knew about the Native Americans and their world and thrown it out the window. In a pleasantly informal yet highly professional style, Mann recounts tales of his own studies and travels, as well as those of many archaeologists, historians, and anthropologists past and present throughout the Americas.
If your knowledge of the Native Americans begins and ends with what you learned in school years ago, or with the stereotypes perpetuated by Hollywood, you are in for quite a shock. To begin with, the Native Americans have been "natives" here for far longer than any one suspected. Next, their cultures were heterogeneous and quite advanced, in many ways far outdoing their counterparts in Europe. And in what may be the most controversial sections, Mann maintains that the Native Americans were neither primitive savages who left no mark on their world, nor dreamy proto-environmentalists who lived as one with nature, but rather people who throughly altered and shaped their landscapes.
This is not a book which will please many with an agenda on either the pro-development or pro-environment side, but it will be found invaluable by those who seek a better understanding of the "New World" before the Europeans "discovered" it.
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