1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

Charles C. Mann “1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus,”  Vintage Books, 2006 Paperback, 407 pp.

I read this book some years ago before I began taking elaborate notes.  I had this summary document filed but never posted.  I would probably read the book again if it wasn't for the six books I have currently checked out from the library.

MOST of us know, or think we know, what the first Europeans encountered when they discovered the Americas in 1492: We have been taught in school that it was a pristine world of overwhelming natural abundance, containing  few people; a hemisphere where -- save perhaps for the Aztec and Mayan civilizations of Central America and the Incan state in Peru -- human beings lightly impacted the earth. Additionally,  beginning around the 1960s, American Indians were usually presented as underachieving, tree-hugging saints, coming to a crescendo in the 70s environmental movement.

For cultural reasons of their own, Europeans and white Americans have "implicitly depicted Indians as people who never changed their environment from its original wild state. Mann, a science journalist and co-author of four previous books on subjects ranging from aspirin to physics to the Internet, provides an important corrective -- a sweeping portrait of human life in the Americas before the arrival of Columbus.

Nearly everything about the Indians is currently a matter of historical contention. There is little or no agreement about when their ancestors first came to the Americas and where those ancestors came from; how many there were, how and where they lived and why they were not more effective in resisting the European invasion. New archaeological discoveries and interpretations of Indian materials are constantly altering the historical record and every debate comes equipped with its own trainload of archaeologists, anthropologists and other social scientists tossing around personal invective.

Mann builds his story around what we want to know -- the "Frequently Asked Questions," as he heads one chapter. He moves back and forth from the earliest prehistoric humans in the Americas to the Pilgrims' first encounter with the Indian they (mistakenly) called "Squanto"; from the villages of the Amazon rain forests to Cahokia, near modern St. Louis, the sole, long-vanished city of the North American Mound Builders; from the cultivation of maize to why it was that the Incas apparently developed the wheel but never used it as anything but a child's toy.

Mann remains resolutely agnostic on some of the fiercest debates. What he is most interested in is showing us is how American Indians -- like all other human beings -- were intensely involved in shaping the world they lived in. He is sure that "many though not all Indians were superbly active land managers -- they did not live lightly on the land." Just how they did live, so long uninfluenced by the world's population in Africa and Eurasia, forms the bulk of his book.

For all the European depredations in the Americas, the work of conquest was largely accomplished for them by their microbes, even before the white men arrived in any great numbers. The diseases brought along by the very first unwitting Spanish conquistadors, and probably by English fishermen working the New England coast, very likely triggered one of the greatest catastrophes in human history. Before the 16th century, there may have been as many as 90 million to 112 million people living in the Americas (the population of Europe in 1492 is estimated at 60 million, of course Europe's own population had been cut in half by the 1348 Black Plague) -- people who could be as different from each other "as Turks and Swedes," but who had cumulatively developed an incredible range of natural environments, from seeding the Amazon Basin with fruit trees to terracing the mountains of Peru. (Even the term "New World" may be a misnomer; it is possible that the world's first city was in South America.)

Then, disaster. According to some estimates, as much as 95 percent of the Indians may have died almost immediately on contact with various European diseases, particularly smallpox. That would have amounted to about one-fifth of the world's total population at the time, a level of destruction unequaled before or since. The exact numbers, like everything else, are in dispute, but it is clear that these plagues wreaked havoc on traditional Indian societies. European misreadings of America should not be attributed wholly to ethnic arrogance. The "savages" most of the colonists saw, without realizing it, were usually the traumatized, destitute survivors of ancient and intricate civilizations that had collapsed almost overnight from disease. Even the superabundant "nature" the Europeans inherited had been largely put in place by these now absent gardeners and had run wild only after they had ceased to cull and harvest it.