Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #167961 in Books
• Published on: 2006-10-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 541 pages

Customer Reviews

A continental vacant lot?
Many thousands of years ago, people arrived in the Western Hemisphere from Asia. How many years, how many people and how many times they made the incursion are all topics of this book. How they lived has been the subject of increasingly intense investigation. Mann has assembled much research, both old and modern, to present a sweeping analysis of what the Europeans found when they arrived millennia later from the opposite direction. In a compelling and well-structured account, he offers an iconoclastic analysis of what the Americas were before Columbus' arrival.

Mann's thesis is that the Western Hemisphere was far more densely populated than our school courses [when they touched on the indigenous peoples at all] led us to believe. After fitful starts along the Atlantic seaboard, European colonists felt they'd entered a nearly empty continent. The sweeping expansion of the United States seemed to reinforce the notion of an "empty land". Recent archaeological finds and closer examination of the conquistadores' accounts suggest otherwise. It's now known that many urban centres of high population density existed in the Mississippi Valley, in central Mexico and throughout South America. The peoples living there had complex societies and economies, with trading and cultural influences extending vast distances. Intricate calendar systems, including use of "zero" as a real number, existed centuries before Europeans developed the idea.

Why did these cities and their inhabitants not survive to greet the invaders? There are the accounts of Cortes in Tenochtitlan and Pizarro saw Inka settlements, but population conglomerates seem rare in most accounts. According to Mann, the culprit was European disease resulting from the development of agriculture. Farming and pastoralism arose long after the arrival of those Asians to the Western Hemisphere. The two populations, isolated from each other led to differing immunities. Centuries of co-habitation with domestic animals like horses, pigs and fowl led to the transmission of many poxes, especially smallpox, to humans. The European and West Asian survivors developed a resistance to the infections. The indigenous peoples of the Americas, who domesticated few animals, had no such resistance. Multitudes of people were swept away, not by conquistadores and "cowboys", but by invisible microorganisms introduced by the earliest explorers. The pestilence left them vulnerable when more Europeans arrived. The result was the identification of the "Indians" as backward, illiterate, vulnerable and hardly worthy of serious study. Mann describes this attitude as "Holmberg's Mistake" - anthropologists finding of remnant peoples living in a manner European observers believed perpetual.

Mann's search for answers to what the Western Hemisphere was like in "1491" took him many places meeting a host of researchers and relying on a massive document base. Skimming the notes and bibliography shows a preponderance of sources published in recent years. Although Mann gives voice to those who contend the numbers are poorly derived, there's little doubt he sympathises with the new wave of research findings. He provides useful maps, that almost overwhelming bibliography and a set of appendices to explain terms, describe a possible binary language of the Inka and "Calendar Math". With the mass of information and the evidence of accomplishments preceding those of its European infectors and conquerers, it's not unexpected when he questions use of the term "New World" in referring to the Americas. In regard to what was lost, he contends the disintegration of the societies in the Americas wasn't just the loss to those communities, "but to the human enterprise as a whole". [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

WELL WRITTEN SUMMARY OF RECENT SCHOLARSHIP ON OCCUPATION OF THE AMERICAS BEFORE COLUMBUS
There has been much scholarly discussion over the years about pre-Columbian societies in the Americas. How many were there? What technologies did they develop? Did they have writing? What destroyed them? Where is the evidence?

In this book, Charles Mann brought together much of the recent scholarly knowledge, piecing together evidence from across North, Central and South America, to come up with a cohesive image of what the Americas looked like in terms of human occupation before Columbus.

The book's main arguemnt is that the Americas were already heavily populated with as many as 20 million people when Columbus arrived. These people possessed technology very advanced that was not, as much of history tells, puny and weak compared to what Europeans had developed. Agricultural methods were advanced and very productive, providing the basis for the establishment of large sedentary populations, much larger than previously thought. These large populations were mainly destroyed by disease. What we see today are in fact the remaining population after the equivalent of a holocaust, which is hardly a good basis to judge their capabilities and one time glory.

To demonstrate this theory, evidence is gathered from archeology and ancient reports from travellers. From most 16th century explorers, we get a picture of a heavily populated landscape, both in the southeastern US and in the Amazon. However, explorers through the same regions roughtly a century later describe a landscape of peaceful nature without large human interventions. The archeological evidence, as more is discovered, points in the direction of large populations and many characteristics (such as religion and art) of sedentary populations.

Particularly interesting is the section on the Amazon forest, in which the author describes the Amazon not as virginal forest but rather an a human construct, a large garden manipulated by ancient inhabitants, now abandoned. Evidence of these people's technology can be found in unlikely places, such as in the formation of terra preta, a highly fertile soil in a land well known for poor soils for agriculture. Additionally, the raised fields of the Bolivian Amazon also point to a highly sophisticated and organized society that would need to be surplus producing in order to spare the manpower for such great public works.

An interesting addendum to his argument is about the freedom enjoyed by antive americans, which is much more similar to the freedom we enjoy today and seek to expand, than the Europeans at the time enjoyed. The author does a superb job of piecing together evidence from across the continent to come to interesting conclusions about our ancestors.

I highly recommend this book not only to anyone interested in the history of the Americas before Columbus, but to anyone looking for an interesting read about our history as humans.

Riveting
With very little prior knowledge of the subject, I bought 1491 half expecting that I would eventually get a bit lost and end up dipping in and out (but that I could still impress my friends for a while by having it on my coffee table). I ended up storming through it from cover to cover - including some of the appendices. Mann imbues the story he tells with such a sense of excitement and mystery that you really do find yourself desperate to find out what happened next. He also manages to work in personal stories without compromising the rigour and seriousness of his writing. Who'd have thought the history of maize would have me missing my stop on the tube?

This is a book not just about a fascinating part of human history, but about the history of history: the debates surrounding how pre-Columbian America has been understood (and misunderstood), why a lot of the misconceptions persist today, and how it ties in with very modern concerns like race relations and environmentalism. It does get quite dense at times, and I don't think I've ever read a book that contained so many words I had never heard used before, but it's well worth it.