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Summary
Summary
A groundbreaking study that radically alters our understanding of the Americas before the arrival of the Europeans in 1492.
Traditionally, Americans learned in school that the ancestors of the people who inhabited the Western Hemisphere at the time of Columbus's landing had crossed the Bering Strait twelve thousand years ago; existed mainly in small, nomadic bands; and lived so lightly on the land that the Americas was, for all practical purposes, still a vast wilderness. But as Charles C. Mann now makes clear, archaeologists and anthropologists have spent the last thirty years proving these and many other long-held assumptions wrong.
In a book that startles and persuades, Mann reveals how a new generation of researchers equipped with novel scientific techniques came to previously unheard-of conclusions. Among them:
* In 1491 there were probably more people living in the Americas than in Europe.
* Certain cities-such as Tenochtitlán, the Aztec capital-were far greater in population than any contemporary European city. Furthermore, Tenochtitlán, unlike any capital in Europe at that time, had running water, beautiful botanical gardens, and immaculately clean streets.
* The earliest cities in the Western Hemisphere were thriving before the Egyptians built the great pyramids.
* Pre-Columbian Indians in Mexico developed corn by a breeding process so sophisticated that the journal Science recently described it as "man's first, and perhaps the greatest, feat of genetic engineering."
* Amazonian Indians learned how to farm the rain forest without destroying it-a process scientists are studying today in the hope of regaining this lost knowledge.
* Native Americans transformed their land so completely that Europeans arrived in a hemisphere already massively "landscaped" by human beings.
Mann sheds clarifying light on the methods used to arrive at these new visions of the pre-Columbian Americas and how they have affected our understanding of our history and our thinking about the environment. His book is an exciting and learned account of scientific inquiry and revelation.
Author Notes
Charles C. Mann is a correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, Science, and Wired. He has also written for Fortune, The New York Times, Smithsonian, Technology Review, Vanity Fair, The Washington Post, the television network HBO, and the television series Law and Order. He has received writing awards from the American Bar Association, the American Institute of Physics, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the Lannan Foundation.
He has written or co-written several books including The Second Creation: Makers of the Revolution in 20th-Century Physics, The Aspirin Wars: Money, Medicine, and 100 Years of Rampant Competition, Noah's Choice: The Future of Endangered Species, At Large: The Strange Case of the Internet's Biggest Invasion, and 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created which made The New York Times Best Seller List for 2012. His book, 1491, won the National Academies Communication Award for the best book of the year.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This production is-as most nonfiction audios ought to be-a "reading" as distinct from a "performance." Johnson renders this thoroughly researched, well-written history of early North and South American Indian populations in a strong, clear voice, with excellent intonation. His diction is almost too perfect-one occasionally focuses on pronunciation rather than content. Most of the book is written in narrative form that sweeps listeners through an exciting rethinking of all we ever learned about when so-called Indians first inhabited the American continents and how they may have come here, about their numbers, religions, cultures, inventions, social structures and their relations to European invaders and settlers. When Mann relates the internecine battles among schools of anthropologists and archeologists, however, the listener might wish he had the book in hand for clarity. It might be wise from the start to make a list of the numerous Indian and European individuals and groupings. This audiobook is well worth the trouble. Simultaneous release with the Knopf hardcover (Reviews, June 20). (August) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Science journalist Mann proves audacious as a surveyor of pre-Columbian history, for few topics are so fraught with controversy. Emanating from the academic, activist, and environmental arenas, the disputes share a revisionist drive to dismantle the popular perception that the New World was a pristine wilderness in balance with its inhabitants. Accordingly, Mann opens with an episode familiar to most Americans, the Plymouth colony of the Pilgrims and its salvation by the friendly Squanto, or Tisquantum, his proper name, according to Mann. Indian altruism toward encroaching Europeans was never quite convincing, so following a discerning inquiry into Tisquantum's more likely motivations, with his Wampanoag people devastated by disease, Mann discusses examples of when warfare abruptly terminated Indian history, as with Pizarro and the Inka (formerly the Inca0 ). Drawing upon the research of recent decades, Mann constructs fascinating narratives of Indian empires, interweaving theories about their rise and fall that are debated by specialists in archaeology, physical anthropology, linguistics, and ecology. Mann had to master an impressive breadth of material but better yet is his clarity and judgment, which meld into a compelling and balanced introduction for general readers. --Gilbert Taylor Copyright 2005 Booklist
Choice Review
Although no relation to this reviewer, science, technology, and commerce journalist Mann is a myth-buster after her own heart. Disgusted with the mythologies still purveyed by textbooks on Native America--of pristine wildernesses thinly populated by unhistoried savages--Mann sets about tracing the footprints of Americas' First Nations, all over the hemisphere. In a tour de force, he brings previously inaccessible scholarship to general readers: mound cultures and constitutional democracies in North America; swamps made productive in Central America; terraced fields in the South American Andes; and the created forests and, more importantly, engineered soils of the Amazon. In between, the author notes Natives' unique, ancient writing systems, textile-and-tension technology, and advanced mathematics. ^BSumming Up: Highly recommended. Especially for general readers and lower-division undergraduates. B. A. Mann University of Toledo
Guardian Review
US schoolchildren are told that the Indians came to America about 13,000 years ago and lived in small groups, having little impact on their environment, so that the land was mostly wilderness before the first Europeans arrived. Cobblers, says Mann in this revisionist (or, as he would have it, re-revisionist) history. Recent research suggests that Indians were in the Americas far longer than previously thought; their cultures were urban and technologically sophisticated; and far from leaving no mark on the landscape, "they were in the midst of terraforming the Amazon when Columbus showed up and ruined everything". The irony is that the European settlers were not sophisticated enough to appreciate the complex cultures they went on to eradicate. Admittedly, by the time they arrived mysterious epidemics had torn through Indian communities, but almost all of these can be traced to early contact with foreign travellers. Indians became "role models of human liberty" for European freethinkers like Voltaire (Candide encounters an imaginary tribe of Indians called the Oreillons), but as Mann makes clear in this fascinating account, they were neither noble savages nor vicious barbarians. Caption: article-be7.1 US schoolchildren are told that the Indians came to America about 13,000 years ago and lived in small groups, having little impact on their environment, so that the land was mostly wilderness before the first Europeans arrived. Cobblers, says Mann in this revisionist (or, as he would have it, re-revisionist) history. - Ian Pindar.
Kirkus Review
Unless you're an anthropologist, it's likely that everything you know about American prehistory is wrong. Science journalist Mann's survey of the current knowledge is a bracing corrective. Historians once thought that prehistoric Indian peoples somehow lived outside of history, adrift and directionless, "passive recipients of whatever windfalls or disasters happenstance put in their way"; that view was central to the myth of the noble savage. In fact, writes Mann (Noah's Choice, with Mark L. Plummer, 1995), Native Americans were as active in shaping their environments as anyone else. They built great and wealthy cities; they lived, for the most part, on farms; and their home continents "were immeasurably busier, more diverse, and more populous than researchers had previously imagined." In defending this view, Mann visits several thriving controversies in the historic/prehistoric record. One is the question of pre-contact demographics: old-school scholars had long advanced the idea that there were only a few million Native Americans at the time of the Columbian arrival, whereas revisionists in the 1960s posited that there were eight million on the island of Hispaniola alone, a figure punctured by revisionists of revisionism, now beset by Native American activists for the political incorrectness of adjusting the census. Another controversy is the chronology of human presence in the Americas: the old date of 12,000 b.c., courtesy of the Bering Land Bridge in Alaska, no longer cuts it. Other arguments center on the nature of Native American societies such as the Aztec and Inca, the latter of whom built a great empire that, defying Western notions of logic, had no market component. Mann addresses each controversy with care, according the old-timers their due while making it clear that his sympathies lie, in the main, with the rising generation. He closes with a provocative thesis: namely, that the present worldwide movement toward democracy owes not to Locke or Newtonian physics, but to Indians, "living, breathing role models of human liberty." An excellent, and highly accessible, survey of America's past: a worthy companion to Jake Page's In the Hands of the Great Spirit (2003). Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
What were the Americas like before the arrival of Christopher Columbus changed the native cultures of the Western Hemisphere forever? Mann, a correspondent for Science and the Atlantic Monthly, provides a fascinating, in-depth examination of this question, identifying tantalizing clues and offering new conclusions from recently discovered archaeological evidence. He explores three different but ultimately related themes. First, the demographics of pre-contact Native American societies are examined to demonstrate that populations in many parts of the Americas were actually much larger than previously believed. (In fact, in all likelihood, more people were living in the Americas, pre-1492, than in Europe.) Next, Mann probes the probability that native peoples inhabited the Americas much earlier than previously thought. Finally, he examines the ecological impact that indigenous groups had on their environments. Mann has done a superb job of analyzing and distilling information, offering a balanced and thoughtful perspective on each of his themes in engaging prose. Including an extensive bibliography, this excellent archaeological synthesis is highly recommended for anthropology and archaeology collections in academic and large public libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 4/1/05.]-Elizabeth Salt, Otterbein Coll. Lib., Westerville, OH (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| List of Maps | p. vii |
| Preface | p. ix |
| Introduction: Holmberg's Mistake | |
| 1 A View from Above | p. 3 |
| Part 1 Numbers from Nowhere? | |
| 2 Why Billington Survived | p. 31 |
| 3 In the Land of Four Quarters | p. 62 |
| 4 Frequently Asked Questions | p. 97 |
| Part 2 Very Old Bones | |
| 5 Pleistocene Wars | p. 137 |
| 6 Cotton (or Anchovies) and Maize (Tales of Two Civilizations, Part I) | p. 174 |
| 7 Writing, Wheels, and Bucket Brigades (Tales of Two Civilizations, Part II) | p. 204 |
| Part 3 Landscape with Figures | |
| 8 Made in America | p. 243 |
| 9 Amazonia | p. 280 |
| 10 The Artificial Wilderness | p. 312 |
| Coda | |
| 11 The Great Law of Peace | p. 329 |
| Appendixes | |
| A Loaded Words | p. 339 |
| B Talking Knots | p. 345 |
| C The Syphilis Exception | p. 351 |
| D Calendar Math | p. 355 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 359 |
| Notes | p. 361 |
| Bibliography | p. 403 |
| Index | p. 451 |
