1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

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1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
Author Charles C. Mann
Publisher Knopf
Publication date 2005

1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus is a 2005 non-fiction book by American author Charles C. Mann about the pre-Columbian Americas. The book argues that there is evidence accumulated over the last several decades suggesting that human populations in the Western Hemisphere - that is, the indigenous peoples of the Americas - were larger in number, had arrived earlier, were more sophisticated culturally, and controlled and shaped the natural landscape to a greater extent than had been previously thought.

Contents

[edit] Book summary

An indicative map of the prominent political entities extant in the Western Hemisphere c. 1491 C.E., as presented in 1491.
An indicative map of the prominent political entities extant in the Western Hemisphere c. 1491 C.E., as presented in 1491.

The past 140 years have seen scientific revolutions in many fields, including demography, climatology, epidemiology, economics, botany, genetics, image analysis, palynology, molecular biology, and soil science. As new evidence has accumulated, long-standing views about the pre-Columbian world have been challenged and reexamined. Although there is no consensus, and Mann acknowledges controversies, Mann asserts that the general trend among scientists is to acknowledge that

  1. (a) the population levels were probably higher than traditionally believed among scientists and closer to the number estimated by "high counters"; (b) humans probably arrived in the Americas earlier than thought over the course of multiple waves of migration to the New World (not solely by the Bering land bridge over a relatively short period of time);
  2. The level of cultural advancement and settlement range was higher and broader than previously imagined; and
  3. The New World was largely not a wilderness but an environment controlled by humans (mostly with fire).

These three main foci (origins/population, culture, environment) form the basis for three parts of the book.

[edit] Introduction

Mann was inspired to write this book because he was taught in high school that "Indians came across the Bering Strait about 13,000 years ago, that they had so little impact on their environment that even after millennia of habitation the continents remain mostly wilderness." He examines what he terms "Holmberg's mistake", named for the anthropologist Allan R. Holmberg, who lived among the Siriono in the 1940s and came to the conclusion that they were the most "culturally backward peoples" in the world. Mann writes that Holmberg's theory was in fact a mistake, because smallpox and influenza devastated Siriono villages during the 1920s, and the Siriono were the "persecuted survivors of a recently shattered culture."

[edit] Part One: Numbers From Nowhere

Mann first tackles New England in the 1600s, and the idea that European technologies were superior to Indian technologies. Guns were a prime example, as they were seen by Indians as nothing more than "noisemakers," and they were difficult to aim. Famous colonist John Smith even noted that "the awful truth...it could not shoot as far as an arrow could fly." Indian technology was actually more impressive, such as the moccasin, which was far more comfortable and sturdy than the boots Europeans wore, and were actually preferred by most of them during that era because its padding offered a much more silent approach to warfare. Canoes are also a prime example that disproves the myth of superior technology of the Europeans. The canoes made by Indians were faster and more maneuverable than any small European boats.

By the 1960s, Henry F. Dobyns researched records in the central cathedral in Lima, Peru, and found that upon European arrival, there were far more burials than baptisms recorded. "The Spaniards arrived and the Indians died – in huge numbers and incredible rates." Dobyns changed the way pre-Columbus America was looked at, particularly the Native Americans themselves.

Mann attempts to piece together how exactly the Inca Empire fell, if their population numbers far exceeded the armies of conquistadors like Francisco Pizarro. Heather Lechtmen explains that Europeans took metals and optimized their value by using them for their "hardness, strength, toughness, and sharpness,” while Indian cultures such as the Inca used metals for “plasticity, malleability, and toughness." Simply put, Europeans used metals to produce materially resilient arms and assorted weapons ("swords and armor, rifles and cannons") whereas metal for the natives was more common within decoration and the creation of arts and craft. Although both cultures had access to and made use of metal, it was for differing purposes: "Europeans used metal for tools [while] Andean societies primarily used it as a token of wealth, power, and community affiliation."

The horse was also thought to have been an advantage for the Europeans, but in cases such as the Inca, switchback roads made them vulnerable, but any anti-horse inventions were not used efficiently enough to successfully stop the Spanish intruders. The Inca Empire collapsed because by the time Europeans arrived, smallpox and other epidemics had already swept through cities quite easily, thanks to intricate road systems and huge population movements. Dobyns concluded that "the Inca were not defeated by steel and horses, but by disease and factionalism," referring to the civil war that came before clashes with the Spanish. From that point on, Dobyns became a "High Counter" (those who thought the number of Native Americans was close to 100 million) by estimating that more people lived in the Americas than previously thought. The Aztecs were also more advanced than previously conceived. Their societies had tlamatini, analogous to the Greek "thinker-teacher," and "the disintegration of Native America was a loss not just to those societies but to the human enterprise as a whole."

There were critics of the High Counters, most notably was David Henige, who wrote Numbers from Nowhere (1998). Was it possible to just invent millions of people that there was no way of proving existed? Yet "Low Counters" commit the "intellectual sin of arguing from silence." The invention of carbon dating in 1949, made it possible to find out how old bones were, with the Clovis culture in New Mexico being one of the first to be examined. The culture first appeared between 13,500 and 12,900 years old, which was "just after the only time period in which migration from Siberia seemed to have been possible." Essentially, archeologists have spent the time since pushing back the date at which Indians were first present in the Americas, and the battle between High Counters and Low Counters went on.

[edit] Part Two: Very Old Bones

Evidence linked to the Lagoa Santa skeletons that were uncovered in caves in Brazil, proved that Indians could have been living there for many thousands of years. Indians in this area come from the same haplogroup as natives in Siberia, making the conclusion "that Indians and Siberians share common ancestry."

Agriculture is another focus of this section, as Mann explores Andean and Mesoamerican cultures. A huge piece of that equation was the agricultural development of maize. Indians basically bred maize from scratch, as it had "no wild ancestor." Maize was grown on a milpa, an intricate system of planting multiple crops in one area that would be "nutritionally and environmentally complementary," and also promoted "long-term success." The development of maize was a pivotal part of Mesoamerican life that promoted high culture in civilizations such as the Olmec.

Evidence that some Mesoamerican cultures used calendars, and even the use of the wheel were discovered proving how far Indians had come. However, the wheel was only used for small toys, and not in advantageous ways. "Every society missed out on obvious technologies," and Mesoamericans did not have the luxury of "stealing" inventions from others, since they were geographically isolated in comparison to Eurasia. They also lacked the beasts of burden and the land was typically wet and boggy, thus limiting further advancement from the invention of the wheel.

[edit] Part Three: Landscape With Figures

Mann attempts to bring it all together in the third and final section of 1491. He focuses on the Maya, whose population growth was about as rapid as its decline. Why did they disappear? Sylvanus Morley gave the best-known theory that "the Maya collapsed because they overshot the carrying capacity of their environment. They exhausted their resource base, began to die of starvation and thirst, and fled their cities en masse, leaving them as silent warnings of the perils of ecological hubris." This pattern is common among many Indian cultures. However, the myth that Indians were not active in transforming the land is untrue.

Most Indians shaped their environment with fire. Fire burns shrubs and trees, opening an area to sunlight, thereby benefitting plants that need sun, while inhibiting others. Burning encourages abundance of certain animals, while discouraging others. By using fire in this manner, William Cronon explains that "people accustomed to keeping domesticated animals lacked the conceptual tools to recognize that the Indians were practicing a more distant kind of husbandry of their own." Indians simply domesticated animals and plant life differently than their European counterparts.

The single biggest missing link to the past was a lack of voices to the past. Europeans held biased and sometimes racist views of Indians, in addition to not speaking a common language. This fact led to people being misled with the result that they misunderstood Indians unjustly. In Amazonia: Man and Culture in a Counterfeit Paradise, Betty J. Meggers suggests the "law of environmental limitation of culture," meaning they "reached their optimal level of environment." Whatever Indians did before slash and burn the logic goes, had to have worked thanks to the acres of healthy forest seen before Europeans.

Mann concludes that Indians were a "keystone species," one that "affects the survival and abundance of many other species." By the time the Europeans arrived and settled in the Americas, the "boss" (Indians) had been almost completely eliminated. Disease ran rampant and killed off the Indians, disrupting their control of the environment. When Indians died, animal populations, such as that of the buffalo grew immensely. "Because they (Europeans) did not burn the land with the same skill and frequency as its previous occupants, the forests grew thicker." The world discovered by Christopher Columbus was “largely an inadvertent European creation.”

Mann concludes with the idea that we must look to the past to right the future. "Native Americans ran the continent as they saw fit. Modern nations must do the same. If they want to return as much of the landscape as possible to its state in 1491, they will have to create the world’s largest gardens."

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