| 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus | |
|---|---|
| Author(s) | Charles C. Mann |
| Genre(s) | non-fiction |
| Publisher | Knopf |
| Publication date | 2005 |
| Pages | xii, 465 p. : ill., maps (1st edn.) |
| ISBN | 9781400040063 |
| OCLC Number | 56632601 |
| Dewey Decimal | 970.01/1 22 |
| LC Classification | E61 .M266 2005 |
| Followed by | 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created |
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus is a 2005 non-fiction book by American author and science writer Charles C. Mann about the pre-Columbian Americas. The book argues that a combination of recent findings in different fields of research suggests that human populations in the Western Hemisphere—that is, the indigenous peoples of the Americas—were more numerous, had arrived earlier, were more sophisticated culturally, and controlled and shaped the natural landscape to a greater extent than scholars had previously thought.
Contents |
A 2005 New York Times book review stated that the book's approach is "in the best scientific tradition, carefully sifting the evidence, never jumping to hasty conclusions, giving everyone a fair hearing - the experts and the amateurs; the accounts of the Indians and their conquerors. And rarely is he less than enthralling."[1]
The past 140 years have seen scientific revolutions in many fields, including demography, climatology, epidemiology, economics, botany, genetics, image analysis, palynology, molecular biology, biochemistry, 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:
1. (a) population levels in the Native Americans were probably higher than traditionally believed among scientists and closer to the number estimated by "high counters";
2. The level of cultural advancement and the settlement range of humans was higher and broader than previously imagined; and
3. The New World was not a wilderness at the time of European contact, but an environment which the indigenous peoples had altered for thousands of years for their benefit, mostly with fire.
These three main foci (origins/population, culture, and environment) form the basis for three parts of the book.
"Native Americans came across the Bering Strait 20,000 to 25,000 years ago, that they had so little impact on their environment that even after millennia of habitation the continents remain mostly wilderness."
Mann first tackles New England in the 17th century. He disagrees with the popular idea that European technologies were superior to those of Indians. 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 noted that "the awful truth...it could not shoot as far as an arrow could fly." Indian technology was more impressive, such as moccasins, which were more comfortable and sturdy than the boots Europeans wore, and were preferred by most of them during that era because their padding offered a more silent approach to warfare. Canoes are 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, anthropologist 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." By marking the social and cultural impact of infectious disease among Native Americans, Dobyns changed the way pre-Columbus America was regarded.
Mann attempts to piece together exactly how the Inca Empire fell, and if their population numbers far exceeded the armies of conquistadors, such as 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."
Use of the horse was thought to have been an advantage for the Europeans, but in cases such as the Inca, their stepped roads were impassable to horses. 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, due both to population density and mostly to the natives' lack of immunity to Eurasian diseases. Dobyns concluded, "[T]he 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". "[T]he disintegration of Native America was a loss not just to those societies but to the human enterprise as a whole."
Critics of the High Counters included 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 ago, which Mann said was "just after the only time period in which migration from Siberia seemed to have been possible." Essentially, archaeologists 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.
Evidence linked to the Lagoa Santa skeletons 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. The agricultural development of maize was significant for the rise in crop surpluses, populations and complex cultures. Indians basically bred maize from scratch, as it had "no wild ancestor"—unlike wheat, barley, and oats, which have wild relatives which can be harvested and eaten, maize's nearest relatives, the teosintes, are essentially not edible. 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 was discovered that some Mesoamerican cultures used calendars and developed the wheel, proving how complex their societies were. 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 lacked the domesticated animals. In some populated areas, the land was typically wet and boggy, thus limiting further advancement from the invention of the wheel.
In his third section, Mann attempts a synthesis. 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: "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.
The myth that Indians were not active in transforming the land is untrue. Most Indians shaped their environment with fire. Fire was used to burn 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. The 20th century environmental historian William Cronon explained that "people accustomed to keeping domesticated animals [Europeans] lacked the conceptual tools to recognize that the Indians were practicing a more distant kind of husbandry of their own." Indians domesticated fewer animals and cultivated plant life differently than their European counterparts.
Europeans held biased and sometimes racist views of Indians, in addition to not speaking a common language with them. 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 arrived.
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 supplanted the indigenous population in the Americas, the previous dominant people (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 and need as its previous occupants, the forests grew thicker." The world discovered by Christopher Columbus was to begin to change from that point on, so Columbus "was also one of the last to see it in pure form".
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."