1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus | 
 enlarge | Author: Charles C. Mann
Publisher: Vintage
Category: Book
List Price: $15.95
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Rating:  201 reviews
Sales Rank: 1643
Media: Paperback
Pages: 541
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.2 x 1.2
ISBN: 1400032059
Dewey Decimal Number: 970.01
EAN: 9781400032051
ASIN: 1400032059
Publication Date: October 10, 2006
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Condition: very good clean condition, no marks or bent pages, thanks.
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Amazon.com Review
I1491/I is not so much the story of a year, as of what that year stands for: the long-debated (and often-dismissed) question of what human civilization in the Americas was like before the Europeans crashed the party. The history books most Americans were (and still are) raised on describe the continents before Columbus as a vast, underused territory, sparsely populated by primitives whose cultures would inevitably bow before the advanced technologies of the Europeans. For decades, though, among the archaeologists, anthropologists, paleolinguists, and others whose discoveries Charles C. Mann brings together in I1491/I, different stories have been emerging. Among the revelations: the first Americans may not have come over the Bering land bridge around 12,000 B.C. but by boat along the Pacific coast 10 or even 20 thousand years earlier; the Americas were a far more urban, more populated, and more technologically advanced region than generally assumed; and the Indians, rather than living in static harmony with nature, radically engineered the landscape across the continents, to the point that even "timeless" natural features like the Amazon rainforest can be seen as products of human intervention. p Mann is well aware that much of the history he relates is necessarily speculative, the product of pot-shard interpretation and precise scientific measurements that often end up being radically revised in later decades. But the most compelling of his eye-opening revisionist stories are among the best-founded: the stories of early American-European contact. To many of those who were there, the earliest encounters felt more like a meeting of equals than one of natural domination. And those who came later and found an emptied landscape that seemed ripe for the taking, Mann argues convincingly, encountered not the natural and unchanging state of the native American, but the evidence of a sudden calamity: the ravages of what was likely the greatest epidemic in human history, the smallpox and other diseases introduced inadvertently by Europeans to a population without immunity, which swept through the Americas faster than the explorers who brought it, and left behind for their discovery a land that held only a shadow of the thriving cultures that it had sustained for centuries before. I--Tom Nissley/Ip p align="center" span class="h1"strongA I1491/I Timeline/strong/span/p table cellpadding="4" border="0" width="100%" cellspacing="4" tr valign="top" align="left" td width="20%"strongEurope and Asia/strong/tdp td width="10%"strongDates/strong/td td width="70%"strongThe Americas/strong/td /trp tr valign="top" align="left" td width="20%"/tdp td width="10%"25000-35000 B.C./td td width="70%"Time of paleo-Indian migration to Americas from Siberia, according to genetic evidence. Groups likely traveled across the Pacific in boats./td /trp tr valign="top" align="left" td width="20%"Wheat and barley grown from wild ancestors in Sumer./tdp td width="10%"6000/td td width="70%"/td /trp tr valign="top" align="left" td width="20%"/tdp td width="10%"5000/td td width="70%"In what many scientists regard as humankind's first and greatest feat of genetic engineering, Indians in southern Mexico systematically breed maize (corn) from dissimilar ancestor species./td /trp tr valign="top" align="left" td width="20%"First cities established in Sumer./tdp td width="10%"4000/td td width="70%"/td /trp tr valign="top" align="left" td width="20%"/tdp td width="10%"3000/td td width="70%"The Americas' first urban complex, in coastal Peru, of at least 30 closely packed cities, each centered around large pyramid-like structures/td /trp tr valign="top" align="left" td width="20%"Great Pyramid at Giza/tdp td width="10%"2650/td td width="70%"/td /trp tr valign="top" align="left" td width="20%"/tdp td width="10%"32/td td width="70%"First clear evidence of Olmec use of zero--an invention, widely described as the most important mathematical discovery ever made, which did not occur in Eurasia until about 600 A.D., in India (zero was not introduced to Europe until the 1200s and not widely used until the 1700s)/td /trp tr valign="top" align="left" td width="20%"/tdp td width="10%"800-840 A.D./td td width="70%"Sudden collapse of most central Maya cities in the face of severe drought and lengthy war/td /trp tr valign="top" align="left" td width="20%"Vikings briefly establish first European settlements in North America./tdp td width="10%"1000/td td width="70%"table cellpadding="0" align="left" width="255" cellspacing="0" trtd align="left" img border="0" src="http://images.amazon.com/images/G/01/books/a-plus/cahokia-250.jpg" align="top"/td /tr tr td align="left" span class="tiny"Reconstruction of Cahokia, c. 1250 A.D.*/span /td/tr /tableAbrupt rise of Cahokia, near modern St. Louis, the largest city north of the Rio Grande. Population estimates vary from at least 15,000 to 100,000./td /trp tr valign="top" align="left" td width="20%"Black Death devastates Europe./tdp td width="10%"1347-1351/td td width="70%"/td /trp tr valign="top" align="left" td width="20%"/tdp td width="10%"1398/td td width="70%"Birth of Tlacaelel, the brilliant Mexican strategist behind the Triple Alliance (also known as the Aztec empire), which within decades controls central Mexico, then the most densely settled place on Earth./td /trp tr valign="top" align="left" td width="20%"The Encounter: Columbus sails from Europe to the Caribbean./tdp td width="10%"1492/td td width="70%"The Encounter: Columbus sails from Europe to the Caribbean./td /trp tr valign="top" align="left" td width="20%"Syphilis apparently brought to Europe by Columbus's returning crew./tdp td width="10%"1493/td td width="70%"/td /trp tr valign="top" align="left" td width="20%"Ferdinand Magellan departs from Spain on around-the-world voyage./tdp td width="10%"1519/td td width="70%"table cellpadding="0" align="left" width="255" cellspacing="0" trtd align="left" img border="0" src="http://images.amazon.com/images/G/01/books/a-plus/disease-250.jpg" align="top"/td /tr tr td align="left" span class="tiny"Sixteenth-century Mexica drawing of the effects of smallpox**/span /td/tr /tableCortes driven from Tenochtitlan, capital of the Triple Alliance, and then gains victory as smallpox, a European disease never before seen in the Americas, kills at least one of three in the empire./td /trp tr valign="top" align="left" td width="20%"/tdp td width="10%"1525-1533/td td width="70%"The smallpox epidemic sweeps into Peru, killing as much as half the population of the Inka empire and opening the door to conquest by Spanish forces led by Pizarro./td /trp tr valign="top" align="left" td width="20%"/tdp td width="10%"1617/td td width="70%"Huge areas of New England nearly depopulated by epidemic brought by shipwrecked French sailors./td /trp tr valign="top" align="left" td width="20%"English Pilgrims arrive at Patuxet, an Indian village emptied by disease, and survive on stored Indian food, renaming the village Plymouth./tdp td width="10%"1620/td td width="70%"/td /tr tr /table table cellpadding="4" border="0" width="100%" cellspacing="4" tr td align="left" width="100%" span class="tiny"*Courtesy Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, Collinsville, Ill., painting by Michael Hampshire. **Courtesy Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, Santa Fe, N.M. (Bernardino de Sahagun, IHistoria General de las Cosas de Nueva Espana,/I 1547-77)./span /td/tr/table
Product Description
In this groundbreaking work of science, history, and archaeology, Charles C. Mann radically alters our understanding of the Americas before the arrival of Columbus in 1492.brbrContrary to what so many Americans learn in school, the pre-Columbian Indians were not sparsely settled in a pristine wilderness; rather, there were huge numbers of Indians who actively molded and influenced the land around them. From the astonishing Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, which had running water, immaculately clean streets, and was larger than any contemporary European city, to the Mexican corn that was so carefully created in a specialized breeding process that it has been called man#8217;s first feat of genetic engineering, Indians were not living lightly on the land but were landscaping and manipulating their world in ways that we are only now beginning to understand. Challenging and surprising, this a transformative new look at a rich and fascinating world we only thought we knew.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 196 more reviews...
 Good History Lesson November 19, 2008
Alexander Scott (Boone, NC)
This book really teaches you some things you may not have learned while you where in high school, or maybe even in college especially if you are older than the age of 25-30. Some of the lessons taught are of finding information that some of the ancient Mesoamerican civilizations wher actually quite large and elaborate. Some had flowing water and others where the size of if not larger than Paris, France at the same time. If you enjoy history you will enjoy this book, if you are not into history this book is probably not for you.
Over the top November 10, 2008
Matthew M. Laiewski (Central, SC USA)
0 out of 3 found this review helpful
I liked the author's story but I can't believe all the things that he assumes for what was happening in the Americas before 1492.
Well Researched, Fascinating, and a Real Eye-Opener November 4, 2008
Guy the Gorilla (Virginia)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Back in the 1980s I picked up a book off my father's shelf that caught my eye and read it through: "Indian New England Before the Mayflower" by Howard Russell. This book was massively researched the way David McCullough would research a book: every account left by early explorers and observers was read; every reference in regional or local histories or archaeological writings was examined; every New England museum or known archaeological site was visited and informed people interviewed. I was impressed by the scholarship and came away convinced that the Native Americans were far more advanced than we have been led to believe in the typical American History book. br / br /Thus I was not surprised by the content of "1491," which takes the same thesis and expands upon it to cover the entire New World. Charles Mann has researched his book nearly as extensively as Russell - in fact it comes as no surprise that Russell's book is cited as a source for "1491." As an aside I am puzzled by some of the one star reviews that imply "1491" has not been adequately researched - there is a 50 page note section at the back, followed by a 58 page bibliography citing, and I am not making this up, well over 1000 scholarly sources. Such comments make me question whether the writers of such reviews even have copies of the book in their possession, or are they simply launching negative reviews for some ulterior motive. br / br /And this would make sense, because the material IS controversial. The idea that the white man is responsible for the deaths of millions of people does not sit well politically with some folks, who perhaps believe it is somehow an indictment of them, or the United States, or maybe democracy. Who knows? Whatever the reason, there is a school of thought devoted toward minimizing estimates of the Native American population prior to the arrival of Columbus, and minimizing their level of cultural advancement. Perhaps it is more palatable to think that there were only a few pesky savages around and we brought them order and civilization, versus contemplating the possibility that we may have erased an entire hemisphere's worth of civilization. To put this in perspective, imagine a scenario where the New World inhabitants had progressed faster than the Old World, and that huge invasion fleets from Central America began appearing off the European coast and the Mediterranean at the time of the Roman Empire. Imagine if these "Indians" arrived with a suite of diseases lethal to the native Europeans, and possessing technology several centuries ahead of the Romans. Imagine Europe enduring the Black Death five times over, and then waves of "Indians" coming to inhabit the now collapsed and abandoned Roman Empire and slightly less civilized areas surrounding it in Germany or Eastern Europe. Mann presents a good case that this kind of scenario is far more likely to have occurred in the New World when the Europeans arrived than the one we have all been told in American History books. br / br /Regarding the population of pre-Columbian America, for every researcher who claims a low, less dense population, Mann shows that there are other researchers who estimate the population to be ten times higher. We will probably never know. In my opinion, and to his credit, Mann provides a balanced view of this debate, citing both sides, and then weighs in with his assessment (which is more in line with the "high" side). Again, I tend to think he presents a pretty convincing argument. br / br /It is also clear that the idea that Native Americans consisted of small bands of stone age savages frolicking in the woods cannot possibly be true. We all know this intuitively just from the "Pilgrim" story. We all know how the Indians taught the Pilgrims how to farm - how to grow corn and squash and beans and how to fertilize and tend these crops - we've all heard the story of "Squanto." So if the Indians were a bunch of Stone Age savages living in tepees in the woods - how is that they knew more about farming than the Pilgrims? If they were that knowledgeable about farming, doesn't that imply that they had settled into agricultural communities? What do we make of the reports from early European explorers of large villages and even small cities surrounded by square miles of farms? The Pilgrims basically occupied the abandoned Indian town that was situated at Plymouth (it was abandoned because the inhabitants had been decimated by disease), and the early accounts describe it as a full-scale village with streets and large wooden buildings. Kind of like Iowa, only without satellite TV or football teams. br / br /And these are descriptions of the Indians living far from the major population centers and urbanized areas in central America. br / br /All in all, Mann presents a compelling argument that America was a far different place in 1491 than most of us realize. A fascinating account, and definitely a must-read for anyone interested in history.
Fun although not gospel October 24, 2008
A. Rehm (Boston)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Take it with a grain of salt: most of this stuff is speculative, to varying degrees. But as a detailed and well-written summary of all the theories you never heard about Native American culture, it's a pretty fun read. Mann actually does a pretty good job of letting you know exactly how speculative each of his ideas are; some of them are certainly true, some are almost certainly wishful thinking. But as long as you don't forget not to believe everything Mann says, this is a great collection of Wicked Cool Ideas. br / br /Sidenote: I do wish someone would come up with a plausible excuse for MesoAmericans' failure to use wheels for anything other than toys. I get that they didn't have appropriate draft animals and all, but...really, no one thought to make a wheelbarrow?
 engaging, thought provoking, stimulating, a great read! October 19, 2008
Nikwax (Portland, OR United States)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
My wife and I co-read this book and spent hours discussing it. An astonishing array of possibilities in the evolving picture of the pre-columbian Americas. Very readable for the non-technician. Fascinating.
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