User Reviews
Rating: really liked it
My favorite recent history book, Mann surveys the breadth and complexity of indigenous cultures in the Americas before the arrival of Columbus. Some of this research was familiar to me. When I taught American history in the 2000s, I would start with such 'snapshots' of Cahokia, the Olmecs, the Serpent Mound, the Maya, the great trade networks that connected the continent. But even that information was hard to find. Good luck finding even a mention of it in the school textbooks. Despite having some knowledge, I was blown away, again, by how populated and cultivated the American landscape was before the cataclysmic arrival of Europeans and their diseases. This book blows up many stubborn, out-dated theories like the singular Bering land-bridge migration, the idea that the land was 'mostly empty' when Europeans arrived, and the idea that most indigenous peoples were 'simple' hunter gatherers. It also gives us a good look at just how stubborn and resistant traditional Euro-American scholarship has been to accepting any new information that didn't fit established theories about the indigenous peoples. None of this will comes as a surprise to indigenous readers themselves, I'm sure, but for me, it was a refreshing, amazing read. I knew nothing about the vast, sophisticated terraforming societies of sub-Amazonian South America, or the pre-Incan empires, or the way that hunter-gatherer people intentionally crafted the landscape to better serve their needs. Mann gave me a tantalizing glimpse into a complex, beautiful pre-Columbian world.
Rating: really liked it
The survey of current thinking on the population of the americas via that Beringia land bridge and the subsequent summary of the evolutions of early american society is interesting.
But the repeated comparisons between american society and eurasian society are really fraught and often belabored. The comparisons between the two hemisphere's agriculture and domesticable animals are fine, but the assertion that Aztec (apparently it's more politically correct to call them Mexica) philosophy was as rich as medieval europe's is ludicrous, especially given that such a huge volume of Aztec codices have been preserved and deciphered. The Aztecs did some respectable philosophical work, but Mann's exaggerations aside, they didn't come close to rivaling the work done in ancient Greece, to say nothing of the subsequent 2,000 years of philosophy in Europe (with a nod towards Middle Eastern contributions as well) that took place between the death of Aristotle and the discovery of the new world. Today, it may be possible to take a mesoamerican philosophy course in some university departments, but there are very few (if any) lasting or novel contributions to the the broader discipline of philosophy to be found in Aztec (or Mayan, or Incan) philosophy. There's no shame in that: it has been said that all philosophy is but a footnote to Plato. So why feel the need to exaggerate and mislead readers by making politically correct assertions that have no basis in reality?
Also, the distinction the author draws between guilt and responsibility (i.e. 'we' should not feel guilty that Cortes introduced smallpox and wiped out 95% of american indians, but 'we' have some responsibility for this) is way too underdeveloped to be taken seriously. I don't necessarily think that the discussion is even necessary, but it is not an uncommon discussion in US politics, and Mann consciously decides to wade into these waters. First, he never defines 'we,' though it seems he means whites of european descent residing in the new world (and maybe Europeans back in Europe who benefitted from mercantilism/colonialism? It's not clear). And then he never explains how responsibility can be justly divided among descendants; how someone of, say, direct Cortez lineage might have a different level of 'responsibility' than a descendant of an Irish family with no seafaring anscestors and no pedigree in the New World until the late 19th century. And if they have the same 'responsibility,' then does a modern day Chinese or Indian immigrant to the new world also have some responsibility? All unclear, and the absence of even any contemplation of these points leaves the book's attempts at constructing a morality of European/American Indian interaction disappointingly hollow. Mann decided the topic was worthy enough to merit some discussion; it is unfortunate he failed to do the topic any justice.
Rating: really liked it
This was like a coloring book of pre-Pilgrim North America for me in that it filled in a lot of unanswered questions and brilliantly illuminated some areas of my knowledge that were mere outlines. It stays within the lines and makes my early attempts at coloring in the past look like spidery, seizure-induced scrawlings.
Being originally from New England, I'm well aware that there were inhabitants here long before the Europeans arrived. Early on in school we were inundated with stories of Samoset and Squanto, the first Native Americans to make contact with the Plymouth Colony pilgrims, and how in 1621 they strolled into the transplanted Englishmen's village and a big party broke out, thus began the tradition of Thanksgiving. I was (mis)taught in a Massachusetts classroom where heritage and history are king, so much was made of this. We were led to believe the story by elementary schoolteachers who probably wholeheartedly believed it themselves. What about the Virginia Colony of 1607 and their contact with the native inhabitants? It failed, so sweep it under the rug. Something tells me this version of America's founding by Europeans was not the one being taught in Virginia at the time...
Never was explained how the two natives could speak English (from Englishmen fishing off of the Maine coast and, in Squanto's case, from abduction and internment for seven years in England) or anything that happened in the Americas prior to the pilgrims landing. Oh sure there was talk of Incas and Mayans and their all important maize. But the extent, the sheer size of the native tribes, clans, and cosmopolitan societies of the Americas, north and south, and how Europe brought it all down upon their heads, none of this was discussed. Why? Because even during the late 1970s and early 80s when the movement to turn the Native Americans into mystical caretakers of Mother Earth, there was still a prejudicial sense of 'white is right' prevalent, at least in the neighborhood I grew up in. The other reason is a plain lack of knowledge. My simple teachers simply did not know. They can't wholly be blamed. The information wasn't readily available or flat-out
wasn't available. School books were traditional and outdated. The grey-area material was swept under the rug. Now there is less grey-area material - advances in technology and archaeological practices have greatly advanced our knowledge of the past in just a few short decades - but there's still plenty of unknown patches of time in the western hemisphere. In
1491 Mann does not shy away from them.
Having said that, it should be noted that this is not just about North America. No, in fact more time is spent on everything below it. Through discovered texts and deciphered inscriptions there's just more known about Mesoamerica than the other areas, so yes, there are pages upon pages about those Incas and Mayans.
In general what I love about
1491 is that it doesn't take the Indians' side or the Europeans'. It doesn't try to cast a glowing angelic light upon the native inhabitants to transform them into woodland spirits whose only concern was the preservation of the trees and the birds, etc blah blah blah (Earth Day is quaint and misguided, but I digress...), nor does Mann attempt to attack or defend the actions of the Europeans. All is more of a statement of fact or, if lacking concrete evidence, a statement of possibility based on sound theory.
Sure, this distills oceans of scholarly study down to a more manageable duck pond, but it never tries to pretend it is doing otherwise. Mann is no pretender to vaunted erudition. He's a journalist who's done some research. He's a guy who realized his own grade school education was lacking, and when he found out the moldy stuff he was taught way back when was still being taught to his son he decided to do something about it. I'm glad for it.
Rating: really liked it
As someone who writes professionally in this area (unabashed plug: watch for God's Mercies, Doubleday Canada, in October 07) I have high praise for this title, a long-overdue assessment of native culture and civilization before (and at) contact with Europeans. I'm still reading it, but I've been impressed so far.[I've now finished, see below.] Anyone who enjoyed it should also consider Elaine Dewar's Bones, which explores the archaeological controversy of how long people have been in the New World. (She wholeheartedly supports the "a really, really long time" camp.)
My only critique of 1491, and it is minor, is that the author I feel overstates the case that Europeans (mainly English) did not enjoy a military superiority over the natives, that their powder weapons were ineffective. This is a rather generous reading of native military capability. The English army did away with the longbow in 1598, and for all their problems, powder weapons were a clear advantage. Frenchman Samuel de Champlain used just three harquebus to devastating effect against the Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) in 1609, and in his trade and colonization monopoly, secured in 1612 under the Prince de Condé, the terms specifically forbid anyone to trade powder weapons with the natives, under penalty of a 10,000 livre fine and corporal punishment. One of the key factors in European inability not to immediately conquer or eradicate native populations by force was the sheer lack of firepower. (They also needed them as trade partners.) These commercial ventures (English and French in particular) didn't have the full might of their states behind them in the early contact period. Had England or France made up their mind to truly "conquer" these shores and their peoples, they would have marched through them much like de Soto did in the southeastern US in the mid 16th century, for good or for ill (pretty well for ill). But an idea the author does well to advance is the fact that coastal nations or tribes that made contact with the newcomers often came to decide that they should secure a strategic advantage and enlist the newcomers' aid in fighting their own enemies. It was a complicated time, and 1491 is a worthy overview.
Having now finished, I'll still recommend it. For those interested in precontact cultures north of 49 (as in half of North America) the lack of material about French Canada is a little disappointing. There's nothing about the much-debated vanishing of the Iroquoian-speaking residents of the St. Lawrence (at Hochelaga and Stadacona) who were there in large numbers in palisade villages when Cartier first visited in the 1530s, but had vanished utterly by the time Champlain showed up in 1603. But that's nitpicky, considering the enormous scope of this work.
Rating: really liked it
See updated alternative reading recommendations below.Well, I finally finished it. There were some interesting factoids, such as the theory that much of the Amazon rainforest was planted by humans, but even then the data were not marshaled in a convincing, coherent fashion. Over all, the book was badly organized, the chapter and section headings provided no clue to their purpose, the text jumped wildly across continents and thousands of years for no logical reason and technical terms were too often introduced but never defined (I had to look up MFAC in the index to discover it meant Maritime Foundation of Andean Civilization). By far the best part of the book were the aerial photographs that clearly showed the size and complexity of South America's ancient farms and cities. The maps were useful as well, but aides such as a pronunciation guide or a timeline were among the many missing elements.
And it's not just the organization of the book that is a challenge; the writing style is difficult as well. One sentence goes on for 27 lines. The author mixes metaphors with such abandon that I often despaired of untangling the meaning: "Peru is the cow-catcher on the train of continental drift. Leading South America's slow, grinding march toward Australia, its coastline hits the ocean floor and crumples up like a carpet shoved into a chair-leg."
I simply cannot fathom why so many people thought this book was so wonderful. I will have to look elsewhere for a coherent analysis of this topic.
Updated Recommendations:For an excellent analysis of some of the earliest evidence of human habitation in North America, consider Settlement Of The Americas A New Prehistory--it is more scholarly as well as being much more readable and interesting.
Timothy Egan's Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis is an interesting introduction to one of the most definitive chronicles of Native American cultures in North America. Curtis' entire multi-volume original work is available online at this Northwestern University site.
I have not read this one yet, but I hear good things about The Last Days of the Incas from my friends at the History Book Club.
The 1491 factoid about the Amazon rainforests having been heavily cultivated for extended periods of time seems likely to be correct. See this fascinating article about the rainforest's maroon people from National Geographic.
Rating: really liked it
You know – in fourteen-hundred-and-ninety-two Columbus sailed the ocean blue. So, 1491 was a particularly interesting year for the inhabitants of the Americas. This is a remarkably similar story to that told in Dark Emu. It is almost as if everything I’ve ever known about pre-European settlement in Australia and the Americas has been, well, utter rubbish. Which is more than a little annoying.
What is very interesting here is that we seem to have grossly under-estimated both the population of the Americas prior to European arrival and also the extent of farming – including farming in the Amazon basin, a particularly interesting part of this book. The author suggests that the local Indian populations in the Amazon effectively created the forest to meet human needs and that this was then able to support a much larger population than we would otherwise have estimated and one much more ‘advanced’ than we assume too.
All of this has consequences and implications, of course, because we could and should learn a lot from peoples who have farmed the land for thousands of years before we arrived and who did so in ways that appear to have been much more sustainable than anything we have achieved since.
This book covers far too much – in fact, so much so that after a while my head was almost spinning. We travel across both continents. Sometimes there is so much detail involving the pre-European arrival political struggles and murders that it pays to remember that if the Indians had invaded the UK at around this same time they’d have come just after the War of the Roses. You know, what I’m saying is that Europe was in no position to criticise other countries and their monarchies for their internecine murders and battles.
The thing that has shifted how I understand this history involves a kind of key provided by this book to understanding what happened. Basically Europeans were filthy since we lived with lots of animals and so we brought horrible, horrible diseases to the Americas. The local populations had no defence against such diseases and also had a remarkably narrow gene pool (are pools narrow? Maybe it was a shallow pool.) Either way, it seems that up to 95% of the local populations were killed by diseases like small pox. We can hardly imagine what that would mean. The debate still rages about whether the Europeans intentionally spread these diseases (although, another book I have read on this said that James the First referred to small pox as a gift from God – so, it wasn’t as if we were particularly upset about the inferno that we allowed to sweep before us as we arrived in the New World. What is clear is that not only did the population collapse, entire civilisations were brought to their knees. And as we arrived we often assumed that what we found was what had been, with us completely unaware we were witnessing societies suffering under dire stress. The author makes it very clear that what we were seeing was a grossly distorted vision of what had previously existed. I’ve never fully understood the implications of this.
Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that some disease came to Melbourne, where I live, a city of about 5 million people, and it wiped out 95% of everyone. Obviously, all of the normal things you might expect to be going on in a city would come to a screaming halt. You would be unlikely to be able to catch a tram, for instance, or buy milk at the local supermarket if 19 in every 20 people suddenly stopped living. And the people left would be without nearly everyone they have known and loved – so, not particularly happy, if you know what I mean. But that would only be the beginning of the problems. Let’s say none of the animals died in this catastrophe. The estimate is that 62% of households in Melbourne have pets, and there are 20 dogs per 100 people, which would mean all of a sudden there would be 20 dogs for every five people. If their owners are dead, then presumably many of these dogs would be pretty hungry and some of them would be out and about looking for food, probably in packs. If you arrived a year or so after the catastrophe, Melbourne would look like a pretty frightening place with lots of hungry and presumably angry dogs walking the streets. You might wonder what the hell was the matter with these people that they had so many damn dogs and didn’t even bother to look after them.
This is effectively what is suggested to have happened with bison. That is, that the removal of humans from farm lands across the continent provided bison with an ideal situation to go through a population explosion. And this then left the Europeans who arrived assuming the Indians spent all of their time hunting bison without ever seeming to diminish the population of them, whereas the bison were actually just taking advantage of the Indian farms that were now no longer farms due to the Indians having died off due to disease.
There is a bit of Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods where he talks of the extinction of various types of birds that had swarmed in such profusion when Europeans arrived that the Europeans basically went nuts killing and eating them. This is presented as proof of European disregard for nature – something that is self-evidently true, by the way. But in this case the birds were also an oddity. Because the Indian farmers had died, the corn harvests were left in the fields, the amount of food available for these birds exploded and with that so too did their populations. What Europeans witnessed and considered normal were in fact a consequence of removing humans from what had been a human-made landscape. And once you do that, other animals take the opportunity to flourish.
This book has shifted how I understand the pre-European Americas – if you are from the Americas, you should read this, not only because it is a fascinating read, but also because it will serve as a useful reminder of a cultural heritage you still have responsibilities for. Just as we Australians can never be reconciled with the land until we help to heal the wound we have made by our terrible and tragic history, so too the Americas have a debt that needs to be repayed.
Rating: really liked it
Mindblowing. Everyone should read this book. It's amazing to me how much historians got wrong -- and what this book illuminates is
why historians get such things wrong. Some of it is flat-out racism and ethnocentrism -- historians' tendency to dismiss oral tradition as crap, for example, when it turns out most Indian groups have done a good job of keeping track of their own past. Some of it, however, was simply lost knowledge that's only now being rediscovered, with the aid of modern technology and research methods. Changed the way I view the world. Truly stunning stuff.
Rating: really liked it
I'm astonished at how many people mention in their reviews that they are surprised at how rich and varied and impressive the cultures of the Americas were until a certain point. Many of them actually live on the said continents. How do you even live on a continent and know little about its history? What, did anyone think the Aztec were a bunch of barbarians? Did anyone think Columbus arrived to find an unpopulated part of the world? Maybe because said history gets understated treatment (if not outright dismissal) in history education? I think this is a prime example of history getting bent (in the best tradition illustrated in 1984) to reach certain ends.
This book is not so much innovative (quite a lot of all this had been published way before in professional research literature, 'traduit' to lots of languages). What it does is make this particular corner of history accessible to laymen.
Some points controversial, of course, as is usual with research in shady regions of history. Still, some are actually plenty good.
Full review to follow.
Rating: really liked it
In brief: I felt this was an adequate, often fascinating summary of human habitation of the Americas prior to the arrival of Europeans as understood by present-day historians and scientists. I was happy to see that Mann highlighted controversial areas without simply adopting one side of any given controversy, and in general it seemed like a balanced, well-researched book. That said, there were numerous peccadillos.
Mann starts with the basic assertion that the West's primary mistake in our conception of American Indians is that we have generally seen them as unchanging features in a primeval wilderness. This, he argues, is dehumanizing, regardless of whether you prefer to prefix "savage" with "noble," because a people incapable of change seems incapable of will, of thought, of ingenuity.
He attempts to dismantle this notion by presenting research supporting 3 broad ideas:
1) pre-Columbian population estimates are now assumed to be much higher than previously thought (i.e. between the time of first contact and the colony at Plymouth, humanity in the Americans witnessed a massive die-off)
2) humans were present in North America for tens of thousand of years, and the complexity of their societies were comparable with with Eurasian counterparts
3) Indians could and did exert influence over the natural world
On the whole, I think Mann made convincing arguments for the broad stokes. However, there were a number of things that set me off, most of them centering around my suspicion that Mann was trying harder to convince than reveal. Maybe this stems from his journalistic rather than academic background, but I constantly felt cajoled when what I wanted to feel was "of course!"
First of all there was the general lack of methods. Reconstructing history is a tricky business fraught with error, so when you're trying to communicate a challenging and controversial notion like the number of American Indians who died as a result of European diseases, I think you need to go into excruciating detail about how population numbers are derived. To his credit, Mann touches on it, but he treats the issue of error as a sort of footnote, noting one scientist who thinks the degree of error makes the numbers meaningless. Throughout the book I found myself asking, "But how do we know that?" and was generally disappointed by the number and quality of the citations (sources often include interviews, personal communication, and secondary sources that themselves lack citation).
To provide another example, on p. 234 he describes how Olmecs deformed the pliant skulls of their infants to make them look a certain way... only to admit archaeologists only assume they did this based on their artwork. No ellipsis can adequately contain my stupefaction at the absurdity of that claim. Have you seen Mesoamerican artwork? Have you seen
any human artwork prior to Enlightenment Europe? Not exactly the height of realism. Perusing his source, it seems that the figurines looked deformed, and intentional deformation was apparently documented elsewhere in Mesoamerica, but the citation trail goes Spanish there, so I'm lost. If there were first-hand accounts of similar practices, you need to describe them. In the text. Because shaping baby skulls is WEIRD by our standards.
There were other portions that just seemed irrational and/or unscientific. His attempt to equate human sacrifice among the Mexica (aka Aztecs) and 17th century executions in Britain was a bit ridiculous, as fellow Goodreads user Stefan pointed out (p. 134). On p. 172 he actually describes error ranges for carbon dating as "typographical clutter" [muffled howl of rage]. On p. 291 he writes, "Indians [...] began systematically replanting large belts of woodland, transforming them into orchards for fruit and mast." He cites Krummer (an Atlantic Monthly article about chestnut restoration) and himself, neither of which mention Indian planting. You get the picture.
Finally, I found his constant comparisons to Europe and the general sense of hand-wringing and guilt a bit trying, and that's coming from a self-avowed Western liberal hand-wringer. Two back-to-back quotes sum this up nicely:
"The complexity of a society's technology has little to do with its level of social complexity–something that we, in our era of rapidly changing seemingly overwhelming technology, have trouble grasping." (p. 250)
"But where Europe had the profoundly different civilizations of China and Islam to steal from, Mesoamerica was alone in the world." (p. 251)
The sagacity of the former idea and the absurd implication that cultural and technological interchange in Eurasia was both one-way
and morally wrong perfectly describe 2/3 of the Ueda-Mann Venn diagram.
But like I said, on the whole pretty good. I found the penultimate bit about defining our relationship to nature and the final section about the role American Indian concepts of freedom and individuality may have influenced the founding of the United States
super intriguing, worth books of their own. Maybe that's where he's going with 1493.
Words prelapsarian (adj): before the Fall of Man. Talkin' Bilbical here. (p. 14)
telluric (adj): terrestrial, pertaining to soil. (p. 80)
statrapies (n): in this context, leaders (or states?) that act primarily in response to larger political entities. (p. 138)
fissiparous (adj): tending to fall apart / separate. (p. 373)
Rating: really liked it
This book has already been widely reviewed. Many other reviewers have outlined the basic 3 premises that the book advances. The book is extremely well-researched. The author has spoken with numerous experts and covered an enormous amount of territory, and on the whole he presents fairly convincing arguments. Most people do I think accept that the Indian population of the Americas experienced a catastrophic crash after 1492, due primarily to the introduction of Old World diseases, but Mann presents this simple fact from another angle. He points out that the earliest European explorers described a heavily populated continent, with numerous towns and even cities. A century or so later their successors described an empty wilderness. Even the huge forests, vast herds of bison and the unimaginably large flocks of passenger pigeons, all of which we tend to associate with early post-colonial North America, were, Mann argues, developments that took place only after the Indian population was drastically reduced post 1492. The author also seeks to change our view of Indian civilisations, arguing persuasively that many Indian societies developed highly complex and effective agricultures as well as independently developing writing, and that in both cases they may have been amongst the earliest in the World to do so.
Unfortunately at times the author falls into the trap of overstating his case. He praises Mesoamerican philosophy, and compares it to that of Ancient Greece and China. In support of his argument he provides some rather unimpressive evidence from the Mexica (aka the Aztecs), consisting largely of creation myths and some simplistic questions such as "In the Beyond, are we still dead or do we live?" Perhaps realising the thinness of his evidence, the author asserts that "Cut short by Cortes, Mexica philosophy did not have the chance to reach as far as Greek or Chinese philosophy." This is speculative. As the author himself sets out, dozens if not scores of Indian civilisations had risen and fallen over millennia, and there is no reason to suppose that the fate of the Mexica or the Inca would have been any different, had the Europeans not arrived. Moreover the author finishes the book with a last chapter in which he seems to argue that worldwide ideas of political liberty derive mainly from the Haudenosaunee (The League of the Iroquois). I am not seeking to denigrate the Haudenosaunee, which was an impressive achievement, and I realise the author would be seeking to finish with a flourish, but I find this claim to be a wild exaggeration, totally ignoring the extent to which Ancient Greek ideas of democracy, liberty and equality before the law influenced the 18th Century Enlightenment, and the extent to which the political philosophy of the Enlightenment was inextricably linked with the Scientific Revolution and the challenges it posed to tradition and faith. Regrettably the book's very last paragraph contains two statements that I found to be simply absurd, and for me this rather soured the rest of the arguments the author advanced.
Rating: really liked it
Very well written, a good mixture of factual evidence and narrative. The main take home point here should be known to everyone, especially Americans. There is a reason why there was a period of 128 years between Colombus' landing and a permanent European settlement in North America. Namely, there were millions of Native Americans there who thought Europeans were dirty, amusing creatures who had interesting objects but were not fit for being neighbors. Attempted European settlers were continuously driven out. When one tribe finally took pity on the English settlement of Plymouth, it was only because a smallpox epidemic had killed vast numbers of the them off, and they were concerned about being run over by their enemies, who had not yet suffered this fate. It is likely that were it not for the outbreaks of smallpox, preceding many of the first European scouts moving westward, that America would have never been a country.
Oh yeah, and concerning South America, there is evidence that much, possibly 70-80%, of the Amazon forest is man-made.
This is definitely a well researched & eye opening book that will challenge the idea that Native Americans were a sparse people who had no effect on their environment and let things be on their own. The only reason people think that most Native Americans were purely nomadic hunters was because the smallpox had killed off most of the 'urbanized' settlements that required agriculture.
Rating: really liked it
Fascinating exploration of what we know of the "New World" before Columbus arrived. I knew pretty much nothing about the Incas, the Mayans, the Aztecs, and all the other societies that actually were possibly BIGGER than Europe in 1492, and dwarfed it in centuries before. It's also an interesting survey of these societies and their environments, of how the Indians and the "pristine" environments are a bit of a myth. The scope of the book covers so many different culture, puts everything into a context I never imagined before.
The author obviously loves what he does, and relishes research and it definitely makes potentially dry material come to life. Opened my eyes to a subject I knew nothing about, so I highly recommend!!!!
Rating: really liked it
As a white man educated in the 1970s and 80s, I am aware of the limitations of the western-view of world history I was taught. As a result, I am always on the lookout for books that might offer me a different perspective, and was delighted when several Goodreads friends recommended 1491 to me. As a survey of pre-Columbian America, it does not disappoint. Mann combines first hand reportage with a survey of the current evidence to reveal a Lost World. Some aspects of the narrative were familiar – the travails of the Mayan civilisations, for example, but others were not. The density of the indigenous population of North America before the arrival of European diseases, for example, came as a surprise to this reader, as did the extraordinary idea that the large forests of the Amazon and Eastern United States might be the result of centuries of landscape management by their residents. All in all, this is a fascinating book that is unafraid to debunk most of our perceived views about the New World.
Charles Mann’s work is not without faults, however. His unquestioning approval of Native American culture leads him to overlook some of the more brutal practices of aggressive cultures such as the Inca and Aztecs – human sacrifice being the most obvious example. He also displays evidence in such an even-handed way (on the one hand, on the other hand) that at times I found myself longing to hear what he actually thought. Mann also uses a device of setting up a particular view point over a number of pages, only to tear it down with new evidence once the reader has absorbed his initial argument. This approach is effective the first time it is used, but becomes irritating as the book progresses and it is repeated again and again. That said, 1491 is a very valuable contribution to a little understood part of human history.
Rating: really liked it
Author Charles Mann's purpose is to debunk three commonly held ideas about the Americas before Columbus: that the continents were sparsely populated, that the social and technical development was limited and that the locals left the environment untouched.
In discussing scholarly debates on these subjects, he convincingly argues that the population, before the decimation of disease, was quite high. The debate is just how many people there were rather than whether the continents were pristine unoccupied lands waiting for the taking. The major factor here is the spread of Old World disease.
On the question of social and cultural development, he argues that Peru and Mesoamerica should be counted among the birthplaces of human culture. While they didn't develop in the same way as Asian or European societies, they represent great achievements that best took advantage of their situation.
His final point is that the locals were extensive modifiers of the environment. In fact he goes so far as to say that the Amazon as we know it is the result of thousands of years of human engineering.
All of these arguments have their foes and Mann gives them room in the book as well. It's a fair, easy to read book that will likely educate and entertain all but specialists.
Rating: really liked it
Sigh, Holmberg didn't 'make a mistake' he used scientific racism. His scientific determinations about Native Americans aren't mistakes. Racism is a form of control and therefore ALWAYS intentional.
If an author is unprepared to deal with white folks behaving badly because of racism, he should've picked another continent on which to set this. As it stands this stance is disrespectful to the very people who's history he's supposed to be providing. Racism is never a mistake or oversight.
The author's inability to leave Europeans out of a book that doesn't include them is annoying. His inability to hold the perpetrators of this genocide accountable is dangerous. Pulling histories for marginalized peoples out of white folks records is a standard method of study and many of the biographies I've read employ this technique. In the beginning generally the author explains where the info/facts/history comes from, the records of the farm or plantation etc, without making those whites the center of the story. No attempt is made to give the subjects that same dignity in this narrative.
Yet for all it's flaws it is a groundbreaking book that ties all of this research together in one place. Just do not give any weight to the author's conclusions. One of the author's main goals here is to expose the mistaken history while protecting white supremacy. It's an intricate dance that ultimately fails.
If this interests you aptn.ca (aboriginal peoples television network) made an 8 part series with this same name. It's considerably better as it includes much more info than exists in this book or I'm told 1493. Also it's created by Native Americans/ First Nations so no need to protect white supremacy. This show is also available on Vimeo. I rarely suggest this but in this case, skip the book watch the show. The history is more accurate and Europeans are non-existent, as they should be in 1491 Americas.
