|
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus | 
 enlarge | Author: Charles C. Mann
Publisher: Knopf
Category: Book
List Price: $30.00
Buy Used: $4.00
You Save: $26.00 (87%)
New (33) Used (53) Collectible (3) from $4.00
Rating:  195 reviews
Sales Rank: 13982
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 480
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.8
Dimensions (in): 9.4 x 6.1 x 1.7
ISBN: 140004006X
Dewey Decimal Number: 970.011
EAN: 9781400040063
Publication Date: August 9, 2005
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Condition: Has been read, but remains in great condition. Ships within 2 business days. 100% Customer satisfaction guaranteed.
| |
| Similar Items:
|
| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com Review
1491 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 1491, 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. 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. --Tom Nissley A 1491 Timeline | Europe and Asia | Dates | The Americas | | 25000-35000 B.C. | Time of paleo-Indian migration to Americas from Siberia, according to genetic evidence. Groups likely traveled across the Pacific in boats. | | Wheat and barley grown from wild ancestors in Sumer. | 6000 | | | 5000 | 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. | | First cities established in Sumer. | 4000 | | | 3000 | The Americas' first urban complex, in coastal Peru, of at least 30 closely packed cities, each centered around large pyramid-like structures | | Great Pyramid at Giza | 2650 | | | 32 | 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) | | 800-840 A.D. | Sudden collapse of most central Maya cities in the face of severe drought and lengthy war | | Vikings briefly establish first European settlements in North America. | 1000 |  | | Reconstruction of Cahokia, c. 1250 A.D.* | Abrupt 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. | | Black Death devastates Europe. | 1347-1351 | | | 1398 | 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. | | The Encounter: Columbus sails from Europe to the Caribbean. | 1492 | The Encounter: Columbus sails from Europe to the Caribbean. | | Syphilis apparently brought to Europe by Columbus's returning crew. | 1493 | | | Ferdinand Magellan departs from Spain on around-the-world voyage. | 1519 |  | | Sixteenth-century Mexica drawing of the effects of smallpox** | Cortes 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. | | 1525-1533 | 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. | | 1617 | Huge areas of New England nearly depopulated by epidemic brought by shipwrecked French sailors. | | English Pilgrims arrive at Patuxet, an Indian village emptied by disease, and survive on stored Indian food, renaming the village Plymouth. | 1620 | | | *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, Historia General de las Cosas de Nueva Espana, 1547-77). |
Product Description
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 Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital–were far greater in population than any contemporary European city. Furthermore, Tenochtitlan, 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.
|
| Customer Reviews: Read 190 more reviews...
 An excellent update on the current academic understanding of pre-Columbian America November 16, 2005
Ursiform (Torrance, CA USA)
268 out of 294 found this review helpful
Although recent years have yielded significant progress in understanding how "Indians" lived throughout the Americas before 1492 and Columbus, only isolated bits of the story have reached the popular press. Far too many people still hold to one of two myths of the Indians, or have little conception at all of pre-Columbian America.
The first popular myth is that the Indians were a bunch of primitive savages just keeping the land warm until superior Europeans showed up. It's sad to read reviews here that assert that because Indians used stone tools they were therefore "stone age", with the implication that their culture was no further advanced than that early period.
The second myth makes the Indians into proto-flower-children, naively and simply in tune with their environment.
Both myths are based on stereotyping and are condescending to the pre-Colombians. How could people spread over two continents and many millennia be briefly summarized? They can't be! The Americas saw the development of a broad range of cultures, just like every other inhabited area of the world. Some cultures overstressed their environment and soon collapsed. Others created stable conditions under which they could survive for generations. (Which is not the same as saying they didn't impact nature.) But even the latter could be brought down by climate change, political instability, disease (especially European), or contact with outsiders (Indian or European).
Great cities arose in mesoamerica and the Andes, and also in other areas when the right conditions prevailed. And sophisticated cultures existed even where city building wasn't favored.
This book takes the reader through a vibrant overview of centuries of Indian culture both before and shortly after Columbus landed. Much of the narrative is based on work-in-progress by archaeologists and historians, and will certainly become dated with time, but it is an important update to the common, current understanding of the subject.
For those not enthralled by one of the myths I mention above, most Americans recall our history along the lines of Scene 1: The Pilgrims land and encounter Indians who teach them how to grow corn; they then have a big Thanksgiving party together. Scene 2: Americans moving inland encounter savage Indians who need to be exterminated or moved to reservations to make the continent safe for manifest destiny. Scene 3: The few remaining Indians are victims of brutal European suppression, and we need to buy jewelry and pottery from them to make ourselves feel better about the situation.
This book is a welcome update to our thinking about the Americas before Columbus. It's also one of the best books I've read in long time, and I highly recommend it.
An Intriguing New Look September 13, 2005
John D. Cofield
79 out of 93 found this review helpful
Charles C. Mann has taken much of what we thought we knew about the Native Americans and their world and thrown it out the window. In a pleasantly informal yet highly professional style, Mann recounts tales of his own studies and travels, as well as those of many archaeologists, historians, and anthropologists past and present throughout the Americas.
If your knowledge of the Native Americans begins and ends with what you learned in school years ago, or with the stereotypes perpetuated by Hollywood, you are in for quite a shock. To begin with, the Native Americans have been "natives" here for far longer than any one suspected. Next, their cultures were heterogeneous and quite advanced, in many ways far outdoing their counterparts in Europe. And in what may be the most controversial sections, Mann maintains that the Native Americans were neither primitive savages who left no mark on their world, nor dreamy proto-environmentalists who lived as one with nature, but rather people who throughly altered and shaped their landscapes.
This is not a book which will please many with an agenda on either the pro-development or pro-environment side, but it will be found invaluable by those who seek a better understanding of the "New World" before the Europeans "discovered" it.
Indian civilizations much more complex than we thought. November 2, 2006
Dave Schwinghammer (Little Falls, Minnesota USA)
18 out of 19 found this review helpful
1491 is part science text, part history book. Charles C. Mann's main premise is that the Americas in 1491 were a much different place than our history books say they were.
Mann's first line of attack is the "empty America" syndrome. He claims there were as many people living in North America as there were in Europe, prior to decimation by smallpox and other European diseases. In the process he also belittles the "pristine America" argument. Prior to the smallpox pandemic, Indians burned the underbrush of our forests; the result was more of a parkland than a wild Garden of Eden. The forest stretching from the coast to the Mississippi came afterward, when the Indian caretakers had been depleted.
Most impressive for me was Mann's analysis of Indian technology. For instance, maize was not an indigenous plant. It was genetically engineered from a mountain grass called teosinte. The Amazonian Indians of South America also managed to invent their own soil, "terra preta," a sort of mixture of pottery shards and charcoal. The South American Indians even experimented in social engineering. Inca warriors would infiltrate villages, "convince" their rulers that accepting Inca rule would be beneficial to their people, then gradually take over. Once in control, they would move some of the subjugated population to others villages where they were required to learn the Inca language. The Incas even managed to "eradicate hunger" in an empire larger than that conquered by Alexander the Great.
Mann hopscotches back and forth between such diverse cultures as Triple Alliance (Aztecs) in Central America to the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) in Canada and New England. Each has a surprise in store for the reader. For instance, it's not true that the Aztecs never invented the wheel. Children's toys have been unearthed with definite wheels. Mann theorizes that because of the mountainous and wet environment the Aztecs scorned the invention. Then he compares them to Europe, where our supposedly superior civilization never did invent the plow; it had to be imported from China.
Another criticism of Native American culture is that they had no system of writing. Mann counters this misconception with the Inca's "khipu," sort of three-dimensional stringed knots, which were felt and read. Scientists are still trying to decipher them. Mixtec Indians also left behind "codices," deerskin or bark books whose painted pages looked rather like murals.
Native America civilizations also appear to be much older than the history books say. The Clovis culture, for instance, has been carbon-dated to between 13,500 and 12,900 years ago and archaeologist Alex D. Krieger lists fifty sites said to be older yet. Some scientists maintain that paleo-Indians "walked or paddled" to Peru fifteen thousand years ago.
An essential book on American history August 19, 2005
D. J. Nardi (NY, USA)
37 out of 46 found this review helpful
I was excited about this book for a while, yet, particularly after disappointment with 1421's overblown claims, I was skeptical that its initial claims would be supported by hard evidence. Instead, I found that Mann has clearly done his homework to produce a brilliant book describing the lost chapters of American history.
Mann's (and the researchers he cites) basic argument is clear: conventional history on American Indians is stale, often relying on faulty, static, or even blatantly racist research. These societies weren't waiting in stasis for Columbus - they rose and fell, much like European societies, a fact many researchers failed to realize. The introduction is illustrative, in which Mann describes an Indian society that is currently poor and nomadic, although it built large earth mounds and had a successful civilization before 1491.
I also like the fact that Mann presents the conventional historical argument before he introduces the more modern argument. He also does a good job explaining why past researchers may have been mistaken. For example, many glossed over the accounts of early explorers, even though they may have actually been recording what they saw (surely not that surprising when you think about it, but a revolution in the field nonetheless).
The only faults I found in the book were relatively small. First, it would have been nice to have a glossary. Second, while the book follows a well-developed structure, I wanted more. One gets the feeling that Mann only scratches the surface, and he could have easily written another 100 pages while keeping the reader entertained. On the other hand, this book already took so much work that this may be a lot to ask. I only hope Mann produces more books on this subject.
The Real Civilized Old World October 6, 2005
doomsdayer520 (Pennsylvania)
34 out of 39 found this review helpful
This is a highly readable and informative compendium of current knowledge on the Americas prior to Columbian contact. Charles Mann has gathered modern research into an engaging narrative that offers updates on old theories, bold new theories that often contradict the old ones, and a fair amount of useful speculation on what was really happening in the ancient Americas. The speculative parts of this book will turn off serious historians (plus those with political, academic, or ethnic agendas, as can be seen in some of the more condescending reviews here), but the speculation offers plenty of food for thought, and Mann has mostly just channeled the exploratory ideas of his sources. In any case, such explorations are grounded in at least partially corroborated findings by modern archeologists, anthropologists, linguists, and experts in other fields, and Mann has made extensive use of legitimate sources both old and new. In fact, his bibliography will provide the enthusiast with reading material for years to come.
In addition to increasing the reader's knowledge of little-covered Native American societies such as the Cahokians and several pre-Inka South American kingdoms, the main running contention in this book is not necessarily historical but ecological. There is growing evidence that Indians throughout the hemisphere did not live in a timeless and static communion with nature, which is a common "green" stereotype. Instead, the majority of native populations actively engineered their landscapes and altered their local ecologies to better suit human needs, though this usually (but not always) resulted in long-term mutual benefits for nature and man, rather than the dead-end destruction resulting from Western methods. And in general, large and structured city states seem to have been remarkably common, even in the previously little-appreciated Amazon basin (which itself is not as "pristine" or "untrammeled" as modern hype would have you believe). And finally, Mann presents the latest evidence showing that Native American populations were once several orders of magnitude higher than those found by European explorers and colonists, with horrendous percentages being wiped out by Western diseases just a few years before. While this book is not a groundbreaking research effort in its own right, Mann has compiled a great amount of knowledge that will go a long way toward shaping your views of how civilized the "old" world really was. [~doomsdayer520~]
|
|
|
| |
