1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

This book is far from reliable accounts. It's full of hearsay statements using words like, "speculations, maybe, may..." It's great someone's writing a book about pre-columbus America. However, the slim evidence presented was weak to me. It felt like a story was being told rather than a "supposedly" scientific book.

My daughter is reading [b:Before Columbus: The Americas of 1491|6415223|Before Columbus The Americas of 1491|Charles C. Mann|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348956360l/6415223.SX50.jpg|89240007] as part of her American History studies this year, and while cataloging that book, I came across this one. For the most part I listened to the audiobook, but in the end I discovered when the audiobook ended there was still about 200+ pages of appendices, annotated bibliography, notes, credits and more in the after section.

I found this entire book to be fascinating as I was listening to the audio book. I did start reading with the Kindle book as well, and was even more enamored with the illustrations and pictures embedded within the text. My daughter just finished reading Before Columbus: The Americas of 1491 and it was my start in on that to where I discovered 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. I will absolutely be following this up with 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. One of the things I love best is that Charles C. Mann will be taking you down and avenue of common theory and then u-turn to tell you what the historical facts and science actually shows. While I don't necessarily take to every supposition, there is a lot that has opened my mind further and made me even more curious.

I borrowed this book from #LibbyApp but own the oversize picture book style paperback of Before Columbus.

I wish I had a similar book to digest and convey recent decades of research for all the fields that interest me.

Still digesting this wide-ranging work.
A few things are very clear. First, the pre-Columbian history of the Americas was very deep, very complex, and in many cases very different from the Euro-Asian experience.
Second, the multiple waves of disease introduced by the Europeans were even more deadly than I had thought. They totally changed the Americas politically, economically, and biologically. Those plagues emptied the landscape and paved the way for domination by the Europeans.
Just as important, the cross-pollination of ideas and the transfer of animals and plant-foods between Euro-Asia/Africa and the Americas changed the world.
Well written and well researched, 1491 doesn't shy away from some contentious topics.
A good read. 4+stars.

Fascinating overview of native cultures in the Americas before the arrival of Columbus. Very readable, with interesting anecdotes everywhere.

This is a fantastic exploration of the Americas pre-European intervention, but it is extremely dry. I'm used to historical texts and academic readings but even with interest in the topic and a willingness to power through, I found myself spacing out and having to backtrack a bit. Persevering did reap reward, though, as the ideas explored in this book are worth examining. Well worth the effort, but it does take effort.

“History is written by the winners.”

This is a really fascinating book. The basic theme is that pre-Columbian natives in the Americas were both more numerous and more culturally developed AND had a greater impact on their ecosystem than we're usually taught in school.

Sadly, we don't have a very robust set of artifacts from native tribes to provide us with the opportunity to study these cultures in greater depth. For that reason, I suspect that the the evidence for a lot of the things discussed is lighter than the author really lets us know, but he does for a great job of making a persuasive argument for these views.

Ah! This was the - gah - the MASTERPIECE of my vacation reading. A magisterial TOMEY TOME of the Western hemisphere, it filled me with immense awe and fellow-feeling at being a person living in the “New World”! I do not exaggerate! I was filled with a sort of pan-American (North and South) solidarity, as I looked upon the Colombian cities I read this in and thought, WE ARE ALL SIBLINGS.

Of course, the core of this book is an immense, cataclysmic tragedy: the complete destruction of a hemisphere's worth of culture and people. The loss of these cultures and societies is enormous; and the fact that their near-complete destruction renders our understanding of them VERY limited is just salt in the wound. Charles Mann tries to, uh, un-salt the wound a little by discussing the more recent research evidence of what, indeed, this hemisphere was actually like pre-Colombus.

The main thesis of the book is that the hemisphere was (a) much more crowded, with much (b) older and (c) more developed societies. The (Eurocentrically self-serving) myth of a near-empty land populated by “under-developed” (euphemism!) “tribes” (insult!) with no written language and barbarous practices (yo, those Mexica/Aztecs and their human sacrifice, YEEEEEESH) is slowly dismantled, archaeological dig by dig.

Like 1493 (about the eco-clash between the hemispheres, AKA the Colombian Exchange), I feel too intimidated by the tomey-ness of this book to give a proper book report, so here are just some thoughts and highlights:

- I was really fascinated (and depressed) by the debate over the actual populations in the hemisphere pre-Colombus. Basically, by comparing accounts of the earliest adventurers to visit in, say, the early 16th century, with accounts of “second wave” adventurers in, say, the 1530s, there's already evidence of a crushing decline in population. The culprit: smallpox. The research community is then split between “High Counters” (who believe the “first contact” of Europeans with indigenous populations may have destroyed the latter by as much as 90% via disease) and “Low Counters” (who don't think it was 90%). Either way, there were MILLIONS of people in places like the eastern US.
- The Inca! Oh man, THE INCA! I loved learning about the two types of empire: hegemonic and, uh, I forgot the other one. But anyway: one type of empire is like the Borg - everyone gets assimilated. Another empire is more like, “you become my vassal and keep your gods, good luck” - loose-knit but VERY effective. The Inca did the latter.
- The Andes! Vertical civilization!
- Talking knots!! AKA quipus! AKA potentially a completely distinct and unique system of writing. Quipus are bunches of colored string with intricate knots. It's believed they were used throughout the Inca Empire like abacuses - but there's a lot of research to decode them even further, since they may have been used as a form of writing (encoding not just numbers but an alphabet?). This is just one specific example of the broader wonder (and, again, tragedy) that is the (loss of the) Western Hemisphere: after human settlement across the Bering Strait, the two hemispheric humanities developed independently - they had independent agricultural revolutions (!), independent math and science and philosophy and art, and, with the quipus, independent (and radically differently imagined!) systems of writing. While the eastern hemisphere was a mish-mash of cultural exchange (India/China/Middle East/North Africa/Europe), the western hemisphere was not: they just did a bunch of different stuff! Incredible.
- MAIZE. Don't get me started. It really is a wonder crop. I mean, everything we eat in America (and even diapers!) is touched by corn. And it's the most giant and successful and long-reaching genetic engineering humans ever did!
- All the crop stuff, actually.
- EVERYTHING about the Haudenosaunee. From the founding myth of the stuttering, inspirational Deganawida (the Peacemaker) teaming up with the charismatic speaker Hiawatha to convince the bellicose Onondaga nation to lay down their weapons and join the other nations in a league of peace and collaboration. That story was amazing! I loved the convincing attempts to back-date it to a likely founding of 12th century (WOW) - the Haudenosaunee council fire still burns! That's nine centuries! Also, the influence of the Haudenosaunee “radically free” Great Law of Peace on the US Constitution.

Okay, one more note about the Haudenosaunee. Okay, as I've been saying, all the wonder that you have when you read about this hemisphere's humanity is made sour by the tragedy that we lost so much in the “Colombian Exchange”. So many people, so much culture and history was lost. And so a bittersweet “what if”/alternative history scenario is always: what would it have been like if smallpox and conquistadors hadn't destroyed a half-planet? Kim Stanley Robinson's epic alt history The Years of Rice and Salt actually includes a lot of stuff about the Haudenosaunee. I'd love to re-read those sections now that I've learned a lot more about them.

Anyway, that's it (for now!). If it isn't plainly obvious, I highly HIGHLY recommend this book.

This was a fascinating read. I had a nebulous understanding of Mann's basic thesis (that pre-European contact American societies were larger and more complex than are usually taught) but seeing it all laid out in a systematic fashion was greatly appreciated. This is especially true for situations were Mann makes direct comparisons between aboriginal cultures and where European cultures were developmentally at the same time; for someone with a Eurocentric education it helped me put everything in context.

A fascinating read about the time before the first western Europeans arrived in the Americas. Part of read more like an novel, others have a bit dry university in it. But overall really enjoyful.

Human history is replete with tragedy. But when we're talking the annihilation (both intentional and inadvertent) of entire civilizations; when those civilizations have no written records or their records are deliberately destroyed; when an entire hemisphere's cultures vanish with barely a ripple; I think we need a better word than tragedy.

This is a must-read. Some material will be familiar; the majority may not be but should be. I'm not arguing that everything in the book is correct, merely that there seems to be worthy scholarly debate about the standard narrative. Time and science and research will build upon this knowledge, and probably only add to the heartbreak.

Mann's writing can be dense at times, and his forays into moral culpability are IMHO unnecessary, hence the four stars. The material itself is five. Recommended.

Een handige samenvatting van recente evoluties in de geschiedenis van Amerika vóór de Europeanen. Een paar onverwachte zaken (de uitgevonden geschiedenis van de Maya, bijvoorbeeld), en voor de rest weinig verrassingen.

The prehistory of the Americas is a concept I find fascinating.

The idea that North and South America were bristling with cities and towns and people isn't the way it was taught in school when I was a kid and I get a kick out of un-learning that the facts I was taught.

It's tough subject matter to present in a gripping way. There are lots of ancient New England Indian names and my South American geography isn't what it used to be so there was defintiely a “reading a text book” vibe that was hard to shake.

Still, the broad strokes were compelling and since it was a subject I really wanted to read more about I enjoyed 1491 a lot.

This continent populated much earlier than 12,000 years ago. Earliest European contacts record post-epidemic population levels; North and South America had millions of people before earliest visitors from Europe brought pigs and diseases. North American populations had less diverse genetic ability to fight disease, so more died in epidemics than Europeans would have done.

Berengia land bridge - theory that Siberians crossed while chasing mastodons is questionable given gatherer nature of other people from similar era.

“Mother cultures” (Olmecs) of middle American weren't - “sister” cultures may have developed in parallel.

p. 311 (conclusion) “Faced with an ecological problem, the Indians fixed it. Rather than adapt to nature, they created it. They were in the midst of terra-forming the Amazon when Columbus showed up and ruined everything.”

Early occupants adopted agricultural methods that would work in the environment. Fruit cultivators and breeding not recognized as “farming” by Europeans but it was. Yanomami can survive “in the wild” because their ancestors created the landscape around them.

Huge numbers of e.g. bison and passenger pigeons resulted from predators (Indians) dying from European diseases - they did not exist in such disproportionate numbers before 1491.

“Virgin forest” created in 18th century when Indians who controlled the growth died and growth was no longer planned and controlled.