To many of those who were there, the earliest encounters felt more like a meeting of equals than one of natural domination. But the most compelling of his eye-opening revisionist stories are among the best-founded: the stories of early American-European contact. 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 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.
Among the revelations: the first Americans may not have come over the Bering land bridge around 12,000 B.C. Mann brings together in 1491, different stories have been emerging. For decades, though, among the archaeologists, anthropologists, paleolinguists, and others whose discoveries Charles C. 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. "synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.ġ491 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. Challenging and surprising, this a transformative new look at a rich and fascinating world we only thought we knew. Indeed, 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. Mexican cultures created corn in a specialized breeding process that it has been called man’s first feat of genetic engineering. The astonishing Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan had running water and immaculately clean streets, and was larger than any contemporary European city. Mann radically alters our understanding of the Americas before the arrival of Columbus in 1492.Ĭontrary 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. In this groundbreaking work of science, history, and archaeology, Charles C.
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