1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
by Charles C. Mann

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Book Reviews of 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

Book Review: A continental vacant lot?
Summary: 5 Stars

Mann's thesis is that the Western Hemisphere was far more densely populated than our school courses [when they touched on the indigenous peoples at all] led us to believe. After fitful starts along the Atlantic seaboard, European colonists felt they'd entered a nearly empty continent. The sweeping expansion of the United States seemed to reinforce the notion of an "empty land". Recent archaeological finds and closer examination of the conquistadores' accounts suggest otherwise. It's now known that many urban centres of high population density existed in the Mississippi Valley, in central Mexico and throughout South America. The peoples living there had complex societies and economies, with trading and cultural influences extending vast distances. Intricate calendar systems, including use of "zero" as a real number, existed centuries before Europeans developed the idea.

Why did these cities and their inhabitants not survive to greet the invaders? There are the accounts of Cortes in Tenochtitlan and Pizarro saw Inka settlements, but population conglomerates seem rare in most accounts. According to Mann, the culprit was European disease resulting from the development of agriculture. Farming and pastoralism arose long after the arrival of those Asians to the Western Hemisphere. The two populations, isolated from each other led to differing immunities. Centuries of co-habitation with domestic animals like horses, pigs and fowl led to the transmission of many poxes, especially smallpox, to humans. The European and West Asian survivors developed a resistance to the infections. The indigenous peoples of the Americas, who domesticated few animals, had no such resistance. Multitudes of people were swept away, not by conquistadores and "cowboys", but by invisible microorganisms introduced by the earliest explorers. The pestilence left them vulnerable when more Europeans arrived. The result was the identification of the "Indians" as backward, illiterate, vulnerable and hardly worthy of serious study. Mann describes this attitude as "Holmberg's Mistake" - anthropologists finding of remnant peoples living in a manner European observers believed perpetual.

Mann's search for answers to what the Western Hemisphere was like in "1491" took him many places meeting a host of researchers and relying on a massive document base. Skimming the notes and bibliography shows a preponderance of sources published in recent years. Although Mann gives voice to those who contend the numbers are poorly derived, there's little doubt he sympathises with the new wave of research findings. He provides useful maps, that almost overwhelming bibliography and a set of appendices to explain terms, describe a possible binary language of the Inka and "Calendar Math". With the mass of information and the evidence of accomplishments preceding those of its European infectors and conquerers, it's not unexpected when he questions use of the term "New World" in referring to the Americas. In regard to what was lost, he contends the disintegration of the societies in the Americas wasn't just the loss to those communities, "but to the human enterprise as a whole". [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

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