1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus | 
 enlarge | Author: Charles C. Mann
Publisher: Knopf
Category: Book
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Rating:  194 reviews
Sales Rank: 55296
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
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Condition: Stain on edge and cover/pages wear.
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com
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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 189 more reviews...
 Book Review August 7, 2008
Margaret Prevot
In this beautifully written book Charles C. Mann recollects his journey to old tribal communties in what is now America. This book holds many facts that are amazing and your idea of what the US was like before Columbus will change drastically. Charles Mann tells lost stories of lies and betrayal between the Indians and the early explorers who landed on the coast of America. Many assumptions about what the Indians were like are completely contradicted in this book, although bold at time all of the facts are true and seem to line up perfectly. Although lacking cities of gold the Americas did have sophisticated technology in some tribes, even more ahead than their un familiar rivals in Europe. Early interactions between the first people to land on the United States are extordanary and just imagine how complicated it was with almost no communication possible. These early trades were great but also left some American Indian tribes in ruins. 1491 Changed everything, and it will change you.
 Probably one of my favorite non fiction reads of all time July 26, 2008
nonficchic (harlan iowa)
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
I will keep this brief and to the point. I read a lot of non-fiction. In fact, one of the reasons I cannot bring myself to read another novel is THIS BOOK. I have gotten more from Mann's 1491 than any other I have read over the last five years--maybe more. I recommend that prospective college/high school students read this and learn.
 Overly Ambitious July 24, 2008
Ron Braithwaite (El Indio, Texas United States)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
"1491" is a journalist's look at pre-Columbian America. It is an overly ambitious, oftentimes confusing assortment of fact, theory, archaeology, geography, genetics, anthropology, ethnography and almost every other science and pseudoscience that can be applied to the study of ancient and recent native Americans.
In my opinion, the author would have been far better off to have thoroughly expored a couple of themes rather than to have hop-scotched over the Americas both temporally and geographically. Even the title--1491--is misleading because the author spends much time discussing European contacts with the natives. He also wastes time highlighting the personal disputes between various scholars.
I would have much preferred an in-depth discussion of 1491 populations in various parts of the continents with evidence of the impact of European diseases. To be sure, the author discusses this subject but, bored or running out of material, he quickly skips to other, only tangentially related matters.
This is really too bad because the author has gone to a great deal of work and study to prepare his work.
Ron Braithwaite author of novels--"Skull Rack" and "Hummingbird God"--on the Spanish Conquest of America
Good, but not convincing July 24, 2008
Dick Marti (Georgia, USA)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
One serious problem with this book is that the author is a journalist, not an archaeologist or historian. After getting past this author's distracting writing style, the reader must tread carefully to separate fact from speculation, realism from romanticism. But most readers are neither archaeologist nor historian and must therefore be wary of being led too far afield by some of the romantic notions presented here, such as the Indian (or Native American) influence on the US Constitution and their wholesale revamping of the Amazon ecosystem. The book is captivating as long as the author is discussing historical and archaeological aspects of particular civilizations. But these peter out about 3/4 way thru the book and give way to ecological speculations. This is fine as long as the reader has some kind of background to deal with this material. Many do not. Therefore there is a misleading element in this book that could benefit from editing in future editions. And of course, there is not a lot of pre-1491 history presented here, as the author admits. Most such "history" is derived from archaeology. And that's ok, as long as you understand where it's coming from.
Fascinating and informative July 13, 2008
Jerry Bunin (Oceano, CA USA)
In a very readable way, author Charles C. Mann re-orients our thinking about the Pre-Columbian world throughout its history and at the moment it dramatically changed in 1492.
Mann synthesizes what we have learned through advances in archaeological methods and techniques over the last 30 years to call into question how and when the native population arrived in the Western Hemisphere, how many lived here, and the innovative ways the various populations adapted their divergent environments to suit cultures that were in many ways rivals to the world of Europe at the same time.
What I enjoyed most was Mann's ability to show how scientific thinking and knowledge have changed, where it still disagrees and why, and what it does and does not know, particularly on such questions as how many people lived in North and South America when Columbus arrived, how many died in the first huge wave of diseases the Europeans brought with them, where corn came from, and how the indigenous people lived in the Amazon.
I wish the book had spent additional time in North America, although the South American information was fascinating. And I would have also liked the book to have included a time line so I could have seen all the cultures he explored organized chronologically next to a single map showing their geographic relationship and communication routes.
Nevertheless, I really enjoyed reading this book and recommend it highly.
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