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Summary:
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 Tlacaélel, 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 Tenochtitlán, 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 Sahagún, Historia General de las Cosas de Nueva España, 1547-77).
Customer Reviews:
Average Customer Rating:
Fascinating, clearly written
Customer Rating:
Mann writes clearly, even about technical subjects that sometimes need to be introduced. He explains how we know things, and what the controversies are, and what is still very much unresolved although the reader may have felt otherwise (like why the large mammals disappeared in North America, and just when the Indians migrated into the America's). While he wants to give the reader a more positive view of Indian culture and achievements, he does not ignore the bad, but puts it into context. For example, he compares estimates of the number of Triple Alliance (Aztec) sacrificial victims to the number of English executions in 16th century England. He does include more dynastic politics than is necessary (I find them interesting, but ultimately not very valuable to read about, kind of like historical gossip), while not including as much as he could about Indian philosophy and technology. Still, this is a truly fascinating book.
By 2005, when this book was written, there had been dramatic changes in the view of pre-Columbian Indian societies. Population in the America's likely exceeded European population, and farming was widespread, having originated independently in 3 separate areas. In fact the majority of food crops planted today originated in the America's. Life was better for New England Indians than for most Europeans, and certainly they had a much greater sense of individual liberty. Cotton Indian clothing was more comfortable than European clothing, and their armor, in Central and South America, was more functional. It was textile based, and much lighter, if not quite as protective. In the Triple Alliance there was a good deal of philosophical thinking, and rudimentary education was mandatory. South American Indians had frigate sized boats.
Indians dramatically altered the landscape for farming in various ways. Irrigation and terracing were widespread practices. Artificial mounds and more extensive built up areas were used in floodplains. Fire was used extensively in North America to clear underbrush, and thin out or eliminate trees, and charcoal was used to enrich Amazon soils and prevent loss of water and leaching of minerals. In fact, this recent rediscovery means that the Amazon basin could be used extensively for farming. Indians also controlled populations of such animals as passenger pigeons and buffalo, which is why their numbers increased dramatically when the Indian population of North America declined dramatically.
European disease wiped out most of the Indians, often preceding the advent of colonists, as the disease was introduced by European traders and spread by Indian traders and war parties. It wasn't just that the Indians had never been subject to these diseases before. Because there had been a population bottleneck (i.e. Indians were descended from a limited number of ancestors who made it to North America), Indians had very similar HLA profiles. HLA's carry viral and bacterial particles to cell surfaces where they are presented to roaming white cells which then destroy the infected cells. However, HLA's can do this only if the particles "fit", and when there is limited HLA variability, it is more likely that no one in the population will have an HLA which will be useful against a new particle.
Broad in Scope, Narrow in Detail
Customer Rating:
1491 sets out with the thesis that there is a lot more to "American History" than what is covered in high school textbooks. Throughout the course of the book Mann lays down wide-ranging evidence that the people and societies that occupied the Americas before Europeans arrived were much more complex than historians and the general population have traditionally given them credit for. Mann argues that with an anywhere from five to fifteen thousand year (and perhaps even more) head-start, the peoples of the Americas developed and cultivated cities, monuments and complete ways of life that rivaled, and at times bested, anything their contemporary European (and Asian) counterparts had to offer.
Mann's 1491 successfully argues that there was much more to the societies of the pre-Columbian Americas than has been traditionally thought as well as taught. The research that Mann put into this book through the course of many years is clear and apparent.
Where Mann lacked in this book was in detail. I believe his primary argument would have been better served -- that pre-Columbian cultures were much more sophisticated and complex than generally believed -- if he had reduced his number of examples and expounded further on selected cases.
However, because this book is so clearly well-researched, I would suggest it to anyone interested in the societies of the pre-Columbian Americas.
Revisionism at Its Best
Customer Rating:
Mann's book, while entertaining, is nothing more than speculative revisionism. The book does not read very easily because it jumps around from one topic to the next without warning frequently. Mann's intentions may have been good, but it doesn't excuse the fact that you can't rewrite history simply to promote an idealistic view of native cultures based on circumstantial evidence. He offers no hard facts to promote his patronizing image of Native American civilizations prior to Europeanization. Nonetheless I enjoyed the book because it does offer some new or "fresh" perspectives into Native American cultures prior to (but mainly after) 1492, but I treated it more as fictional entertainment rather than an authentic historical account.
Good History Lesson
Customer Rating:
This book really teaches you some things you may not have learned while you where in high school, or maybe even in college especially if you are older than the age of 25-30. Some of the lessons taught are of finding information that some of the ancient Mesoamerican civilizations wher actually quite large and elaborate. Some had flowing water and others where the size of if not larger than Paris, France at the same time. If you enjoy history you will enjoy this book, if you are not into history this book is probably not for you.
Over the top
Customer Rating:
I liked the author's story but I can't believe all the things that he assumes for what was happening in the Americas before 1492.
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