BOOK REVIEW: ‘1491’ Blasts Away Every Preconception About Pre-Columbian Western Hemisphere; Forget Everything You Learned in School!
Reviewed By David M. KinchenHuntington News Network Book Critic
Hinton, WV (HNN) – Once again, it’s time to start with a tabula rasa, a clean slate concerning North and South America before the arrival of Columbus in 1492. Charles C. Mann in “1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus” (Knopf, $30, 480 pages; 56 b&w photos, 15 maps.) demolished just about everything I learned in school, even while I was paying attention.
Using the latest archaeologists’ studies – including input from an archaeologist from my alma mater, Northern Illinois University, I’m proud to say – Mann shows that the Western Hemisphere was the home of advanced civilizations, large cities – including several cities much larger than anything in Europe or Asia – and people who were not living as lightly on the land that today’s environmentalists like to portray.
Mann says that many nation states in both North and South America transformed their landscape by planting trees where none had been before and burning down forests in successful attempts to gain more arable land. Rather than living “lightly on the land,” pre-Columbian peoples drove off huge numbers of bison from the newly reclaimed land and nearly wiped out the passenger pigeon before the illegal aliens from Europe came to finish the job.
Mann says that most Americans learned – and are still learning – that both
Western Hemisphere continents were vast empty spaces, thinly populated by
primitive hunter-gatherer peoples with little impact on the land they
occupied. They were supposed to have crossed over a Bering Straits land
bridge around 12,000 B.C.
Instead of this simplistic theory, how about people arriving by boat across the Pacific Ocean – as well as across the Bering land bridge – perhaps 10,000 or even 20,000 years earlier? He points to civilizations like the Olmecs of Central America, the Inka (he prefers this spelling to the more common Inca) of South America and – close to home – the Adena mound-building cultures of the Midwest and Southeast, including present-day West Virginia. Around 1250 A.D., Cahokia, across the Mississippi River from present-day St. Louis, was the biggest city north of the Rio Grande, with a population estimated at 15,000 to 100,000, featuring earthen pyramids rivaling in size those of Egypt.
Cahokia not only was the largest city north of the Rio Grande, it was the only city so situated, Mann says. The Indians of the Northeast lived in small villages, as did the Pueblo peoples of the Southwest. I’ve personally walked through one of the latter, Acoma in New Mexico, between Albuquerque and Gallup. It’s a very small place.
Winifred Creamer, the previously-mentioned NIU archaeologist, and her archaeologist husband Jonathan Haas of Chicago’s Field Museum, studied the Norte Chico area of Peru, along the coast and inland, just north of Lima. They studied the cotton-growing culture of this area, which Mann calls the first urban complex in the Americas, dating back to 3000 to 1800 B.C. The area was served by rivers and the people expanded the agricultural base by irrigation canals, just like the ones used today by the cotton growers of California’s San Joaquin Valley.
Mann covers a lot of ground in a relatively small book. He describes the latest findings on the peoples of southern Mexico and Central America, including the Mixtecs, the Olmecs and the Aztecs. Perhaps the biggest pre-Columbian city was the Mexica capital of Tenochtitlan, an island city of perhaps 250,000 people. This was far larger than London, Paris, Rome or any other European city, Mann says.
There’s no doubt in the minds of most scientists that what reduced the population from the tens of millions to a few hundred thousand after the arrival of the Europeans was smallpox. Europeans, described invariably by the peoples of the Western Hemisphere as hairy, filthy creatures, had lived with smallpox and other diseases and had developed immunities to them. In other words, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Pre-Columbian Western Hemisphere peoples had no such immunity and died in vast numbers. It wasn’t a plot to wipe out the people so much as a lack of immunity.
Mann, a contributor to Atlantic Monthly and Science magazines and the co-author of four previous books, debunks the theory that the Inka fell to Pizarro’s small band because they had no steel weapons. In fact, he says, what defeated the Inka was smallpox and internecine warfare.
In what many historians believed inspired the authors of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, the Haudenosaunee, in what is now the Northeast U.S., constructed a loose confederation of tribes governed by the principles of individual liberty and social equality, Mann says.
“1491” is thoroughly annotated and documented. It deserves to win just about every book award available. It’s undoubtedly on the short list for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. It’s also outstandingly readable. Get it and read it.
Publisher’s web site: www.aaknopf.com
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).