1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

I just finished reading 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles Mann for the second time. A science reporter, Mann uses his skills to discuss the cultures of the Americas before Columbus made his voyage.

The major point of the book is that there were civilizations with long histories and large populations by 1491, including importantly the Inca empire in the Andes and the Aztec empire in the Mexican highland. He describes other earlier civilizations such as those of the Maya, of Cahokia and the Hopewell mound builders, and even indications from the Beni and the Amazon basin.

In a final note he describes the Iroquois nations and the liberty that they afforded their people, and the debt that modern nations owe to the example that they set which was picked up by the American revolutionaries and has swept so much of the world.

Of course large pre-Columbian populations were supported by extensive food production, often based on agriculture using crops domesticated in the Americas such as corn, beans, and potatoes as well as livestock such as guinea pigs, llamas, ducks and dogs. Before Columbus, Americans also assured that there would be many trees available to their villages and towns providing fruits and mast (nuts and acorns) as well as other useful materials. The manipulated the environment using fire and hunting out animals that they regarded as pests while working to try to assure that game was available. The even created raised beds for crops, terraced fields and irrigation systems, not to mention the floating gardens of the Aztecs and the terra preta and terra mulata created by the Amazonian peoples.

Mann points out that in the thousands of years from the time that humans first successfully occupied the Americas until 1491 they eventually profoundly modified the environment. He also points to the terrible impact of the Columbian exchange and European immigrant population which resulted in the populations of the original inhabitants being completely exterminated in some islands and reduced by 90 percent or more in the Americas as a whole. The peoples that the North American settlers and even the later Spanish immigrants saw were, according to Mann, the desperate remnants of decimated populations living in environments that were no longer sustainable by their civilizations. It is little wonder that they could be subdued in Mexico and Peru, or pushed into reservations in the west in the United States. Mann points out that the dense forests and empty lands found by the Pilgrims were the not "natural" but the result of the destruction of the earlier civilization.

My book club has chosen to read this book twice, the only time it has done so in 10 years of monthly meetings. That is because it tells a story that all Americans should know, and that we did not adequately know before reading Mann's book.

1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus has some problems. I think for example, that Mann may have misunderstood the relative importance of terra preta (created by kitchen middens) and terra mulata (created more extensively for cultivation). I found his use of other than the standard English names for people and tribes to be an annoying interference with my ability to remember what I had read. I also found his journalistic style of reporting on his conversations with scientists to distract from the information I was seeking from the book.

Still, this is a readable book telling a story of the past that we should all appreciate. The extermination of civilizations in the Americas following the Columbian voyages may have been largely inadvertent, but that is no excuse for failing to recognize the significance of their achievements. We should morn what has been lost to us all with their fall.