. The prevailing impression is that there is a continent of history that lasted thousands of years until and after 1492 that we simply don't have.People arrived in the Americas many thousand years ago. no one knows exactly when but more than 10,000 years ago. They modified the world they found to make it more livable for man. They found plants that they could use for agriculture and in places such as Central America and the west coast of South America and the Andes they developed high production farming systems, including massive terracing and irrigation systems. In these places, dense populations developed and evolved complex civilizations, Some of these farming systems were in places such as the Amazon jungle where we still don't fully understand how to farm well.
The Incas in 1491 were a tribe of something like 100,000 people who had a very elaborate agricultural technology including livestock. They had an extended empire over more than 100 other tribes. Adding a new tribe to the fold, they offered the choice -- security within the Inca fold and wealth for tribal leaders or war against the empire's military which could field 100,000 or more soldiers. They could impress other tribes with their public display of wealth, and claimed that their leader, the Inca, was a representative on earth of the Sun God, The empire's road systems extended from the south of Colombia to central Chile. There are not only archaeological records of their cities but also written recodes from the 16th century. Apparently there was a group of wise men among the Incas whose main function was to recall history using quipus which were destroyed by the Spanish.
The Aztecs were another tribe with a sophisticated food production system which had come to dominate many other tribes in the central Mexican highlands. They were apparently more warlike than the Inca, with a religion that included human sacrifice, Their capital, which is now the core of Mexico City, was one of the largest cities in the world in 1491 with a great many monumental buildings. Man writes of a debate between Spanish and Aztec theologians to illustrate the level of formal learning within the Aztec culture,
In other places, peoples developed systems to promote undomesticated food sources that they could harvest easily and to encourage game animals to stay and populate places where they could be hunted. In both cases, fish and other aquatic resources were exploited sustainably. These people to developed civilizations that must have been interesting,
When the Europeans came to the Americas, they brought diseases to which the native Americans had no defenses as well as rats and mice, weeds and domestic animals such as cattle and pigs that changed the ecology in which they lived. The native Americans died in droves, and the generations of settles found only the remnant populations trying to survive in the ruins of their former civilizations. The Europeans often thought that they had God-given rights to subject the native Americans, to drive them off the land, and to replace them with other European and European American settles.
While few of the native American cultures had developed writing, much of what was written by those that did write was destroyed, The key point of the book is I think, that generation after generation of European Americans thought that the lands that they found were as they always were, and that the remnants of the civilizations that they observed represented the high point of their development and glory, Only now with a variety of new scientific tools and new ways of looking at the world are we beginning to realize how wrong they were.
Perhaps another lesson of the book is that the Iroquois in the Great Lakes region of North America, the Inca, and the Aztecs were very different people with their own languages, their own way of living in the world, their own religions. You would only understand others of these peoples by studying one as you might understand the Italians and the Russians by studying the English. There were of course many hundreds of other distinct tribal peoples in the Americas in 1491. We probably could have learned a lot from them!
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