1491 (Second Edition): New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (Vintage)

An engaging and culturally rich book which displays a rich range of knowledge and many years’ study. I came to this book after reading one of Mann’s articles in National Geographic where I was struck by the sensitivity and grasp he had of the topic (not always a luxury in journalistic coverage but something many feature writers would ideally like to achieve). The book challenges conventional nationalistic history using an evidence-based approach, rather than polemic, and with an engaging humorous and anecdotal structure. The book is rightly (gently) critical of the way that the topic has been dealt with from an imperialist academic perspective and highlighting the often obfuscated role of the ordinary people who came across archaeological sites. At the same time it pulls no punches when discussing the politicisation of Mesoamerican histories, whether imperialist apology or native activism. A series of endnotes and bibliographic sources opens the door to further enquiry.

Very informative and brave in its hypotheses but not to far going to be on the verge of fiction or fantasy. Made me willing to deepen my knowledge in this area and verify some of the theses.

Prior to the arrival of Columbus, the American continent, north to south, was home to thriving communities of people who built extensive road networks, cities of heroic proportions and sophisticated water management systems which often defied the inhospitability of the environments in which they existed. Over the years some of these civilisations conspired to destroy themselves and each other, some were irreparably damaged by the depredations of acquisitive, disease-carrying Europeans, and others mysteriously faded and vanished. Until quite recently, virtually all have been ostracised by mainstream history books (particularly, Mann points out, American school textbooks), and those that have not have been misrepresented, misunderstood and misnamed.For me, one revelation of Charles Mann's 1491 stands out as testimony to the sheer depth of the civilisations of which he writes: the story of maize. Maize, or corn, that deliciously sweet, dazzlingly yellow, phenomenally versatile crop was one of the cornerstones of the pre-Colombian American diet. It was bred to come in all sorts of colours as well as yellow, that here in Europe we seldom if ever get to see. And it stands beside, and possibly even above, the potato, as one of the lasting bequests of the Americas to the diet of the rest of the world as we boil it, barbecue it, douse it in butter, turn it into tortillas and pop it.Yet it has so far proven impossible to identify in the wild the plant from which maize was derived, such is the timeframe of its relationship with humanity.This is, indeed, a captivating story, and is only one of thousands which reside in this book.Unfortunately, Charles Mann is not the person who should have got the job of telling it. Somewhere in this sprawling, chaotic, episodic account there's a good book hiding, which tells a coherent tale of life in the Americas before Columbus. But for all his ability to dig up the past, Mann has been unable to excavate that book.My principal objections come down to three things.Firstly, there appears no logic in the organisation of the book as it careens around the American continent, and the centuries, apparently at random.Secondly, the pre-Colombian narrative is incessantly intruded upon by the post-Colombian, with the result that certainly much of the first third of the book is more about the Conquistadors and the Pilgrims than about anything that was on the continent before them.And similarly, there's just a little too much Charles Mann in the book, as he heroically explores the continent and interviews other explorers. He's a little like a DJ who can't stop talking over the music.Not that there is no purpose to all this. He explains how some of the misconceptions about Americans before 1492 came about: through treating one native community as representative of the whole, through simple misinterpretation, and often through a misplaced notion of European superiority which led some to simply ignore the evidence before them. He also emphasises the sheer vastness of the continent, as in one episode where the plane he is in nearly runs out of fuel over the wildness of the rainforest.A part of the account that stood out for me was the destruction of so much of the written legacy of the Americas - sometimes self-inflicted, far too often inflicted by Europeans. In Europe itself we are familiar with the classic tales of the Old World, from Gilgamesh, The Odyssey and Beowulf through to Genji Monogatari, The 1001 Nights and so on. Where, I wondered, are their New World analogues? What happened to the New World's Bhagavad Gita, Tao Te Ching, Bible or Quran? Who was their Sun Tzu, their Aristotle, their Omar Khayyam? After all, what's a civilisation without its historians, philosophers, poets and playwrights? Did they disappear? What is the view of the archaeologists, anthropologists and cultural historians?Mann touches on this question himself, breezing through it in a single paragraph where he touches on the difficulties of societies lacking a written language and reliant on oral traditions, and the fact that Mesoamerican texts are slowly giving up their secrets. And that's about it (apart from his afterthought/Appendix which, frankly, doesn't add much value). He then reverts to default position and tells us about what the early Europeans reported, before more or less totally dismissing this as a source because of the self-serving nature of many of these accounts (he briefly discusses, for example, the origin of stories about the Amazon warrior women). The outcome is less than satisfactory, sad to say.Towards the end, Mann begins to draw his conclusions, a principal, and by far the most startling one of which is that, far from a pristine natural environment, the American continent in 1491 was in large part a creation of its human inhabitants, who had developed effective land and animal management techniques in order to enrich the soil and maximise its yield. Mann compares the sustained fertility of soils in certain parts of the Americas with those of the formerly superfertile Middle East, now exhausted. The arrival of Europeans following 1492, in many different ways, disrupted the established management system, one result of which was a short-term explosion in the populations of numerous species of animal. Lewis and Clark's encounters with massive herds of buffalo (see for example the account in David Lavender's The Way To The Western Sea), and Audubon's account of a flock of billions of passenger pigeon were snapshots of a temporary America, created and relatively quickly destroyed by the European colonists. (This throws a whole new light on Amanda Petrusich's contention, in her book It Still Moves, that artifice is authenticity in America, at least the northern part of the landmass. It has been thus for millennia, it appears.)Nevertheless, Mann also points out that the prospect of millions of marauding buffalo, or billions of the superdestructive passenger pigeon (which would vomit a previous meal rather than pass up its next, and made a profession of totally stripping farms of their entire maize crop) is not one that bears contemplation.But yet again, as fascinating as all this is, it is not 1491 he's talking about here, it's 1493 going on 1880.Altogether, then, whilst there is plenty to capture the imagination here, a disappointingly small amount of it addresses the title of the book.Footnote: I'm still irritated that secular books like this one insist on BC and AD as markers. It's not perfect, but more mature and culturally aware writers use BCE and CE. Again, Mann refers to this himself in yet another Appendix, but I didn't find his explanation especially convincing.

This is well written and easy to read. Most importantly, it is incredibly informative and expanded my knowledge on the Americas in so many ways.It delves into multiple areas, provides compelling background and evidence. The bottom line, what you were taught in school is wrong. Much of this information is not ‘new’, which leads to understand how our own bias is maintaining an incorrect narrative on the Americas.

A fascinating and easy read account that leaves you with plenty to think about.

Not perfect but fulfilled my requirements for my daily commute is a purportedly factual and interesting book. 5 stars too generous but 4 felt a bit mean

Tradução em português muito ruim. Comprei o otigjinal

J'aime l'histoire de notre monde e des peuples, car on trouve toujours des nouveautées et on apprend sur nous mêmes. Ce que nous touchons aujourd'hui revele une histoire et nous encourage a poursuivre nos recherches. Une feuille tombe pour que d'autres naissent. On avance en reculant dans le temps et l'espace. Ce livre nous aide a reconnaitre le meilleur et le pire de nous même.Je sais que les illustrations en couleur sont très chères, mais j'aimerais voir les photos en couleur, en particulier celles des cartes geographiques.

Apasionante. Todos los descubrimientos recientes que cambian la historia que creíamos cierta de América hasta Colón. Muy bien documentado. Fue una historia inmensamente más rica que lo que creíamos. Pasados sorprendentes en todo el hemisferio. Increíble el del Amazonas. También el "invento" del maíz, que no era un cereal silvestre. Algunos capítulos pueden hacerse largos, pero vale la pena seguir. El último es imperdible. La coda es polémica, y por ello buen "food for thought".

what was expected

‘1491’ by Charles C. MannCharles Mann’s subtitle ‘New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus’ aptly summarizes much of what is in this provocative and engaging book that paints a broad rethink of what the New World was like just before Columbus sailed into Hispaniola. Columbus and others after him thought they had reached Asia, a pristine land inhabited by savages; hence, they referred to local inhabitants as Indians, successive populations of which they subjugated by force of arms with the aim of religious conversion tied to a civilizing effort. Aside from taking the reader back to various theories of populating the Americas, starting with the decay of ice sheets in the north, his chapter called the ‘Pleistocene Wars’ focuses on the contentious theory of what caused the demise of the Clovis Culture, the earliest immigrants who are thought to be responsible for the extinction of local megafauna including the mammoth, sabre-toothed cat, horse etc. The archaeological argument that the Clovis population over-killed the mammoth-sabre-toothed cat-horse population has been discounted by a new theory that a comet impact (black mat event) or airburst 12,800 years ago (not 11,000 yr. as Mann cites) led to the demise of the Clovis people. What is compelling about this theory is that the cosmic event is written into several geological sections worldwide and in the Americas a thin, 2-3 cm thick black sediment layer dates to exactly the age cited above—below this level (older sediment) megafauna/Clovis artifacts remain in situ; above there is no trace. Taking Mann’s excellent summary of South American history into account, think for a moment what would have happened if the black mat event had never happened and the indigenous population had confronted a few dozen Spanish heavy horse with their own cavalry numbering in the thousands. The shock of seeing horses for the first time would have been lost on the indigenous populations. All that transpired historically with Pizarro routing the Inca Empire and Cortez the Aztecs, as compellingly recounted by Mann, likely would have had a much different ending. Think also of the North American Indians confronting European colonists with mounted warriors, and you quite possibly would have a rewrite of history with much different outcomes. The core of this book recounts the numerous pathways by which indigenous cultures reformed the Americas in substantial ways to carry populations from hunter-gatherers to agriculturists, ultimately to build civilized centers that in some cases rivaled anything existing in contemporary Europe. This is one exemplary piece of scholarship recounting historical theory with new advances in understanding the reformation of the American environment north-to-south since the ice age.Bill Mahaney, author of ‘Ice on the Equator’, ‘Hannibal’s Odyssey: Environmental Background to the Alpine Invasion of Italia’ and ‘Atlas of Sand Grain Surface Textures and Applications’.