1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before

Columbus
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus is a 2005 non-fiction
1491: New Revelations of
book by American author and science writer Charles C. Mann about the pre-
the Americas Before
Columbian Americas. It was the 2006 winner of the National Academies
Columbus
Communication Award for best creative work that helps the public understanding of
topics in science, engineering or medicine.

The book presents recent research findings in different fields that suggest human
populations in the Western Hemisphere—that is, the indigenous peoples of the
Americas—were more numerous, had arrived earlier, were more sophisticated
culturally, and controlled and shaped the natural landscape to a greater extent than
scholars had previously thought.

The author notes that, according to these findings, two of the first six independent
centers of civilization arose in the Americas: the first, Norte Chico or Caral-Supe, in
present-day northern Peru; and that of Formative-era Mesoamerica in what is now
southern Mexico.

Contents Author Charles C. Mann

Book summary Genre non-fiction
Part One: Numbers from Nowhere
Part Two: Very Old Bones Publisher Knopf
Part Three: Landscape With Figures Publication 2005
date
Reception
Editions
Pages xii, 465 p.: ill., maps
(1st ed.)
Sequel
See also ISBN 978-1-4000-4006-3

References OCLC 56632601

Further reading Dewey 970.01/1 22
Reviews Decimal
LC Class E61 .M266 2005
Followed by 1493: Uncovering the
Book summary New World Columbus
Mann develops his arguments from a variety of recent re-assessments of Created
longstanding views about the pre-Columbian world, based on new findings in
demography, climatology, epidemiology, economics, botany, genetics, image analysis, palynology, molecular biology, biochemistry,
and soil science. Although there is no consensus, and Mann acknowledges controversies, he asserts that the general trend among
scientists currently is to acknowledge:

1. (a) population levels in the Native Americans were probably higher than traditionally believed among
scientists and closer to the number estimated by "high counters."
(b) humans probably arrived in the Americas earlier than thought, over the course of multiple waves of
migration to the New World (not solely by the Bering land bridge over a relatively short period of time).
 2. The level of cultural advancement and the settlement range of humans was
higher and broader than previously imagined.
3. The New World was not a wilderness at the time of European contact, but
an environment which the indigenous peoples had altered for thousands of
years for their benefit, mostly withfire.
These three main foci (origins/population, culture, and environment) form the basis for
three parts of the book.

In the introduction, Mann attempts to refute the thesis that "Native Americans came
across the Bering Strait20,000 to 25,000 years ago, and they had so little impact on their
environment that even after a millennia of habitation the continents remained mostly
wilderness."

Part One: Numbers from Nowhere

An indicative map of the
Mann first treats New England in the 17th century. He disagrees with the popular idea
prominent political entities extant
that European technologies were superior to those of Native Americans, using guns as a in the Western Hemisphere c.
specific example. The Native Americans considered them little more than 1491, as presented in 1491
"noisemakers", and concluded they were more difficult to aim than arrows. Noted
colonist John Smith of the southern Jamestown colony noted that "the awful truth...it
[gun] could not shoot as far as an arrow could fly." Moccasins were more comfortable and sturdy than the boots Europeans wore, and
were preferred by most during that era because their padding offered a more silent approach to warfare; canoes could be paddled
faster and were more maneuverable than any small European boats.

Mann explores the fall of the Inca Empire and attempts to assess their population compared to the armies of conquistadors, such as
Francisco Pizarro. He discusses the importance of the large number of newly introduced infectious diseases and the likelihood that
these played a far more significant role in the Native American decline than warfare or other actions by Europeans. He notes that
while Europeans probably derived less benefit from their possession of horses than expected, as e.g. the stepped roads of Inca
settlements were impassable to horses, the Inca did not maximize their use of anti-horse inventions to stop the Spanish intruders. The
Inca Empire collapsed because by the time Europeans arrived, smallpox and other epidemics had already swept through cities, due
mostly to the natives' lack ofimmunity to Eurasian diseases.

The contrasting approaches of "High Counters" and "Low Counters" among historians are discussed. Among the former,
anthropologist Henry F. Dobyns estimated the number of pre-Columbian Native Americans as close to 100 million, while critics of
the High Counters includeDavid Henige, who wrote Numbers from Nowhere (1998).

Part Two: Very Old Bones

Mann then goes into the provenance and dating of human remains that may shed light on the period of first settlement of the
Americas. The Clovis culture in New Mexico was one of the first to be assessed using carbon dating. While it at first appeared to
originate between 13,500 and 12,900 years ago, following immigration from Siberia over the Bering land bridge, recent evidence
indicates that Paleo-Indians were present in the Americas at even earlier dates.

Agriculture is another focus of this section, as Mann explores Andean and Mesoamerican cultures. The agricultural development of
maize from essentially inedible precursors like teosinte was significant for the rise in crop surpluses, populations and complex
cultures, and pivotal in the rise of civilizations such as the Olmec. Mann notes that Mesoamericans did not have the luxury of
"stealing" inventions from others, since they were geographically isolated in comparison to the cultures of Eurasia, leading to an
absence of inventions that played fundamental roles in other cultures (such as the wheel) and also lacked
domesticated large animals.

Part Three: Landscape With Figures

In the third section, Mann attempts a synthesis. He focuses on the Maya, whose population growth appears to have been as rapid as
its decline. The canonical theory about the disappearance of Mayan civilization, a pattern common among many Native American
cultures, was stated bySylvanus Morley as:

"the Maya collapsed because they overshot the carrying capacity of their environment. They exhausted their resource
base, began to die of starvation and thirst, and fled their cities 'en masse', leaving them as silent warnings of the perils
of ecological hubris."

Mann discusses the growing evidence against the perception that Native Americans were not active in transforming their lands. Most
Native Americans shaped their environment with fire, employingslash-and-burn techniques to create grasslands for cultivation and to
encourage the abundance of game animals. Native Americans domesticated fewer animals and cultivated plant life differently from
their European counterparts, but did so quite intensively. The author suggests that limited and often racist views about the indigenous
people, in addition to lack of a common language among the indigenous people, often led to a failure to recognize these dynamics,
and has historically found expression in conclusions like the "law of environmental limitation of culture" (Betty J. Meggers) —
whatever Native Americans did before slash and burn, the logic goes, had to have worked thanks to the vast expanses of healthy
forest seen before Europeans arrived.

Mann argues that Native Americans were akeystone species, one that "affects the survival and abundance of many other species". By
the time the Europeans arrived in number to supplant the indigenous population in the Americas, the previous dominant people had
been almost completely eliminated, mostly by disease, with a consequent disruption of societies and environmental control.
Decreased environmental influence and resource competition would have led to population explosions in species such as the
American bison and the passenger pigeon, and because fire clearing had ceased, forests would have expanded and become denser.
The world discovered by Christopher Columbus was to begin to change from that point on, so Columbus "was also one of the last to
see it in pure form".

Mann concludes that we must look to the past to write the future. "Native Americans ran the continent as they saw fit. Modern
nations must do the same. If they want to return as much of the landscape as possible to its state in 1491, they will have to create the
world’s largest gardens."

Reception
A 2005 The New York Times book review stated that the book's approach is "in the best scientific tradition, carefully sifting the
evidence, never jumping to hasty conclusions, giving everyone a fair hearing -- the experts and the amateurs, the accounts of the
[1]
Indians and of their conquerors. And rarely is he less than enthralling."

Editions
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
. Knopf, 2005 ISBN 1-4000-3205-9.
1491: The Americas Before Columbus. ISBN 1-86207-876-9 European edition. Published in Europe byGranta
Books on 6 November 2006.
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
. Vintage, 2011 ISBN 978-1-4000-3205-1
1491: Una nueva historia de las Américas antes de Colón(Spanish-language edition).Seven Stories Press, 2013.[2]

Sequel
In 2011, Mann published his sequel, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. It explores the results of the European
colonization of the Americas, a topic begun in Alfred Crosby's 1972 work The Columbian Exchange, which examined exchanges of
plants, animals, diseases and technologies after European encounter with the Americas. Mann added much new scholarship that had
been developed in the 40 years since that book was published.
See also
Archaeology of the Americas
Beni savanna
Columbian Exchange
European colonization of the Americas
Forest gardening
Indian massacres
Megafauna
Population history of American indigenous peoples
Quaternary extinction event
Terra preta, anthropogenic soil found in the Amazon Basin

Books

Before the Revolution: America's Ancient Pastsby Daniel K. Richter

Indian Givers: How the Indians of the Americas rTansformed the World

References
1. Baker, Kevin (October 2005)." '1491': Vanished Americans" (https://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/09/books/review/09b
aker.html?scp=1&sq=1491+new+revelations&st=nyt). The New York Times. Retrieved 8 December 2011.
2. http://catalog.sevenstories.com/products/1491-una-nueva-historia-de-la-americas-antes-de-colon

Further reading
Charles Mann, "1491", from The Atlantic Monthly, March 2002. Original article that inspired the book.
"An interview with Charles C. Mann" P( art 1, Part 2), from Indian Country Today December 20, 2005.
"A Conversation with Charles C. Mann", by Bookbrowse.com
Paper challenges 1491 Amazonian population theories , Argues, contra Mann, that the activities of pre-Columbian
Amazonians did not reshape or "build up" the Amazon into its current state. Accessed August 18, 2008.
University of Gothenburg(17 October 2010). "New discoveries concerning pre-Columbian settlements in the
Amazon". EurekAlert!. Archived fromthe original on 10 November 2010. Retrieved 10 November 2010. "Together
with Brazilian colleagues, archaeologists from the University of Gothenburg have found the remains of approximately
90 settlements in an area South of the city of Santarém, in the Brazilian part of the Amazon. "
1491 By CHARLES C. MANN

Reviews
Michael Coe, "The Old New World", American Scientist, July–August 2006 issue.
Mary D'Ambrosio, "The myth of an empty frontier: Explorers' diseases wiped out native populations long before
settlers arrived", San Francisco Chronicle, August 14, 2005.
Alan Taylor, "A Cultivated World", The Washington Post, August 7, 2005; BW05
Bruce Ramsey, ""1491": Discovering what Americas were like before Columbus" , The Seattle Times, August 12,
2005

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