1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus |  | Author: Charles C. Mann
Publisher: Vintage
Category: Book
List Price: $16.00
Buy Used: $4.00
as of 9/7/2010 09:33 CDT details
You Save: $12.00 (75%)
New (68) Used (111) Collectible (2) from $4.00
Seller: dscarbrough3
Rating:  253 reviews
Sales Rank: 1,256
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1ST
Pages: 541
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.2 x 1.3
ISBN: 1400032059
Dewey Decimal Number: 970.01
EAN: 9781400032051
ASIN: 1400032059
Publication Date: October 10, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
| |
| Also Available In:
|
| Similar Items:
| |
| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com Review
1491 is not so much the story of a year, as of what that year stands for: the long-debated (and often-dismissed) question of what human civilization in the Americas was like before the Europeans crashed the party. The history books most Americans were (and still are) raised on describe the continents before Columbus as a vast, underused territory, sparsely populated by primitives whose cultures would inevitably bow before the advanced technologies of the Europeans. For decades, though, among the archaeologists, anthropologists, paleolinguists, and others whose discoveries Charles C. Mann brings together in 1491, different stories have been emerging. Among the revelations: the first Americans may not have come over the Bering land bridge around 12,000 B.C. but by boat along the Pacific coast 10 or even 20 thousand years earlier; the Americas were a far more urban, more populated, and more technologically advanced region than generally assumed; and the Indians, rather than living in static harmony with nature, radically engineered the landscape across the continents, to the point that even "timeless" natural features like the Amazon rainforest can be seen as products of human intervention. Mann is well aware that much of the history he relates is necessarily speculative, the product of pot-shard interpretation and precise scientific measurements that often end up being radically revised in later decades. But the most compelling of his eye-opening revisionist stories are among the best-founded: the stories of early American-European contact. To many of those who were there, the earliest encounters felt more like a meeting of equals than one of natural domination. And those who came later and found an emptied landscape that seemed ripe for the taking, Mann argues convincingly, encountered not the natural and unchanging state of the native American, but the evidence of a sudden calamity: the ravages of what was likely the greatest epidemic in human history, the smallpox and other diseases introduced inadvertently by Europeans to a population without immunity, which swept through the Americas faster than the explorers who brought it, and left behind for their discovery a land that held only a shadow of the thriving cultures that it had sustained for centuries before. --Tom Nissley 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). |
Product Description
In this groundbreaking work of science, history, and archaeology, Charles C. Mann radically alters our understanding of the Americas before the arrival of Columbus in 1492.
Contrary to what so many Americans learn in school, the pre-Columbian Indians were not sparsely settled in a pristine wilderness; rather, there were huge numbers of Indians who actively molded and influenced the land around them. From the astonishing Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán, which had running water, immaculately clean streets, and was larger than any contemporary European city, to the Mexican corn that was so carefully created in a specialized breeding process that it has been called manâs first feat of genetic engineering, Indians were not living lightly on the land but were landscaping and manipulating their world in ways that we are only now beginning to understand. Challenging and surprising, this a transformative new look at a rich and fascinating world we only thought we knew.
|
| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 253
 An excellent update on the current academic understanding of pre-Columbian America November 16, 2005
Ursiform (Torrance, CA USA)
360 out of 392 found this review helpful
Although recent years have yielded significant progress in understanding how "Indians" lived throughout the Americas before 1492 and Columbus, only isolated bits of the story have reached the popular press. Far too many people still hold to one of two myths of the Indians, or have little conception at all of pre-Columbian America.
The first popular myth is that the Indians were a bunch of primitive savages just keeping the land warm until superior Europeans showed up. It's sad to read reviews here that assert that because Indians used stone tools they were therefore "stone age", with the implication that their culture was no further advanced than that early period.
The second myth makes the Indians into proto-flower-children, naively and simply in tune with their environment.
Both myths are based on stereotyping and are condescending to the pre-Colombians. How could people spread over two continents and many millennia be briefly summarized? They can't be! The Americas saw the development of a broad range of cultures, just like every other inhabited area of the world. Some cultures overstressed their environment and soon collapsed. Others created stable conditions under which they could survive for generations. (Which is not the same as saying they didn't impact nature.) But even the latter could be brought down by climate change, political instability, disease (especially European), or contact with outsiders (Indian or European).
Great cities arose in mesoamerica and the Andes, and also in other areas when the right conditions prevailed. And sophisticated cultures existed even where city building wasn't favored.
This book takes the reader through a vibrant overview of centuries of Indian culture both before and shortly after Columbus landed. Much of the narrative is based on work-in-progress by archaeologists and historians, and will certainly become dated with time, but it is an important update to the common, current understanding of the subject.
For those not enthralled by one of the myths I mention above, most Americans recall our history along the lines of Scene 1: The Pilgrims land and encounter Indians who teach them how to grow corn; they then have a big Thanksgiving party together. Scene 2: Americans moving inland encounter savage Indians who need to be exterminated or moved to reservations to make the continent safe for manifest destiny. Scene 3: The few remaining Indians are victims of brutal European suppression, and we need to buy jewelry and pottery from them to make ourselves feel better about the situation.
This book is a welcome update to our thinking about the Americas before Columbus. It's also one of the best books I've read in long time, and I highly recommend it.
An Intriguing New Look September 13, 2005
John D. Cofield
91 out of 105 found this review helpful
Charles C. Mann has taken much of what we thought we knew about the Native Americans and their world and thrown it out the window. In a pleasantly informal yet highly professional style, Mann recounts tales of his own studies and travels, as well as those of many archaeologists, historians, and anthropologists past and present throughout the Americas.
If your knowledge of the Native Americans begins and ends with what you learned in school years ago, or with the stereotypes perpetuated by Hollywood, you are in for quite a shock. To begin with, the Native Americans have been "natives" here for far longer than any one suspected. Next, their cultures were heterogeneous and quite advanced, in many ways far outdoing their counterparts in Europe. And in what may be the most controversial sections, Mann maintains that the Native Americans were neither primitive savages who left no mark on their world, nor dreamy proto-environmentalists who lived as one with nature, but rather people who throughly altered and shaped their landscapes.
This is not a book which will please many with an agenda on either the pro-development or pro-environment side, but it will be found invaluable by those who seek a better understanding of the "New World" before the Europeans "discovered" it.
The Real Civilized Old World October 6, 2005
doomsdayer520 (Pennsylvania)
44 out of 49 found this review helpful
This is a highly readable and informative compendium of current knowledge on the Americas prior to Columbian contact. Charles Mann has gathered modern research into an engaging narrative that offers updates on old theories, bold new theories that often contradict the old ones, and a fair amount of useful speculation on what was really happening in the ancient Americas. The speculative parts of this book will turn off serious historians (plus those with political, academic, or ethnic agendas, as can be seen in some of the more condescending reviews here), but the speculation offers plenty of food for thought, and Mann has mostly just channeled the exploratory ideas of his sources. In any case, such explorations are grounded in at least partially corroborated findings by modern archeologists, anthropologists, linguists, and experts in other fields, and Mann has made extensive use of legitimate sources both old and new. In fact, his bibliography will provide the enthusiast with reading material for years to come.
In addition to increasing the reader's knowledge of little-covered Native American societies such as the Cahokians and several pre-Inka South American kingdoms, the main running contention in this book is not necessarily historical but ecological. There is growing evidence that Indians throughout the hemisphere did not live in a timeless and static communion with nature, which is a common "green" stereotype. Instead, the majority of native populations actively engineered their landscapes and altered their local ecologies to better suit human needs, though this usually (but not always) resulted in long-term mutual benefits for nature and man, rather than the dead-end destruction resulting from Western methods. And in general, large and structured city states seem to have been remarkably common, even in the previously little-appreciated Amazon basin (which itself is not as "pristine" or "untrammeled" as modern hype would have you believe). And finally, Mann presents the latest evidence showing that Native American populations were once several orders of magnitude higher than those found by European explorers and colonists, with horrendous percentages being wiped out by Western diseases just a few years before. While this book is not a groundbreaking research effort in its own right, Mann has compiled a great amount of knowledge that will go a long way toward shaping your views of how civilized the "old" world really was. [~doomsdayer520~]
Wow! August 16, 2005
history buff (Robbinsdale, Minnesota)
61 out of 70 found this review helpful
If you thought, as I did, that the Americas prior to Columbus were a couple of barren continents occupied by a sparce population of savages, you are in for a mindblowing surprise in this wonderful new book. There may have been 100 million people living in the Americas in 1491, perhaps more than in Europe. There were bigger cities, some with running water and botanical gardens, larger than any in Europe. Did you know the Inkas invented the salad bar? Okay, that's a joke, but the other stuff is true and a zillion other amazing things. Other books and articles on preColumbian America have disappointed me with their fantasy: Chinese in Rhode Island, King Arthur in Kentucky, aliens in Peru, etc. But this is solidly researched by an award-winning science writer, with endorsements from some heavyweight historians--Richard Rhodes, Tom Powers, Joseph Ellis, and others. There are clear and helpful maps, copious and readable footnotes, and a H-U-G-E bibliography for those of us who teach or just want to know more. On a personal note, Mann explains why he uses the term "Indian" rather than "native American" or more politically correct terms. The Chippewas (aka Ojibwa) in my family always called themselves Indians, so this makes me realize Mann really immersed himself in the subject. This is an important, fascinating, readable, and handsome book
Sound and Rigorous October 13, 2005
Jeff Platt (Bridgewater, Maine)
27 out of 29 found this review helpful
Mann's excellent book does not deliver "new" revelations so much as an accomplished and respected historian's summation of the salient points known to date about the history of the Americas. Certainly much of the material is new to many readers, and in Mann's competent prose, the information is presented in an understandable and compelling style. Significantly, Mann balances his sound and rigorous research with suppositions based on his own remarkable insights. It is a clever and interesting read for the lay historian--as well as an important book for researchers into early American history.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 253
|
|
|
