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'1491': Vanished Americans

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By Kevin Baker

• Oct. 9, 2005

New Revelations of the Americas

Before Columbus.

By Charles C. Mann.

Illustrated. 462 pp.

Alfred A. Knopf. $30.

MOST of us know, or think we know, what the first Europeans encountered when they began their formal invasion of the Americas in 1492: a pristine world of overwhelming natural abundance and precious few people; a hemisphere where -- save perhaps for the Aztec and Mayan civilizations of Central America and the Incan state in Peru -- human beings indeed trod lightly upon the earth. Small wonder that, right up to the present day, American Indians have usually been presented as either underachieving metahippies, tree-hugging saints or some combination of the two.

The trouble with all such stereotypes, as Charles C. Mann points out in his marvelous new book, "1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus," is that they are essentially dehumanizing. For cultural reasons of their own, Europeans and white Americans have "implicitly depicted Indians as people who never changed their environment from its original wild state. Because history is change, they were people without history."

Mann, a science journalist and co-author of four previous books on subjects ranging from aspirin to physics to the Internet, provides an important corrective -- a sweeping portrait of human life in the Americas before the arrival of Columbus. This would be a formidable task under any circumstance, and it is complicated by the fact that so much of the deep American past is embroiled in vituperative political and scientific controversies.

Nearly everything about the Indians is currently a matter of contention. There is little or no agreement about when their ancestors first came to the Americas and where they came from; how many there were, how and where they lived and why they were not more effective in resisting the European invasion. New archaeological discoveries and interpretations of Indian materials are constantly altering the historical record, and every debate comes equipped with its own bevy of archaeologists, anthropologists and other social scientists tossing around personal invective with the abandon of Rudy Giuliani on a bad day.

Mann navigates adroitly through the controversies. He approaches each 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 Indians and their conquerors. And rarely is he less than enthralling. A remarkably engaging writer, he lucidly explains the significance of everything from haplogroups to glottochronology to landraces. He offers amusing asides to some of his adventures across the hemisphere during the course of his research, but unlike so many contemporary journalists, he never lets his personal experiences overwhelm his subject.

Instead, Mann builds his story around what we want to know -- the "Frequently Asked Questions," as he heads one chapter. He moves nimbly back and forth from the earliest prehistoric humans in the Americas to the Pilgrims' first encounter with the Indian they (mistakenly) called "Squanto"; from the villages of the Amazon rain forests to Cahokia, near modern St. Louis, the sole, long-vanished city of the North American Mound Builders; from the cultivation of maize to why it was that the Incas apparently developed the wheel but never used it as anything but a child's toy.

Mann remains resolutely agnostic on some of the fiercest debates. What he is most interested in showing us is how American Indians -- like all other human beings -- were intensely involved in shaping the world they lived in. He is sure that "many though not all Indians were superbly active land managers -- they did not live lightly on the land." Just how they did live, so long uninfluenced by the vast majority of the world's population in Africa and Eurasia, forms the bulk of his fascinating narrative.

What emerges is an epic story, with a subtly altered tragedy at its heart. For all the European depredations in the Americas, the work of conquest was largely accomplished for them by their microbes, even before the white men arrived in any great numbers. The diseases brought along by the very first unwitting Spanish conquistadors, and probably by English fishermen working the New England coast, very likely triggered one of the greatest catastrophes in human history. Before the 16th century, there may have been as many as 90 million to 112 million people living in the Americas -- people who could be as different from each other "as Turks and Swedes," but who had cumulatively developed an incredible range of natural environments, from seeding the Amazon Basin with fruit trees to terracing the mountains of Peru. (Even the term "New World" may be a misnomer; it is possible that the world's first city was in South America.)

Then, disaster. According to some estimates, as much as 95 percent of the Indians may have died almost immediately on contact with various European diseases, particularly smallpox. That would have amounted to about one-fifth of the world's total population at the time, a level of destruction unequaled before or since. The exact numbers, like everything else, are in dispute, but it is clear that these plagues wreaked havoc on traditional Indian societies. European misreadings of America should not be attributed wholly to ethnic arrogance. The "savages" most of the colonists saw, without ever realizing it, were usually the traumatized, destitute survivors of ancient and intricate civilizations that had collapsed almost overnight. Even the superabundant "nature" the Europeans inherited had been largely put in place by these now absent gardeners, and had run wild only after they had ceased to cull and harvest it.

In the end, the loss to us all was incalculable. As Mann writes, "Having grown separately for millennia, the Americas were a boundless sea of novel ideas, dreams, stories, philosophies, religions, moralities, discoveries and all the other products of the mind. Few things are more sublime or characteristically human than the cross-fertilization of cultures. The simple discovery by Europe of the existence of the Americas caused an intellectual ferment. How much grander would have been the tumult if Indian societies had survived in full splendor!"

Kevin Baker is the author of the forthcoming historical novel "Strivers Row."

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NEW REVELATIONS OF THE AMERICAS BEFORE COLUMBUS

by Charles C. Mann ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 12, 2005

An excellent, and highly accessible, survey of America’s past: a worthy companion to Jake Page’s In the Hands of the Great...

Unless you’re an anthropologist, it’s likely that everything you know about American prehistory is wrong. Science journalist Mann’s survey of the current knowledge is a bracing corrective.

Historians once thought that prehistoric Indian peoples somehow lived outside of history, adrift and directionless, “passive recipients of whatever windfalls or disasters happenstance put in their way”; that view was central to the myth of the noble savage. In fact, writes Mann ( Noah’s Choice , with Mark L. Plummer, 1995), Native Americans were as active in shaping their environments as anyone else. They built great and wealthy cities; they lived, for the most part, on farms; and their home continents “were immeasurably busier, more diverse, and more populous than researchers had previously imagined.” In defending this view, Mann visits several thriving controversies in the historic/prehistoric record. One is the question of pre-contact demographics: old-school scholars had long advanced the idea that there were only a few million Native Americans at the time of the Columbian arrival, whereas revisionists in the 1960s posited that there were eight million on the island of Hispaniola alone, a figure punctured by revisionists of revisionism, now beset by Native American activists for the political incorrectness of adjusting the census. Another controversy is the chronology of human presence in the Americas: the old date of 12,000 b.c., courtesy of the Bering Land Bridge in Alaska, no longer cuts it. Other arguments center on the nature of Native American societies such as the Aztec and Inca, the latter of whom built a great empire that, defying Western notions of logic, had no market component. Mann addresses each controversy with care, according the old-timers their due while making it clear that his sympathies lie, in the main, with the rising generation. He closes with a provocative thesis: namely, that the present worldwide movement toward democracy owes not to Locke or Newtonian physics, but to Indians, “living, breathing role models of human liberty.”

Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2005

ISBN: 1-4000-4006-X

Page Count: 480

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2005

HISTORY | FIRST/NATIVE NATIONS | GENERAL HISTORY

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

The osage murders and the birth of the fbi.

by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.

During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann ( The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession , 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.

Pub Date: April 18, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017

GENERAL HISTORY | TRUE CRIME | UNITED STATES | FIRST/NATIVE NATIONS | HISTORY

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BOOK TO SCREEN

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. 

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. 

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006

ISBN: 0374500010

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Publisher: Hill & Wang

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006

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1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

Charles c. mann.

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. The astonishing Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan had running water and immaculately clean streets, and was larger than any contemporary European city. Mexican cultures created corn in a specialized breeding process that it has been called man’s first feat of genetic engineering. Indeed, 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.

563 pages, Paperback

First published August 9, 2005

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New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

by Charles C. Mann

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A groundbreaking study that radically alters our understanding of the Americas before the arrival of the Europeans in 1492. Traditionally, Americans learned in school that the ancestors of the people who inhabited the Western Hemisphere at the time of Columbus’s landing had crossed the Bering Strait twelve thousand years ago; existed mainly in small, nomadic bands; and lived so lightly on the land that the Americas was, for all practical purposes, still a vast wilderness. But as Charles C. Mann now makes clear, archaeologists and anthropologists have spent the last thirty years proving these and many other long-held assumptions wrong. In a book that startles and persuades, Mann reveals how a new generation of researchers equipped with novel scientific techniques came to previously unheard-of conclusions. Among them:

• In 1491 there were probably more people living in the Americas than in Europe.
• Certain cities–such as Tenochtitlán, the Aztec capital–were far greater in population than any contemporary European city. Furthermore, Tenochtitlán, unlike any capital in Europe at that time, had running water, beautiful botanical gardens, and immaculately clean streets.
• The earliest cities in the Western Hemisphere were thriving before the Egyptians built the great pyramids.
• Pre-Columbian Indians in Mexico developed corn by a breeding process so sophisticated that the journal Science recently described it as "man’s first, and perhaps the greatest, feat of genetic engineering."
• Amazonian Indians learned how to farm the rain forest without destroying it–a process scientists are studying today in the hope of regaining this lost knowledge.
• Native Americans transformed their land so completely that Europeans arrived in a hemisphere already massively "landscaped" by human beings.

Mann sheds clarifying light on the methods used to arrive at these new visions of the pre-Columbian Americas and how they have affected our understanding of our history and our thinking about the environment. His book is an exciting and learned account of scientific inquiry and revelation.

Why Billington Survived The Friendly Indian On March 22, 1621, an official Native American delegation walked through what is now southern New England to negotiate with a group of foreigners who had taken over a recently deserted Indian settlement. At the head of the party was an uneasy triumvirate: Massasoit, the sachem (political-military leader) of the Wampanoag confederation, a loose coalition of several dozen villages that controlled most of what is now southeastern Massachusetts; Samoset, sachem of an allied group to the north; and Tisquantum, a distrusted captive, whom Massasoit had reluctantly brought along as an interpreter. Massasoit was an adroit politician, but the dilemma he faced would have tested Machiavelli. About five years before, most of his subjects had fallen before a terrible calamity. Whole villages had been ...

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In a book that startles and persuades, Mann reveals how a new generation of researchers equipped with novel scientific techniques came to previously unheard-of conclusions... continued

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The article that formed the basis for this book was originally published in The Atlantic Monthly in 2002.  If, after reading the extensive book excerpt and author interview at BookBrowse, you want to read more you can read the Atlantic Monthly article here .  Also of interest is an extensive review in the Washington Post Book World written by Alan Taylor, the author of American Colonies , and a professor of history at the University of California at Davis. Did you know? In response to the frequently asked question, "why do you have a 'pretentious' C in your name?" Charles C Mann replies, "I get asked about this a lot, occasionally in exactly those words. The answer is not very interesting. I am named after ...

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1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

In the last several decades, archaeologists and others have made very significant strides in understanding what the Western Hemisphere looked like when Columbus stepped ashore. It is a very different view of native societies from that of only 50 years ago and vastly different from that of the 19th century. In 1491, science writer Charles C. Mann endeavors to describe the diverse people of two continents as they appeared on that fateful day. Skillfully using the latest archaeological research, Mann summarizes mountains of new data to paint his picture of native America. For regular readers of American Archaeology, much of that picture will be old hat, but for the less informed it may well be startling to learn of the extent and complexity of New World cultures.

Mann divides the new findings into three foci: Indian demography, Indian origins, and Indian ecology. The most interesting of these is Indian demography—how many people lived in the New World in 1491 and what happened to them. It is a politically loaded question debated on talk radio every week by people trying to make their point. But the answer remains elusive and estimates range from a few million to as many as 112 million people (more than the population of Europe). A good journalist, Mann dutifully reports all sides of the raging debate. But one thing is clear, European diseases like small pox and measles took a terrible, if unintended, toll on the native population. These diseases spread rapidly and the firsthand accounts of the explorers that transmitted them underplayed the devastation.

In 1491, Mann gives a fair and impartial view of the New World in 1491 and describes new archaeological research and the debates it has engendered. His view may be a bit romantic, but it is a useful survey of a hotly debated topic.

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1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

A more appropriate subtitle for this iconoclastic book might be: "Everything you thought you knew about Pre-Columbian America is (probably) wrong." Charles Mann is not himself an archeologist, anthropologist or geographer; he is a science writer with impressive credentials. He obviously is also an industrious fellow who has traveled widely, interviewed everyone he could find who seemed to matter, and burrowed conscientiously through a mountain of technical literature. His intent in this book is to demolish the idea that America before Columbus was a howling wilderness thinly populated by inconsequential native people who can safely be ignored by historians. The general consensus among scholars today is that America had hosted a good number of highly advanced civilizations long before Columbus appeared and that its population when he did show up was equal to or greater than that of the Europe from whence he had sailed. One estimate put it in the "tens of millions." The scope of this book's vision is wide, ranging from the coast of Massachusetts to the heights of the Andes and the Amazon rain forest. This gives it a rich underpinning of history, legend and scholarship; it also gives it a loose and blurry focus as Mann's argument moves abruptly from upland Peru to Massachusetts and from the Mississippi flood plain opposite Saint Louis to ancient Mexico. The reader learns quite quickly that very little about this vast subject can be pinned down with certainty. Every theory that has been advanced seems to have generated a counter-theory --- and Mann shows that scientific types are as capable as ward-heeler politicians of nasty public invective and personal attacks on each other. He seems almost to take delight in detailing their catfights and hair-pulling matches. Another lesson the lay reader takes from this book is the vast sweep of geological time. Mann writes of the rise and fall of empires over a span of perhaps 20 millennia. If two experts come within a century or so of dating a certain event or shard of pottery, the assumption is that they agree with each other. Population movements and geological events that took place over 200 or 300 years are called "abrupt." It makes the modern reader suddenly aware of how small we bulk on the cosmic scale of time. Even with these cautions, Mann's book is full of fascinating tales of places like the great Inca city of Tenochtitlan --- in its heyday, it was larger than Paris --- and Tawantinsuyu on the shore of Lake Titicaca in the high Andes, a marvel of architecture and economic prosperity. Closer to home he writes enthrallingly about the Plymouth Colony and about the great settlement at what is now Cahokia, Illinois, just across the Mississippi from modern-day Saint Louis. Cahokia, once the largest settlement north of the Rio Grande and a center of trade and government, is today a tiny place of interest only to archeologists. Mann ranges across agriculture, government, warfare, economics and population movement in his broad-gauge survey of two continents and the historically rich Central American isthmus that connects them. Variations in religious beliefs and practices loom especially large. His prose is lively enough, but it can get highly technical, and he does have a tendency to get bogged down in the minutiae of some of his subjects. His discussions of agriculture, for example, will daunt readers who are not comfortable with terms like "mitochondrial haplogroups." Elsewhere one must deal with terms like glyptodonts, caliche and zoonotic. At the very end of his book Mann confronts the clash between environmentalists and developers, a theme that has lurked in the background of much of his text. He sees this endless controversy as a clash between two conflicting philosophical principles: nomos (rationality, artifice) and physis (irrationality, nature). He comes down tentatively and without much conviction somewhere in the middle. We have to accept the need to bring order to nature, but at the same time we must respect the rights and historical accomplishments of native peoples, who were anything but the ignorant savages we heard about in school. Our learned tour guide seems unwilling to choose sides. This is disappointing --- but we cannot deny that we have learned a lot from him in the course of this long and difficult journey through time.    

Reviewed by Robert Finn on December 22, 2010

1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann

• Publication Date: October 10, 2006
• Genres: History , Nonfiction
• Paperback: 541 pages
• Publisher: Vintage
• ISBN-10: 1400032059
• ISBN-13: 9781400032051

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Review |1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann

I’ll be the first to admit that my interests in the historical have generally been Eurocentric, especially the Roman Republic and Empire. Recently, though, I found reason to pick up Charles C. Mann’s “1491,” and I have had a hard time putting it down since.

The children’s nursery rhyme reminds us that “In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.” Just this last week we’ve celebrated Thanksgiving and the mythologized first meal shared by “Pilgrims” and Native Americans in the early years of Captain John Smith’s  Plymouth Colony  in the 1620s. But what came before Europeans in the “New World” of North and South America? What was already here when they arrived? Was there much more than a few human sacrificing Aztecs (in South and Central America) and nomadic tribes in North America?

Quite the contrary, says Mann. Rather, he says, the land was full of people, developed into complex cultures and polities. For example, and he expands on many, the Maya controlled an empire that was larger than any in the old world, both in size and population. The Mexica (pronounced Meh-shi-ka) had a literary culture full of metaphor and simile, and a rhetorical tradition that enabled them to meet Franciscan friars sent to convert them on equal ground. In North America, as far as the shores of New England, the coast was full hundreds of thousands of Native Americans–the nations of the Micmac, Passamoquoddy, Abenaki, Mahican, and the Massachusett, among others.

Indeed, there were so many people in both North and South America that Mann wonders if settlement by European colonists would have been possible but for the effects of disease on the native population. So devastating were diseases such as small pox, influenza, and non-sexually transmitted hepatitis that civilizations such as the Maya may have been destroyed before Europeans even landed on the shores of South America. Similarly, the nations of New England, which had filled the land and had traded with early French and English merchants during the 16th century, almost disappeared over a period as short as two to five years.

Why was disease so devastating? While not the central focus of the book, or even the examination of “what was here before 1492,” Mann explains how the relatively limited genetic stock of Native Americans presented insufficient diversity for the native populations to survive the diseases that had been active in Europe and Africa for thousands of years. Native Americans were in no way inferior–they just came from fewer people and thus had less genetic diversity, had never faced diseases as the Europeans (and their pigs) carried and therefore fewer of them survived the introduction of the diseases to the American peoples. The result was that within a few years, entire nations and their cultures all but vanished from the Earth…leaving the appearance of a empty land with only a few roving tribes. Indeed, says Mann, the reason those tribes were roving may be because they had been cut down from populations levels necessary to support a stable and stationary settlement.

Among some of the other interesting tales and studies that Mann shares in his book is the story of Tisquantum, who we know as Squanto. His name, which he may have given himself, meant something along the lines of “wrath of God,” and Mann suggests that when he appeared in the Plymouth Colony, his intentions may not have been as benign as have been told to us in elementary school pageants. Born an original New Englander, he was kidnapped by Europeans as a souvenir and taken to Spain. Eventually, he ended up in England in the home of a rich merchant, again as an oddity to show to visitors. Learning English, he eventually convinced the merchant to send him back to America. However, in the time between his kidnapping and return, hepatitis ran rampant through his and the other nations living in what is not modern-day Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine, wiping out his people and others. He returned to an empty land and was captured by a rival nation, who later used him and his ability to speak English to liaison with the Plymouth Colony. He, in return, may have tried to use the colonists as leverage to take over the rival nation.

1491 is a fascinating book, and a fascinating piece of history, covering a period of history that we may have spent less time examining than is merited given the size and scope of the civilizations that preceded European colonization of the Americas. Containing cities that dwarfed Rome in its greatest day and Paris and London at the time, the Americas in 1491 were, by Mann’s telling, a busy, populated and colorful place, and it deserves a place in our histories and archives alongside those of the other great civilizations of history.

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Dan Burton lives in Millcreek, Utah, where he practices law by day and everything else by night. He reads about history, politics, science, medicine, and current events, as well as more serious genres such as science fiction and fantasy.

[…] It’s a fascinating book, and a valuable companion to Mann’s 1491. […]

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1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus Hardcover – Deckle Edge, August 9, 2005

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• Print length 480 pages
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A 1491 Timeline

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).

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• ASIN ‏ : ‎ 140004006X
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Knopf (August 9, 2005)
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• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.82 pounds
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Charles c. mann.

Charles C. Mann is the author of 1493, a New York Times best-seller, and 1491, which won the U.S. National Academy of Sciences' Keck award for the best book of the year. A correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, Science, and Wired, he has covered the intersection of science, technology, and commerce for many newspapers and magazines here and abroad, including National Geographic, the New York Times, Vanity Fair, and the Washington Post. In addition to 1491 and 1493, he is the co-author of five other books, one of which is a young person's version of 1491 called Before Columbus. His website is www.charlesmann.org.

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Book review: “1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus” by Charles C. Mann

Prior to publishing 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus in 2006, Charles C. Mann had co-authored a few books on science and technology.  But he had specialized in writing magazine pieces on scientific subjects for such publications as Fortune, Smithsonian, Technology Review, Vanity Fair, Science, the Atlantic Monthly and Wired .

Indeed, at many points in 1491 , Mann describes encounters he had with archeologists and visits he made to ancient sites while carrying out magazine assignments.

So, it’s not very surprising that his book has the feel of several long magazine stories packaged together under a single thesis.

That thesis could be summarized in a question that Mann read in an article in a technical journal in 1992:

“What was the New World like at the time of Columbus?”

Nomadic Indians and virgin landscapes

In other words, when Christopher Columbus and his crews became the first Europeans to record a visit to the Western Hemisphere, who were the Indians that they found? How many Indians were there in what became known as North America and South America?  What were the cultures and civilizations of the Indians?  What was the relationship of the Indians to their landscapes?  How long had they been there?

For much of the past five hundred years, the answers to those questions, as presented in textbooks and general histories, were that, at the time Columbus arrived, Indians had loosely settled the two continents and, with a few exceptions, lived nomadic lives, hunting and gathering and living off the bounty of the land. 

And the land they lived on was primeval Nature, a virgin landscape, as pristine as when the Indians arrived.  It remained pure because the Indians were so technologically primitive and used the land so lightly. 

It was that primordial wildness that, starting in the mid-20 th century, environmentalists asserted was the ideal — an ideal to use as the template in protecting the few “virgin” areas left and in reconstructing such wildernesses.

Mann, though, knew — and found out even more as he researched — that those ideas were very much out of date.  So, he wrote his book.

Demography, origins and ecology

At the beginning of 1491 , Mann alerts the reader that his book isn’t a systematic, chronological account of the Western Hemisphere’s cultural and social development before Europeans arrived.  Such a book, he comments, would need to be so vast in scope in terms of space and time that it would be impossible to write.

Nor, he writes, is it a “full intellectual history of the recent changes in perspective among the anthropologists, archeologists, ecologists, geographers, and historians who study the first Americans,” a similarly impossible task since so many new ideas “are still rippling outward in too many directions” to be contained in a single work.

“Instead, this book explores what I believe to be the three main foci of the new findings: Indian demography (Part I), Indian origins (Part II) and Indian ecology (Part III).  Because so many different societies illustrate these points in such different ways, I could not possibly be comprehensive.  Instead, I chose my examples from cultures that are among the best documented, or have drawn the most recent attention, or just seemed the most intriguing.”

“A sweeping portrait”

After reading 1491 , I disagree with Mann that his approach was the only viable one.  And I think he made a mistake to write the book he wrote.

Of course, what do I know? 

1491 was and remains a bestseller, called “a sweeping portrait of human life in the Americas before the arrival of Columbus” by the New York Times and “concise and brilliantly entertaining” by the Los Angeles Times .  I must be barking up the wrong tree.  After all, as the century-old song says, 50 million Frenchmen can’t be wrong.

Well, for what it’s worth, I think Mann’s book was and remains a bestseller because of his magazine-article approach to the stories that make up his chapters and sections of chapters. 

Like many a magazine writer, Mann puts himself in the story.  Here he is at this ruin watching Archeologist A ever-so-carefully digging up a piece of pottery.  Here he is in an office at Harvard or Chicago’s Field Museum or Stanford interviewing Anthropologist B or Historian C.

Also, like many a magazine story, the tales Mann tells often have to do with disputes between one set of experts and another set of experts.  This gives these accounts a narrative tension — Is this one right?  Or maybe this one?

How iffy or solid?

Having proclaimed comprehensiveness to be impossible, Mann gives himself freedom to tell stories all over the hemispheric map from all up and down the millenniums.

Conceivably, the result could have been an impressionistic account of the state of research into the world and lives of ancient Indians.  It wouldn’t have been comprehensive, but it might have given an overview that would stress what seems pretty clear rather than emphasizing the debates over what’s not clear.

Mann, though, doesn’t present an overview.  Instead, he layers this story on that story on another story in what, to me, seemed to be a hodge-podge of dates and details and personalities. This, I think, is due to his magazine-article approach to his text.

The stuff with a story fits, and the stuff without a story is left out.  The only framework is a vaguely delineated subject area, such as Indian demography.  The goal is to inform and entertain, with the main emphasis on entertainment.

I felt inundated and overwhelmed by all this data, much of it in question, presented in anecdote after scene after debate after speculation.  From page to page, I couldn’t tell how iffy or solid this stuff was.

It seems pretty clear — and Mann’s accounts of bad old theories reinforce this — that the descriptions by present-day scholars about Indian life five hundred or two thousand or however many years ago are based on an attempt to read of the evidence.

In some cases, there is actually something to read written in a language that can be deciphered although that involves a lot of guesswork.  Even more guesswork comes into play when experts are trying to envision what life was like for specific Indians at some specific time in the far distant past based on ruins and pottery and pollen counts.

It’s detective work.  Here, the focus is on the detecting, on the story of the detecting, rather than stepping back and giving an analysis of a pattern of discovery.  I would have preferred a book that involved both detective stories and analysis.

Key findings

The key findings of Mann’s book are fairly simple in the broadest sense:

• Modern research seems to indicate pretty clearly that there were a lot more Indians in the Western Hemisphere in 1491 that previous generations of researchers had believed.  Exactly how many is widely debated.
• Modern research seems to indicate pretty clearly that Indians have been on the two continents a lot longer than previous generations of researchers had believed. Exactly how many is widely debated.
• Modern research seems to indicate pretty clearly that Indians did much to shape, manipulate, rearrange and tinker with the natural world — to terraform, to suit their needs — than previous generations of researchers had been able to envision. 

The moral dimension

These are striking insights, and they raise many questions about the collision of Europeans with Indians after the arrival of Columbus, such as the deaths of large numbers of Indians who had no means to fight off the diseases that Europeans — innocently — brought with them.

Innocent to the extent that, for the most part, Europeans weren’t trying to use disease as a means of clearing Indians off the land. 

But not innocent inasmuch as there is a moral dimension to the invasion that Europeans carried out in the Americas.  No Indians would have died of European diseases if the Europeans had not come to the Americas.  Unintended consequences are still consequences.

Mann does touch on such questions, but, for me, his consideration of these issues were buried in all of the stories and factoids and speculations.

Again, what do I know?  Many reviewers have praised the book, and many readers have purchased copies. 

I wonder, though, after being entertained by Mann’s stories, how many readers, say, three months after reading the book, remember the details of any of them.

Patrick T. Reardon

Written by : Patrick T. Reardon

For more than three decades Patrick T. Reardon was an urban affairs writer, a feature writer, a columnist, and an editor for the Chicago Tribune. In 2000 he was one of a team of 50 staff members who won a Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting. Now a freelance writer and poet, he has contributed chapters to several books and is the author of Faith Stripped to Its Essence. His website is https://patricktreardon.com/.

Hi Pat. I read this book soon after it was published. To me, it did read like a collection of separate magazine articles. It was the information given, which you have summarized, that I found interesting and memorable, not the overall reading experience. I think I would have the same experience if I attended a university lecture on this material. I just found the subject matter so interesting that the packaging and narrative delivery became a secondary concern.

Hey, Darnell — Great to hear from you. This is our History Book Club book for this month. We’re meeting on Tuesday in Oak Park if you’d like to join us. (Let me know.) You’re right, the material is all very interesting and eye-opening. My complaint is from the standpoint of a reader and a writer. For me, there were so many dates, places, anecdotes, academic controversies, bad old theories, good new theories and so on that my eyes glazed over and I found I had a hard time retaining anything except the main bullet points. The writer in me was frustrated at this, realizing that there were any number of other ways of writing the book that wouldn’t have had to have this “glazed-over” problem. Still, I’m sure that, on Tuesday, I’ll be in the minority in the discussion since this book really does open a window onto stuff most of us don’t know much or anything about…..or, worse, think we know stuff that’s actually wrong! Hope you’re doing well. Pat

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Book Review: 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, by Charles C. Mann.

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Low tech home tech, book review: 1491.

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For those of you who haven’t read it, though, this is the type of book that you look up from every few minutes and say, “Listen to this!” or “Did you know…?” 

1491 is a depiction of the Americas just before and just after contact with the Europeans. The gist of it is that the peoples of the Americas were much more populous and their civilizations more advanced than we are taught in our school books.

The first part of the book deals with horrific impact of imported European diseases on the native populations. I always knew it was very bad–but I never understood the extent of the devastation. In part this is because I never understood extent of the civilizations destroyed. This section is depressing, but it’s well worth understanding.

The rest of the book covers so much ground that I don’t even know what to focus on. Warring archeologists struggling to define the past. The complex and fascinating debate over when and how the first people came to the Americas. (Nope, the old land-bridge theory doesn’t hold water anymore.) Grisly tales of the Conquistadors coupled with intriguing records made by Spanish scribes that offer us precious insights into the strange and magnificent technologies and theologies of the Inka, Maya and Aztecs. The mystery of the development of corn and it’s impact on the world. The true history of the buffalo and the passenger pigeon–it’s not what you were taught. The wonders just pile up. 

There are so many lessons to be learned from these ignored histories. And what’s most interesting is that it seems we are only able to understand the skill and knowledge these lost people now, because we are only just becoming able to conceptualize more subtle relationships to nature. For instance, until we began to understand food forestry as a legitimate agricultural practice, we had no hope of recognizing an ancient Amazonian food forest when we saw one.

Lots to think about. You can hear 1491 author Charles Mann deliver an interesting lecture, “Living in the Homogenocene: The First 500 Years” on the Long Now Foundation’s podcast .

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I have a BA in History, and this entire book was a revelation. I kept saying aloud, “Why haven’t I heard this before?!?!?” I absolutely love this book and recommend it to people whole-heartedly because of the information it contains and the way it’s written.

I’m reading 1493 now and it’s just as good. I never knew that earthworms weren’t native to NJ! Another remarkable fact in 1493 is the possible cause of the cooling in the 17th and 18th centuries. The 18th century was remarkably cold (the Thames froze in London, Washington crossing the Delaware filled with chunks of ice), but they think that happened because of a lowering of the CO2 levels. Since the Native Americans were no longer burning the vast acreages of North America, greenhouse emissions went way down and the globe cooled. We may have possibly already gone through man-made climate change! Very fascinating.

Yes! The sequel! I’m waiting for 1493 to come up on reserve from the library. It looks to be just as good.

a great book. If you haven’t read it yet, I STRONGLY recommend you read William Cronon’s “Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England.” There are really three different protagonists in this book: Native Practices, Colonial (European) Practices, and the Ecosystem itself. A classic. Thanks for your blog.

http://www.amazon.com/Changes-Land-Indians-Colonists-Ecology/dp/0809001586

Thanks for the rec!

I adore those “Did you know…?” sort of books. Thanks for the suggestion.

Had you read Zinn’s People’s History of the United States? Talk about revelatory history. It was that book that really made me understand for the first time the horror of the genocide against the native peoples of North America. Like you said, I always knew it was very bad, but…

Living in South America, I see first hand remaining indigenous cultures and recognize so much of it as permaculture, which is amazing. I also notice a lot of people living in rural areas who are practicing a sort of accidental permaculture, using techniques handed down from those native peoples, not because of any particular reverence for mother earth, but just because they work and people have always done it that way. Unfortunately, because they’ve lost that fundamental reverence, now they also dump a lot of cement and other unnecessary contaminants in the mix – the tendency is to embrace technology for its own sake without analyzing its real impact. That’s where a new phase of education is needed – what is “appropriate technology”, and a re-awakening of understanding our true place in the ecosystem.

Can’t wait to get my hands on a copy of 1491 – thanks for the review.

i was about to recommend this! but rather than focusing on just one era, this book covers the discovery of america through about 2002 or so.

I read this book shortly after it was published while on the way to the Peruvian Amazon. It was revelatory, to say the least. I “loaned” it to a friend there, and it made the rounds in the ex-pat community till it fell to shreds. I hope it was composted and turned into terra preta.

The part that blew me away was the fruit “orchards” in the Amazon river region.

“The complex and fascinating debate over when and how the first people came to the Americas. (Nope, the old land-bridge theory doesn’t hold water anymore.) ”

Does a book pushing unsupported assertions that are directly contradicted by solid science not leave in question everything it contains? Are you not left having to fact check every statement in it?

The most significant genetic testing on Native peoples has occurred since this book was written, so I guess we allow for that, but when you take one man’s *interpretation* over hard science, you do yourself no favors.

Fact is, there is thus far no evidence of European or modern Asian genetics in the indigenous populations of the Americas pre-1492.

You’d expect some mixing with the Norse post-1000 AD, but they didn’t mix with the natives in Greenland, either, it seems, preferring to die off rather than adapt to or adopt any indigenous survival strategies.

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The Millennial Star

Book Review – 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

I recently finished Charles Mann’s book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus and wanted to do a quick book review.

As the title indicates, this is a book about what the civilizations of the American continent were like before Columbus arrived. The book is based on the most current research on the subject, though I must warn you that even our best most recent research seems quite tentative to me, as the author often admits. But here are some interesting new directions that seem worthy of note.

Population of the Americas – The Impact on the Environment

One recent claim is that the population of the Americas prior to Columbus’ arrival was much large than early estimates. The legendary view of the American Indians (the author uses the word “Indian” throughout and explains why this is the preferred term) is that of a small group of humans at one with the land. Not true, claims the author. First of all, there was apparently a massive small pox endemic after the Europeans accidently brought it here. Apparently even they didn’t realize they had done it. The net result was a massive drop in population that also collapsed many of the civilizations that existed. Imagine if 1 in 10 people in America suddenly died off from a plague. How disruptive would that be to our civilization? Now imagine if it has been the other way around: 1 in 10 surviving. Some researches think it might have been that serious. However, the evidence isn’t strong here, so we don’t really know how bad the small pox plague was, but we do know it was very disruptive to the Indian civilizations.

Prior to the arrival of Columbus the Indians seem to have developed some considerable technologies for how to change the environment for their own sake. One of the more fantastic claims is that the Amazon forest is actually human created – a sort of gigantic garden. If this is true (and of course the evidence is mixed) then calls to leave it alone will turn out to be misguided. It would be like leaving a garden alone to grow naturally.

The Indians also may have used a fire burning method to change the landscape to their liking without destroying everything. In short, the myth that the Indians were at one with nature is probably not as true as we believed. However, we may have to instead think of them as being the greatest gardeners that ever lived.

Mann also points out that the Indians created Maize apparently out of ancestral plants that are nothing like them. It may be one of the greatest genetic engineering feats in the history of the world.

Arrival of Indians in Neolithic Age

It would appear that the first ancestors of the American Indians probably arrived 20,000 to 30,000 years ago during the last ice age. The old view that they came across the Bering Strait 13,000 years ago is starting to die out. The book even cites evidence that the American continent may have been inhabited long before ‘the old world’ of Europe was. (I’m not clear on how this is possible, but that’s what he claimed.)

I couldn’t help but think of the Book of Mormon here. Anti-Mormons hold this up as a serious flaw for The Book of Mormon . Actually, this isn’t much of a problem for The Book of Mormon at all. LDS Scholars had actively been arguing for a limited geography model with the Lehite tribes mingling in (over time) with a larger group of people for decades prior to the latest DNA evidence being discovered. In fact, those limited geographic models had seemed necessary both because of outside evidence (i.e. too many Indian languages or the larger population estimates of recent years, for example) and because of inside evidence (i.e. the Book of Mormon insists the land was quite small, travelable from end to end in short periods of time.) The recent DNA evidence actually brought nothing new to the table that wasn’t already a problem for The Book of Mormon and hadn’t already been responded to via the limited geography model.

Interestingly, author Orson Scott Card, long before the DNA evidence, had actually argued that the Mulekites were not Jewish but rather they adopted that as a tribal myth once they came across the Nephites. This explains why there were so many of them, according to the Book of Mormon, and also why their language had changed seemingly so quickly. (His take was they were Jaredite remnants, however.)

While the recent DNA evidence and migration models pose little problem for The Book of Mormon , unfortunately they cause massive carnage to the Bible’s story of Adam of Eve as presently constituted because the primary ancestors of the American Indians are then pre-Adamites. There is going to have to be new thinking on that subject, either placing Adam and Eve much further back in time than the Bible (both OT and NT) claims, or making them not the Father and Mother of the primary Indian ancestors. Mormons will be able to claim that they only believed in the Bible ‘as far as it is translated correctly’ anyhow. Biblical Inerrantists have a lot of explaining to do. Strange that Evangelical anti-Mormons never seem to notice how often their own anti-Mormon arguments are a suicide bomb that goes off no where near Mormons.

Indian Technology vs. European Technology

Mann challenges the idea that the Europeans has superior technology and superior weapons compared to the Indians. He points out that Indian bows shot further, more accurately, and did more kinetic damage than firearms of that era. John Smith reported that he destroyed his own gun when captured by Indians so that they would have a chance to test it out and figure out it wasn’t as powerful as seemed. Mann argues that the real impact of guns was invisible projectiles and loud noises.

When it came to metallurgy, Mann argues that the Indians were as advanced as the Europeans, but that they were more interested in adornments rather then hard metals.

Also, when it came to large boats, the Europeans had the edge. But for smaller boats, the Indians technology was superior.

Indian Culture vs. European Culture

The Europeans had a class system while the Indians were often early democracies based on personal freedom. Anecdotal evidence suggests that Europeans were far more likely to defect to Indian society rather than the other way around.

I wasn’t fully convinced by this evidence because Mann gives far too many stories of corrupt empires and kings amongst the Indians and I’m generally distrustful of anecdotal evidence. However, I find it fascinating that it’s possible that the democracies of the new world may have arisen in part because the European nations had to tread lightly with the Americans because they were surrounded by democratic societies that they could defect to if their kings became too oppressive. Mann argues that this might have led to the increasing freedoms in America until finally they revolted. Of course the fact that they lived so far away during an era without telephones (you know, those things that act like cell phones but are plugged into walls?) might have had something to do with it too.

White Guilt

The book doesn’t spend much time on this, but I thought it was humorous how it treated it. Two theories about the Indians (ones that book does not buy into) are the displacement hypothesis and the overkill hypothesis. Taken together, they essentially mean that the Indians came across the Bering strait and destroyed the earlier inhabitants and then went on to cause mass extinction of all the animals (horses, elephants, etc.) there.

This theory is problematic to some because it basically exonerates whites of guilt. Oh yeah, and it’s questionable science too.

However, the bottom line is that there is ample evidence that the white people did nothing but what everyone else was doing at the time. Indian society was often quite brutal and conquering everyone else was common. Besides, the book argues, the real reason the Europeans were able to conquer the Indians was actually because they brought small pox and not because of any advanced technology. Therefore, they Europeans weren’t even aware of what they had done to the Indians.

The book suggests that in place of white guilt we take on ‘white responsibility.’ It’s not modern white people’s fault, nor technically even their ancestors (since they didn’t even have a clue at the time what they were doing.) And frankly they just aren’t more guilty than anyone else at the time. Yet, the end result was that Europeans did accidently cause mass damage to Indian society through small pox and did rub out that culture from the world. So it was their responsibility and we can take responsibility for it too.

Rating: 3 stars out of 5

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7 thoughts on “ Book Review – 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus ”

There was just a big show on Discovery Channel or History about the colonization of America and they went over many theories about how people got to America (including a brief description of the Book of Mormon story). There is good evidence that humans have been getting to America from diverse directions for thousands of years before the Bering Strait, as you mention. The old theories about how humans got to America, how they interacted with the land, the Pleistocene extinctions, etc. are all now looking way overly simplistic as we gather new information. And you’re right that all of this only strengthens the Mormon position on many issues. Thanks for the review, I look forward to reading it.

Bruce, I think it’s important to point out that there is a wide variation from tribe to tribe in the Americas. The Aztecs were relatively advanced, but many smaller tribes in North America and South America were not. You could make a strong argument that some of the smaller North American tribes were as different from the Aztecs as the Europeans were. Making uniform claims about pre-Columbian Indians is problematic.

This might be a good time to mention the book, “He Walked the Americas.” A non-Mormon anthropologist finds very interesting folk legend evidence that a beared white man appeared to different indigenous tribes in the 1st century AD.

http://www.amazon.com/He-Walked-Americas-Taylor-Hansen/dp/0964499703

Here’s one thing that’s always mystified me. If you can see Russia from Sarah Palin’s yard (at least one of Russia’s islands), then it’s simply impossible to believe that Siberians for thousands of years had no knowledge of a great body of land to the east. How is it possible that China, for example, during her imperial periods of expansion and power, did not know of this land? I find it baffling. Surely many in East Asia knew of America over thousands of years, but for one reason or another it did not become a part of history. If you think about how, for example, the Islanders crossed the Pacific, or various ethnic groups crossed the Indonesian islands, or the islands of the Mediterranean – this is simply baffling.

Back to the book’s thesis, surely there were innumerable crossings to and from America over the centuries.

I read this a few years ago and thought it was pretty great.

You mentioned the possibility that Indians carefully managed ecosystems on huge scales. Was it Mann who discussed carrier pigeons and bison? The argument I remember is that early European descriptions of virtually unlimited flocks of pigeons or herds of bison reflected population booms due to the smallpox-induced demographic collapse rather than some untainted Eden-like state.

Geoff, I suggest you read the book. I never felt like Mann was too sweeping or too general. He rather focuses on particular peoples and the ways they may have managed the land.

The Aztecs were relatively advanced, but many smaller tribes in North America and South America were not.

Mann confronts this deeply-set notion directly. For example it was this book that introduced me to Terra Preta, which may hint at a mind-bogglingly extensive Amazonian culture.

In all honesty, I read the book a while back, wrote this review at the time, and finally got around to publishing it. So my memory isn’t what it used to be. I think Ben’s statements are probably accurate.

The author does make a point that much of everything we ‘know’ is speculative. So my post is reporting what the book said, not The Truth.

When it comes to technology comparisions, he is, effectively, comparing the top technological civilizations of both continents. I’m sure neither continent had a consistent level of technology.

A few thoughts on the idea of the Chinese discovering America:

There has been some speculation that some Chinese ships did just that. But there aren’t any compelling artifacts to confirm that through archaeology, and there isn’t much written about it to confirm it through history. Even if the Chinese were capable of sending ships on such a voyage, it doesn’t naturally follow that they did. Remember also that while Alaska and Siberia are very close (and the waters up there aren’t very accommodating for wooden sailing vessels), most of Asia and North America are separated by thousands of miles of ocean, and when people have to choose whether to devote their attention to several neighboring countries or to vast uncharted seas, there’s little question which seems more important.

Quite honestly, humans aren’t very curious people. There are exceptions, of course; they do things like explore unknown lands, climb mountains, invent things, etc. But look at how many civilizations there have been in the world, and how few of them have engaged in ambitious enterprises in exploration. Rome, Egypt, Japan, Persia, you name it; hardly anyone had any interest in striking out further than the territory of their immediate neighbors. It wasn’t until the Portuguese and Spanish decided to circumvent Arab spice traders and get the goods at their source that exploration on a serious scale took place. We know the Vikings discovered North America 500 years before Columbus did, but it didn’t really mean anything to them or to anyone else who heard about it.

I just got done watching a show on the History Channel that talked about this exact subject of who discovered the Americas. They did mention the Book of Mormon and talked about it seriously rather than dismissing it with a snicker. The conclusion was still that that it didn’t according to evidence take place and would have taken a year and a half if it did happen. However, the technology at the time of Lehi was available in ship building that could survive the voyage. Its the people that would have perished because of the length of time needed. After listening to that portion of it my own thoughts are that the Book of Mormon is very clear the ship was modified different than the surrounding engineering. Also, that there were worries about the time it was taking and a storm surge might have reduced the time required. The show didn’t mention the even earlier travels of what I consider Asiatic Jaredites.

Another interesting part of the show is that many Native American tribes from both continents claim they came from other cultures beyond the expected. It doesn’t matter if its Japan, Europe, or as in the case of the Cherokee Israel. Not enough DNA evidence supports more than the traditional scientific Bering Straight theory, but there is enough cultural and archeology evidence to put those results into question. Besides, even the DNA evidence has anomalies that ask when and not if there is mixed blood. Five of the experts interviewed who believed in pre-columbian or even pre-viking voyages to America were professors and not amateurs. Two of them worked at the Smithsonian. It is still a small group, but the consensus theory that all Native Americans came from ancestors of one group of people is slowly chipping away.

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Book Review: 1491 by Charles Mann

Mann goes on to discuss the arguments of how and when the Indians arrived in America. Going over several different theories in the end Mann lays out a speculation that the Indians were in America much earlier than conventional history has allowed for. Not only were they there earlier but they also had thriving cultures that were responsible for the bioengineering of the food staple maize, had complex irrigation, writing and architectural achievements. In other words, they had cultures and civilizations that were as rich as their European counterparts at the same time. All of which is intriguing, however, Mann tends to lay out some of the most speculative theories and yet the reader is only briefly warned of it near the end.

Finally, a major contention of Mann’s is that rather than the Indians being passive minions of the land, they were actually active landscapers, molding the land all around them. There is even the contention that the great Amazon Rainforest is actually man made and not a product of a chaotic nature. Several of the scenarios laid forth in the latter part of the book do resonate as quite believable, others really test the reader’s internal BS detector. Though far from an expert on any of the matters discussed, it seems that Mann often presents some of the most speculative and grand theories available in order to bolster the main thesis, all of which is really unnecessary.

In the end Mann achieves the goal of displaying that the Indian did not live an unchanged an unvaried existence for several thousand years. Instead they had a deep and rich history and culture that deserves to be studied and appreciated more so than what we are left with in high school text books. The academic work in this area is constantly being updated and revised and it is extremely interesting to even the non experts among us. There are several mysteries to be solved and historical work to be done and I am sure soon we will have a new view of what happened on this continent before Europeans encountered it.

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Interestingly, there is now considerable archaeological evidence to support the idea that the Amazon rainforest has long been manipulated by humans.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jan/05/amazon-dorado-satellite-discovery

There are also journal articles demonstrating the impact of humans on the make up of the South American forests, and areas of disturbed soil in “pristine” rain forest areas that suggest long habitation by humans.

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Book Review of 1491: NEW REVELATIONS OF THE AMERICAS BEFORE COLUMBUS by Charles C. Mann (2005)

1491 is a summary of recent changes in (scholarly) understanding of the peoples in the Americas immediately before Columbus. Part I argues that there were many more people here than you think. Part II argues that they got here much earlier than you think. Part III argues that they had a much larger impact on the environment than you think.

The new understanding of the Americas is really cool. I just wish that the book had been written by one of the scientists, instead of a professional popular science writer. It is obvious to me, from reading it, that the author is not and never has been a scientist.

Prerequisites: Pre-Columbian history as taught by grade schools in the US. So very little.

Originally Written: September 2020.

Confidence Level: Not my ideas.

I’ll start with the stuff I didn’t like, and end with the stuff that I did. Most of the criticism centers on Ch. 4: Frequently Asked Questions. All emphasis is mine.

An inconsequential, but terrible error. When describing human immune response:

Like minute scouts inspecting potential battle zones, leukocytes constantly scan cell walls for little bits of stuff … that doesn’t belong. p. 117

Animal cells don’t have cell walls. Plant cells do. That’s middle school science.

Other History

Although Mann has talked with many experts in the history of the Americas, his knowledge of history elsewhere is lacking. Here are a few of those claims that I either recognized immediately as false or I was suspicious of and looked for alternative sources:

• The milpa, a field of corn, beans, squash, etc planted together, is the only farming system where the same field can be cultivated for thousands of years. [p. 226]

Mann doesn’t provide evidence that any particular field has been cultivated for this long. Wet rice & carp seems like a better candidate for longest cultivated field.

• The concept of zero, that nothingness is a number, confused Europe until the Renaissance. [p. 245]

At the very latest, this idea became common in Europe when Fibonacci introduced Arabic numerals to Europe in 1202.

• The moldboard plow wasn’t used in Europe until the Enlightenment. [p. 254]

We have records of it in Britain by the 600s. As evidence for this claim, Mann cites an author whose most well-known book is about ancient aliens in West Africa.

Mann doesn’t understand religious people. Although he recognizes the social roles of religion, he seems to have a hard time accepting that people actually believe their own religion. Some examples:

• During a debate between 12 Catholic monks and 12 Mexica (Aztec) priests:

‘What more, immediately, will we say?’ the lead [Mexica] cleric asks. ‘We are those who shelter the people, / We are mothers to the people, fathers to the people.’ Translation: We priests are in the same business as you Franciscans. We are high-ranking clerics, elite intellectuals, just like you. And just like you, we have a function: providing comfort and meaning to the common folk. p. 129

That is not the purpose of a Catholic priest. The purpose of a priest is not to improve society and comfort people here on Earth. It’s to keep people from BURNING IN HELL FOR ETERNITY. Improving society is secondary. I know very little about the Mexica religion, but I guess that the 12 most prominent defenders really believed in it. They probably thought of their role in cosmic terms, not in terms of the temporal services they provide to the common folk.

In their penchant for public slaughter, the Alliance and Europe were more alike than either side grasped. … And in both the goal was to create a cathartic paroxysm of loyalty to the government. p. 137

• Mann doesn’t just think that ancient people don’t really believe their own religions, modern people don’t either. When noting that Catholics debated whether the destruction they wrought was worth the conversions:

‘Christianity is not about getting healthy, it’s about getting saved,’ Crease said summarizing. Today few Christians would endorse this argument. p. 149

Christianity is still about getting saved. Health is nice and something that you should support, but it is not as important as salvation. If you are causing destruction while trying to save people, you should stop and consider your own salvation first. If your behavior is so terrible that you need to doubt your own salvation, can you really be bringing salvation to other people? Cleanse the inner vessel first.

Empirical and Ethical Claims

Mann could be much clearer about distinguishing between ethical claims and technical claims. I’m comparing this to other popular science books, written by scientists. Weather, Macroweather, and the Climate by Lovejoy (2019) refuses to talk about whether humans caused climate change until the last chapter. By this point, he has explained enough climate science to fully explain his argument. The Future of Fusion Energy by Parisi & Ball (2019) has ethical claims much more central to its argument: We should pursue fusion to avoid the problems with fossil fuels, nuclear proliferation, and intermittency / land use of wind & solar. And here’s how we can do it. But I think that every sentence is clear on whether it’s making a ethical claim or a technical claim. Mann regularly blends the two kinds of arguments.

He is willing to apply moral judgment on historical Europeans (who definitely deserve it), but not on Indians. This is especially ironic because one of his main points is that we should treat Indians as agents, not part of the landscape.

For some reason, Mann decides to devote a footnote to emphasizing that the Indians are not inferior in a Darwinian sense. [p. 119] This is absurd. In a Darwinian sense, the group where 95% of the people die is inferior to the group which survives, by definition. The correct response to someone saying this is to remind them that Darwinism is a terrible thing to base ethics on. We shouldn’t even use ethical terms like ‘inferior’ or ‘superior’ in this context. The value of a human life is not determined by their immune system.

Uncertainty

Mann doesn’t think about uncertainty properly. The error is most obvious from:

Scientists usually report $C^{14}$ dates with their potential error, as in 3000 $\pm$ 150 B.P. (1050 $\pm$ 150 B.C.). To avoid typographical clutter, I do not include the error spread, believing that readers understand the unavoidable uncertainties in measuring minute levels of residual radioactivity. p. 177

The point of the error bars is not to remind you that error exists – it’s to tell you how much error there is. Mann’s way of thinking about uncertainty don’t seem to be quantified.

Mann includes detailed narratives about many regions of the Americans. Uncertainties in these narratives are relegated to the endnotes, which are not even referenced in the text itself. The superscript numbers might disrupt the story, so instead, endnotes are referenced by page numbers.

He is overconfident about his narratives and refuses to say anything about uncertain numbers.

How Many People?

The biggest problem I have with the book is one of omission which stems from not understanding uncertainty. I don’t know how many people lived in the Americas in 1491. Mann’s response to this question is: more than you think. This is not an answer.

There are two instances where a pre-European population estimate is given. In one, Mann quotes Henige:

‘perhaps 40 million throughout the Western Hemisphere’ is a ‘not unreasonable’ figure – putting him at the low end of the High Counters, but a High Counter nonetheless. p. 151

Since Mann is definitely on the side of the High Counters, he presumably thinks that there were at least 40 million people in the Americas in 1491.

The second is a figure copied from Cook and Borah which estimates how the population of Central Mexico changed from 1518 to 1623. [p. 147] The numbers start at 25,000,000 (and end at 700,000). There are no error bars on the graph or alternative estimates from other scholars.

There is no effort to connect these two numbers. Was over half the population of the hemisphere in Central Mexico?

I understand that there is huge uncertainty. But the appropriate response is not silence. Mann should have taken two estimates of the population of the Americas, a typical Low Counter and a typical High Counter, and walked us through their calculations. We would then have a much better understanding of the debate – and why Mann thinks the High Counters are right. We would not only have an estimate for what the number is, we would also learn large scale demographic patterns, and where people disagree. Is the dispute mainly because the High Counters think that the cities of Mexico and the Andes were significantly larger? Or is it because the Low Counters completely miss significant civilizations in the Amazon and Southeast US?

In the place where I would have put these estimates, Mann has (admittedly excellent) excerpts of Mexica poetry. It does make me wonder if Mann would be more upset by the loss of a literary tradition or the loss of an additional 10,000,000 people.

One of the things I like best is that Mann is a good storyteller. His stories of the histories of the Americas are engaging. So, with the caveat above that I’m not con dent on the accuracy of the details, I’ll summarize a few of the ones I found most interesting: New England, the Southeast United States, Norte Chico (in Peru), and the Amazon.

New England

European trade with New England started in the early 1500s. It was already densely populated, and any Europeans who tried to stay there would be ‘encouraged’ to leave after a few weeks or months. In the inland river valleys, there were towns fed by maize agriculture. Along the coast was a continually shifting network of small villages and individual households that farmed as a supplement to the abundant seafood.

The Wampanoag were a confederation of these coastal communities. Sometimes, Europeans would abduct Indians, which eventually led to the Wampanoag attacking any Europeans on sight.

The man who would later introduce himself to the Pilgrims as ‘Divine Wrath’ (Tesquantum $\rightarrow$ Squanto) was one of the people taken and sold into slavery in Spain. He spent the next 5 years in Europe (Spain & England), where he became fluent in English and learned how to plant fish with crops. He returned to New England less than a year before the Pilgrims arrived.

In the meantime, smallpox had hit New England. It decimated the population of the Wampanoag and their allies – but not their enemies, who they had little contact with.

When the Pilgrims arrived, they found the coast lined with villages full of skeletons. They selected one of them to settle in and survived by raiding the abandoned food stores. They arrived in November and didn’t have a plan for what to eat until Spring.

Both peoples attributed the desolation to supernatural forces. The Pilgrims believed that God had cleared the land for them and the Wampanoag believed that the manitou were enraged.

By Spring, the remnants of the Wampanoag, who were now surviving as hunter-gatherers in the woods, decided to change their policy on Europeans. These Europeans would be allowed to stay, as long as they promised to be allies against their enemies inland. Although Massasoit didn’t trust Squanto (wisely), he needed him as a translator and diplomat.

Squanto spent the rest of his life trying to gain advantage by manipulating conflict between the colonists and natives, and then positioning himself as the essential peacemaker, until he too died from a European disease.

Southeast United States

Chapters 4 & 10

The first Europeans to explore the Southeast United States were de Soto and La Salle. They were more than 100 years apart: 1540s vs 1680s. No Europeans traveled through this area in between.

The accounts of the two journeys are wildly different. De Soto found many large fortified towns and armies of several thousand men. La Salle found the area deserted and the few people there were nomadic hunters. During the time between de Soto and La Salle, European diseases, introduced by the pigs of de Soto’s camp, caused apocalyptic loss of life and destroyed entire civilizations.

De Soto did not see a single live bison. La Salle found herds grazing in the plains along the river. There were tens of millions of bison in the United States in 1800. They were so plentiful that people hunted them without limits. By the end of that century, there were less than a thousand.

The population swings of passenger pigeons were even more dramatic. In early America, there were billions of them. Over a quarter of all of the birds on the continent were passenger pigeons. There were flocks so large that it took days for them to pass overhead. In 1914, the last passenger pigeon died in Cincinnati Zoo.

Both of these species are often used as examples of overhunting destroying the natural bounty of the wilderness. But North America was not wilderness. The environment had been heavily managed for thousands of years, by agriculture, forestry, and controlled burns. Humans were a keystone species, and they had been decimated by European diseases.

Before Columbus, North America did not have billions of passenger pigeons. Their bones are rare in archaeological sites, even compared to other bird bones. However, when most of the fertile farmland and managed forests opened up, they seized the opportunity and overran everything before collapsing.

The huge, and extremely fragile, populations of bison and passenger pigeons were not natural. They were outbreak populations. When a keystone species (in this case, humans) are removed, the populations of other species fluctuate wildly, with huge population booms and spectacular crashes.

Norte Chico

Norte Chico is a stretch of dry coastline in Peru. It is in the rain shadow of the Andes, so it gets only a couple inches of precipitation a year – mostly as mist. There are rivers running down deep ravines from the glaciers in the Andes.

The Humbodlt current and upwelling zones bring cold water and nutrients up from the Antarctic and from the depths. The ocean off of Peru is extremely productive.

There are the remains of cities in Norte Chico dating from 3500 B.C. to 1800 B.C. This makes it one of the earliest centers of civilization in the world. Only Mesopotamia and Egypt clearly have older cities. All other cradles of civilization were based on growing grains in fertile river valleys. Norte Chico had neither fertile river valleys nor domesticated grains.

Instead, the cities of Norte Chico got most of their food from the sea. Fish bones outnumber the waste from any remnants from plant food, even in inland cities.

There were some crops grown on terraced and irrigated land. The most common crop was cotton. Rather than agriculture for food, Norte Chico had agriculture for textiles. These textiles were not unrelated to food – cotton nets dramatically increase how many fish you can catch. The inland cities along the river where cotton was grown were larger than the cities along the coast.

Grain based agriculture is not the only surprising thing missing in Norte Chico. There is no pottery. In Eurasian civilizations, pottery preceded agriculture by at least 10,000 years, and agriculture preceded cities by another 5,000 years. There are also no stone carvings. There are building made of stone, but no sculptures, bas-relief, drawing, or painting, even on interior walls. There is one drawing of the staff god (common in later Andean religions) that dates from this era, but the drawing might have been etched onto a petrified gourd that was already thousands of year old. The art seems to be entirely textiles and music from pelican bone flutes.

There are monumental mounds. Mann thinks that the labor for these mounds was organized by persuasion, not coercion. I’m not convinced. All other monumental architecture this early was built with slave labor. In the first states, there often wasn’t a big difference between slave and subject – the society consisted mostly of war captives. Mann’s main evidence for this is that there are remnants of feasts within the mounds (so the feasts had to occur during the construction) and that there is little evidence of war in any of these sites. The cities did not have walls and few of the skeletons found had died violent deaths.

The people of Norte Chico did mummify some of their dead, especially children who had died from malnutrition caused by intestinal worms. The mummies were painted and repainted, so, unlike in Egypt, they probably were not immediately buried. This suggest cultural continuity with the Inca millennia later who venerated their former leaders in temples centered around the leader’s mummy. People believed that, as long as the body is preserved, their soul still has power.

Chapters 1 & 9

The Amazon is often considered the paradigmatic example of untouched wilderness.

There is increasing evidence that it was actually a center of pre-Columbian civilization that was completely destroyed by European diseases.

Farther into the Amazon forest itself, there was also large scale human civilization.

There is one Spanish account of the Amazon from the 1500s. Carvajal was the chaplain of an expedition which left the Andes looking for a lake of gold. Traveling through the steep, wet forests just east of the Andes was more difficult than expected. When half of the expedition found a large river, they thought that they must be close to the ocean and decided to raft out. Five months later, they eventually reached the ocean. Carvajal kept a careful record of how not treasonous abandoning the other half of their expedition was, and sometimes described his surroundings. The river was lined by large settlements, located close together. Most were hostile – the Spaniards were trying to raid for food. At the largest settlement, they were met by 200 war canoes, with 20-30 people each, and many more people lining the bluffs waving palm fronds. The soldiers wore feathered cloaks and used poisoned arrows. An orchestra accompanied the soldiers onto the water to signal attack. The Spaniards escaped only through the surprise caused by their firearms. Carvajal’s account was considered fictitious and wasn’t even published until the late 1800s. Not only was Carvajal’s captain definitely treasonous, but the Amazon shouldn’t have been able to support that large of a population.

Most of the Amazon has terrible soil: clays that retain very few nutrients. All of the nutrients are in the living plants. Anything in the soil gets washed out by the continual rain. The land can only be farmed for a few years after you clear the trees.

In some areas of the Amazon, there is terra preta, dark earth, which is extremely fertile. Terra preta is clearly man-made: it almost always contains pottery shards. Instead of burning the undergrowth in the open, people burned it underground with little oxygen so charcoal remains and added manure, small bones, and pottery shards. The charcoal retains nutrients, the bones and pottery keep the soil aerated, and microorganisms allow the soil to slowly replenish itself. Faced with soil too poor for agriculture, people created their own fertile soil.

Any place terra preta is found has had human agriculture. It is most often found on bluffs overlooking major rivers, but can be found in many other geologically distinct settings. Estimates vary widely as to how much of the Amazon has terra perta – between 0.1\% and 10\%. Even the small estimates could support a significant number of people. The larger estimates would mean that a significant fraction of the Amazon is not natural, but cultivated.

There is no archaeological evidence of large, cleared fields in the Amazon, which form the basis of agriculture elsewhere. Most of the crop domesticated in the Amazon are trees: fruits, nuts, and palms. Rather than clearing the forest for crops, in the Amazon, people managed the forest as a garden.

Since there is very little stone available, houses and other buildings had to be made of wood and other organic materials. These rot quickly in a tropical rainforest, leaving little evidence behind except shards of pottery, terra preta, and unusually productive areas of the forest.

Some of his other histories were less striking to me. His telling of Pizarro’s conquest of the Inca is very similar to how it is presented in Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond (1997). Mesoamerican civilizations were discussed repeatedly, but scattered across the book, not in chronological order, and mixed with stories of his personal experiences. Even though there probably is enough information to provide an outline of the history of the region, it is not organized in a way to make that transparent. I will not summarize either the Inca or Mesoamerica. I also will not summarize his stories about modern archaeologists, which are quite critical of the scientific community.

Despite not having a broad scientific foundation, Mann describes a lot of new science in 1491 . Not all of the claims he presents have reached scientific consensus. That is a challenge of describing new science to the public: some debates are still ongoing. I don’t trust Mann to give an overview of the field and accurately represent the uncertainties therein. But Mann is excellent at taking either one side of the debate or a new scientific consensus and presenting it in a personable way. I enjoyed reading it and expect that you would too.

References [ + ]

1 comment on Book Review of 1491: NEW REVELATIONS OF THE AMERICAS BEFORE COLUMBUS by Charles C. Mann (2005)

This is very thorough – I will admit I didn’t get through the full thing just yet. But so far I have loved your frank feedback on the things you didn’t like. I’m certain that when I get to the praise, it will be equally well thought out and accurate. 🙂 Thanks Chaostician!

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1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus-Book Review

How I chose this book for our South America to the World book club is by what I like to call the result of a book chain effect. When you read a good book, certain authors get mentioned, and curiosity takes its course. Especially in specific topics that you desire to understand better or learn more about it. Our December’s book review “Long Road From Quito: Transforming Healthcare in Rural Latin America” by Tony Hiss led me to Mr. Mann’s book on the Americas.

1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. Shines a new light on everything we thought we knew about the Americas, and its habitants. It is a book full of new information got by professionals on various fields. Historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, ecologists, geographers, epigraphers, and linguists alike. All contributed to the new results used in the book.

Mr. Mann’s cites “Demography, climatology, epidemiology, economics, botany, palynology (pollen analysis); molecular and evolutionary biology; carbon-14 dating, ice-core sampling, satellite photography, and soils assays; genetic microsatellite analysis and virtual 3-D fly-throughs—a torrent of novel perspectives and techniques cascaded into use.” We are left with new knowledge and amazement of previous civilizations.

1491 book explains the advance in scientific research done in the matter. Shifting our pre-conceived ideas, and what we were taught in high school and universities. Mr. Charles C. Mann compiled all this new information in the most extraordinary way. Science plays the main role in all new discoveries presented in the book.

Once again authors make the remark that all we know about older civilizations is based on European chronicles. Mr. Mann established this fact in his book, as Mr. MacQuarrie mentioned in his book our July’s book review “The Last Days of the Incas.”  We can agree that it is bias account. 

1491 book contains three parts in which the author explains to be Indian demography (Part I), Indian origins (Part II), and Indian ecology (Part III) plus coda. It is an ample read. I praise the author for presenting us new historical information in the most engaging and entertaining way. Never a dull part in the book, and it is easy to understand. I have definitely learned a lot from it, which is the most rewarding effect on spending time and money on something.

As I have stated before, a book that starts with a map is a good start, especially in such topic like this. The author presents a map of Native America as it could have been in 1491.

As a Peruvian-American, I am fascinated by what scientists are discovering now. As well as to have a better understanding of what they found before. The author shares a more complete account on the first colonists’ (pilgrims) arrival to North America. There is a more comprehensive narration of what took place on the First Thanksgiving. The influence that Native Americans had on the visitors and so on.

Scientists are coming closer to discovering one of the biggest mysteries of our time. Why or how ancient populations disappear? The Maya culture comes to mind. Also, how was possible for the Spaniards with only over one-hundred men to conquer the Incas? We know the Incas had a bigger army and possessed great military skills; well planned strategies showed by the conquers themselves performed.

This reminds me of our visit to Mesa Verde, to what I refer as, The Machu Picchu of North America. Where we were told the Anasazi people just disappear. There are speculations about it, but this book gives me an idea of what might have happened.

I have a better understanding now of The Three Sisters (maize, beans, and squash) the most efficient way to grow maize established by the Native Americans. Trade was another practice used by these indigenous groups.

The more I read about the history of the Incas, the more I am thrilled by it. To quote the author “In 1491, the Inka ruled the greatest empire on earth. Bigger than Ming Dynasty China, bigger than Ivan the Great’s expanding Russia, bigger than Songhay in the Sahel or powerful Great Zimbabwe in the West Africa tablelands, bigger than the cresting Ottoman Empire, bigger than the Triple Alliance, bigger by far than any European state, the Inka dominion extended over a staggering thirty-two degrees of latitude—as if a single power held sway from St. Petersburg to Cairo.” We have a better understanding now on how they worked. The genius of Pachacutec and his hegemonic empire. The Tawantinsuyo.

Scientist are deciphering the Quipus-Kipus (the ones that the Spaniards didn’t destroy) better now. This system of knots holds more information than previously thought. They now recognize the kipus as a written system. Author’s quote “All known writing systems use instruments to paint or inscribe on flat surfaces. Khipu are three-dimensional arrays of knots.” This, to me, is fascinating. 

The author in his book refers to many cultures, among them the Olmec, the Maya, the Zapotec. And the Adena, and the Hopewell people. He mentioned how Native Americans used the land by burning it. Showing their agricultural skills. They were masters on working the land. Also, Mr. Mann explains the Maya’s calendar. Besides the use of the Christian calendar, they could add to it more. Author’s quote “The Mesoamerica calendar also tied together linear and cyclical time, but more elaborately.”  

This book offers the most comprehensive history on Mesoamerica that I have read. All backed up with new data. Author’s quote “Tenochtitlan dazzled its invaders… Even more astounding that the great temples and immense banners and colorful promenades were the botanical gardens—none existed in Europe.”  Unfortunately for us. The conquerors were the only ones who got to marvel Montezuma’s land in all its splendor. On the other hand, historians were able to find some old accounts on the subject.

On the south he talks about People of Norte Chico, Wari and Tiahuanacu, Chimu, Moche cultures. The Chinchorro and their mummies, the Sumerians. And many artifacts and ruins found. Using cotton in Peru, the Nazca lines , Chavin de Huantar , etc. Also, how Native Americas grew maize with their “millpa” system, and the used of potato by Andean farmers. He analysis how many cultures had influenced others, their trade systems and yes, the use of government.

Something that caught my attention was this, author’s quote “scientists did not confirm the existence of the Great Wall of Peru, a forty-mile stone rampart across the Andes, until the 1930s. And it still has never been fully excavated.” Thinking about it, we can assume that there is still so much to be discovered!

More and more, scientists are leaning toward epidemic diseases, introduced by Europeans. As the main cause of population decline in the Americas. The biggest of them all, smallpox affected the entire continent. It was devastating, for it exposed the susceptibility to the natives. If we add to these, conflict among cultures, and civil wars, the result was the most favorable for conquerors. Two great examples were Cortes, who conquered the Aztec empire. And Pizarro, who conquered the Incas. 

1491 is a controversial book, and it will continue to be so. In part because of some old historians unwilling to accept new results and professional rivalry. The Americas in many respects remains to be a mystery. Thus, scientists are working on it, trying to interpret or decipher old artifacts becomes more extraordinary. We can’t avoid to give credit where credit is due. People from the Americas were more advanced than previously thought. They had great organization skills in government. Possessed military strategy, they were self-reliant; they had laws; they had impressive agricultural skills, built cities, and they were great astronomers. 

This is a book that I would like to keep as a reference book, the amount of information provided is ample. Mr. Mann’s book is without a doubt a book that all interested in ancient civilizations must read. 

– Yanira K. Wise, March, 2020

5 Best Ruins in Peru that are not Machu Picchu

1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann

Long Road From Quito: Transforming Healthcare in Rural Latin America by Tony Hiss.

The Last Days of the Incas by Kim MacQuarrie

Peru 100 by James M. Wise

Do connect with us:

ResearchGate:  James M. Wise  

Author´s page:  James M. Wise

Photography page:  JamesM.Wise.com 

Author´s page:  Yanira K. Wise

South America seems to refuse to show its inexhaustible creative force.

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1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

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