1491
2005
- origin
- nature
- indians
- antiquities
- nyt:paperback_nonfiction=2011-07-23
- history
- nonfiction
- long now manual for civilization
- civilization
- native americans
The story
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 Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital--were far greater in population than any contemporary European city. Furthermore, Tenochtitlan, 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
What it’s like
Dense but unhurried, a book that reads like a well-organised tour through time and terrain: sober chapters of archaeological findings, maps, and the careful reasoning behind each claim, with a journalist's curiosity about the scientists doing the digging. Its sensory world is the Americas before 1492 as the evidence reconstructs it: the orderly grid of a lakeside Aztec capital, cornfields bred over millennia, rainforest gardens thick with managed plants, rivers and plazas glimpsed through excavation trenches and pollen cores. The voice is clear, conversational and wry, with the pleasure of a good argument being won by evidence. Its tone is intellectual and quietly revisionist, more excited than mournful, though the later chapters carry the weight of what disease and conquest erased. There is no graphic violence; the harshest material is the historical record of epidemics and the displacement that followed, handled with restraint. It suits a slow weekend afternoon, a long train ride, or reading in small sittings with a notebook nearby. It is for readers who enjoy history rebuilt from the ground up, and for anyone who wants to see a familiar story reframed.
More books like 1491
Closest in mood, pacing and theme. Tell us why you loved 1491and we’ll explain which ones fit you.
