Mann has a very personable writing style. He talks about his travels a lot. He takes you along with him up in helicopters and prop planes that are scouring lush landscapes for signs of human habitation, for signs of civilization hidden right under our eyes. Right from the get go, Mann lets you know that he is going to try to enlighten you, he is going to try to change your mind. The pre-Columbian Americas were not how you thought they were, and they were not even how the most educated and studied anthropologists thought they were either. Mann breaks "1491" up into three parts based around his three central premises. The first is dedicated to evidence that the native populations of the American continents were far more numerous than we have always been taught; the second contends that those populations were far older and more sophisticated than previously believed; and the third argues that these peoples had a much greater impact on their environments than we thought.
But before he can even get to these three points Mann has to tackle a major problem with the way we have all come to think of native populations. He calls it 'Holmberg's Mistake.' In 1940, a student named Allen Holmberg lived among a native population in remote Bolivia. He found that the Siriono' people were as primitive as Western minds can imagine. They had no clothes, no shelters, no written language, no culture, not even any knowledge of how to make fire. He wrote a landmark book ("Nomads of the Longbow") about this primitive people whose entire history miraculously blossomed after encountering Western concepts of narrative history and clothing and fire. This wasn't true at all. The Siriono' people had numbered in the thousands before a series of epidemics reduced their numbers to fewer than 200. The local white cattle ranchers had also allied with the Bolivian Army and wiped out many of the natives who managed to survive the rampant disease. Holmberg hadn't found a culture preserved in time, he had found a population suffering from genocide and catastrophic disease outbreak. But Holmberg had concluded that this must be the way the Siriono' had always been. Mann compares his observations to that of a researcher who might have come across refugees from a Nazi concentration camp and surmising that the Jewish people had always been naked and starving.
Holmberg's big mistake, and yours as well Mann argues, was that he conceived of native peoples as being somehow frozen in time. The way he found them must be the way that they had always been. Holmberg's mistake is the same mistake that Westerners have been making since 1492, and it is a mistake. The cultures that covered the America's before Columbus' arrival were not static, locked in some museum display case, immune to change for eons just awaiting the arrival of white folk. They were dynamic and fluid cultures that affected one another and which were in a constant state of change.
After opening your eyes to this problem, Mann is free to continue making his points. There were lots and lots of people here before Columbus' fateful voyage. In New England alone there were so many people that after John Smith's lieutenant kidnapped several members of the friendly Pautuxent Indian community and they became decidedly hostile to European visitors, the first few attempts to settle the area ended in failure. The settlers were being run off the newly "discovered" continent despite the fact that they were far better organized and much better supplied than the Pilgrims who came a few years later. In fact, in 1605, when Samuel Champlain visited the New England coast to try to establish a French base of operations, he simply could not find any shoreline that wasn't too crowded to land on. At night, the campfires lit the coast as far as the eye could see, and in the the mornings smoke from cooking fires obscured the land from sailors' sight. A short fifteen years later, those same shores were abandoned. Everyone was dead. The first fifty colonial settlements in New England were established in villages that had been emptied by catastrophic disease outbreaks. When Westerners arrived in the 'New World' it wasn't some vast pristine wilderness, it was a ghost town.
Centuries (or eons) of living closely with large domesticated animals (who carried disease) and waves of pandemics spread by contact with Eastern cultures over the Silk Road had inoculated Europeans from a myriad of infectious diseases. These diseases then destroyed untold millions of natives in the Americas. Because the various Indian cultures had all come from the same limited stock of people migrating from Siberia (via land routes or by boat) their lack of genetic diversity and similar mitochondrial DNA made them more vulnerable to new virulent pestilences. These pandemics spread out from any contact with Europeans like tsunamis, far outracing the pace that even the Spanish conquistadors could make. It is possible that these pandemics had a mortality rate of over 90%, and millions upon millions died without ever having seen a European face. Some estimates would rank this as the largest population loss in human history, even greater than the Black Death that killed half of everyone in Europe in 1346. But when Europeans roamed these newly emptied continents, they found few survivors and they assumed, as would Holmberg, that this was how these lands had always been. The New World was sparsely populated so it must have always been sparsely populated. Nothing could be further from the truth.
In fact, Peru alone is as extraordinary a launching pad for cultures as the Fertile Crescent. In 1491 the Inca Empire was the largest on Earth. It spread over all variants of topography and across thousands of feet of altitude. It was interconnected with one unifying spoken and written language as well as 25,000 miles of roads (the greatest road network on the planet). One of the empire's rulers, named Thupa Inca, conquered as much geographic territory as Alexander the Great or Genghis Kahn. Thupa Inca's death set off a civil war whose complexity would shock George RR Martin himself. And then Francisco Pizarro enters the story. The Incan Empire was almost immediately doomed. Sadly, it had only lasted about one hundred years before the Spanish destroyed it. Internal strife and factionalism in the Empire helped the Spanish conquer, but again, disease was the real killer. Mann paraphrases Crosby in "The Colombian Exchange" (add that book to your 'to read' list too, man), "If Genghis Khan had arrived with the Black Death, as Pizarro did with smallpox, this book (and this blog) would not be written in any European language."
Mann then delves into how rich these lost cultures were, how sophisticated they might have been. Not just the Incas, but the Mexica (Aztecs) of the Triple Alliance in Mesoamerica as well. Yes, they engaged in human sacrifice, but the frequency of public deaths was less than that of England or France at the time (adjusting for relative population). So, which culture was the savage and which was the enlightened? The cutting short of the intellectual growth of the burgeoning philosophers in the New World is almost as tragic as the staggering loss of life.These people were quickly becoming as inspired and as influential as any of the ancient Greek or Chinese philosophers. It is truly a pity that minds like Jefferson's and Voltaire's, Locke's and Rousseau's were never allowed to meet with those of the Mexica or Inca schools of philosophy. Who knows where human thinking might be today if they had had that opportunity?
Peru and Mesoamerica join the Fertile Crescent as two of the world's only locations where governments sprang up independently. Everywhere else, they were copied or borrowed from neighbors. After much back and forth, a fragile consensus has emerged in the anthropological community that the Americas may have been peopled 20 or even 30,000 years ago. by contrast, western Europe's massive ice sheets kept them from being populated until about 18,000 years ago and England was empty until 12,500 years ago. The New World might be older than the Old World. In fact, it is entirely possible, according to Mann, that the first civilization on Earth arose on the shores of Peru, and it was not even an agricultural society (sort of). It was a fishing one. They did, however, develop extensive inland farming in order to grow the cotton needed to maintain all those nets and lines that a fishing lifestyle requires. Civilization followed by agriculture flips the anthropological paradigm on its head. It is supposed to be the other way around.
Moving deeper into the agricultural theme, Mann then makes the point that native cultures had a greater impact on the environment than we thought. Hell, maize was pretty much created, for lack of a better term, by those supposedly savage Mesoamericans. Maize cannot exist without humans harvesting and planting it and many humans could not exist without it. The development of this spectacular food (corn has long been your favorite food if you'll remember) allowed for the concurrent rise of multiple complex sister civilizations throughout Central and South America. The Olmecs, Maya, Toltecs, Totonacs, and Zapotecs all based their diets on maize. And when maize was introduced to the rest of the world, it took off like wildfire. In fact, oddly enough, maize is probably responsible for a huge boom in the population of Africa right about the time that Europeans were finding a devastated population in the Americas and wondering where they could find some nice cheap (or even free) labor. Therefore maize may have been responsible for the African slave trade. Regardless, the creation of this incredible food stands alone in the annals of human history. Never before or since have humans, even with our modern knowledge of genetic manipulation, created such a powerful and new organism.
The wild places of the Americas like the Great Plains and the rain forests of the Amazon are not examples of a biosphere in its pristine, untouched condition. They were created by civilizations that are now long gone. The endless expanse of trees covering the Amazon river basin isn't naturally occurring. It is a garden. One cultivated and planted by human beings. For thousands of years now those same humans have even created the very soils that are rich enough to sustain such a colossal area so diverse in life. So much for the idea that native people left no trace of their existence on the land by living with it in perfect harmony. They shaped it in powerful ways and used it to their own ends.
"1491" helped you be able to step back and see human cultural evolution, the rise and fall of civilizations, from a distance. It gave you a more global perspective and freed you from being nestled tight into a purely Western view. You are now better able to see the history of humanity from a planetary, almost alien view. If/when humans ever discover evidence of intelligent life on other worlds it is entirely possible that that alien life will be long gone. How would we view the evolution of the culture(s) on that planet? We certainly wouldn't try to interpret every miraculous cultural advancement through the experience of solely one culture on one random continent. But we do just that here on Earth. "1491" helped you come closer to breaking that habit.
The last chapter, called 'Coda,' makes the point that natives of the American Northeast may have even given the world the idea that true individual liberty was achievable, not in some Utopian world of fantasy or theory, but in this world. Right here and now. Be you a colonial British subject in 18th century America or 20th century India, a subjugated student in Beijing or an oppressed shop keeper in Cairo, do you not owe something to the people once considered savage and uncivilized? Their example was what has inspired generations of revolutions. "1491" closes with this line;
"...everywhere that liberty is cherished... people are children of the Haudenosauncee and their neighbors (in New England). Imagine... somehow meeting a member of (this tribe) from 1491. Is it too much to speculate that beneath the swirling tattoos, asymmetrically trimmed hair, and bedizened robes, you would recognize someone much closer to yourself, at least in certain respects, than your own ancestors?"
Well you certainly do now.
On to the next book!
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