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[books 2016] 1491
Jan. 11th, 2016 09:06 am2. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus by Charles C Mann
A while ago, someone on Facebook linked to an article that had a wealth of resources on the subject of native Americans. This one and its sequel struck me as something I had to read right away.
Through the course of his work, the author, a journalist, found out that most of what he was taught about native Americans and the Americas before Columbus is simply not true. He was then horrified that his son was being taught the same load of lies and decided to do something about it.
In a nutshell, the Americas were populated earlier than is usually thought, the pre-Columbus population was a lot higher than we have been told, and (perhaps most importantly) the landscape was not pristine wilderness but highly and sophisticatedly managed.
The other key fact is that most of the native Americans were wiped out by epidemic disease before Europeans got to them. Pizarro was easily able to defeat the Inca because they were in a state of civil war; that in turn happened because the ruler had died in a smallpox epidemic. If you read accounts of very early explorers they talk about encountering large populations; when the settlers came 100 or 200 years later they found an emptier landscape and wrote off what the original explorers observed as fantasy. Mann details how European weapons and armour weren't really better than the native versions; conquest and settlement were made easier by the fact that most of the European settlers encountered cultures already in crisis.
It opens with an area and culture I'd never even heard of (in what is now Bolivia), which was a good start. There is a lot about the Inca and the various Mesoamerican cultures. I've read a lot about these, but this book is still full of things I didn't know. Because they didn't use the wheel and only used metal for decoration, every book I've read highlights this aspect and therefore sees everything they did achieve as a kind of cute factoid and/or curiosity. Mann emphasizes how advanced and how well adapted these cultures were - I knew the facts about the way the Inca state was run but had somehow never appreciated just what an achievement it was; because it's always been presented as some kind of fluke.
This is not only an important book, it's a really good read. I cannot recommend it highly enough.
A while ago, someone on Facebook linked to an article that had a wealth of resources on the subject of native Americans. This one and its sequel struck me as something I had to read right away.
Through the course of his work, the author, a journalist, found out that most of what he was taught about native Americans and the Americas before Columbus is simply not true. He was then horrified that his son was being taught the same load of lies and decided to do something about it.
In a nutshell, the Americas were populated earlier than is usually thought, the pre-Columbus population was a lot higher than we have been told, and (perhaps most importantly) the landscape was not pristine wilderness but highly and sophisticatedly managed.
The other key fact is that most of the native Americans were wiped out by epidemic disease before Europeans got to them. Pizarro was easily able to defeat the Inca because they were in a state of civil war; that in turn happened because the ruler had died in a smallpox epidemic. If you read accounts of very early explorers they talk about encountering large populations; when the settlers came 100 or 200 years later they found an emptier landscape and wrote off what the original explorers observed as fantasy. Mann details how European weapons and armour weren't really better than the native versions; conquest and settlement were made easier by the fact that most of the European settlers encountered cultures already in crisis.
It opens with an area and culture I'd never even heard of (in what is now Bolivia), which was a good start. There is a lot about the Inca and the various Mesoamerican cultures. I've read a lot about these, but this book is still full of things I didn't know. Because they didn't use the wheel and only used metal for decoration, every book I've read highlights this aspect and therefore sees everything they did achieve as a kind of cute factoid and/or curiosity. Mann emphasizes how advanced and how well adapted these cultures were - I knew the facts about the way the Inca state was run but had somehow never appreciated just what an achievement it was; because it's always been presented as some kind of fluke.
This is not only an important book, it's a really good read. I cannot recommend it highly enough.
