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About This Book
ISBN13: 9781400040063 |
Powells.com Staff Pick
Charles C. Mann has pulled off an impressive feat — a scholarly, thorough
work of history that's almost compulsively readable. In 1491, he summarizes and examines the last thirty years of research into the
pre-Columbian Americas, and
comes to some startling and exciting conclusions. Mann is an enthusiastic and
capable guide, and 1491 is satisfyingly rich with description, anecdote,
and example.
Recommended by Jill, Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
Publisher Comments:
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.
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Synopsis:
About the Author
Table of Contents
Preface
INTRODUCTION / Holmberg’s Mistake
1. A View from Above
PART ONE / Numbers from Nowhere?
2. Why Billington Survived
3. In the Land of Four Quarters
4. Frequently Asked Questions
PART TWO / Very Old Bones
5. Pleistocene Wars
6. Cotton (or Anchovies) and Maize (Tales of Two Civilizations, Part I)
7. Writing, Wheels, and Bucket Brigades (Tales of Two Civilizations, Part II)
PART THREE / Landscape with Figures
8. Made in America
9. Amazonia
10. The Artificial Wilderness
11. The Great Law of Peace
Appendixes
A. Loaded Words
B. Talking Knots
C. The Syphilis Exception
D. Calendar Math
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
From the Hardcover edition.
What Our Readers Are Saying
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Average customer rating based on 2 comments:
-
martola, August 2, 2007 (view all comments by martola)
I'm impressed with the information in this book. I feel very fortunate Charles C. Mann put toghether this information into this book. There's one thing I strongly disagree with Mann on this book-his claim that some Natives prefer to be called Indian instead of "Native Americans" is at most a "stupidaggine" (absurdity) as the that name was concocted by ignorance! The very ignorance of Christoforo Colombo or "Cristobal Colon" who thought he had landed in India. Why do we continue to perpetuate ignorance is unknown to me. Unless, of course, immigrants from other lands now want to claim the title for themselves! I'm sure it wouldn't matter now, they took everything else already from Native Peoples...
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jattrill, January 14, 2007 (view all comments by jattrill)
This is a very readable account of modern thoughts about the Americas in Pre-Colombian times. It argues that the population of the Americas was far larger than conventional historians believe. Several civilizations are thought to have been much further advanced than previously admitted. American Indians are thought to have managed/farmed the habitat of the Midwest and Amazonia through the use of fire and selective breeding of plants to produce a higher than expected proportion of edible nuts and fruit.
I would thoroughly recommend this book to anyone interested in history or travel in the Americas.
View all 2 comments
Product Details
- ISBN:
- 9781400040063
- Subtitle:
- New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
- Author:
- Publisher:
- Alfred A. Knopf
- Subject:
- Americas (North Central South West Indies)
- Subject:
- North American
- Subject:
- Native American
- Subject:
- Antiquities
- Subject:
- Ethnic Studies - Native American Studies
- Subject:
- Expeditions & Discoveries
- Publication Date:
- August 2005
- Binding:
- Hardcover
- Language:
- English
- Illustrations:
- Y
- Pages:
- 480
- Dimensions:
- 9.48x6.60x1.48 in. 1.77 lbs.
