Is '1491: New Revelations Of The Americas Before Columbus' Accurate?

While reading ‘1491’, I was frequently impressed by the author’s tireless efforts to bring sound and accurate journalism to more complex and highly-respected academic work. A notable area in which he succeeds is in presenting what he knows to be true, what he suspects to be true and what he guesses to be true. The sections on estimating past populations were most successful, and drew on no fewer than three disciplines: epidemiology, climatology and soil science to tease out the strongest available evidence that the pre-contact populations of indigenous peoples were, in fact, far greater than had previously been estimated.

One of the strongest aspects of ‘1491’ is its handling of difficult and controversial subjects, especially the topic of pre-Columbian urbanization in the Amazon. The book considers various historical accounts of different settlements, and discusses the different archaeological theories for various sites. While acknowledging that there is currently not enough evidence to reach a definitive conclusion for some of these sites, Mann clearly outlines the strongest evidence to support any given theory or account.

My views have also changed by the time that later editions of 1491 appeared, in part because of all the underwater archaeological evidence for pre-Columbian villages along coastlines of South America as well as early agriculture research into the advantages of Three Sisters methods of crops such as corn, beans and squash versus more European-style single crop plant monocultures.

I highly recommend A History of the World to Anyone interested in pre-Columbian history. This book is one of the most, if not most, groundbreaking on the subject. It is based on decades of archaeological and anthropological research and is masterfully written to convey a great deal of information within a relatively small space. This book dissuades readers of the stereotype that the pre-Columbian Americas were a thinly populated wilderness. Instead, there were complex agrarian communities of great size and sophistication in terms of architecture and management of their environment via practices such as controlled burns and terraforming, or even_create_/management of landscape features. Mann is meticulously careful to note the source of the research upon which he draws in the form of hundreds of peer-reviewed articles and/or personal interviews with leading academics in relevant fields. Although some points of minute detail may be subject to minor dispute amongst experts, there is no question that Native peoples established highly complex, sophisticated civilizations long prior to the arrival of Columbus and the Europeans that would follow in his wake. As Mann notes, for example, the pre-Columbian city of Cahokia was a enormous metropolis featuring the remains of many pyramidic structures. Such findings regarding the massive pre-Columbian city of Cahokia are corroborated by current archaeological digs at the site. Moreover, the book makes sense of how Native peoples of the pre-Columbian New World would have managed to develop their environments via using practices such as controlled burns and terraforming in order to create a variety of built features and manage their natural surroundings in highly sophisticated ways that have been confirmed by the most up-to-date studies in modern ecology.

I was a friendly reader checkng out many of Mann’s sources for a chapter on Native American land management practices. I was amazed to learn that much of what Europeans called “untouched nature” had actually been cultivated by Native Americans. Forest composition and fire ecology studies in recent years have actually backed up Mann’s descriptions of how Native Americans used to burn down forests in order to create very productive ecosystems. The Inca road system described by Mann is still very much there today to hike along in the Andes, it is incredibly impressive, in my opinion even more so than the Roman road system.

Overall, Mann does a great job of showing that indigenous peoples had technology that Europeans did not. The chapter on pre-Columbian metallurgy shows impressive control of gold and copper, for example. And the chapter on the Amazon shows that indigenous peoples were capable of creating very rich soils, which are still in use today. While some historians might argue that Mann is too high in his estimates of the pre-contact populations of the New World, most historians would agree with him that the pre-contact populations were larger than commonly stated in textbooks. The evidence of disease transmission history supports this.