1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus Author: | Language: English | ISBN:
B000BD3CSS | Format: PDF
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus Description
Based on the latest scientific findings, this breakthrough book argues that most of what we thought we knew about the Americas before Columbus was wrong.
In the last 20 years, archaeologists and anthropologists equipped with new scientific techniques have made far-reaching discoveries about the Americas. For example, Indians did not cross the Bering Strait 12,000 years ago, as most of us learned in school. They were already here. Their numbers were vast, not few. And instead of living lightly on the land, they managed it beautifully and left behind an enormous ecological legacy.
In this riveting, accessible work of science, Charles Mann takes us on an enthralling journey of scientific exploration. We learn that the Indian development of modern corn was one of the most complex feats of genetic engineering ever performed. That the Great Plains are a third smaller today than they were in 1700 because the Indians who maintained them by burning died. And that the Amazon rain forest may be largely a human artifact.
Compelling and eye-opening, this book has the potential to vastly alter our understanding of our history and change the course of today's environmental disputes.
- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 11 hours and 20 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Abridged
- Publisher: HighBridge Company
- Audible.com Release Date: September 9, 2005
- Language: English
- ASIN: B000BD3CSS
Although recent years have yielded significant progress in understanding how "Indians" lived throughout the Americas before 1492 and Columbus, only isolated bits of the story have reached the popular press. Far too many people still hold to one of two myths of the Indians, or have little conception at all of pre-Columbian America.
The first popular myth is that the Indians were a bunch of primitive savages just keeping the land warm until superior Europeans showed up. It's sad to read reviews here that assert that because Indians used stone tools they were therefore "stone age", with the implication that their culture was no further advanced than that early period.
The second myth makes the Indians into proto-flower-children, naively and simply in tune with their environment.
Both myths are based on stereotyping and are condescending to the pre-Colombians. How could people spread over two continents and many millennia be briefly summarized? They can't be! The Americas saw the development of a broad range of cultures, just like every other inhabited area of the world. Some cultures overstressed their environment and soon collapsed. Others created stable conditions under which they could survive for generations. (Which is not the same as saying they didn't impact nature.) But even the latter could be brought down by climate change, political instability, disease (especially European), or contact with outsiders (Indian or European).
Great cities arose in mesoamerica and the Andes, and also in other areas when the right conditions prevailed. And sophisticated cultures existed even where city building wasn't favored.
This book takes the reader through a vibrant overview of centuries of Indian culture both before and shortly after Columbus landed.
This is a highly readable and informative compendium of current knowledge on the Americas prior to Columbian contact. Charles Mann has gathered modern research into an engaging narrative that offers updates on old theories, bold new theories that often contradict the old ones, and a fair amount of useful speculation on what was really happening in the ancient Americas. The speculative parts of this book will turn off serious historians (plus those with political, academic, or ethnic agendas, as can be seen in some of the more condescending reviews here), but the speculation offers plenty of food for thought, and Mann has mostly just channeled the exploratory ideas of his sources. In any case, such explorations are grounded in at least partially corroborated findings by modern archeologists, anthropologists, linguists, and experts in other fields, and Mann has made extensive use of legitimate sources both old and new. In fact, his bibliography will provide the enthusiast with reading material for years to come.
In addition to increasing the reader's knowledge of little-covered Native American societies such as the Cahokians and several pre-Inka South American kingdoms, the main running contention in this book is not necessarily historical but ecological. There is growing evidence that Indians throughout the hemisphere did not live in a timeless and static communion with nature, which is a common "green" stereotype. Instead, the majority of native populations actively engineered their landscapes and altered their local ecologies to better suit human needs, though this usually (but not always) resulted in long-term mutual benefits for nature and man, rather than the dead-end destruction resulting from Western methods.
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