1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann (PDF)

Description

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A groundbreaking work of science, history, and archaeology that radically alters our understanding of the Americas before the arrival of Columbus in 1492—from “a remarkably engaging writer” (The New York Times Book Review). Contrary to what so many Americans learn in school, the pre-Columbian Indians were not sparsely settled in a pristine wilderness; rather, there were huge numbers of Indians who actively molded and influenced the land around them. The astonishing Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan had running water and immaculately clean streets, and was larger than any contemporary European city. Mexican cultures created corn in a specialized breeding process that it has been called man’s first feat of genetic engineering. Indeed, Indians were not living lightly on the land but were landscaping and manipulating their world in ways that we are only now beginning to understand. Challenging and surprising, this a transformative new look at a rich and fascinating world we only thought we knew.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review “A journalistic masterpiece.”—The New York Review of Books“Marvelous…. A sweeping portrait of human life in the Americas before the arrival of Columbus…. A remarkably engaging writer.”—The New York Times Book Review “Fascinating…. A landmark of a book that drops ingrained images of colonial American into the dustbin, one after the other.”—The Boston Globe“A ripping, man-on-the-ground tour of a world most of us barely intuit…. An exhilarating shift in perspective…. 1491 erases our myth of a wilderness Eden. It replaces that fallacy with evidence of a different genesis, exciting and closer to true.”—The Cleveland Plain Dealer“Mann tells a powerful, provocative and important story…. 1491 vividly compels us to re-examine how we teach the ancient history of the Americas and how we live with the environmental consequences of colonization.”—The Washington Post Book World“Engagingly written and utterly absorbing…. Part detective story, part epic and part tragedy.”—The Miami Herald“Provocative…. A Jared Diamond-like volley that challenges prevailing thinking about global development. Mann has chronicled an important shift in our vision of world development, one out young children could end up studying in their text books when they reach junior high.”—San Francisco Chronicle“Marvelous…. A revelation…. Our concept of pure wilderness untouched by grubby human hands must now be jettisoned.”—The New York Sun“Monumental…. Mann slips in so many fresh, new interpretations of American history that it all adds up to a deeply subversive work.”—Salon“Concise and brilliantly entertaining…. Reminiscent of John McPhee’s eloquence with scientific detail.”—Los Angeles Times About the Author CHARLES C. MANN, a correspondent for The Atlantic, Science, and Wired, has written for Fortune, The New York Times, Smithsonian, Technology Review, Vanity Fair, and The Washington Post, as well as for the TV network HBO and the series Law & Order. A three-time National Magazine Award finalist, he is the recipient of writing awards from the American Bar Association, the American Institute of Physics, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the Lannan Foundation. His 1491 won the National Academies Communication Award for the best book of the year. He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Why Billington SurvivedTHE FRIENDLY INDIANOn March 22, 1621, an official Native American delegation walked through what is now southern New England to negotiate with a group of foreigners who had taken over a recently deserted Indian settlement. At the head of the party was an uneasy triumvirate: Massasoit, the sachem (political-military leader) of the Wampanoag confederation, a loose coalition of several dozen villages that controlled most of what is now southeastern Massachusetts; Samoset, sachem of an allied group to the north; and Tisquantum, a distrusted captive, whom Massasoit had reluctantly brought along as an interpreter.Massasoit was an adroit politician, but the dilemma he faced would have tested Machiavelli. About five years before, most of his subjects had fallen before a terrible calamity. Whole villages had been depopulated—indeed, the foreigners ahead now occupied one of the empty sites. It was all he could do to hold together the remnants of his people. Adding to his problems, the disaster had not touched the Wampanoag’s longtime enemies, the Narragansett alliance to the west. Soon, Massasoit feared, they would take advantage of the Wampanoag’s weakness and overrun them.Desperate threats require desperate countermeasures. In a gamble, Massasoit intended to abandon, even reverse, a long-standing policy. Europeans had been visiting New England for at least a century. Shorter than the natives, oddly dressed, and often unbearably dirty, the pallid foreigners had peculiar blue eyes that peeped out of the masks of bristly, animal-like hair that encased their faces. They were irritatingly garrulous, prone to fits of chicanery, and often surprisingly incompetent at what seemed to Indians like basic tasks. But they also made useful and beautiful goods—copper kettles, glittering colored glass, and steel knives and hatchets—unlike anything else in New England. Moreover, they would exchange these valuable items for cheap furs of the sort used by Indians as blankets. It was like happening upon a dingy kiosk that would swap fancy electronic goods for customers’ used socks—almost anyone would be willing to overlook the shopkeeper’s peculiarities.Over time, the Wampanoag, like other native societies in coastal New England, had learned how to manage the European presence. They encouraged the exchange of goods, but would only allow their visitors to stay ashore for brief, carefully controlled excursions. Those who overstayed their welcome were forcefully reminded of the limited duration of Indian hospitality. At the same time, the Wampanoag fended off Indians from the interior, preventing them from trading directly with the foreigners. In this way the shoreline groups put themselves in the position of classic middlemen, overseeing both European access to Indian products and Indian access to European products. Now Massasoit was visiting a group of British with the intent of changing the rules. He would permit the newcomers to stay for an unlimited time—provided that they formally allied with the Wampanoag against the Narragansett.Tisquantum, the interpreter, had shown up alone at Massasoit’s home a year and a half before. He spoke fluent English, because he had lived for several years in Britain. But Massasoit didn’t trust him. He seems to have been in Massasoit’s eyes a man without anchor, out for himself. In a conflict, Tisquantum might even side with the foreigners. Massasoit had kept Tisquantum in a kind of captivity since his arrival, monitoring his actions closely. And he refused to use him to negotiate with the colonists until he had another, independent means of communication with them.That March Samoset—the third member of the triumvirate—appeared, having hitched a ride from his home in Maine on an English ship that was plying the coast. Not known is whether his arrival was due to chance or if Massasoit had asked him to come down because he had picked up a few English phrases by trading with the British. In any case, Massasoit first had sent Samoset, rather than Tisquantum, to the foreigners.Samoset had walked unaccompanied and unarmed into the circle of rude huts in which the British were living on March 17, 1621. The colonists saw a robust, erect-postured man wearing only a loincloth; his straight black hair was shaved in front but flowed down his shoulders behind. To their further amazement, this almost naked man greeted them in broken but understandable English. He left the next morning with a few presents. A day later he came back, accompanied by five “tall proper men”—the phrase is the colonist Edward Winslow’s—with three-inch black stripes painted down the middle of their faces. The two sides talked inconclusively, each warily checking out the other, for a few hours. Five days later, on the 22nd, Samoset showed up again at the foreigners’ ramshackle base, this time with Tisquantum. Meanwhile Massasoit and the rest of the Indian company waited out of sight.Samoset and Tisquantum spoke with the colonists for about an hour. Perhaps they then gave a signal. Or perhaps Massasoit was simply following a schedule. In any case, he and the rest of the Indian party appeared without warning at the crest of a hill on the south bank of the creek that ran through Patuxet. Alarmed by Massasoit’s sudden entrance, the settlers withdrew to the hill on the opposite bank, where they had emplaced their few cannons behind a half-finished stockade. A standoff ensued.Finally Winslow exhibited the decisiveness that later led to his selection as colony governor. Wearing a full suit of armor and carrying a sword, he waded through the stream and offered himself as a hostage. Tisquantum, who walked with him, served as interpreter. Massasoit’s brother took charge of Winslow and then Massasoit crossed the water himself followed by Tisquantum and twenty of Massasoit’s men, all ostentatiously unarmed. The colonists took the sachem to an unfinished house and gave him some cushions to recline on. Both sides shared some of the foreigners’ homemade moonshine, then settled down to talk, Tisquantum translating.To the colonists, Massasoit could be distinguished from his subjects more by manner than by dress or ornament. He wore the same deerskin shawls and leggings and like his fellows had covered his face with bug-repelling oil and reddish-purple dye. Around his neck hung a pouch of tobacco, a long knife, and a thick chain of the prized white shell beads called wampum. In appearance, Winslow wrote afterward, he was “a very lusty man, in his best years, an able body, grave of countenance, and spare of speech.” The Europeans, who had barely survived the previous winter, were in much worse shape. Half of the original colony now lay underground beneath wooden markers painted with death’s heads; most of the survivors were malnourished.Their meeting was a critical moment in American history. The foreigners called their colony Plymouth; they themselves were the famous Pilgrims.* As schoolchildren learn, at that meeting the Pilgrims obtained the services of Tisquantum, usually known as “Squanto.” In the 1970s, when I attended high school, a popular history text was America: Its People and Values, by Leonard C. Wood, Ralph H. Gabriel, and Edward L. Biller. Nestled among colorful illustrations of colonial life was a succinct explanation of Tisquantum’s role:A friendly Indian named Squanto helped the colonists. He showed them how to plant corn and how to live on the edge of the wilderness. A soldier, Captain Miles Standish, taught the Pilgrims how to defend themselves against unfriendly Indians.My teacher explained that maize was unfamiliar to the Pilgrims and that Tisquantum had demonstrated the proper maize-planting technique—sticking the seed in little heaps of dirt, accompanied by beans and squash that would later twine themselves up the tall stalks. And he told the Pilgrims to fertilize the soil by burying fish alongside the maize seeds, a traditional native technique for producing a bountiful harvest. Following this advice, my teacher said, the colonists grew so much maize that it became the centerpiece of the first Thanksgiving. In our slipshod fashion, we students took notes.The story in America: Its People and Values isn’t wrong, so far as it goes. But the impression it gives is entirely misleading.Tisquantum was critical to the colony’s survival, contemporary scholars agree. He moved to Plymouth after the meeting and spent the rest of his life there. Just as my teacher said, Tisquantum told the colonists to bury several small fish in each maize hill, a procedure followed by European settlers for the next two centuries. Squanto’s teachings, Winslow concluded, led to “a good increase of Indian corn”—the difference between success and starvation.Winslow didn’t know that fish fertilizer may not have been an age-old Indian custom, but a recent invention—if it was an Indian practice at all. So little evidence has emerged of Indians fertilizing with fish that some archaeologists believe that Tisquantum actually picked up the idea from European farmers. The notion is not as ridiculous as it may seem. Tisquantum had learned English because British sailors had kidnapped him seven years before. To return to the Americas, he in effect had to escape twice—once from Spain, where his captors initially sold him into slavery, and once from England, to which he was smuggled from Spain, and where he served as a kind of living conversation piece at a rich man’s house. In his travels, Tisquantum stayed in places where Europeans used fish as fertilizer, a practice on the Continent since medieval times.Skipping over the complex course of Tisquantum’s life is understandable in a textbook with limited space. But the omission is symptomatic of the complete failure to consider Indian motives, or even that Indians might have motives. The alliance Massasoit negotiated with Plymouth was successful from the Wampanoag perspective, for it helped to hold off the Narragansett. But it was a disaster from the point of view of New England Indian society as a whole, for the alliance ensured the survival of Plymouth colony, which spearheaded the great wave of British immigration to New England. All of this was absent not only from my high school textbooks, but from the academic accounts they were based on.This variant of Holmberg’s Mistake dates back to the Pilgrims themselves, who ascribed the lack of effective native resistance to the will of God. “Divine providence,” the colonist Daniel Gookin wrote, favored “the quiet and peaceable settlement of the English.” Later writers tended to attribute European success not to European deities but to European technology. In a contest where only one side had rifles and cannons, historians said, the other side’s motives were irrelevant. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Indians of the Northeast were thought of as rapidly fading background details in the saga of the rise of the United States—“marginal people who were losers in the end,” as James Axtell of the College of William and Mary dryly put it in an interview. Vietnam War–era denunciations of the Pilgrims as imperialist or racist simply replicated the error in a new form. Whether the cause was the Pilgrim God, Pilgrim guns, or Pilgrim greed, native losses were foreordained; Indians could not have stopped colonization, in this view, and they hardly tried.Beginning in the 1970s, Axtell, Neal Salisbury, Francis Jennings, and other historians grew dissatisfied with this view. “Indians were seen as trivial, ineffectual patsies,” Salisbury, a historian at Smith College, told me. “But that assumption—a whole continent of patsies—simply didn’t make sense.” These researchers tried to peer through the colonial records to the Indian lives beneath. Their work fed a tsunami of inquiry into the interactions between natives and newcomers in the era when they faced each other as relative equals. “No other field in American history has grown as fast,” marveled Joyce Chaplin, a Harvard historian, in 2003.The fall of Indian societies had everything to do with the natives themselves, researchers argue, rather than being religiously or technologically determined. (Here the claim is not that indigenous cultures should be blamed for their own demise but that they helped to determine their own fates.) “When you look at the historical record, it’s clear that Indians were trying to control their own destinies,” Salisbury said. “And often enough they succeeded”—only to learn, as all peoples do, that the consequences were not what they expected.This chapter and the next will explore how two different Indian societies, the Wampanoag and the Inka, reacted to the incursions from across the sea. It may seem odd that a book about Indian life before contact should devote space to the period after contact, but there are reasons for it. First, colonial descriptions of Native Americans are among the few glimpses we have of Indians whose lives were not shaped by the presence of Europe. The accounts of the initial encounters between Indians and Europeans are windows into the past, even if the glass is smeared and distorted by the chroniclers’ prejudices and misapprehensions.Second, although the stories of early contact—the Wampanoag with the British, the Inka with the Spanish—are as dissimilar as their protagonists, many archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians have recently come to believe that they have deep commonalities. And the tales of other Indians’ encounters with the strangers were alike in the same way. From these shared features, researchers have constructed what might be thought of as a master narrative of the meeting of Europe and America. Although it remains surprisingly little known outside specialist circles, this master narrative illuminates the origins of every nation in the Americas today. More than that, the effort to understand events after Columbus shed unexpected light on critical aspects of life before Columbus. Indeed, the master narrative led to such surprising conclusions about Native American societies before the arrival of Europeans that it stirred up an intellectual firestorm.COMING OF AGE IN THE DAWNLANDConsider Tisquantum, the “friendly Indian” of the textbook. More than likely Tisquantum was not the name he was given at birth. In that part of the Northeast, tisquantum referred to rage, especially the rage of manitou, the world-suffusing spiritual power at the heart of coastal Indians’ religious beliefs. When Tisquantum approached the Pilgrims and identified himself by that sobriquet, it was as if he had stuck out his hand and said, Hello, I’m the Wrath of God. No one would lightly adopt such a name in contemporary Western society. Neither would anyone in seventeenth-century indigenous society. Tisquantum was trying to project something.Tisquantum was not an Indian. True, he belonged to that category of people whose ancestors had inhabited the Western Hemisphere for thousands of years. And it is true that I refer to him as an Indian, because the label is useful shorthand; so would his descendants, and for much the same reason. But “Indian” was not a category that Tisquantum himself would have recognized, any more than the inhabitants of the same area today would call themselves “Western Hemisphereans.” Still less would Tisquantum have claimed to belong to “Norumbega,” the label by which most Europeans then referred to New England. (“New England” was coined only in 1616.) As Tisquantum’s later history made clear, he regarded himself first and foremost as a citizen of Patuxet, a shoreline settlement halfway between what is now Boston and the beginning of Cape Cod.Patuxet was one of the dozen or so settlements in what is now eastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island that comprised the Wampanoag confederation. In turn, the Wampanoag were part of a tripartite alliance with two other confederations: the Nauset, which comprised some thirty groups on Cape Cod; and the Massachusett, several dozen villages clustered around Massachusetts Bay. All of these people spoke variants of Massachusett, a member of the Algonquian language family, the biggest in eastern North America at the time. (Massachusett was the name both of a language and of one of the groups that spoke it.) In Massachusett, the name for the New England shore was the Dawnland, the place where the sun rose. The inhabitants of the Dawnland were the People of the First Light. Read more

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Highlights of the dark ages were the Spanish Arabs and the Byzantine. A people that were partly protected from the Germanic barbarians of the dark ages by the Byzantines was the Venitians. They’d go on to dominate the second half of the dark ages(from 1000 A.d to about 1500 A.D. Part of what happened was the Byzantine’s were overrun by the Turks in the mid 1400s. Now, if you wanted to get silk and spices from the mysterious east, you needed to pay crazy amount of money or find another way. The Europeans found another way. – find the Aristotle quote and note it here – I think I’ve noted it in my finite and infinite write up.I’ve put up pictures of the Haglia Sophia before, but why not show it again? I’ll just say watch John Romer’s Testament episode 6 I do believe for good video of the inside and outside of the Haglia Sophia. He goes straight up the outside doors and knocks on them . . . and opens them up! It’s like something out of the ‘Lord of the Rings”!How about a Venice picture,When the Portuguese, Spanish, English and French went west, they found a world of riches. This wealth essentially made Venice a relic of the past. A measure of the fame and former power of the Venicians was when Gasper Corte-Real found Venician swords and jewelry on some of the Natives that he captured! This was in 1501, just a few years after Chritopher Columbuses successful voyages.Lots of things happened, lots of discoveries at this time of course. Even my writeup about rivers throughout human history doesn’t cover it all! That kind of covers a good amount of the great voyages that happened back then. I can’t help noting Tisquantum, Samoset and Massasoit. These three met what were called the Pilgrims around 1600 A.D.(a hundred years after lots of Spanish and Portuguese exploration had already been done). The Pilgrims first went to Denmark. But they left there because those people were too free thinking for their taste. So, they packed their bags and went all the way across the ocean to practice their Puritan religion. Their descendents went through the Salem witch trials.Tisquantum led a remarkable life. Tisquantum met other explorers after the Puritans. A Thomas Hunt captured him. Thomas Hunt was a kind of lieutenant of a John Smith, of Pocahontus fame. Thomas Hunt took Tisquantum all the way to Europe and back where he died of plague from the Europeans.As it turns out, plagues brought by the Europeans seem to be the major culprit for how the Europeans conquered the Americas comparatively easily. One recent remarkable revelation about this is the Native American’s lack of immune system may be due to a cometary Impact tens of thousands of years ago. The impact removed lots of animals that would have carried and spread viruses.One remarkable story of some of the great Native American empires conquered supposedly by one man army Europeans was a Spaniard Francisco Pizarro. Pizarro reportedly conquered the Inca around 1533 A.D. Maybe he did; but, he conquered a substantially weakened Inca empire. Pizarro was killed in a political assassination and power struggle. But, natives buried his remains in a Roman Catholic church that still stands to this day. Here’s the outside of the Cathedral of LimaToday, the scientific exploration of both the great European discoveries of the America and who and how the Native Americans got there is a rapidly shifting field. There’s no firm conclusions to be drawn. Everyone has a theory . . . Asians, ten lost tribes of Israel(which helped found the Christian sect of Mormons; it’s in their book of Mormon), Egyptians, the people from the lost city of Atlantis. One remarkable possibility though has been the boat conjecture.For the longest time, people assumed the Native Americans came across the Bering straight into North America. But, people argue that some of the 30,000 year old finds in South America suggest those people could not have gotten through all that wilderness in so fast a time. How could they have done it? The remarkable revelation here is by boat! Recently, I’ve posted about the remarkable Indonisian cave paintings to like 40,000 years ago. People would have had to boat from Asia to Indonesia, and as everyone knows, the Australians also would have had to boat to get there as well! So, the boat suggestion has plausibility, and in my opinion is a great revelation of contempory scientific understanding of Human history and of how Native Americans got to the Americas.Remarkably, when the Europeans found the Americas, it didn’t dawn on them that this was a challenge to their religion. Does the bible mention anything about the Americas and Native Americans? That they know nothing of their religion. If they knew nothing of Christianity, wouldn’t that suggest something to the Europeans? It never dawned on 99.99 percent of them. They just went about trying to convert them. The technologies and science that are similar and dissimilar to one another are some of the real revelations of the discovery of the Americas(the fact that Jesus Christ was not known to the Native Americans should have been, but anyways).Ecologists have argued that ecological diversity was of major importance of the founding of civilization. They argue that Mesopotamia was an ecologicaly diverse area. As Jared Diamond(through Charles Mann’s “1491”) says, “a wide ranger of altitudes and topographies within a short distance”. The fertile crescent has mountains in Iran and the Dead Sea, and the lowest places on the Earth bracket the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Another place is Peru, where going from mountain to sea has 20 of the the worlds 34 major types of environment. Down there arose a variety of cultures. They ultimately led to the Inca. Another interesting diverse area was Oaxica a little bit higher in contemporary Mexico. This area originated Maize, or corn.The area had a diversity of people who grew Maize in a great variety of colors.Maize appears to have been a genetic engineering effort of the peoples of the Oaxica. Today’s scientific thinkers would initially recoil from such an idea. They’d note that Gregory Mendel in the mid 1800s came up with the idea of genetics. But, if you learn about what he did, you might think, hey? This is a simple experiment he did; why could’t some cultures thousands of years ago have done such simple things? Well yea. This is kind of like why didn’t Archimedes think of the place value system for numbers? Why didn’t the Greeks think to apply their deductive logic to numbers and algebra like they did to Geometry? This really comes to show that the cultural upbringing of a person influences what he innovates, and that every theorem is a precious thing because people innovate based on what’s in their heads at a given time. It also suggests that taking the general viewpoint, philosophicaly/spiritiually is valuable for figuring out nature(everything in it, including humanity). I’ve struggled to say this in this blog! So, the discovery of Maize in the America was a great discovery. It spread all up and down North and South America. All Native Americans cherished Maize. They made their religion say they were made from Maize. One of the most mysterious Native American cultures were the Olmecs. They arose shortly after Maize was created.The earliest we know of them so far is that of 1800 B.C. Within three centuries, San Lorenzo was built. San Lorenzo was destroyed around 1200 B.C. which is why all those gigantic heads are found dispersed all over the place. That’s how far back in time those gigantic heads go! A La Venta and the last of the Olmecs was destroyed around 350 B.C. I’m not going to speculate too much on why the Olmecs fell. I’ve mentioned the reason those great heads are dispersed. Seeing those heads and realizing how far back they date is enough to suggest how great of a civilization they were. Charles Mann, in his 1491, says they figured out Venus and retrograde motion. I’m not sure how they know that.Everyone knows the great architecture of the Aztecs, Maya, and Inca. I don’t want to dwell on that. The Inca had another most remarkable science/technology in their language. It consisted of ropes and knots in them. In fact, it was a binary number language. I had suggested early on in this blog that maybe language gets its ability to swap words around by mathematics. That mathematics came first before natural language. I later tried to laugh it off; but, remarkably, the recent scientific studies of Native Americans history shows the Inca language was mathematical! Unfortunately, they were a comparative late and fleeting(two hundred years) culture. Still, it’s a tantalizing piece of empirical evidence.Another remarkable science/technology of the Native Americans was the use of fire. An ecological understanding of plants shows there’s what’s called ‘succession plants.’ Because of natural disasters, there’s plants that have evolved to go into destroyed ecosystems to prepare the way for later plants to get the ecosystem going again. If there were no disasters, these plants would go extinct. Native Americans, and in particular the South American rain forest cultures(including the Maya), found that the use of fire allowed them to take advantage of this succession plants and shape the Rain forests . . . ! Instead of domesticating animals, they influenced where animals would go by the use of fire to shape ecosystems. This was done in the North Americas. In the South Americas, the use of fire was used to influence which fruiting plants they wanted to grow naturally. This is one major example of the great things we can learn about changing cultural lifestyles to be more ecologically friendly.Another remarkable technology that still hasn’t been taken advantage of much is tension architecture. Much is made of how the Native Americans never innovated the wheel. This is kind of an example of what people innovate depends on their cultureal upbringing. But, this is more geological influence. The Native Americans knew about circles and wheels, but their environment generally had no practial use for it. The science/technologies innovated by the New and Old world wasn’t because one was dumber than the other.In the old world(Europe, Africa and the Orient), the major architectural innovation was the arch. This Roman aqueduct is in SpainThe arch and even the post/lintel are compression archtecture based. There’s some small examples of arches in Maya temples, but they were not extensive; you’d have to look hard to find the small examples. What the Native Americans appear to have innovated was tension technologies. I don’t know of any extant example of this. They used rope and cotton to make their boats and houses and bridges and so on. But, this made me pull out an old Scientific American and finally read an article I always meant to read! It was the January 1998 issue, and Tensigrity was the cover page article.I don’t want to get into all the biological insights that tensigrity reveals; just the definitions. Tensigrity has both tensional and compressional elements. Only the stress parts are separated from the compression components. The compression and tensional members are like dual to one another, the compressional members are compressed by the tensional members, and tensional members are pulled by the compressional members. So, if an elements is taken out, all structural members, whether compression or tensional take up the forces that former member once held. All the members feel all the forces all the others feel. All the forces are balanced out. I’m thinking this can be a new way of understanding self-organisation in both natural and technologies. How does something self-assemble when a member is taken out?I start out my write up with examples of Tensigrity pictures . . . !I end this with a great Native American quote!”He goes his way singing, offering flowers.And his words rain downLike jade and quetzal plumes.Is this what pleases the Giver of Life?Is that the only truth on earth?” – Ayocuan CuetzpaltzinThe Native Americans struggled with the same problems Plato did in understanding truth in a changing world. This piece of Native American poetry broke the philosphical problem. One can’t understand it without knowing the cultural meaning of the words.Flowers and song meant poetry, the highest art. ‘jade and quetzal feathers’ meant ‘gold and silver.’ The song of the bird stood for aesthetic inspiration. The poetry suggests there’s a time when mankind can touch truth of our fleeting lives; that time is the moment of creation. Here artistic creation. Right when Native Americans made this cultural breakthrough to valueing intellectual persuits, Christopher Columbus succeeded in finding lands west of the old world. This launched a rush of exploration from the Europeans. By historical accident, plagues affected them more than the Europeans. Well, there’s still indians here. One Native American architecture Charles Mann fails to mention in his 1491 book is a Native American Stonehenge and the Anasazi of the Arizona, New Mexico . . . Chico Canyon in general.

⭐Charles C. Mann’s book, 1491, provides us with an eye opener about the pre-Columbus populations of the North and South America. It is not an easy read: it is very detailed and well researched with references to critical scientific studies. It is not a chronological or systematic account, and this makes the book somewhat disjointed. Mann’s main intents were to examine Indian demography, Indian origins and Indian ecology.In my opinion, he is not successful in the first objective of describing Indian demography. However, I doubt there are enough research available to tackle this objective. They may never be enough research as there were multiple occupations of land by unknown populations throughout the period from the first arrivals of the peoples loosely described as Indians to the present day. Also, the populations were dynamic, growing and shrinking depending on the social and natural environments of various groups of Indians. The task may just be too difficult to build a record of Indian populations prior to the arrival of Christopher Columbus. Mann has tried to report the research faithfully but the Indian populations of Western United States and that of Argentina in my opinion, not well researched, and thus understated in this book. It is also possible that populations reported are also understated.Mann has been more successful in the second two objectives and particularly the third. I think the overriding theme of this book is that pre-Columbian inhabitants of the Americas shaped their environment to fit their needs, no more than we do today and certainly, no less. Where we think that that current forests are wild and untouched by man, in fact, they are the results of previous inhabitation of the lands. There is no more a representation of this than the forests in the vicinity of the Amazon River. However, after the demise of the inhabiting culture, what remains is an overgrowth of plant and animal life. And this is true in North and Central America as well! It can be said definitively based on research that the Indian populations did not live lightly on the land.I found the book at the first reading contradictory of what I had been taught of American Indians after growing up in Montana and having lived with Yupik Eskimos (technically, Eskimos are not Indians,) in Western Alaska. In the first Chapter, Mann indicates that I would have this experience. But I find the research he quotes valid and confirmatory of his arguments. In addition, he often provides alternative arguments. Mann is not the author of this research, but the reporter of the research.Before reading and finishing the book, I did not read reviews of it. Thus, as I read it, I was amazed at the information and oftentimes, skeptical. However, I read several of the research reports referenced. Then, on finishing the book, I read several reviews both positive and critical. The book is widely acclaimed. The critical reviews stem mainly from people who found the book too detailed for their tastes and too difficult to read. One of the critical reviews was from an interpreter of the Cahokia site in Illinois who questions Mann’s statements which originated from Professor Woods. However, this same interpreter does not provide alternative research to support his claims.There probably is nothing more understood in the United States, and perhaps the World, than the pre-Columbus North and South American cultures. There are many reasons for this.First and foremost, Columbus in his search for Asia did not know the Americas nor had he ever been to the coastlines of Asia. Therefore, on reaching America, he thought he had reached Asia and thought the peoples he witnessed where of India. Thus, he named them “Indians” and the name, despite the confusion, has remained to this day and is a global term for all of the pre-Columbus inhabitants even though there are major distinctions in their cultures and genetics. While a number of the various tribes and nations object to the use of the word “Indian,” no better term has emerged that all will accept. For a discussion of this, see Appendix A of 1491.Second, most of the pre-Columbus inhabitants of the Americas either did not have writing or not a form of writing recognized by the European explorers and invaders. The result was that much of the written information of the pre-Columbus inhabitants had been lost either through decay of whatever records there were or through the willful destruction of the records by the invaders. Where there were no known records, Europeans interested in pre-Columbus cultures had to rely on the inhabitants themselves who were often recent transplants to the regions.Third, the pre-Columbus population of the Americas has been estimated from the finds of various archeological sites to be as high as 125 million people. Yet when early European scholars arrived to study and record Indian cultures, they found only remnants of the populations. It is accepted that European diseases such as small pox, influenza, and others, killed the vast majority of the populations that existed and that this happened in a very short time after the arrival of the first Europeans. For example, De Soto records thousands of people living in current day Arkansas. When La Salle visited this area a century later, he could find almost no traces of man. The estimates that Charles Mann seems to believe that the population loss was 95%! While this is arguable, it is also creditable based on eye witness accounts of the effects of small pox on various indigenous peoples. Thus, many Europeans recorded for history the shell-shocked left overs of populations essentially no longer functional.For these reasons, the attempt to build a history of pre-Columbus cultures will be problematic. Also, the popular cultures we have today in the United States have built up fantasies around the Indian cultures which are also promulgated in our school systems. These have influenced past researchers trying to understand Indian cultures. And they made, now known, mistakes in their assumptions and conclusions. As Mann clearly shows, the research today using more modern techniques is building a much different picture. The archeology of the Americas shows that we need to question almost everything that we have been taught.It is taught that the Indians cross the land bridge at Beringia during the last ice age (13,000 years ago,) and then descended South using a narrow strip of land near the current Continental Divide which did not ice over some 12, 000 years ago. Then it would take another 1000 years to enter and populate South America. Yet, the evidence suggests something different also happened. The ice-free path proposed has yet to yield artifacts that would support such a theory. It is possible that perhaps the path was the Western seaboard of North America, though. The genetics of certain Indians in Amazonia are distinct from those of North America. An archaeological dig in Southern Chiles found human artifacts that predated the supposed Beringia crossing. There is evidence of culture at Painted Rock Cave near Santarem on the Amazon River that is contemporary with the Clovis culture which is the earliest found in North America. Thus, while Beringia may be part of the story, it not all of the story on how the Americas were populated. More research is still needed here.Another major point assumed was that the Indian cultures did not have the sophistication of European cultures in pre-Columbus societies. Research finds that the Olmec, who were inhabitants of Mexico approximately 1800 B.C., were using the number zero in its mathematical form well before it was invented in India a few centuries A.D. They created a 365-day calendar more accurate than the calendars in use in Europe. In addition, they were recording the Olmec history on folded books of bark paper, now called codices. Many of these were destroyed by the Spanish when they were found, so only a few remain extant. It can be said their cultures were different than those of the European but no less complex.Overall, this book while not easy to read, if a very worthwhile read. I feel this is a work in progress: new research will emerge on the Indian populations of the Americas. Mann has provided a current state of the art understanding of Indian cultures in the Americas based on known and referenced research. It is clear that what schools are teaching about Indian populations needs to change and acknowledge the results of this research.

⭐An engaging and culturally rich book which displays a rich range of knowledge and many years’ study. I came to this book after reading one of Mann’s articles in National Geographic where I was struck by the sensitivity and grasp he had of the topic (not always a luxury in journalistic coverage but something many feature writers would ideally like to achieve). The book challenges conventional nationalistic history using an evidence-based approach, rather than polemic, and with an engaging humorous and anecdotal structure. The book is rightly (gently) critical of the way that the topic has been dealt with from an imperialist academic perspective and highlighting the often obfuscated role of the ordinary people who came across archaeological sites. At the same time it pulls no punches when discussing the politicisation of Mesoamerican histories, whether imperialist apology or native activism. A series of endnotes and bibliographic sources opens the door to further enquiry.

⭐This is clearly a very well researched book which combines first hand views of the subject matter with historical accounts and academic interpretation. The book considers the origins of the people who lived in The Americas prior to the arrival of Columbus, the effect that contact with Europeans had on those people and offers well advanced arguments that the first hand reports of explorers in the 17th and 18th centuries may have been accurate but failed to appreciate how the lands had been inhabited and managed for 1000s of years prior to Columbus, simply see the current state as the natural state. The writing is clear though necessarily complex with a massive ‘notes’ appendix and bibliography. I have to say I was won over by the clear logic of the narrative.

⭐This is well written and easy to read. Most importantly, it is incredibly informative and expanded my knowledge on the Americas in so many ways.It delves into multiple areas, provides compelling background and evidence. The bottom line, what you were taught in school is wrong. Much of this information is not ‘new’, which leads to understand how our own bias is maintaining an incorrect narrative on the Americas.

⭐An impressive summary of how people lived before the “discovery” of America, with very many illustrative details documenting that impressive cultures existed long before Europa reached a similar level of sophistication.

⭐I realise that people left little evidence of their lives pre Columbus in the Americas but this book is little more than a series of opposing views of various Archeologists putting their own spin on their finds over the last century…The book is padded out with such little gems as how South American maize differs from European maize …Hardly a page turner..

Keywords

Free Download 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus in PDF format
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus PDF Free Download
Download 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus 2006 PDF Free
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus 2006 PDF Free Download
Download 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus PDF
Free Download Ebook 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus