1491 New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus Charles C. Mann,
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0739464418
Edition: Paperback; 2005
Summary:
Amazon.com 1491 is not so much the story of a year, as of what that
year stands for: the long-debated (and often-dismissed) question of
what human civilization in the Americas was like before the Europeans
crashed the party. The history books most Americans were (and still
are) raised on describe the continents before Columbus as a vast,
underused territory, sparsely populated by primitives whose cultures
would inevitably bow before the advanced technologies of the
Europeans. For decades, though, among the archaeologists,
anthropologists, paleolinguists, and others whose discoveries Charles
C. Mann brings together in 1491, different stories have been
emerging. Among the revelations: the first Americans may not have
come over the Bering land bridge around 12,000 B.C. but by boat along
the Pacific coast 10 or even 20 thousand years earlier; the Americas
were a far more urban, more populated, and more technologically
advanced region than generally assumed; and the Indians, rather than
living in static harmony with nature, radically engineered the
landscape across the continents, to the point that even "timeless"
natural features like the Amazon rainforest can be seen as products
of human intervention.
Book Details:
Edition Info: Paperback; 2005
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