Summary:

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. Mann is well aware that much of the history he
relates is necessarily speculative, the product of pot-shard
interpretation and precise scientific measurements that often end up
being radically revised in later decades. But the most compelling of
his eye-opening revisionist stories are among the best-founded: the
stories of early American-European contact. To many of those who were
there, the earliest encounters felt more like a meeting of equals
than one of natural domination. And those who came later and found an
emptied landscape that seemed ripe for the taking, Mann argues
convincingly, encountered not the natural and unchanging state of the
native American, but the evidence of a sudden calamity: the ravages
of what was likely the greatest epidemic in human history, the
smallpox and other diseases introduced inadvertently by Europeans to
a population without immunity, which swept through the Americas
faster than the explorers who brought it, and left behind for their
discovery a land that held only a shadow of the thriving cultures
that it had sustained for centuries before. --Tom Nissley A 1491
Timeline Europe and Asia Dates The Americas 25000-35000 B.C. Time of
paleo-Indian migration to Americas from Siberia, according to genetic
evidence. Groups likely traveled across the Pacific in boats. Wheat
and barley grown from wild ancestors in Sumer. 6000 5000 In what many
scientists regard as humankind's first and greatest feat of genetic
engineering, Indians in southern Mexico systematically breed maize
(corn) from dissimilar ancestor species. First cities established in
Sumer. 4000 3000 The Americas' first urban complex, in coastal Peru,
of at least 30 closely packed cities, each centered around large
pyramid-like structures Great Pyramid at Giza 2650 32 First clear
evidence of Olmec use of zero--an invention, widely described as the
most important mathematical discovery ever made, which did not occur
in Eurasia until about 600 A.D., in India (zero was not introduced to
Europe until the 1200s and not widely used until the 1700s) 800-840
A.D. Sudden collapse of most central Maya cities in the face of
severe drought and lengthy war Vikings briefly establish first
European settlements in North America. 1000 Reconstruction of
Cahokia, c. 1250 A.D.* Abrupt rise of Cahokia, near modern St. Louis,
the largest city north of the Rio Grande. Population estimates vary
from at least 15,000 to 100,000. Black Death devastates Europe.
1347-1351 1398 Birth of Tlacaélel, the brilliant Mexican strategist
behind the Triple Alliance (also known as the Aztec empire), which
within decades controls central Mexico, then the most densely settled
place on Earth. The Encounter: Columbus sails from Europe to the
Caribbean. 1492 The Encounter: Columbus sails from Europe to the
Caribbean. Syphilis apparently brought to Europe by Columbus's
returning crew. 1493 Ferdinand Magellan departs from Spain on
around-the-world voyage. 1519 Sixteenth-century Mexica drawing of the
effects of smallpox** Cortes driven from Tenochtitlán, capital of the
Triple Alliance, and then gains victory as smallpox, a European
disease never before seen in the Americas, kills at least one of
three in the empire. 1525-1533 The smallpox epidemic sweeps into
Peru, killing as much as half the population of the Inka empire and
opening the door to conquest by Spanish forces led by Pizarro. 1617
Huge areas of New England nearly depopulated by epidemic brought by
shipwrecked French sailors. English Pilgrims arrive at Patuxet, an
Indian village emptied by disease, and survive on stored Indian food,
renaming the village Plymouth. 1620 *Courtesy Cahokia Mounds State
Historic Site, Collinsville, Ill., painting by Michael Hampshire.
**Courtesy Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, Santa Fe, N.M.
(Bernardino de Sahagún, Historia General de las Cosas de Nueva
España, 1547-77).

Classification:

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Dewey Class: 909 -- World history

Book Details:

Physical Description: 560 pages
Edition Info: Paperback; 2006-10-10

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