Book review: "1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus" by Charles C. Mann

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A few years ago, I read an article in The New Yorker about a new kind of archeology: archeologists would fly in an airplane over a South American jungle, sending down continuous laser beams as they flew. Dense though the canopy may be, the little laser beams still managed to find the minuscule gaps between the leaves and send down their light to the landscape below, resulting in a 3D rendering of what lay hidden under the trees. The result was astounding: an entire overgrown civilization was concealed in the jungle, undiscovered for centuries, waiting for this breakthrough technology to find it.

This book is like that airplane: it reveals that many, indeed most, things we thought we knew about the Americas before Columbus now turn out to be false. The civilizations of the continent were considered static, underdeveloped and uniform, and this book shows them to be none of the three. After reading 1491, the Americas seem to me as alien as a faraway planet. Most of the population died out before the rest of the world had a decent opportunity to discover and explore it. Those deaths, the book argues, were much more numerous than we previously imagined (Mann quotes a 95% death rate in some areas) on the one hand, and also much less intentional than conventional wisdom assumes (most died of diseases they were completely unfamiliar with, rather than directly at the hands of European invaders).

Because of this massive loss of life, what we're left with are scraps and ruins, hints and clues about what was lost. From what we know, the Indians (a term preferred by many indigenous people over the stiffly PC "Native Americans") did almost everything so wildly differently from the rest of the world that outsiders were not even capable of recognizing the sophistication, subtlety or even existence of it.

A good example is agriculture. To Eurasians and Africans, this means cordoning off land, growing a crop on it, maybe letting animals graze on it, that sort of thing. To the original Americans, it means turning the Amazon rain forest into a gigantic garden, growing multiple plant species side by side (a technique called milpa) and using fire to control the land. Because this was an alien concept to the rest of the world, they mistook a giant stretch of agricultural land for untouched wilderness. In this way, the book also does away with the romantic notion of Indians living in some kind of New Age harmony with nature.

At the same time, it's also a big misconception to see the population of this giant continent as one homogenous group. Quite the contrary: in addition to the cultures most of us know, like the Inka, the Aztecs, the Olmecs and the Mayans, there were many more cultures I'd never heard of, like the Wari, for example, and other cultures whose names we'll never know. Some were bloodthirsty, brutal and warlike; others were peaceful, surviving under harsh conditions, or democratic to an extent that Europe was at that time unfamiliar with (and tried to suppress).

The most important, inescapable conclusion, is that Europe was, in many ways, the inferior culture. It may seem as if only superior firepower could explain how a handful of foreign invaders could subjugate an entire continent. But the reality was that that firepower was not nearly as superior as you might think, not to mention that Indians got their hands on some of those firearms themselves before long. Physically, the native population tended to be strong, muscular and imposing: they were horrified by the Spanish with their pockmarked faces. It was chicken pox and various other diseases that wiped out huge swaths of the population, often emptying a region even before the colonists caught up with the bugs.

Maybe you've come across the story of the passenger pigeon, a now-extinct pigeon species of which, at one point, there were a billion in the Americas. You'll probably have been told that this incredibly abundant bird (one in four birds in America were passenger pigeons at some point) went extinct due to deforestation and large-scale hunting. And that is all true.

But what's often left out of the story is the odd fact that the Indians before Columbus seem to have eaten very few passenger pigeons. When examining Indian sites, the bones of all kinds of animals can be found, but bones of these birds, despite their apparent abundance, were quite uncommon. How could this be? The shocking explanation is that before Columbus, passenger pigeons were not as abundant: they had large numbers of human predators. That all changed after the Europeans arrived: the mass deaths of the indigenous population paved the way for a population explosion of the bird.

We'll probably never know the real scale of the devastating loss that the "discovery" of the Americas brought about. But this book offers a glimpse, through stories like these. We owe it, not just to the lost peoples, but also to the world, to find out as much as we can about the people who lived in the Americas --even if that is very little.