1491
New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus
By Charles C. Mann
465 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $30.00
By
Kevin Baker
Kevin
Baker is the author of the forthcoming historical novel, “Strivers
Row,” to be published by HarperCollins in March, 2006.
Most of us know, or think we know, what the first
Europeans encountered when they began their formal invasion of
the Americas in 1492. That is, a pristine world of overwhelming
natural abundance and precious few people; a hemisphere where—save
perhaps for the Aztec and Mayan civilizations of Mesoamerica,
and the Incan state in Peru—human beings indeed treaded
lightly upon the earth. Small wonder that, right up to the present
day, American Indians have been usually presented as either underachieving
meta-hippies, tree-hugging saints, or some combination thereof.
The
trouble with all such stereotypes, as Charles C. Mann points out
in his marvelous new book, 1491, is that they are essentially
dehumanizing. For various cultural reasons of their own, Europeans
and white Americans have “implicitly depicted Indians as
people who never changed their environment from its original wild
state. Because history is change, they were people without history.”
By means of a corrective, Mann, an award-winning
science journalist and co-author of four previous books on subjects
ranging from aspirin to physics to the internet, has endeavored
to give us a sweeping portrait of human life in the Americas before
the arrival of Columbus. This would be a formidable task under
any circumstance, and it is complicated by the fact that so much
of the deep American past is embroiled in vituperative political
and scientific controversies.
Nearly everything about the Indians is currently
a matter of contention, from when their ancestors first came to
the Americas and where they came from; to how many there were,
to how and where they lived, and why they were not more effectual
in resisting the European invasion. New archaeological discoveries
and translations of Indian records are constantly altering the
historical record, and every debate comes equipped with its own
bevy of archaeologists, anthropologists, and social scientists,
who seem to enjoy tossing around personal invective like so many
Fox News commentators.
Mann navigates adroitly through all the controversies.
He approaches each in the best scientific tradition, carefully
sifting the evidence, never jumping to hasty conclusions—giving
everyone a fair hearing, the experts and the amateurs; the accounts
of the Indians and their conquerors. In the process, he is rarely
less than enthralling. Mann is a remarkably lucid and engaging
writer, able to easily explain for the layman the significance
of everything from haplogroups, to glottochronology, to landraces.
He makes amusing asides to some of his adventures traversing the
hemisphere in the course of his research, but unlike too many
contemporary journalists he never lets his personal experiences
shove aside his subject.
Instead, Mann builds his story around what we
want to know—the “Frequently Asked Questions,”
as he heads one chapter; iconic encounters, and enduring mythologies.
He moves nimbly back and forth from the earliest, prehistoric
tribes in the Americas, to the Pilgrims’ first encounter
with the Indian they (mistakenly) called “Squanto”;
from the villages of the Amazon rain forest to Cahokia, near modern
St. Louis, the sole, long vanished city of the North American
“Moundbuilders”; from the cultivation of maize to
why it was that the Incans apparently developed the wheel but
never used it as anything but a child’s toy.
Mann
remains resolutely agnostic on some of the fiercest debates; what
he is most interested in showing us is how American Indians—like
all other human beings who ever walked the earth—were actively
involved in shaping the world they lived in. What he is
sure of is that “many though not all Indians were superbly
active land managers—they did not live lightly on the land.”
Just how they did live, so long uninfluenced by the vast majority
of the world’s population in Africa and Eurasia, forms the
bulk of his fascinating narrative.
What
emerges is an epic story, with a subtly altered tragedy at its
heart. For all the European depredations in the Americas, the
work of conquest was largely accomplished for them by their microbes
even before the white men arrived in any great numbers.
The diseases brought along by the very first, unwitting Spanish
conquistadors, and probably by English fishermen working the New
England coast, likely triggered one of the greatest catastrophes
in human history. Before the sixteenth century, there may have
been as many as 90 to 112 million people living in the Americas—people
who could be as different from each other “as Turks and
Swedes,” but who had cumulatively developed an incredible
range of natural environments, from seeding the Amazon Basin with
fruit trees, to terracing the mountains of Peru. (Even the term
“New World” may be a misnomer; it is possible that
the world’s first city was in South America.)
Then, disaster. According to some estimates, as
much as 95 percent of the Indians may have died almost immediately
on contact with various European diseases, particularly smallpox.
That would have amounted to about one-fifth of the world’s
total population at the time, a dying off unequaled before or
since. The exact numbers, like everything else, are under dispute,
but it is clear that these plagues wreaked havoc on traditional
Indian societies. European misreadings of America should not be
attributed wholly to ethnic arrogance. The “savages”
that most of the colonists saw, without ever realizing it, were
usually the traumatized, destitute survivors of ancient and intricate
civilizations that had collapsed almost overnight. Even the super-abundant
“nature” the Europeans inherited had been largely
put in place by these now absent gardeners, and had run wild only
after they had ceased to cull and harvest it.
In the end, the loss to us all was incalculable.
“As Mann writes, “Having grown separately for millennia,
the Americas were a boundless sea of novel ideas, dreams, stories,
philosophies, religions, moralities, discoveries, and all the
other products of the mind. Few things are more sublime or characteristically
human than the cross-fertilization of cultures. The simple discovery
by Europe of the existence of the Americas caused an intellectual
ferment. How much grander would have been the tumult if Indian
societies had survived in full splendor!”
©
Copyright The
New York Times
