I love books that challenge my beliefs with well-formed arguments and mountains of supporting evidence. Those books come about infrequently and pretenders are full of holes large enough to drive my stubbornness through. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles Mann is a treatise guaranteed to both please and anger every reader coming to the volume with preconceptions about the Americas and its history.

It challenges the two most persevering paradigms about these continents, which in themselves contrast drastically and often violently. The environmentalist sees a hemisphere pristine when we arrived, precariously balanced ecologically, with multitudes of natives tending for the land as adherents care for the Goddess. The developer sees untouched, empty terrain, destined to be crafted into a population-sustaining paradise - preplanned to a degree the world has never seen. Okay, I grant you that I’m greatly oversimplifying the viewpoints, but Mann doesn’t. He gives the opposing sides plenty of real estate in his book and then dissembles both arguments equally.

This is the first comprehensive historical and scientific book to incorporate all of the most recent research and discovery. The picture of the Americas that emerges is one of two continents of well structured societies with no pristine wildernesses left. There were a lot of people here, in the hundreds of millions. First accounts show settlements of humans in lengths of the Amazon river spanning up to a hundred solid miles. MezoAmerica was teeming with civilization, nothing was untouched, uncultivated, or unstructured. Archeology and Anthropology experts show that the technology of the Americas matched anything anywhere else in the world. They had developed mathematics and the building arts to surpass the Greeks, Arabics and Chinese. Maize, the principle crop of the New World, is the single greatest human example of biogenetics before the genome project.
So, the environmentalists, if these hypothesis prove accurate, are going to have to concede that the Americas are a product of human land stewardship and that the natives were exploiting every species of plant and animal and changing the landscape however they saw fit. Alternatively, the developers are going to have to concede that this land was teeming with people (and according to the consensus of scientific study, those people fell in horrific numbers to the onslaught of diseases, spreading in advance of European conquest) and that those people were using the land in more productive ways than today’s industrial advancement has been able to achieve. To sum up, the Americans were neither eco-saviors, nor eco-destroyers; instead they were merely people living the best they could.

He also deals with the concept of White Guilt. If the land was mostly empty with a few nomadic tribes scattered about, then the idea is that it was okay to come in, take over, and create a civilization. Well, Mann argues, we’re just going to have to get used to the idea that with the discovery and settling of the Americas, disease, conquest, and even genocide wiped out up to one out of every five people living on the planet. 20%. That’s a hard pill to swallow.

In a revelation startling to me, he examines the Incas in this book and writes about an emerging and strongly supported theory. The Incas had an empire that extended latitudinally farther than any empire ever has. They had eradicated hunger, erected monumental public improvement projects and successfully implemented a form of socialism that lasted until devastated by disease and invading conquerors.

Mann teaches important lessons about the losses of keystone species, those whose disappearance brings down other species and triggers a ripple through the demographics of the survivors. The loss of a keystone species is like a drill accidentally striking a power line. It causes lights to go out all over:

Until Columbus, Indians were a keystone species in most of the hemisphere, annually burning undergrowth, clearing and replanting forests, building canals and raising fields, hunting bison and netting salmon, growing maize, mantioch and the eastern agricultural complex. Native Americans had been managing their environments for thousands of years. They made mistakes, but by and large they modified their landscapes in stable, supple, resilient ways. Some Milpa areas had been farmed for thousands of years time with which farmers in Mesopotamia and North Africa and parts of India ruined their land. Even the wholesale transformation seen in places like Peru where irrigated terraces cover huge areas were exceptionally well done. But all of these efforts required close continual oversight. In the 16th century epidemics removed the boss.

American landscapes after 1492 were empty, widowed in the historian Francis Jennings’s term. Suddenly deregulated ecosystems shook and sloshed like a cup of tea in an earthquake. Not only did non-native endives and rats beset them, but native species too burst and blasted, freed from constraints by the disappearance of Native Americans. The forest that the first colonists thought primeval and enduring was actually in the midst of violent change and demographic collapse. So catastrophic and irrevocable were the changes that it is tempting to think that almost nothing survived from the past. This is wrong. Landscape and people remain but greatly altered and they have lessons to heed, both about the earth in which we all live and about the mental framework we bring to it.

This is the best book I’ve read this year.

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