1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

In Early December I finished a first reading of 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. There's a nice summary in the wikipedia entry on the book. 

I had earlier in the year read the Atlantic article from 2002 on which the 2005 book is based. Not sure why I'm coming to this topic so late, but I think my friend Stephen was the one who triggered the interest.

What pushed me from the article to the book was that I have always accepted the standard narrative of European technological and cultural superiority and eventual population domination as the reasons that North and South America eventually were over-run by Euros starting in the 16th century. Mann's 1491 article put a large, new idea on the table for me -- that there is a case that the population of the Americas was much larger than we have been led to believe. So I wanted to hear more. 

I had a good grounding in the 70's conventional narrative from a terrifying experience in the 8th or 9th grade (?) where I was expected to write a paper (60 pages eventually?) and talk on any subject for an hour and I chose to lecture on the origins of Native Americans. I remember laying out the Bering Strait land bridge theory and showing migrating bands of Asian nomads filling up the Americas from the top down.

I've had a couple major updates to that conventional theory over the years -- the first Gavin Menzies book, and then personally exploring pyramids in the Yucatan, and later a private tour of smuggled Inca artifacts that I got in Miraflores from an old Italian dude who carried out five rooms of pornographic pottery, gold jewelry, silver wire statues from a bombed-out of a secret store-room of the convent (why a dude?) in Cusco where he had been a cook. I have slowly been getting the sense that the pre-Columbian Americas were more sophisticated and complicated than I had thought.

The 1491 book represented a big jump in my thinking here. It not only added some pretty compelling -- to me -- stories about research into the population changes in the last 1500 years to the Americas, but put a couple large ideas about nature of those populations on the table for me as well. 

Especially:

1) How the continent probably emptied -- early contact by the Portuguese and Spanish kicked off waves of viral attack in the local native populations that spread rapidly and broadly because these cultures were already interconnected up and down the continents and had some genetic vulnerabilities (see p. 115 onward, esp. the HLA discussion). Every new contact brought new instances, locations and kinds of viral attack. And the social impact of a collapsing society compounded the losses -- where complex societies lose critical members, and where social customs or just plain human connection accelerated the spread of contagion. The example (p. 147) of the Aztec Empire collapse research stood out -- the diagram that showed a regional population of 25m at first contact in 1518 that suffers waves of smallpox, measles, cocolitzii, influenza, etc. from subsequent contact until by the time colonization really kicks off in the early 1600s the native population in that region is down under 700k, or about 3% of the original number. I try to imagine what life in Los Angeles (20m, roughly the same land area as the Triple Alliance) would be like if we lost 97% of the people in a hundred years. Very Mad Max I would think -- shit would get very weird.

2) How the native populations bent the ecology to their needs (see chapter 10). The idea that the Americas were shaped ecologically -- not just terraces and mounds for breeding plant species and cultivating crops, but land and forest burning programs to promote healthy diversity of plants and animals. The sophistication of their knowledge and extent of the impact is still to be researched, but I think less now that the Indians were living "at one with nature" almost passively and more like they had very sophisticated ways of actively getting the most out of the land and scaling their populations -- and not always successfully (Cahokia p 295, etc.)

3) How the social structures that survived may have had a deeper influence on the colonizing culture -- esp. in the North America case -- than we realize. To hear early missionaries and colonists talk about the kind of personal liberty and self-reliance and social equality they found maddening in the native populations is pretty fascinating and its not that hard for me to see how America includes a healthy dose of this newish-to-Euros Indian governing systems that preferred independent states and personal agency. I want to know more about the Five Nations government for sure, and its influence on the founding documents of the United States.

Overall I thought the book provided me with a very interesting introduction to some of the research being done in these areas, and there's a decent biblio as a point of departure. Not sure how much time I'll be able to dedicate to going deeper but I have some provocative placeholders now in my head. 

There was enough about the Colombian Exchange -- the cross-pollination of plants and animals across the Atlantic.. Tomatoes, Corn, Horses, Coffee, Rubber, etc. -- which is the topic of Mann's next book 1493 that I will probably take a look at that in the near future.